My dearest stylegrl, I have grown quite fond of you! I truly admire your chutzpah.

First of all, an easy and effective way of keeping your cool is to develop a habit of calming yourself down. It could be as simple as counting your breaths or counting numbers. Whatever works for you, to slow down the emotional outpouring and eventually to get it completely under control. Once you have your way to calm yourself, make a habit out of it.

In addition, visualize your emotions morphing into a cool, calm state that will result after you have done your calming ritual in response to religious inanity BEFORE YOU ENTER THE CLASS. You are, in essence, preparing your brain to be receptive to the real situation when it occurs. I use this approach to remain calm and collected before I begin trading stock shares. This is what elite sports people and traders do. This is an skill that will serve you well in many different situations for the rest of your life.

So what else can you get out of a negative situation that is positive? Following Brian’s answer, I would suggest that you could don the secret, inner hat of a psychologist. Your peers and religious teachers are a gold mine – they will be the gift that keeps giving. You could spend happily the rest of your time at your school identifying defense mechanisms (denial, projection), the underpinnings of patriarchy, sexist/homophobe references, etc. You could start a journal, jotting down your day-by-day observations of the psychological dynamics at your school. Your writing skills will most likely improve.

Be creative, be resourceful, and be confident that you will develop the inner skills to come out of this challenging situation better for it.

Posted: April 18th 2009

See all questions answered by logicel

I haven’t been through quite the same situation, and the best I can recommend is to abstract yourself from the whole process, and analyse it. I presume you’ll be assessed on what you have learned, so it won’t do to zone out and let it all go over your head.

Instead, can you look at it as a kind of anthropology, as if you were on the outside, looking in? Imagine you’re presenting a documentary on TV, about some Amazon tribe, and you have to fit in by wearing the right clothes, and learning about their primitive rituals and customs.

“And, here we are in the classroom, where older members of the tribe teach their sacred rituals to the younger members. Some students question the nature and wisdom of these rituals, but are expected to go along, since they are rewarded for being able to repeat what they were told.”

Posted: April 18th 2009

See all questions answered by brian thomson