Sweethearts and Heroes doesn’t just change lives, it saves lives, and one of the tenets of Sweethearts and Heroes is behavior as a form of communication.
“It’s not just the verbal things that we say,” Sweethearts and Heroes co-founder Tom Murphy says in this short segment below, one of 27 videos that are intended to provide you with tips and strategies related to our mission.
Stories are also a form of communication, and Tom likes telling stories from his Sweethearts and Heroes partner Jason Spector, a teacher in Glens Falls, N.Y. In this clip, Tom describes the time Jason entered the teacher’s lounge and heard another teacher say, “She’s never going to make it.”
The teacher was talking about a student who was distracted by the constant application of her make-up. What the teacher didn’t know was that the girl’s father had recently killed himself, and that she was feeling lost in a houseful of a half-dozen other children.
So Jason suggested that the teacher provide the girl with a mirror and make-up, so that she could apply it before school started in the morning.
“This girl was behaving a certain way because she wanted attention,” Tom says below, while relaying the anecdote.
Watch this segment to hear Jason and Tom explain how behaviors from teachers toward students are also forms of communication: