I stopped giving detentions when I finally understood that…

I stopped giving detentions when I finally understood that behaviour is a form of communication. I was punishing the act, rather than trying to understand the root cause of it - and when I finally did, I was typically more sad than I was angry.

@mr.aspinall on Twitter

“Behaviour is communication.” Geez, let that sink in for a minute. 👀

Brian is a teacher and this quote specifically applies to kids but um…adults aren’t immune to this. How many times do we see a tweet where the intention behind the tweet has nothing to do with the words in the actual tweet? How many times is a post just saying “I was hurt and I just want someone else to hurt like me.” Like Brian said, I find myself getting more sad than angry.

I’m trying to go a little deeper lately. Instead of arguing a point or fussing with someone over what they said, I’m starting to ask why? Why did you post that? What that’s tweet about? No I mean…what’s it *really* about? The conversations are much more interesting that way.

ASIDE: If you don’t know I’m a developer in my day job. I make a lot of stuff and it’s been an amazing career. I started following Brian because of his passion for teaching kids how to code. My son is learning basic web stuff in high school and it’s a lot of fun because this thing - my coding skills - has always been this amorphous thing I do to feed my family but it came alive to my son because we were talking about code and he said “is this what you do all day? Seems like fun.”

Bro, you have no idea. 😳 It’s the *best.* I drink coffee and solve puzzles and they pay me to do it.

I’ve seen the spark and I’m trying to keep that flame going! 🙏🏻 Here I combine art and faith. If I ever figure out how to combine art and faith AND code I think that would be something amazing.

ASIDE 2: I’m spelling behaviour with the u because that’s how Brian tweeted it. 😅