Personal- Nonverbal

For my personal connection on non verbal communication I thought I would take you way back with me to seventh grade. At this point in my life I was sassy! I tended to be very verbally sparring when it came to matters of opinion. I was still a very kind person, but I got a great deal of satisfaction out of disagreeing with someone. As I grew up, I became more and more non confrontational. But anyways, during my seventh grade year I had a social studies teacher who I really did not like. She was young and rather moody all the time. Every day she would come in and ask us to do about 100 book questions. She would then lecture us on things that did not even connect to what we were reading. Our assignments were long and tedious. I began to despise social studies! After awhile, when she explained our assignment, I would roll my eyes and sigh loudly. I was far too scared to actually speak to her about my anger, so I would communicate my disgust unconsciously, and nonverbally. The problem was that I was a good student, and I always completed my assignments for her class, but she began to dislike me as much as I disliked her class. I had been sighing and rolling my eyes for so long, that it happened naturally and the thought did not even occur to me that she would view me as a “brat”. She began to call on me all the time to answer questions, and she would ask to speak to me after class about silly things. I would go home and cry, complaining to my mom that my teacher was treating me unfairly. Like any mother, my mom called this teacher up and asked her what I had done in order to be treated this way. The teacher, of course, replied that I frequently rolled my eyes and sighed in class which communicated the fact that I did not like her teaching method. When my mom told me this I immediately understood the teacher’s reasoning. I began to carefully watch my nonverbal communication so that the teacher knew I respected her. She was after all, an authority figure, and I had no right to conclude that she couldn’t do her job well. The next day we straightened things out, and from that day on, I started to enjoy her class. This teacher and I actually became friends, and I went to talk to her about things in the future. I think that many people have the tendency to communicate things unconsciously that they really would not want to communicate. Although I did not enjoy her class, I know that I would not want to convey my judgment as I respected her as a teacher.