"Oh, Just Like Humans"

I was awake at two in the morning earlier this week, working on the business, when something fluttered at the edge of my vision.

I assumed my eyes were tired and went back to what I was doing. A minute later it happened again, and this time I looked up properly.

There was a bat in our house.

My heart rate rose immediately. My chest tightened. My thinking narrowed down to the size of a hallway.

From the outside I looked fine. I stayed quiet, I moved carefully, I did not shout or wake anyone. Anybody watching would have described me as calm.

I was not calm. I was stressed.

I want to name that gap, because it is the same gap that walks into school buildings every morning. The adult who appears composed and the adult who is actually regulated are not always the same adult, and children read the second one, not the first.

For forty-five minutes I tried to handle it alone. I tracked the bat around the room and told myself I could solve this without disturbing anyone.

Eventually I admitted I could not, and I woke Rebecca up.

That graphic is the vocabulary we teach. A regulated body is the one on the left, the one that can think the thought "I am safe to learn." The other four are not misbehavior and they are not character. They are a nervous system doing its job under threat, in one of four directions: fight, flight, freeze, or fawn.

What is worth noticing is what happens above the shoulders in each of them. Once the body is in one of those four states, the thinking is scribbled. You cannot reason with a scribble. You cannot consequence your way out of one either.

I was somewhere between fight and flight, at two in the morning, over an animal roughly the size of my thumb.

Waking Rebecca did not remove the bat. The bat was still circling the room.

What it did was give me a second nervous system to borrow from. We named what was happening out loud, which is the single most useful thing either of us did all night. We decided what we could and could not control. We stopped chasing.

The bat eventually flew into our bathroom. We shut the door and left it there until morning, which is a far less impressive solution than catching it and a far better one. In the morning we found it wedged between the vanity and the wall, got it into a jar, carried it outside, and let it go.

Everyone was fine. The bat flew away.

Afterward I said to Rebecca that I really do not love bats, because they are so unpredictable.

She said, "Oh, just like humans?"

She was not being clever. It was flat, and calm, and it landed.

She is right. People are unpredictable. Students are unpredictable. Staff are unpredictable. We cannot control how another person is going to act or react, and most of the exhaustion in this field comes from trying anyway.

What I said back, once I had thought about it, is the part I have not stopped thinking about since. Maybe people are less unpredictable when everyone is regulated.

A dysregulated room is unpredictable because four or five nervous systems are all reacting to each other with no stable reference point. Add one genuinely regulated adult and the room becomes readable. Not perfect. Readable.

We do not have a strategy for controlling children, and we should be suspicious of anyone selling one.

What we have is co-regulation, which is unglamorous and slow and works. A regulated adult lends their state to a child who does not have access to their own yet. That is it. That is the intervention.

Which means the adult's regulation is not a wellness perk sitting off to the side of the real work. It is the delivery mechanism for the real work. A staff that is running on empty in October cannot lend a state it does not have.

Rebecca spent two hours this week with general education teachers at a middle school in Los Angeles, on exactly this. Co-regulation, trust, and what it takes to build a room where children can think.

The obstacle she names in secondary buildings is not resistance from staff. It is an assumption. Somewhere around sixth grade we start to believe that regulation was covered in elementary school and should be in place by now, so a student who cannot manage a hard moment gets read as choosing not to rather than as not yet able.

Those same students are walking into social and academic situations far more complicated than anything they faced at nine, under expectations that changed underneath them, and we are asking tools taught in a completely different setting to transfer on their own.

They are still students. They are still kids. The demands are simply harder now.

Her work on this draws on the Trust Framework, which is hers, and on Safe to Learn, which is mine. We have been writing about it from two different chairs for years.

And then a bat got into our house at two in the morning, and I found out how well I actually knew it.

I have stood in front of rooms of adults and taught this. And I still needed another person before I could get my own body back under me, over an animal the size of my thumb, in my own house, in no real danger.

If that is true for me, it is worth asking honestly what we are expecting of a twelve-year-old on a difficult Thursday morning.

Before the year starts, decide who your person is.

Not a mentor and not a supervisor. The one colleague you can walk up to and say, out loud, "I am not okay right now," and know that nothing bad will happen as a result.

Then, and this is the part I would change about my own night, go to them sooner than you think you need to. I spent forty-five minutes managing alone before I asked for help, and those forty-five minutes did not accomplish anything except make me worse at the thing I was trying to do.

Regulation is a shared resource. It was never meant to be produced alone.

If you have had your own version of “the bat”, at work or at home, we’d love to hear your story.

Have a great Thursday,

Eric