Teach-in reflection

Ariel, Abby and I decided to do the teach in we did (the focus/contact/connection exercises) because we thought it put into practice a lot of the ecological principles and concepts we talked about this semester. We've talked so much about interconnectedness and connection without words, but we didn't talk a whole lot about physical connection between people or ways of actually practicing the connection without words. So we thought these exercises could force us to play with that idea some - give us a real, physical, tangible experience of both connecting without words, physically connecting, and how those two can influence and enhance each other. The physical contact exercises were cool because in our culture we really seem to avoid making physical contact with people, even with people we know well, in certain settings such as in an academic classroom. It's as if we think our intellectual connections made in a classroom are completely separate from physical connection and trust. So by doing this contact exercise, we took a group of people (us) who do seem to be pretty close and have spent a semester connecting intellectually, and had us connect physically by trusting each other withour weight, touching hands and shoulders and backs and even trusting our classmates to lift our entire bodies into the air. We also wanted to do the silent mental connection exercise (the counting game) both before and after the physical contact exercises to see if it changed at all, if the physical contact and trust practice made the silent communication easier, harder, or had no effect. I honestly did not expect it to change that much, so I thought it was really amazing when we did the counting game for the second time at the end and it felt much easier, faster, rhythmic, and comfortable. All of this felt like it brought our already close class to a new level of connection and trust with each other. It makes me wonder if this is this sort of thing that would actually be really helpful to do earlier on in a course (or used to bring any other group together), because the physical connection and learning to trust each other really did seem to have an effect on our mental/wordless connection, and maybe learning to be comfortable with physical connection and trust in a course (at least a small discussion-based one like this) would enhance the ability for students to connect intellectually and mentally throughout the course.