Wednesday, May 6, 2009

Dealing with the sting of rejection


Former San Francisco psychology teacher extraordinaire (and current free-lance education journalist) Patrick Mattimore shared one way he helped seniors deal with the stress of college acceptance/rejection letters (the description of Patrick's activity starts about half way down, under the header "Share the Pain"). Getting a rejection letter can obviously be a very stressful event for an already stressed high school student, and Patrick's "rejection therapy" sessions sound very humane to me, and a very relevant way to introduce some concepts from the therapy/treatment chapter.

1 comment:

Steve Jones said...

That's awesome! I recently knew that a former student was very dejected about not getting into her preferred college, so I sent her a copy of one of my rejection letters. I had already gotten an undergraduate degree and had decided to go back to get my teaching certificate and was turned down! Obviously it ended up working out for me, and I think that really helped her to see an example of an adult who'd been rejected and survived it.