noun
reciprocal action, effect, or influence.
As I headed out for my regular run along the “not so picturesque” West Gate Freeway path in my hometown of Melbourne, I had an interaction. This interaction sparked this blog post.
It’s mid afternoon as I approach a rather disheveled looking man meandering slowly with a slouch and grasping a liquor bottle in his right hand. He and I were on that path for different reasons. As I approached him from behind and ran past him I looked over my shoulder and smiled whilst giving him a fleeting thumbs up. I was on a mission (to run!) so I kept going not thinking much of this interaction. A kilometre or so along the track I turn at my usual place and continued back home along the same path. To be expected, I then see the same man in the distance still trudging along the path, now walking towards me. As I approach him this second time, I felt I had already said my “hello”, so was prepared to continue past looking into the distance. But he beat me to it. He looked up, recognised me from our interaction minutes earlier, and gave me a huge grin and a double thumbs up. I was flat out keeping to my religious 4:30/km pace and therefore continued on without missing a beat.
As I tend to do, I use my running time as thinking time, and this interaction got me thinking. I’m constantly saying “hi” or giving a nod as I pass people on running tracks and am fascinated by the varied responses, or lack thereof! I’ve often thought it would make a great measure of a town or suburb or city’s “friendliness”. Some scientific formula of response rates of greetings and/or nods as a %. For example in country towns, I am supremely confident that response rates would be statistically significantly larger than in cities. Anyhow...I digress.
This cheerful response from my anonymous man on the running trail brought a short phrase to mind….”Every interaction matters”. I wasn’t sure if I had heard it before or whether it just made sense to explain my rather fleeting but meaningful interaction I had just encountered. Upon Googling the phrase I’m definitely not the first to coin it...but most search results pointed to business articles and sales strategies. As an educator, my thoughts then immediately jumped to how “Every interaction matters” is a wonderfully fitting mantra for teachers.
On any given school day we have any number of interactions with students, from before school duty in the yard, to greeting your students at the classroom door, to answering that same question for the fifth time in two minutes, to disciplining that students who continually makes “poor choices”.
We may have hundreds of interactions in a day that you lose track of, but to any individual student they are only going to remember that one you had with them.
Therefore:
-give a thumbs up
-keep your eyes up as you walk the school & smile
-call out across the yard to say good morning to that student walking into school with their head down
-ask your student (the one who continually makes “poor choices”) how he went at footy on the weekend
-send a quick email to a student congratulating them on some minor (or major) achievement
-ask to see the baby photos of the newborn sibling of your student
-give a “low five” (you know the one...like a high five but the low key, down by your side type) to that quiet student who has just nailed a tricky maths problem
-if a student has a nickname, ask how they got it and suss out if its ok to use it...I still pass one particular ex-student down the street and will always call out “Hey Buggsy”- he beams and always says hi back.
Every Interaction Matters!
