Ruby Payne, founder and CEO of aha! Process, had the opportunity to interview Carey Arensberg, who is a TikTok influencer and standout educator.
Please take a moment to watch or read the interview on strategies that stick with kids in the classroom.
Ruby Payne: Good morning. We’re so delighted to have Carey Arensberg with us. And as you know, she’s got 500,000 followers on TikTok. One of the most interesting things that Carrie does in addition to teaching fourth grade is she’s got a care closet. Carrie, tell us about your care closet.
Carey Arensberg: My care closet is literally a closet in my classroom that I transformed from holding books and just extra school supplies to actually holding supplies that kids would need to be able to get through their day without having to leave my classroom to go to the office to call somebody for a change of clothes. It’s basically comfort and care items for the kids that they can access right inside of my classroom.
Ruby Payne: How did you get those items?
Carey Arensberg: I started this back in 2020. I initially started by purchasing them myself, and the more that I told people about it, they were like, well, let us help you. So I started an Amazon wish list and I sent it out to my friends and family, and eventually they shared it on social media and it kind of blew up from there. And so this closet is almost 100% funded from followers on TikTok and Instagram and things like that. And these amazing donations would not be possible had all of this not come about.
Ruby Payne: That is so cool. And I think that is because you deal with a lot of under-resourced children, right? Do you want to say a little bit about the kids you have?
Carey Arensberg: Sure. I am in an area of our town that is, it’s very, I almost like to say it’s kind of a forgotten part of our city. A lot of the kids just don’t have the resources that they need. We’re in an area where there is a lot of violence, a lot of poverty, a lot of issues with crime in the community. And so the stories that these kids are coming to us with are really quite shocking. Maybe not shocking for you, because I’m sure you’ve probably heard of these things for your research a lot, but it’s just something that is a need that our kids really have, and it’s something that is filling for them in such a positive way they can actually focus on their academics. So I wanted to ask you, I know you’ve done research on all of this your whole life. How do you think that something like this or any sort of resource support system can benefit kids academically?
Ruby Payne: Oh, it is tremendous, because one of the things it does is it takes away the allostatic load, which is neuroscience for when you’re stressed and your autonomic nervous system is under a lot of stress. What it does is it increases your heartbeat and it slows down your digestive system. It takes the blood away from your prefrontal cortex so you can think less clearly. And so what happens whenever your safety or belonging or your needs are really in your face, then your ability to function decreases. One study I read said that it lowers IQ by 13 points.
Carey Arensberg: Oh, wow. That is extremely interesting. I have noticed a lot of times, and before I had this closet, when the kids were coming in, maybe they had missed breakfast or they hadn’t had dinner the night before, or they were so preoccupied with something that they didn’t have the capacity to hold the information that I was giving them. That part of them was completely shut off because they had these needs that they couldn’t get past until these other needs were met. And so academically, they were not prepared to take on information until they had these needs filled.
Ruby Payne: Funny, I saw a report that said that it’ll leave the prefrontal cortex within 12 seconds.
Carey Arensberg: Oh.
Ruby Payne: Yeah. Like you said, they can’t focus on it.
Carey Arensberg: Right. And when you’re hungry, I mean, I think we’ve all come in contact with a “hangry” person, and those decision-making skills are way down. And it doesn’t matter how many deep breaths you take to oxygenate the brain—when you’re hungry, the stomach takes over. We have a breakfast bar in here because if the kids are late to school and they miss their free breakfast, the first thing they do is come in and grab a breakfast from me. We have a little dinner drawer in here that in the afternoons they can take home a dinner, just to make sure it’s something simple, like a cup of ramen or something like that—something simple that they know that they’re going to be able to make independently. If there’s no one at home. I try to keep a variety of food items that they don’t have to have resources for.
If they don’t have a microwave, a can opener, or a refrigerator, there are options for them in here to make it equal for everybody to have some dinner at night. So at the very beginning of the year, I introduced this closet as a community closet, and I model it for them the first couple weeks by, if I come in, they might see me back here brushing my hair or putting my hair in a ponytail holder or putting lotion on or something. So I try to normalize it for them at the very beginning of the year. And we have a lot of social emotional lessons on wants versus needs or how to take care of yourself and how to ask for help when you need it. And so it becomes very normal in here for the kids to ask for things and to use it.
So there is no embarrassment towards it because they see me using it also. And they’re very appreciative. I mean, one of my classroom jobs even in here is called the care coordinator, and their job is to come back here and kind of take stock for me. They will see what we need to see if we need to run down to our food pantry and grab extra items. Or if they’re like, “Ms. Arensberg, we’re running low on toothbrushes,” it helps me out. And it helps them feel like they have that sense of belonging in my classroom and take ownership of the closet because they’re in charge of organizing it. So it’s just a very huge part of our community in this classroom. I mean, I know that you, in your Emotional Poverty book, talk a lot about school safety and that sense of belonging in all demographics. And if you don’t feel safe in a school and you don’t feel like you belong, then you’re all out of whack. So what do you think or how important do you think it is for kids to come in and have that sense of ownership and feel like they belong to a classroom like this?
Ruby Payne: Well, I think it’s everything. And one of the things I’m hoping that we will move to in the future, because right now education is in crisis.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing because I hope that, out of it, we’ll get some better models, but we have it backward. They used to believe that the Earth was the center of the solar system, and the Sun went around the Earth. Copernicus came and said, no, it’s just the opposite. And right now in schooling, we think that the cognitive piece is the key piece if you want to get learning. And actually, it’s just the opposite. It’s the emotional piece. It’s the belonging piece. It’s this safety piece that actually spurs the learning. So we’ve got it backward, and I’m hoping that we will, in the next 10 years, rethink that and start looking at it.
Carey Arensberg: I 100% agree, because my passion really is the emotional part of teaching. I like the academics. I like teaching academics, but really, I like teaching the whole kid and helping them grow emotionally and connecting with their community. It helps them to learn because, I mean, you don’t learn from someone you don’t like. One thing I will say that has amazed me over the years is that I’ve had hundreds of kids come through, and it’s in their nature to fight for survival. And so when little things happen, they’ll fight, they’ll throw punches, they’ll push and shove. But when the community is built correctly, in 12 years, I have had three fights in my classroom. And I think that’s such a testament to feeling safe to where you don’t ever feel like you have to get into that fight for survival. That’s something that I take a lot of pride in because I just love watching them grow as whole humans, not just like an academic output.
Ruby Payne: We talked about the fact that you use A Framework for Understanding Poverty quite a bit to understand your students in poverty, but how would you say your students are different now than five years ago, pre-COVID?
Carey Arensberg: Well, Framework for me was transformative. I read Framework probably my second year of teaching or so, second or third year, and I was ready to give up. Honestly, I had a group of kids come through that was very challenging. And once I read Framework, it helped me figure out the why’s of like, oh, okay, now this makes sense to me why you have a brand-new pair of shoes but not a pencil. Post-COVID, I feel like, emotionally, the children are so much more challenged. And I think it’s because we made such a huge digital shift to where everything is online. There’s less one-on-one human connection. The kids are communicating less. Their communication skills are just so, there’s such a deficit there. And I’m afraid that as we keep focusing on technology and keep social media everywhere, we’re going to continue to lose them to that and their sense of self-confidence and things like that. I never had to worry about being bullied online as a fourth grader. I can’t imagine having to deal with that now. So I just feel like that’s such a different difference in them right now. The communication is a huge thing.
Ruby Payne: Well, and one of the things when their eyes are down all the time on their devices, in the neurology of the brain, they’re processing information emotionally. When your eyes are up and you’re looking up, your brain’s processing visually, so they’re down all the time and you just can’t learn some academic stuff emotionally, like math. Math is pretty hard to learn emotionally. So I think that’s a key issue. And what advice would you give to people? Well, first of all, tell us about your TikTok.
Carey Arensberg: My TikTok is @MrsArensberg4th.
Ruby Payne: Now they can watch you on TikTok. She’s got great practical strategies.
Carey Arensberg: Oh, thank you. I learned most of it from you. So my TikTok is just @MrsArensberg4th. It’s been a great learning platform and a great way to communicate with people on here that also are like-minded, where they feel like they want to be more compassionate and they want to understand more about their students. There’s always those people that think that it’s mumbo jumbo, doesn’t make sense. But those are the people that make me want to continue. Like I will change your mind. I will make you understand that there are people out there that just need your compassion a little more.
Ruby Payne: Well, 25 years ago, when I wrote that book, I had a guy, a set of professors write a paper and say, it’s just absolutely incorrect to say that you have to have relationships for learning to occur. That’s just not true. And so a lot of times when the ideas are first introduced, people are just like, no, that couldn’t possibly be true. And then over time, yeah. So as we close here, what advice would you give somebody who’s thinking about either getting into teaching or leaving?
Carey Arensberg: The best advice that I can give is to, you have to kind of adapt to the children that you’re with. And you have to see them as humans, not just in academic output. And yes, your job is to teach the academics, but you can’t teach the academics without teaching the child. So if you don’t have that connection with them and you don’t put forth the effort to understand them well, a child who is presenting trauma symptoms you might think is ADHD, you just have to understand their backgrounds to really be able to reach them. The people who are leaving, I definitely know that a lot of them have valid reasons, and there’s a lot of difficulties in education right now as far as unsupportive parents, a lot of behaviors that are not being taken care of foundationally at home. And so I understand that. But I do feel like if teachers just take that time to build their community within their classroom, it’s not going to be perfect, but it’s going to be so much better. And taking time on the forefront to spend time doing things like morning meetings and communication circles, and having a calming area in your classroom. It seems like it’s more work upfront, but oh gosh, in the end, it’s going to save you such a headache as far as behaviors go.
Reach us on TikTok: @MrsArensberg4th @RubyKPayne
