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Every Child Can Win the Memory Game

APRIL 21, 2014

Photo credit: Caroline O'Brien

As a student, I had great difficulty concentrating during lesson time and consequently didn't retain much knowledge. I was diagnosed with dyslexia and had the symptoms of attention deficit disorder. Academic information just didn't get through to me. Here are samples of reports that my teachers sent home when I was ten:

• "He tends to dream in the middle of a calculation which leads him to lose track of the thought."
• "Has not paid much attention. Appears to know more of the Universe than the Earth." (This was a veiled reference to daydreaming from my Geography teacher.)
• "Terribly slow. Often cannot repeat the question. Must concentrate."
• "Unless Dominic really shakes himself up and gets down to work, he is not going to achieve any success . . . he is painfully slow."

The comments contained no evidence that I would one day become an eight-time World Memory Champion and author of over a dozen books and courses on memory training. So what happened?

In 1987, aged 30, I watched a man on television memorize a shuffled deck of playing cards in just under three minutes. As corny as it may sound, that moment changed my life.

I taught myself to memorize playing cards and realized that the strategy I was developing could be used to remember anything. Today, when I appear on TV and radio shows all over the world, one question is always asked: "Why don't they teach this stuff in schools?" Had I acquired those skills when I was at school, I would have achieved exam success, gone onto higher education, and actually enjoyed the learning process. Instead, I suffered low self-esteem and dropped out of school when I was 16.

Schools Memory Championships

In 2008, I co-founded the U.K. Schools Memory Championships along with Tony Buzan, the inventor of mind-mapping, and chess Grandmaster Raymond Keene. Rather than just going into a school and entertaining students with a few memory tricks, the aim was to embed powerful memory techniques into the minds of students by getting them to play "The Game of Memory" for themselves. These memory workshops are proven to boost young people's self esteem, confidence and motivation to learn, and they provide tools to help improve overall achievement and exam performance.

Thinking back to when I was at school, I don't recall a single lesson devoted entirely to the subject of memory. I can vaguely remember being given the acronym "Richard Of York Goes Battling In Vain" to remember the colors of the rainbow, but that was about it.

Having helped establish the teaching of memory skills the U.K. schools, I now find it completely illogical to expect a child to learn any subject without first teaching how to learn and how to remember.

Teaching Basic Memory Skills

Here are five strategies that will help students remember academic information:

1. The Story Method

To remember a set of information, create a story that links all the elements together. In chemistry, for example, the noble gases are helium, neon, argon, krypton, xenon and radon. Imagine taking off in a helium balloon lit up with a neon light. An argon welder turns into Superman, who takes you to the planet Krypton, and so on.

2. Numeral Shapes

To remember numerical information, give each numeral a picture code. For example, 2 is shaped like a swan, and 9 resembles a balloon and string. To remember that Queen Victoria had nine children, imagine her holding a balloon and string.

3. The Link Method

To remember foreign vocabulary, find a link between the sound of a foreign word and its meaning. For example, the German word for "bone" is knochen, so imagine the pain involved in "knocking" a bone in your leg. You can remember the Spanish word for "boat" –barco -- by imagining that a boat has a large "barcode" on its side, or picture a dog "barking" on a boat.

4. The Journey Method

To remember a list, choose a familiar journey, maybe around your house, and picture each item on the list at specific locations. Test your class with a random list of 20 objects, then get them to imagine each item along a 20-stage route around their house. The same method can then be applied to remembering practical information such as the Periodic Table of Elements or the U.S. presidents.

5. The Rule of Five

To avoid having information gradually fade from your memory banks, it's important to know when to review information. Apply the Rule of Five:

• First review: immediately
• Second review: 24 hours later
• Third review: one week later
• Fourth review: one month later
• Fifth review: three months

Tapping the Potential

To date, I have taught over 10,000 schoolchildren basic memory skills. Typically, I get a volunteer to write down and call out a random 60-digit number, which I then repeat forwards and backwards having heard the number just once.

The faces register amazement. However, the real payoff is when I ask, "Would you like to be able to do that, too?"

"Yeeeeeeeees!"

Next, we discuss how easy and fun learning could be if they knew the secret. After all, if a dyslexic kid can go on to become a World Memory Champion, then all children are potential memory champions.

• DOMINIC O'BRIEN'S BLOG

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Appreciate Teachers by Understanding What They Do

APRIL 24, 2014

Just this week, I asked some of my non-educator Facebook friends to tell me what responses they get when they describe what they do for a living. Overall, the consensus fell into one of these categories:

1. People don’t really understand what the job is and ask exactly what it entails.
2. People already know what the job is and ask for advice or a favor, or start telling the person all about their experiences or opinion with that career or about their friend who is in the same field.

The Perception

When I tell people what I do, I rarely get asked for advice or a favor, and people never ask me what my job entails. However, I will get plenty of opinions or stories related to my career. Most of these involve stories of family members who are teachers and the crazy things they have to endure, strong opinions about what it must be like to be a teacher, or comments about some crazy news article they recently read.

Unlike many careers, teaching is well understood. Nearly everyone has attended school and has had experience interacting with teachers. In their minds, there is no question as to what teachers do because 15 (or however many) years ago, they were sitting in a classroom learning from a teacher. People also don't seem to look to teachers as a source of advice, and rarely is teaching seen as a career where anyone has any clout to give a favor. This, to me, is an indication that, unlike many other careers (even non-prestigious ones), there is an assumption that teaching hasn't changed in the last 15-20 years, and that teachers don't hold enough expertise to be able to provide advice or fulfill a favor. In addition, many of the responses I get are framed around the idea that teaching is a career that is charitable, or that I've made some kind of sacrifice to do a good deed.

The next time you talk to a teacher, ask them why they got into teaching. Ask them about their favorite reading strategies, or a recent project their students worked on that they are really proud of. Ask them for advice for your own child's education. Ask them for their opinion on the Common Core Standards, or for their favorite learning website or tool in the classroom. If they have some great suggestions, ask them a favor -- ask them to send those resources to you by email, or write them down on the spot.

The Reality

Teaching is not what it was 15 years ago. Teachers are expected to track student data, integrate technology, map their teaching to standards and be familiar with the diverse ways in which their students learn, while also doing daily things like taking attendance, getting students to lunch on time, tying shoes, resolving conflict, grading homework, and all the while making sure that all of their students learn. They also work with families and with the community, creating partnerships and navigating the difficult world of interpersonal relationships. Teachers tend to be highly educated (usually at their own expense), with their certification often dependent on continuous learning. The teaching career at this point in time is as demanding and professional as some of the most prestigious careers.

The best way to appreciate a teacher is to appreciate the hard work that they do and their high level of expertise by allowing them to share the positive and professional aspects of their career. Too often, we focus on the negativity that surrounds the profession in the news, and conversation turns to working conditions, class size, union issues or other outside forces that teachers have little control over. The best way to thank a teacher is not to treat what they do as a good deed, but to treat it as a highly professional career path that they love to follow, and for which they work hard to be successful.

• MARY BETH HERTZ'S BLOG

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Exploring the Idea of ‘Happiness’ As Part of School Work

Katrina Schwartz | April 29, 2014 | 5 Comments

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Luca Nisalli

Happiness isn’t often a big topic of conversation in classrooms. Amidst the rush to meet standards, raise test scores, and provide engaging learning experiences, not to mention the daily chaos of students’ lives, many educators don’t have much time to bring up issues around students’ happiness.

But what if students could explore an important life lesson about how to identify and replicate happiness as they’re doing school work? That’s the premise behind New Tech Network’s Global Happiness Project. The driving question behind the project is this: What elements contribute to a happy and healthy society? More than 240 teachers across in 43 states and 11 countries are taking up that challenge.

As part of the project, students will discuss what it means to be happy and how happiness manifests in their own lives. Based on their personal definitions of happiness, they’ll develop a survey to give to a wider community in order to gauge the community’s definition of happiness. Students will then analyze the survey results and design a local or global advocacy project to improve happiness in their local community.

The project’s structure is fairly simple, and teachers have modified it in lots of creative ways to better fit with their own curriculum.

A high school in urban Cleveland has taken a unique approach to the Happiness Project. Led by an ambitious teacher who questions the high-stakes testing culture at a low-income school, she’s asking students to look within. And rather than integrating the project into her course, Melissa Svigelj-Smith, who co-teaches an American Studies course combining American History and English II, decided to test out discussions of happiness with her group of students during advisory time, which meets for 45 minutes each day.

• • 
  • What Keeps Students Motivated to Learn?
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  • Hacking School: One Teenager's Path to Happiness

“They all responded that seeing their friends at school made them happy, but school itself was not making them happy,” she said.

All students at New Tech West on the western side of Cleveland receive free and reduced price lunch, many are English Language Learners, and the student body is ethnically diverse.

“A lot of schools like ours are completely driven towards testing,” said. “It inspired me to integrate some of that happiness and how to be happy and how to take control over your happiness into school.”

Svigelj-Smith’s students were constantly asking her why she was smiling, asking her about what she does outside of school. She also felt inspired by teenager Logan LaPlante’s Ted Talk in which he describes schools as places that teach kids how to make a living, not how to live life. “Part of what he defined as success was health and happiness,” Svigelj-Smith said. She wasn’t sure her students knew how to be happy. “It was something I thought might give students a sense of empowerment over their lives,” Svigelj-Smith said.

Svigelj-Smith is trying to forcibly change that, asking her advisory students to mentor freshman. “Sometimes just pushing them in a direction that you think will benefit them, even when there’s resistance in the beginning, in the end they’re grateful,” she said. Her students recently did a presentation on how the work with freshman is going and reported a feeling of satisfaction for giving back to someone else successfully.

One of the hardest, but most rewarding tasks Svigelj-Smith has been working on this year is helping students to have a growth mindset about their learning. Growth mindset is a term coined by the Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck, who found students who believe they can improve skills through hard work fair better. Some of Svigelj-Smith’s students with Individual Study Plans (ISPs) had never been told they were smart before. “That was really eye opening for them because they had been told prior that they were in this position and this is where they were going to stay,” Svigelj-Smith said.

She’s now trying to relate the idea of happiness to that of growth mindset, encouraging students to think about steps they can take to make themselves happier. She’s pushing them to set happiness goals and to imagine happiness as another mindset they can work towards. It’s a slow process, but Svigelj-Smith is glad it’s a topic that can take some pressure off the many tests 10th graders in Ohio have to take.

TAKING IT TO THE STREETS

Sophomore English students in Valerie Hoover’s class at Rochester High School in rural Indiana, are reading the play Our Town and weaving elements of the happiness project into their analysis of the characters and setting within their reading. The driving question for Hoover’s class as they explore happiness is a quote from the Thornton Wilder play asked by Emily in the third Act: “Do any human being ever realize life while they live it?–every, every minute.”

“I had this in my mind, what I wanted to do in terms of the Our Town book and that big question of, how do we make every moment feel important,” Hoover said. “I wanted to take that context and move it into the bigger community and how the little things we do everyday affect the community.”

To get at the question of what makes the larger community happy, Hoover’s students are researching the history of Rochester’s historic downtown to discover how the past might inform feelings about the present. Students will reach out to businesses owners for permission to post QR codes that will link to interactive descriptions of what used to stand in different local locations. That way community members can access students’ research.

Hoover wants to bring the whole project full circle by integrating individual happiness with community happiness. She’s asking her students to design and execute a community service project that will help increase Rochester’s level of happiness. “I’m really anxious to see their reaction to the research of our town and the community service aspect,” Hoover said. “I think they’ll run with it.”

Meanwhile the class’s deep dive into what makes people happy is surfacing again as students analyze Our Town. Students are discussing difficult, philosophical ideas like whether the characters are happy or merely content, if there’s a difference between the two, and does one need one to have the other? “There are all these big open-ended questions that we’re getting into,” Hoover said.

In Indiana, all 10th graders have to take an end-of-year assessment that determines if they graduate high school, so there’s a lot of attention on writing skills, understanding how questions are phrased on that test, and completing tasks on time. Hoover described it not as teaching to the test, but an overall awareness that it’s there. She said the Our Town happiness project has been a great way to get students practicing their analytical and writing skills

SEL for Adults

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5 Simple Lessons for Social and Emotional Learning for Adults

APRIL 24, 2014

In my last blog I made the case for social emotional learning (SEL) for all -- for children, teachers, administrators, coaches, and all other staff working in and with schools. I promised suggestions for how this could be done in schools. The following lessons can be taken up by an entire staff or by an individual and are intended to build emotional awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management.

Lesson 1: Practice Recognizing Emotions

Spend a day or an hour observing your emotional responses. You might, for example, notice yourself arriving at school and feeling anxious about getting everything done before kids arrive. Just notice this, and say to yourself, "There's anxiety." You might notice that when you pass a particular colleague's room, you feel content because she's a friend. Notice this, "There's contentment." The key is to notice and name without attaching judgment. If you like you can take notes or journal so that you can keep a log of your emotional journey over a period of time. There might be moments when you don't know how to name what you're feeling, and that's okay. Jot down all the words that come to mind.

Lesson 2: Notice Physical Responses

Honing the ability to recognize how your body experiences emotions is another step. Our bodies often manifest feelings and if we can become conscious of our responses, we may gain useful information. For example, you might notice yourself smiling authentically when a parent drops off her child -- and then you might notice the underlying emotions -- "Gratitude. This mother is always so positive." Or you might notice that when you talk to an administrator your shoulders tense, your belly tightens, and your breathing gets shallow. And then you might be able to recognize the underlying feelings, "Defensive and anxious."

When we gain awareness, we can make decisions about how we want to behave. For example, if we notice we're feeling anxious when talking to an administrator, we might just take a deep breath or drop our shoulders. Noticing and naming our emotions means we move away from operating on autopilot. It's usually a more empowered place to be.

Lesson 3: Get Curious

Once you've started noticing and naming your emotions, get curious about them. Investigate. Explore. You might notice anxiety when talking to an administrator and reflect on this: "Have I always felt this way? When did it start? How do I feel when talking to my other administrator? What does this one trigger in me? Where did that come from?" The purpose in doing this isn't to dig deep into your own psychological history, it's to infuse the experience with questions, wondering, and curiosity. This can loosen the grip of the emotions and also illuminate something about the experience that might be helpful.

Lesson 4: Observe Your Emotions

We are not our emotions. If we can practice observing them -- seeing ourselves experience emotions from 10,000 feet above earth -- we are more likely to make decisions that don't emerge from them. We might notice that sometimes they're powerful and gripping, and sometimes they're lighter and less sticky. It helps to practice non-attachment to emotions. They're just emotional states and they come and go -- and remember that we have some control over these states. Sometimes I visualize my emotions as weather patterns: There are storms and calm skies, heavy rain, and light winds. They always change. I visualize myself as a tree experiencing these emotions that come and go.

Lesson 5: Notice the Impact of Your Emotions on Others

Without getting into self-judgment, start noticing how your emotional states impact others. The key is to think like a scientist and make comments to yourself such as, "Oh, that's interesting! I never noticed that. Wow, look at what happens to X when I am feeling ______." For example, you might notice that you always greet one of your students with big smiles, warm welcomes, and that you feel really happy when you see him. You might then notice, "Wow, after I greet him that way, I see his face relax, his smile widens, and he calmly sits at his desk." Or you might notice that when you were feeling tired and anxious and you curtly asked the school secretary for a form, that her shoulders hunched up and she was snappy in return. As you do this noticing, try again to refrain from self-criticism. Just notice. Name. Observe.

Here's my fantasy: a school staff engages in these practices for a few weeks or months. As they do so, they discuss the experience, what they're noticing, and what they're learning. This could take only 10 minutes per week (at the beginning of a staff meeting or professional development, for example) or it could be given the time it really deserves -- a hour or longer per week. These lessons would incorporate expanding our vocabulary for emotions (this is a skill set that's missing in many adults) as well as developing our tool kit for how to respond to difficult emotions. And to extend my fantasy, I'd love to see all staff and all students in a school engaging in this learning together.

This would be a start -- a very powerful, transformational start -- for providing adults with the social and emotional learning that we deserve. I also know that it would make our schools calmer and happier places to be.

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Strategies for Motivating Students in Mathematics

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9 Strategies for Motivating Students in Mathematics

NOVEMBER 1, 2013

Photo credit: Veer

Motivating students to be (enthusiastically) receptive is one of the most important aspects of mathematics instruction and a critical aspect of the Common Core State Standards. Effective teachers should focus attention on the less interested students as well as the motivated ones. Presented in this blog post are nine techniques, based on intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, which can be used to motivate secondary school students in mathematics.

Extrinsic and Intrinsic Motivation

Extrinsic motivation involves rewards that occur outside the learner's control. These may include token economic rewards for good performance, peer acceptance of good performance, avoidance of "punishment" by performing well, praise for good work and so on.

However, many students demonstrate intrinsic goals in their desire to understand a topic or concept (task-related), to outperform others (ego-related), or to impress others (social-related). The last goal straddles the fence between intrinsic and extrinsic.

With these basic concepts in mind, there are specific techniques which might be expanded, embellished and adapted to the teacher's personality and, above all, made appropriate for the learner's level of ability and environment. The strategies are the important parts to remember -- examples are provided merely to help understand the techniques.

Strategies for Increasing Student Motivation in Math

1. Call Attention to a Void in Students' Knowledge

This motivational technique involves making students aware of a void in their knowledge and capitalizes on their desire to learn more. For instance, you may present a few simple exercises involving familiar situations, followed by exercises involving unfamiliar situations on the same topic. The more dramatically you do this, the more effective the motivation.

2. Show a Sequential Achievement

Closely related to the preceding technique is that of having students appreciate a logical sequence of concepts. This differs from the previous method in that it depends on students' desire to increase, but not complete, their knowledge. One example of a sequential process is how special quadrilaterals lead from one to another, from the point of view of their properties.

3. Discovering a Pattern

Setting up a contrived situation that leads students to "discovering" a pattern can often be quite motivating, as they take pleasure in finding and then "owning" an idea. An example could be adding the numbers from 1 to 100. Rather than adding in sequence, students add the first and last (1 + 100 = 101), and then the second and next-to-last (2 + 99 = 101), and so on. Then all one has to do to get the required sum is multiplying 50 X 101 = 5,050. The exercise will give students an enlightening experience.

4. Present a Challenge

When students are challenged intellectually, they react with enthusiasm. Great care must be taken in selecting the challenge. The problem (if that is the type of challenge) must definitely lead into the lesson and be within reach of the students' abilities.

5. Entice the Class with a “Gee-Whiz” Mathematical Result

To motivate basic belief in probability, a very effect motivation is a class discussion of the famous "Birthday Problem," which gives the unexpectedly high probability of birthday matches in relatively small groups. Its amazing -- even unbelievable -- result will leave the class in awe.

6. Indicate the Usefulness of a Topic

Introduce a practical application of genuine interest to the class at the beginning of a lesson. For example, in the high school geometry course, a student could be asked to find the diameter of a plate where all the information he or she has is a section smaller that a semicircle. The applications chosen should be brief and uncomplicated to motivate the lesson rather than detract from it.

7. Use Recreational Mathematics

Recreational motivation consists of puzzles, games, paradoxes or facilities. In addition to being selected for their specific motivational gain, these devices must be brief and simple. An effective execution of this technique will allow students to complete the "recreation" without much effort.

8. Tell a Pertinent Story

A story of a historical event (for example, math involved in building the Brooklyn Bridge) or contrived situation can motivate students. Teachers should not rush while telling the story. A hurried presentation minimizes the potential motivation of the strategy.

9. Get Students Actively Involved in Justifying Mathematical Curiosities

One of the more effective techniques for motivating students is asking them to justify one of many pertinent mathematical curiosities. The students should be familiar and comfortable with the mathematical curiosity before you "challenge" them to defend it.

Teachers of mathematics must understand the basic motives already present in their learners. The teacher can then play on these motivations to maximize engagement and enhance the effectiveness of the teaching process. Exploiting student motivations and affinities can lead to the development of artificial mathematical problems and situations. But if such methods generate genuine interest in a topic, the techniques are eminently fair and desirable.

• ALFRED POSAMENTIER'S BLOG

Why "The Customer Is Always Right' is Wrong

Top 5 Reasons Why 'The Customer Is Always Right' Is Wrong

Posted: 04/15/2014 11:53 am EDT Updated: 04/21/2014 6:59 pm EDT

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One woman who frequently flew on Southwest was constantly disappointed with every aspect of the company's operation. In fact, she became known as the "Pen Pal" because after every flight she wrote in with a complaint.

She didn't like the fact that the company didn't assign seats; she didn't like the absence of a first-class section; she didn't like not having a meal in flight; she didn't like Southwest's boarding procedure; she didn't like the flight attendants' sporty uniforms and the casual atmosphere.

Her last letter, reciting a litany of complaints, momentarily stumped Southwest's customer relations people. They bumped it up to Herb's [Kelleher, CEO of Southwest at the time] desk, with a note: 'This one's yours.'

In sixty seconds Kelleher wrote back and said, 'Dear Mrs. Crabapple, We will miss you. Love, Herb.'"

The phrase "The customer is always right" was originally coined in 1909 by Harry Gordon Selfridge, the founder of Selfridge's department store in London, and is typically used by businesses to convince customers that they will get good service at this company and convince employees to give customers good service.

However, I think businesses should abandon this phrase once and for all -- ironically, because it leads to worse customer service.

Here are the top five reasons why "The Customer Is Always Right" is wrong.

1: It Makes Employees Unhappy

Gordon Bethune is a brash Texan (as is Herb Kelleher, coincidentally) who is best known for turning Continental Airlines around "From Worst to First," a story told in his book of the same title from 1998. He wanted to make sure that both customers and employees liked the way Continental treated them, so he made it very clear that the maxim "the customer is always right" didn't hold sway at Continental.

In conflicts between employees and unruly customers he would consistently side with his people. Here's how he put it:

When we run into customers that we can't reel back in, our loyalty is with our employees. They have to put up with this stuff every day. Just because you buy a ticket does not give you the right to abuse our employees ...

We run more than 3 million people through our books every month. One or two of those people are going to be unreasonable, demanding jerks. When it's a choice between supporting your employees, who work with you every day and make your product what it is, or some irate jerk who demands a free ticket to Paris because you ran out of peanuts, whose side are you going to be on?

You can't treat your employees like serfs. You have to value them ... If they think that you won't support them when a customer is out of line, even the smallest problem can cause resentment.

So Bethune trusted his people over unreasonable customers. What I like about this attitude is that it balances employees and customers. The "always right" maxim squarely favors the customer which is a bad idea, because, as Bethune says, it causes resentment among employees.

Of course, there are plenty of examples of bad employees giving lousy customer service but trying to solve this by declaring the customer "always right" is counter-productive.

2: It Gives Abrasive Customers an Unfair Advantage

Using the slogan "The customer is always right," abusive customers can demand just about anything -- they're right by definition, aren't they? This makes the employees' jobs that much harder when trying to rein them in.

Also, it means that abusive people get better treatment and conditions than nice people. That always seemed wrong to me, and it makes much more sense to be nice to the nice customers to keep them coming back.

3: Some Customers Are Bad for Business

Most businesses think that "the more customers the better". But some customers are quite simply bad for business.

Danish IT service provider ServiceGruppen proudly tell this story:

One of our service technicians arrived at a customer's site for a maintenance task, and to his great shock was treated very rudely by the customer.

When he'd finished the task and returned to the office, he told management about his experience. They promptly cancelled the customer's contract.

Just like Kelleher dismissed the irate lady who kept complaining (but somehow also kept flying on Southwest), ServiceGruppen fired a bad customer. Note that it was not even a matter of a financial calculation -- not a question of whether either company would make or lose money on that customer in the long run. It was a simple matter of respect and dignity and of treating their employees right.

4: It Results in Worse Customer Service

Rosenbluth International, a corporate travel agency since bought by American Express, took it even further. CEO Hal Rosenbluth wrote an excellent book about their approach called Put The Customer Second - Put your people first and watch'em kick butt.

Rosenbluth argues that when you put the employees first, they put the customers first. Put employees first and they will be happy at work. Employees who are happy at work give better customer service because:

• They care more about other people, including customers
• They have more energy
• They are happy, meaning they are more fun to talk to and interact with
• They are more motivated

On the other hand, when the company and management consistently side with customers instead of with employees, it sends a clear message that:

• Employees are not valued
• Treating employees fairly is not important
• Employees have no right to respect from customers
• Employees have to put up with everything from customers

When this attitude prevails, employees stop caring about service. At that point, genuinely good service is almost impossible -- the best customers can hope for is fake good service. You know the kind I mean: courteous on the surface only.

5: Some Customers Are Just Plain Wrong

Herb Kelleher agrees, as this passage From Nuts! the excellent book about Southwest Airlines shows:

Herb Kelleher [...] makes it clear that his employees come first -- even if it means dismissing customers. But aren't customers always right? "No, they are not," Kelleher snaps. "And I think that's one of the biggest betrayals of employees a boss can possibly commit. The customer is sometimes wrong. We don't carry those sorts of customers. We write to them and say, 'Fly somebody else. Don't abuse our people.'"

If you still think that the customer is always right, read this story from Bethune's book From Worst to First:

A Continental flight attendant once was offended by a passenger's child wearing a hat with Nazi and KKK emblems on it. It was pretty offensive stuff, so the attendant went to the kid's father and asked him to put away the hat. "No," the guy said. "My kid can wear what he wants, and I don't care who likes it."

The flight attendant went into the cockpit and got the first officer, who explained to the passenger the FAA regulation that makes it a crime to interfere with the duties of a crew member. The hat was causing other passengers and the crew discomfort, and that interfered with the flight attendant's duties. The guy better put away the hat.

He did, but he didn't like it. He wrote many nasty letters. We made every effort to explain our policy and the federal air regulations, but he wasn't hearing it. He even showed up in our executive suite to discuss the matter with me. I let him sit out there. I didn't want to see him and I didn't want to listen to him. He bought a ticket on our airplane, and that means we'll take him where he wants to go. But if he's going to be rude and offensive, he's welcome to fly another airline.

The fact is that some customers are just plain wrong, that businesses are better of without them, and that managers siding with unreasonable customers over employees is a very bad idea, that results in worse customer service.

So any business needs to put its people first -- and watch them put the customers first.

--

Alexander Kjerulf, the "Chief Happiness Officer," is one of the world's leading experts on workplace happiness and the author of Happy Hour is 9 to 5: How to love your job, love your life and kick butt at work.
 
Alexander is a speaker, consultant, and author with a global following of millions. He runs a consultancy firm offering lectures, workshops, and leadership training with focus on happiness at work for clients including IBM, Hilton, LEGO, HP and Ikea.

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