Are Our Students Allowed to Flex Their Decision Making Muscles?
“Simply put, we have fallen in love with the illusory certainty of making a choice, and abandoned any shared commitment to investing in the long and careful deliberative process that is necessary to ensure that the decisions we do make are both well informed and thoughtfully constructed.”
These sentiments came from: the Education Week article In Modern School Reform is it We the People or Me the Individual?
I agree whole-heartedly, I just haven’t articulated it the way they have. As a middle school teacher, this is what you lose when you create “zero-tolerance” policies. This is what you lose when you evaluate instruction with selected response assessments. There’s no wiggle room, no second chances, no mercy and no grace. We are teaching our children that making “good” decisions is a natural innate ability. We give little room for growth to reflect that one’s ability to make the right decision comes more easily over time and maturity, or that decision making is more like a muscle and only gets better with exercising. When an adolescent makes a mistake now-a-days, they are severely punished …imagine how this discourages their faith in their ability to make good choices throughout life?
I know that is not the central thesis of this of this article, but I couldn’t help but pull it out. It is definitely a problem in our schools.
Time is a major factor. So much as to get done in a certain amount of time, and we simply ignore the differences in time it takes different individuals to process information.
How can teachers and parents help students flex their decision making muscles?
How do you feel about “zero-tolerance”?
In what ways can we teach children to enjoy the process instead of focusing solely on the product?
Kill Em’ Kindness: How Teaching Empathy Curves the Bullying Epidemic
I’ve been watching quite a few videos on empathy. America seems to be dealing with a huge bullying problem. From our classrooms all the way to Wall Street, people are being pushed around. I’ve been “researching” if you will, ways to address this bully phenomenon, from attending the National Conference on School Safety and Discipline which might I add, had an abundance of policy makers in attendance and very few teachers…the people closest to the children. They were actually shocked that I (a teacher) had been invited..that’s a problem, but I digress. Anyway, it seems that when we focus on attacking this issue, we are being more reactive than proactive. We teach students in school how to react to bullying: tell a teacher, do not fight or argue, tell a parent, etc…There are very few schools who approach this problem by addressing the lack of empathy in the first place. I mean, peer mediation helps with problem solving and addresses empathy to some extent, but only after someone has already been offended. Below is a video about how a school used a baby to “teach” 5 year olds empathy.
Ever notice how bigger kids interact with younger kids? I’ve seen my 4 year old niece protect, support, and even teach my 2 year old nephew. Her empathy barometer is on level 10 with him. Even I tend to be more empathetic when I’m dealing with my students or other children. Having to help someone who is more vulnerable or dependent on you increases your ability to empathize.
Now the next video addresses extending this empathic spirit throughout your life. Understanding how empathy and sympathy differs. To truly empathize, you must feel the pain and the woes of the person you are helping NOT pity them. By pitying them, you have disassociated yourself from their experience. A lot of us do it, thinking, that could never happen to me. Here this video shows us how introspection can be significant to our personal growth, but outrospection is key to building our ability to empathize. It’s not very hard. As humans, we’re hardwired to want to “belong,” already, but in these great civilizations, we’ve taught ourselves to separate and form “cliques.” Don’t get me wrong, these small communities do create quite tight unified bonds; however, it also creates outcasts and ostracizes. You can see it in religious affiliations, political parties, ethic groups, gender, and even age groups. Sure, people like you can understand you better, but we often cut off, those who are not “like” us. At the end of the day, we’re all human. There has to be a balance.
Teaching Makes Me Smile
This is for anyone out there who is fed up. Maybe an observation didn’t go so well, or maybe your planning was taken up today with an unscheduled meeting. I’ve had those days. Days that made me feel completely frustrated…made me even question my career choice to become a public school teacher, but then my students come into class and I’m quickly reminded why I’m there. Despite all the craziness outside of my classroom, my room is my sanctuary when my students get there. I just close the door, shut out the world and enter the new world of learning with my students. Little gifts, notes and pictures from my students sits behind my desk, from all the years I’ve been teaching…”Even when I’m having a bad day, this makes me smile.”
What are somethings you do to refocus throughout the day?
Count Your Lessons 