OT: Teaching emotional control

[Lenona]

I found this and thought it was pretty important.

It's by a teacher, David Consiglio, from the Quora site.

(But I can't access the 322 comments right now.)
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What desperately needs to be taught in schools?

Emotional management skills.

Right now, my students don’t do poorly because they don’t understand chemistry or physics. It’s often not even reading or math.

They do poorly because they lack the ability to rein in their emotions and focus on the task at hand.

Students in my classroom get suspended because someone took their pencil. No, seriously. This happens all the time. Someone takes a pencil, and a student becomes angry, and then other students become angry, and then they post nasty things on InstaSnapFaceTweetBook and then they resort to physical violence because someone took their pencil.

Oh, but it turns out the pencil just fell under a table and no one saw it.

My students want to stay up late, text, watch TV, and play video games. So they do. Then, they sleep in my class.

I make my students put their phones at the charging station…so they bring two phones, put one at the charging station, and then spend the rest of the hour sneaking peeks at their other phone.

I create intricate lessons and creative strategies to capture their attention. They run the cord of their headphones up their sleeves so they can listen to music without me noticing.

I try to be funny, do labs and projects, make assignments creative and different…and my students just flatly refuse to do anything because “they don’t feel like it.”

I don’t know where emotional maturity went, but I do know this: barely any high school students in the history of high school have ever really wanted to do high school. Certainly none of them have been enthusiastic all the time. This is nothing new.

Successful people defer gratification, they put their heads down, and they complete the task. They do this because they know the rewards will be greater later, and the consequences fewer now.

But to do this, to be successful in this way, you must have the skills to manage your emotions.

Without these skills, you are a ship adrift in the sea of your own feelings. It’s no way to live. I only wish I knew how to teach emotional management! Any ideas, Quorans?
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Me:

What kids and ESPECIALLY parents need to grasp is that, unlike physical height with the right diet, emotional maturity doesn't just happen. Kids have to MAKE it happen, just as they have to spend a lot of time exercising to stay in shape. (Or studying in order to get good grades.) Of course, they also need guidance - and good examples - from adults.

And, regarding the need to express emotions, Judith Martin (Miss Manners) likes to say:

"There's a time and a place for everything, and this isn't it."

(And being emotionally mature doesn't mean counting to ten - only to go cyberbullying later. If one makes it too easy, online, to identify the other person, that IS bullying.)

[Allen]

My parents paid me for grades, on an exponential scale, so and A got me 16 times as much money as a D and almost twice as much (16/9) as a B. this involved delayed gratification, but only by a quarter, 3 months or so, and gave me real rest during the summer rather than summer jobs, my first boat and my first car, which soon taught me mechanics, and changed my major from biology (overpopulation) to mechanical engineering.
Kids can't be expected to delay gratification all the way to adulthood. Few kids can do that and cannot envision themselves as full adults, just as teens and maybe college students, when some have cars and some don't.
And studious kids make real sacrifices as they are seen by their peers as nerds and teacher's pets, so they must accept being bullied in order to study, and the rewards must exceed that sacrifice. Never forget that it is the school attendance system that is forcing kids into proximity with bullies, so schools enable bullies hugely and have got to suppress them if they want to force attendance; and remember that such fights are not just about one pencil because once a kid fails to defend his pencil, everything he owns including his body is up for grabs, just like in prison. Nations do the same and career diplomats have found no solution. School sports including gym class are part of the problem, as is supervision on buses.
I feel school buses should be integrated with city buses to provide adult supervision from passengers, despite the fact that some such adults will be drunk etc. Also, k-12 buses do better because 12th graders get little status from bullying kindergartners. It is peers and near peers who bully, k-12 far less so, and if college buses can be integrated, better still.
I think the discontinuation of online k-12 instruction at the end of the pandemic was a big mistake and a big opportunity for bullies, though at the expense of abusive parents and big siblings.
Working class adults, and teachers, delay paycheck gratification for a week, maybe two, while they expect school kids to delay it to an adulthood they can't even imagine? while being constantly assaulted by bullies who deliberately attack the studious?
Meanwhile, curricula is very weak on applications, starting almost entirely with theory and saving most applications for graduate school using excessive prerequisites without nearly enough McGuivering, though the texts and secret notes criticized above do require basic literacy just as my grade payment formula required me to be able to square a gradepoint.
BTW, I don't hate kids so much as to forget having been one. It turned out that my father offered to continue grade payments in college, but never told me, and if he had, I likely would have rested in summer and done better, but politics, including overpopulation politics, before the abortion rights movement embraced "reproductive justice" childcare funding demands, would still have interfered. I think I dropped out the very year the Cairo Convention "consensus" destroyed the global overpopulation movement, which is why Roe was never applied to occupied Afghanistan and Iraq.

[Lenona]

Speaking of delayed gratification...

I was telling someone that one not-so-minor reason I never wanted kids is the following.

Imagine this. You spend five years slowly and patiently putting your small kids through the motions of:

-Outdoor activities or at least vigorous daily physical activity

-Face-to-face conversations and all the etiquette that goes into them - if the kids hope to make friends

-Creative play

-Learning to enjoy delayed gratifications and multitasking, such as how to bake a cake and cleaning up while waiting for the oven to finish so that the only work, afterward, is preparing the frosting

-Doing chores and other unwanted duties without complaining about them

-Lots of reading aloud - and learning to enjoy reading alone

-Above all, putting other people first in general, within reason

You then have to send them to school, where...

...they're suddenly surrounded by classmates who don't do ANY of those things - or if they do, it's pretty seldom. What's more, they seem pretty happy about it. That is, they're not exactly depressed (yet) by having five or more hours of screen time every day. They're only unhappy that they don't have MORE hours.

How can that turn out well for YOUR kids?

After all, the golden rule in conversation is to talk about what other people are interested in, not what you're interested in - or you're not acting like a good friend, and kids who aren't allowed to watch screens much won't be able to keep up with each new episode of a show - or talk about it. Also, unfortunately, when most of the other little kids don't do things that require mental and physical effort, they're not going to feel socially compelled to talk about "dorky" activities that only ONE kid in the class does, just to be polite!

(I was a teen before I even heard of VCRs, so of course the idea of reading the book version before seeing the movie - such as "Mary Poppins" - was more or less normal among my classmates, and no one would have thought of anyone as a nerd just for doing that. At any rate, I can only imagine how much less of a reader I would have been, had it been normal, in the schools I attended, for kids to put down kids who read books without pictures for fun.)

[Lenona]

Post by Lenona
Speaking of delayed gratification...
I was telling someone that one not-so-minor reason I never wanted kids is the following.
-Outdoor activities or at least vigorous daily physical activity
-Face-to-face conversations and all the etiquette that goes into them - if the kids hope to make friends
-Creative play
-Learning to enjoy delayed gratifications and multitasking, such as how to bake a cake and cleaning up while waiting for the oven to finish so that the only work, afterward, is preparing the frosting
-Doing chores and other unwanted duties without complaining about them
-Lots of reading aloud - and learning to enjoy reading alone
-Above all, putting other people first in general, within reason
You then have to send them to school, where...
...they're suddenly surrounded by classmates who don't do ANY of those things - or if they do, it's pretty seldom. What's more, they seem pretty happy about it. That is, they're not exactly depressed (yet) by having five or more hours of screen time every day. They're only unhappy that they don't have MORE hours.
How can that turn out well for YOUR kids?
After all, the golden rule in conversation is to talk about what other people are interested in, not what you're interested in - or you're not acting like a good friend, and kids who aren't allowed to watch screens much won't be able to keep up with each new episode of a show - or talk about it. Also, unfortunately, when most of the other little kids don't do things that require mental and physical effort, they're not going to feel socially compelled to talk about "dorky" activities that only ONE kid in the class does, just to be polite!

And here's an example of how screen-addicted kids think, at age 10 (this was in the Boston Globe this September, written by a 16-year-old girl):

"I remember the dread I would feel as I sat on my twin-size bed when I didn't receive any texts. I was 10. When my neighbor knocked on my door and asked me to play with her, I thought she was a loser. What ten-year-old still plays outside? I was much cooler because I sat inside all day anxiously awaiting a phone call or a like. I look back and can't help but be jealous of that neighbor. She had a real childhood."