I've been enjoying the serial review without having read the book, and thus felt unable to comment, but decided to at this stage, even if with this caveat: all I know about the book comes from its summaries and reviews, ranging from adulatory to neutral to critical.
I'm commenting on this part because I feel it goes to the core of not just the specific educational approach but broader zeitgeist. I'd call it "therapeutic approach to social and other life" but that's not quite right because much therapy (including the very common CBT and CBT derived styles like ACT) are nothing like the phenomenon I mean. So I don't quite know what to call it but it's a thing, and from what I've seen is particularly widespread among slightly-alternative*-young-people (and the extended niche occupied by their older versions in MORE "alternative" millieus.
And the thing consists of encouraging what seems like excessive focus on and giving immense importance to one's inner states, specifically one's emotions, *as well as those states and emotions of others*, rather than focusing on being in and acting on the world, pursuing goals, and generally looking outwards.
And I'm not saying that introspection should be actively discouraged, or that teachers and carers should be ignoring children's states or emotions. But the main point the author SEEMS to be making, that active EXTENSIVE focus on and not just encouraging but REQUESTING that children do that feels (and I purposefully choose this word, because it's an intuition rather than a fact) potentially counterproductive, in not dissimilar way to the way psychological debriefing provided for all survivors of distressing and traumatic events and responders to those turned out to be more harmful than helpful (even if it might be helpful to SOME).
So I'm looking at this "Spy" exercise, and while I don't share author's concerns about invading sacred privacy behind family home doors, I'm wondering if making children ACTIVELY FOCUS on doing what most humans do to a huge extent anyway (because we're highly social species and because we depend on families completely for many years when very young and on communities/society forever) -- monitoring and trying to interpret inner states of other people -- is going to be useful to the general population, and whether it might not be actively harmful even by making them obsess even more than the human average over "what did X think about and whether they like me":
The exercise you describe as being useful for autistic children or adults might be counterproductive in non-autistic people?
So while your general thrust in this section feels persuasive, the:
>>"Shrier says that emotional checkins cause children to ruminate constantly about their feelings and how terrible they feel"
...might have a point? Maybe not to the "until they flunk out of school and have major depressive disorder" level but to a certain degree at least? In ways similar to "you don't need to feel guilty for X" will be a needed intervention for some, and will make those who didn't feel guilty think that maybe they should, or how DEI training can activate thinking using categories that prejudice is based on?
I also feel there's a wider cultural context to this. "It's good to talk, no shame in sharing" is likely a very important message if the societal norm is a full-on repressed stoicism -- but if the norm has shifted (and I have no idea if it has in American education!) closer to emotional incontinence, then the corrective message needs to change to.
My reaction to this was similar to yours. The active focus on inner states of other people strikes me as a very "coupled" thing (in the sense of John Nerst's "Tilted Political Compass", https://everythingstudies.com/2019/03/01/the-tilted-political-compass-part-1-left-and-right/) -- a society where we owe potentially infinite emotional debts to others and everything is everyone's business.
I think maybe there's almost a motte and bailey. Obviously we want to teach kids not to hit each other or yell insults at each other, and that kind of stuff. But I think some of the social-emotional learning stuff that's being described here goes too far towards making people feel responsible for each other's feelings, which is what I would discourage.
The model for dealing with emotions that I learned as a kid, and which informs the one I currently have, was learned more in performing arts and sports than in the academic parts of school, but it was basically: my emotions are my problem, not anyone else's. I learned explicit and implicit lessons along the following lines: it was OK and natural to FEEL disappointed that Jenny got the solo in choir and not me, or that I had to play right field instead of pitcher, but ACTING disappointed would be disrespectful to everyone else in the choir/softball team.
And, like, I still don't think this is totally wrong? If my boss has to give me negative feedback or pass me over for a promotion, I want her to be able to trust that I will still be able to do my job and that she won't have to walk on eggshells around me. So even if I'm upset, I will hide my feelings, but I also need people not to pry. (If they did, that would just create a hiding-your-feelings arms race: Bob gets promoted over me -> I am disappointed -> I hide my feelings -> everyone else scrutinizes my behavior for more and more subtle tells -> I hide my feelings more.)
Caveats:
(1) this is for "out in the world", not for close friends and family. I think that part of what it means in the first place to have that more intimate relationship with someone is that your emotional states will be more intertwined. (John makes a similar point in his post.)
(2) The circumstances of what caused a particular emotional state do play a role in what the appropriate response is, both from the person having the emotion and from everyone else. Bursting into tears during a meeting because my boss corrected my math error would be inappropriate; bursting into tears during a meeting because my close family member died would be very different. Similarly, I 100% do not want my boss or coworkers checking in with me emotionally about normal work things, but if I were dealing with a death in the family, that might be more appropriate too.
I agree with that — and I also think that active, constant and persistent focus on ONE’S OWN emotions and feelings is not something that should be universally encouraged at all.
I think learning how to handle troubling emotions is important! But I also think that most of the time for most people most emotions are not particularly troubling and they just are, like weather (to use CAT-borrowed metaphor). Encouraging focus on them might create problems of its own. “Therapeutic approach” seems to assume universal fragility and flooding with negative, troublesome emotions, which is natural because it's originated in working with troubled people. Extending this to general population MIGHT lead to somewhat iatrogenic harms.
I think ultimately it's the problem of the optimal approaches varying for different people, also different kids. SOME people need encouragement and even help in connecting to their emotions or “permission” to feel and express in civilised manner. Others very much need the opposite. The kind of activity that might be very useful for an autistic child, or one that has a very wobbly self esteem or is shy is likely to be not so useful (or even positively counterproductive) in another one. I don't think it's an easy one to optimise, and likely impossible to for any group.
i feel like the daisy/ladybug thing might have made me more emotionally repressed by associating emotionally checking in with twee bullshit but thats me ig
> * People in the past lived differently than how we do, and their lives were often worse. We should be grateful we live in the present.
> * People in different countries live differently from how we do, and that’s really cool.
Now, if I had been in charge of this class the second bullet would've been, "People in different countries live differently from how we do, and their lives are often worse. We should establish a world government that guarantees legal equality and freedom of movement for everyone regardless of where they're born, and which uses tax revenues to combat poverty on a global scale."
I think we hit this from both angles! Ozy did a geography class where the vibe was more "other people have different cultures and live in different ways; the way you live isn't the only way to live", but we've also looked at Dollar Street and done exercises examining what people in poorer countries sometimes don't have that we take for granted, and the kids were super engaged while comparing and contrasting what kinds of material goods people had or didn't have and what they reported most wanting.
Admittedly, the suggested thing that we might do about this was more like "think about what things we might want to send children in other countries for Christmas" than "establish one world government". They can explore this possibility later, but I'm going to hold off at least until we have completed the class about how Russia is full of many people besides Putin and we probably can't solve the war in Ukraine by disrupting the planet's rotation and ushering in eternal night on that side of the planet (real child suggestion, I think inspired by My Little Pony).
I feel like schools have been doing something like SEL for years and years, but no-one decided it had to have a Methodology (TM) and a three-letter acronym until much more recently. When were social skills and responsible decision-making ever not part of school?
I'll grant that "be in touch with your feelings" as opposed to "act like a good little robot in school" is probably a new-ish thing - though feelings have always had their place in literature and art, even in the western classical tradition (I don't think anyone is suggesting we ban teaching Romanticism for example).
I understand most of the things you’re teaching, but why teach “the world is an interesting place” and “reading is fun, math is fun”?
I’m much happier when I’m not thinking about the intricacies of the world and just focusing on things like exercise, non-controversial entertainment, having goofy and kind of pointless conversations, eating some good food. For this reason among others, I’m not going into academia and instead doing something much more “mindless”.
Why are they obligated to think of reading and math as fun?
Perhaps it’s because most people have intellectual hobbies they actually enjoy, while I’m interested in things like politics and philosophy which just tends to make me sad (yes, I have interests I do not enjoy. I swear this is a real thing). Oh well.
(I am the full-time teacher at the school.) I think you basically can't obligate kids to think that reading and math are fun, and probably can't inculcate the attitude just by saying it out loud, either. It's more that we use a comic book and puzzles based math curriculum, take breaks from the main curriculum to do things like teach math through the lens of Magic: the Gathering or use math to answer questions the kids have, let them select their own reading materials from the library and try to obtain books that they enjoy reading for fun, have a school Pathfinder game that kids can't join until they have mastery of basic reading, writing, addition, and subtraction, etc.
The big thing that I would like to teach them in this area is that they can use math and reading to answer questions that they have and as skills that actually open up more things that they can do for fun, rather than just thinking of them as Stuff We Have To Do In The Classroom. But that has to be taught by demonstrating it over and over, not just by asserting it.
I was about to post a link to an old theunitofcaring blog post about someone who hated math but then rediscovered it through D&D - then I noticed the original poster was you! That was one of my all-time most inspiring reads on math education, especially is it fights back against "we should do less math in RPGs to be more inclusive to women".
(Meanwhile in the pathfinder universe, I swear our GM has a cursed die. It's about time we had a battle where the enemy didn't open with a Nat20 on their first attack.)
I think maybe what they mean is that they’re teaching that “reading can be fun” and “math can be fun”, given that the perceived public school standard is “reading is boring” and “math is hell”.
(Seventh-graders are 12 or 13; third-graders are 8 or 9; kindergarteners are 5 or 6. Kindergarten is the first year of mandatory schooling, though many children go to preschool before it.)
> But Abigail Shrier seems to expect that a randomly sampled moment usually contains something that you’d rather a school counsellor not know: a marital argument, an emotional breakdown, a harsh punishment of the child’s sibling.
That's possible, but the quote you're deriving this from doesn't really imply that. Perhaps Ms Shrier just doesn't want the school counsellor to know about the silly songs she sings to her cat.
I agree with 90% of this but I am not fond of the math curriculum I’ve seen first hand in U.S. schools (obviously varies by state and district). Not only does it fail to teach facility with facts and basic calculations but it ALSO FAILS TO TEACH WHAT IT CLAIMS TO FOCUS ON. That is, the deep understanding. I’ve seen it with multiple very different children now so I am certain it is the fault of the curriculum. I was open to the idea that the different approaches etc. would work for that understanding but it just doesn’t seem to at all. Instead, teaching how to accurately and quickly add and subtract does, in my experience, lead to an ability to see if an answer “makes sense.” Same with multiplication tables etc. So I’m onboard with the math goals you cite but I think the path towards them lies in a certain amount of rote memorization and practice.
I’m not opposed to showing a kid how to solve a problem in three different ways - but the curriculum I’ve seen has them do the inefficient frankly ridiculous method 100s of times. Insane.
“Dad, I think my curfew should be 9:30” at sixteen is practice for “ma’am, I think I deserve a raise” at twenty-six."
If you're going to public school, that answer is going to be no at twenty-six, thirty-six, and forty-six. (Okay, that might not be the for-sure case every single time, but public school is not meant to turn out assertive, high earner types.) SEL is supposed to reduce interpersonal violence between children by teaching self-soothing skills and emotional resilience, it is in no way meant to increase the subject's desire to improve their material circumstances. Put another way, it's meant to help you turn the "thorn into a rose" when you get turned down from that raise and not end up brandishing a gun at your boss.
I don't think you can teach kids that reading and maths are fun....because that's not factually correct... people differ in what they have fun doing.
We teach kids that maths and reading are very important..so even if its not fun or they find it hard..it's worthwhile ti find a way to manage to do them as without them they lose out on lots of opportunities....some of which they may find fun!
I've been enjoying the serial review without having read the book, and thus felt unable to comment, but decided to at this stage, even if with this caveat: all I know about the book comes from its summaries and reviews, ranging from adulatory to neutral to critical.
I'm commenting on this part because I feel it goes to the core of not just the specific educational approach but broader zeitgeist. I'd call it "therapeutic approach to social and other life" but that's not quite right because much therapy (including the very common CBT and CBT derived styles like ACT) are nothing like the phenomenon I mean. So I don't quite know what to call it but it's a thing, and from what I've seen is particularly widespread among slightly-alternative*-young-people (and the extended niche occupied by their older versions in MORE "alternative" millieus.
And the thing consists of encouraging what seems like excessive focus on and giving immense importance to one's inner states, specifically one's emotions, *as well as those states and emotions of others*, rather than focusing on being in and acting on the world, pursuing goals, and generally looking outwards.
And I'm not saying that introspection should be actively discouraged, or that teachers and carers should be ignoring children's states or emotions. But the main point the author SEEMS to be making, that active EXTENSIVE focus on and not just encouraging but REQUESTING that children do that feels (and I purposefully choose this word, because it's an intuition rather than a fact) potentially counterproductive, in not dissimilar way to the way psychological debriefing provided for all survivors of distressing and traumatic events and responders to those turned out to be more harmful than helpful (even if it might be helpful to SOME).
So I'm looking at this "Spy" exercise, and while I don't share author's concerns about invading sacred privacy behind family home doors, I'm wondering if making children ACTIVELY FOCUS on doing what most humans do to a huge extent anyway (because we're highly social species and because we depend on families completely for many years when very young and on communities/society forever) -- monitoring and trying to interpret inner states of other people -- is going to be useful to the general population, and whether it might not be actively harmful even by making them obsess even more than the human average over "what did X think about and whether they like me":
The exercise you describe as being useful for autistic children or adults might be counterproductive in non-autistic people?
So while your general thrust in this section feels persuasive, the:
>>"Shrier says that emotional checkins cause children to ruminate constantly about their feelings and how terrible they feel"
...might have a point? Maybe not to the "until they flunk out of school and have major depressive disorder" level but to a certain degree at least? In ways similar to "you don't need to feel guilty for X" will be a needed intervention for some, and will make those who didn't feel guilty think that maybe they should, or how DEI training can activate thinking using categories that prejudice is based on?
I also feel there's a wider cultural context to this. "It's good to talk, no shame in sharing" is likely a very important message if the societal norm is a full-on repressed stoicism -- but if the norm has shifted (and I have no idea if it has in American education!) closer to emotional incontinence, then the corrective message needs to change to.
My reaction to this was similar to yours. The active focus on inner states of other people strikes me as a very "coupled" thing (in the sense of John Nerst's "Tilted Political Compass", https://everythingstudies.com/2019/03/01/the-tilted-political-compass-part-1-left-and-right/) -- a society where we owe potentially infinite emotional debts to others and everything is everyone's business.
I think maybe there's almost a motte and bailey. Obviously we want to teach kids not to hit each other or yell insults at each other, and that kind of stuff. But I think some of the social-emotional learning stuff that's being described here goes too far towards making people feel responsible for each other's feelings, which is what I would discourage.
The model for dealing with emotions that I learned as a kid, and which informs the one I currently have, was learned more in performing arts and sports than in the academic parts of school, but it was basically: my emotions are my problem, not anyone else's. I learned explicit and implicit lessons along the following lines: it was OK and natural to FEEL disappointed that Jenny got the solo in choir and not me, or that I had to play right field instead of pitcher, but ACTING disappointed would be disrespectful to everyone else in the choir/softball team.
And, like, I still don't think this is totally wrong? If my boss has to give me negative feedback or pass me over for a promotion, I want her to be able to trust that I will still be able to do my job and that she won't have to walk on eggshells around me. So even if I'm upset, I will hide my feelings, but I also need people not to pry. (If they did, that would just create a hiding-your-feelings arms race: Bob gets promoted over me -> I am disappointed -> I hide my feelings -> everyone else scrutinizes my behavior for more and more subtle tells -> I hide my feelings more.)
Caveats:
(1) this is for "out in the world", not for close friends and family. I think that part of what it means in the first place to have that more intimate relationship with someone is that your emotional states will be more intertwined. (John makes a similar point in his post.)
(2) The circumstances of what caused a particular emotional state do play a role in what the appropriate response is, both from the person having the emotion and from everyone else. Bursting into tears during a meeting because my boss corrected my math error would be inappropriate; bursting into tears during a meeting because my close family member died would be very different. Similarly, I 100% do not want my boss or coworkers checking in with me emotionally about normal work things, but if I were dealing with a death in the family, that might be more appropriate too.
I agree with that — and I also think that active, constant and persistent focus on ONE’S OWN emotions and feelings is not something that should be universally encouraged at all.
I think learning how to handle troubling emotions is important! But I also think that most of the time for most people most emotions are not particularly troubling and they just are, like weather (to use CAT-borrowed metaphor). Encouraging focus on them might create problems of its own. “Therapeutic approach” seems to assume universal fragility and flooding with negative, troublesome emotions, which is natural because it's originated in working with troubled people. Extending this to general population MIGHT lead to somewhat iatrogenic harms.
I think ultimately it's the problem of the optimal approaches varying for different people, also different kids. SOME people need encouragement and even help in connecting to their emotions or “permission” to feel and express in civilised manner. Others very much need the opposite. The kind of activity that might be very useful for an autistic child, or one that has a very wobbly self esteem or is shy is likely to be not so useful (or even positively counterproductive) in another one. I don't think it's an easy one to optimise, and likely impossible to for any group.
*too
i feel like the daisy/ladybug thing might have made me more emotionally repressed by associating emotionally checking in with twee bullshit but thats me ig
> * People in the past lived differently than how we do, and their lives were often worse. We should be grateful we live in the present.
> * People in different countries live differently from how we do, and that’s really cool.
Now, if I had been in charge of this class the second bullet would've been, "People in different countries live differently from how we do, and their lives are often worse. We should establish a world government that guarantees legal equality and freedom of movement for everyone regardless of where they're born, and which uses tax revenues to combat poverty on a global scale."
I think we hit this from both angles! Ozy did a geography class where the vibe was more "other people have different cultures and live in different ways; the way you live isn't the only way to live", but we've also looked at Dollar Street and done exercises examining what people in poorer countries sometimes don't have that we take for granted, and the kids were super engaged while comparing and contrasting what kinds of material goods people had or didn't have and what they reported most wanting.
Admittedly, the suggested thing that we might do about this was more like "think about what things we might want to send children in other countries for Christmas" than "establish one world government". They can explore this possibility later, but I'm going to hold off at least until we have completed the class about how Russia is full of many people besides Putin and we probably can't solve the war in Ukraine by disrupting the planet's rotation and ushering in eternal night on that side of the planet (real child suggestion, I think inspired by My Little Pony).
On the topic of math education, I will never pass up the opportunity to share Lockhart's Lament:
https://worrydream.com/refs/Lockhart_2002_-_A_Mathematician's_Lament.pdf
I think it's the best introduction to "real math" for those who are unfamiliar.
I feel like schools have been doing something like SEL for years and years, but no-one decided it had to have a Methodology (TM) and a three-letter acronym until much more recently. When were social skills and responsible decision-making ever not part of school?
I'll grant that "be in touch with your feelings" as opposed to "act like a good little robot in school" is probably a new-ish thing - though feelings have always had their place in literature and art, even in the western classical tradition (I don't think anyone is suggesting we ban teaching Romanticism for example).
I understand most of the things you’re teaching, but why teach “the world is an interesting place” and “reading is fun, math is fun”?
I’m much happier when I’m not thinking about the intricacies of the world and just focusing on things like exercise, non-controversial entertainment, having goofy and kind of pointless conversations, eating some good food. For this reason among others, I’m not going into academia and instead doing something much more “mindless”.
Why are they obligated to think of reading and math as fun?
Perhaps it’s because most people have intellectual hobbies they actually enjoy, while I’m interested in things like politics and philosophy which just tends to make me sad (yes, I have interests I do not enjoy. I swear this is a real thing). Oh well.
(I am the full-time teacher at the school.) I think you basically can't obligate kids to think that reading and math are fun, and probably can't inculcate the attitude just by saying it out loud, either. It's more that we use a comic book and puzzles based math curriculum, take breaks from the main curriculum to do things like teach math through the lens of Magic: the Gathering or use math to answer questions the kids have, let them select their own reading materials from the library and try to obtain books that they enjoy reading for fun, have a school Pathfinder game that kids can't join until they have mastery of basic reading, writing, addition, and subtraction, etc.
The big thing that I would like to teach them in this area is that they can use math and reading to answer questions that they have and as skills that actually open up more things that they can do for fun, rather than just thinking of them as Stuff We Have To Do In The Classroom. But that has to be taught by demonstrating it over and over, not just by asserting it.
I was about to post a link to an old theunitofcaring blog post about someone who hated math but then rediscovered it through D&D - then I noticed the original poster was you! That was one of my all-time most inspiring reads on math education, especially is it fights back against "we should do less math in RPGs to be more inclusive to women".
(Meanwhile in the pathfinder universe, I swear our GM has a cursed die. It's about time we had a battle where the enemy didn't open with a Nat20 on their first attack.)
I think maybe what they mean is that they’re teaching that “reading can be fun” and “math can be fun”, given that the perceived public school standard is “reading is boring” and “math is hell”.
(Seventh-graders are 12 or 13; third-graders are 8 or 9; kindergarteners are 5 or 6. Kindergarten is the first year of mandatory schooling, though many children go to preschool before it.)
> But Abigail Shrier seems to expect that a randomly sampled moment usually contains something that you’d rather a school counsellor not know: a marital argument, an emotional breakdown, a harsh punishment of the child’s sibling.
That's possible, but the quote you're deriving this from doesn't really imply that. Perhaps Ms Shrier just doesn't want the school counsellor to know about the silly songs she sings to her cat.
I agree with 90% of this but I am not fond of the math curriculum I’ve seen first hand in U.S. schools (obviously varies by state and district). Not only does it fail to teach facility with facts and basic calculations but it ALSO FAILS TO TEACH WHAT IT CLAIMS TO FOCUS ON. That is, the deep understanding. I’ve seen it with multiple very different children now so I am certain it is the fault of the curriculum. I was open to the idea that the different approaches etc. would work for that understanding but it just doesn’t seem to at all. Instead, teaching how to accurately and quickly add and subtract does, in my experience, lead to an ability to see if an answer “makes sense.” Same with multiplication tables etc. So I’m onboard with the math goals you cite but I think the path towards them lies in a certain amount of rote memorization and practice.
I’m not opposed to showing a kid how to solve a problem in three different ways - but the curriculum I’ve seen has them do the inefficient frankly ridiculous method 100s of times. Insane.
“Dad, I think my curfew should be 9:30” at sixteen is practice for “ma’am, I think I deserve a raise” at twenty-six."
If you're going to public school, that answer is going to be no at twenty-six, thirty-six, and forty-six. (Okay, that might not be the for-sure case every single time, but public school is not meant to turn out assertive, high earner types.) SEL is supposed to reduce interpersonal violence between children by teaching self-soothing skills and emotional resilience, it is in no way meant to increase the subject's desire to improve their material circumstances. Put another way, it's meant to help you turn the "thorn into a rose" when you get turned down from that raise and not end up brandishing a gun at your boss.
Yeah, the way to get a raise these days is to find another job. :/
I don't think you can teach kids that reading and maths are fun....because that's not factually correct... people differ in what they have fun doing.
We teach kids that maths and reading are very important..so even if its not fun or they find it hard..it's worthwhile ti find a way to manage to do them as without them they lose out on lots of opportunities....some of which they may find fun!