Opinions, Opinions, Opinions

It is Monday, which means that I now give myself permission to get into a bit of a rant or express opinions that I hold near and dear. So, here it goes.

I was thinking in the shower this morning about education and how students interact with the world these days. My sister, a second grade teacher, has a group of students that are challenging her this year. The students have not settled into any sort of learning routine. They have no interest in learning anything. All they want to do is play without consequences. Almost all of her students are performing significantly below grade level, and they have not been taught how to learn in their school experience so far. She is struggling to find ways to engage their interests while teaching curriculum (which is an entirely different rant) and reining in the extreme behaviors that happen every hour in her current classroom.

I feel that we have shifted so far away from teaching into the realms of social-emotional development that we have forgotten how to teach students how to learn. I have seen this played out in the higher education process, but it is glaringly obvious in this year's classroom. I am not always the best judge for how the process of educating tiny humans is going because my clients are those who have been removed from their educational processes due to extreme behaviors of concern, but some of the things that I am hearing from others (not just my sister) are very familiar to me. It is becoming more likely that children act out in aggressive manners that put themselves and others in danger in "regular" classrooms. It almost feels like we have babied our children to the point where they are no longer moving through patterns of development - as a generation!

Being a "vintage music therapist," I have had an opportunity to watch how education has changed and swung from one end of a pendulum to the other and back again. I have been a school-based therapist for most of my life, but my school is a different type of school. Most of my students are with us for short bursts of time, so we do as much educating as possible while working on their extreme social-emotional needs in an effort to get them back into their home communities and schools. My services are not IEP-related. I have the luxury of not having to shape my therapy to documents, but I get to shape it to the current clients who walk into my room. 

I see some of the same sorts of things that my sister and other teachers report in my own clinic, but my kids tend to take issues to the extreme. What I am watching is that kids in general education seem to be coming closer to my students who are removed from their educational programs due to their behaviors of concern.

I don't think that changes in how we fund education will fix these issues. In fact, when funding for small humans gets cut, we see more difficulties with learning in later years. We know this, but science is often sacrificed so the rich can get richer and the poor become more ignorant.

The students that my sister is teaching right now were toddlers when COVID shut down the world. They were not in Headstart programs. They were at home with parents who probably did not know what to do with them. I wonder if they were just placed in front of screens for most of that crucial developmental period. I wonder if the kids who were born during the COVID crisis will be better than the current crop of seven year olds and better than the kids that will not get Headstart now due to misguided thinking from rich people. There's a longitudinal study for ya.

This is one of the things that causes my blood pressure to rise. I can clearly see cause and effect, and it staggers my brain when others cannot see those things as well.

So, what? Who cares?

I know that there are people out there who care. I know that there are people out there who are monitoring these things. I know that I am not alone in these thoughts, but I am not around many of those people right now on a day-to-day basis. I also feel queasy when I write and speak about these things.

What am I going to do? I am going to continue to write about what is happening in my facility/school and what others report about what is happening in their professional settings. Let me know what you are seeing in your professional setting - how are people behaving around you??