Response to Chpt. 4: Tracking and Emotional Intelligence

I know what you mean with relating all of your information to your preschool class. That is what I tend to do with my last job, but I agree that it is our best source of information. I feel applying what we know to our past experiences makes all of this information real and interesting.

I found your question about the over representation of minority groups in lower achieving ability groups interesting. I think that your two potential answers to this reasoning fit together. It is unfortunate, but I think students are placed in these lower ability groups because of their differing cultural capital and because of this the teacher views them as lower achieving. Sometimes I wonder if all teachers should come back to school and take the classes we are taking because I feel so enlightened by all of this information and motivated to do my best to prevent this from happening in my own classroom. Granted, this is idealistic and it may not be possible for me to change, but I know I can do my best to work for that goal.

When I read your comment about emotion intelligence, I began thinking back to our past discussions about our old jobs. I think the most common reason for aggression and rage at such a young age is a misunderstanding of situations (at least the violence I witnessed). I know that the second grader I worked with really struggled to read the situation properly. This is why he usually acted out. I feel that if someone would have worked with him to educate him on his emotional intelligence, it would have had a huge impact on his behavior and a lot less stress for everyone involved. These are children, but they need to learn early on how to interact with one another and read situations properly. The older they get the more trouble they could get into because of this lack of intelligence.

I wish all schools and classes would educate children on tattling and solving problems on their own. During recess, I would have at least five different students come to me to tattle on someone else. We tried to discourage them from tattling, but fifteen minutes just didn’t seem like enough time to do it in.

I also agree that the best way to educate students on emotional intelligence is to model it yourself. I think the strategies are wonderful ideas, as long as they could be implemented. I think it should be a requirement in schools to teach these kinds of strategies and to model them. This doesn’t just mean having the counselor come in once a week and talk for thirty minutes about it, but to actually apply it to their everyday life. I think the counselor at our school came every other week at most (I know they are busy!) and that is why the regular classroom should work on these strategies as well.