Social Learning and Back To Basics

I just came back from Muffins in the Morning, a special program in which parents are invited to come have some breakfast with their kids before the start of the school day. It's an evolved version of the old "Donuts with Dad" concept, in which schools assumed that fathers were less involved in their children's lives and would therefor benefit from being lured to school with pasties. It was a well-meant program larded with all sorts of assumptions about gender roles and sexual identities and would, of course, now be illegal in Florida and other similar states. 

But I digress. 

The Board of Directors enjoyed their muffins and apple slices, but mostly they enjoyed seeing their classmates. This is standard stuff. On any given day at dropoff they will get excited about seeing and greeting a classmate even though they're going to see them in about three minutes anyway (the extra level of charm comes because kindergartners' preferred manner of saying "hi" is a big hug). 

Watching the boys in their element reminds me just how very social the whole experience of school is for students.

At my old school, the day starts with the roaming of the halls, a social ritual in which students roam or stand with their friends so they can start the day with their friends. If you've got a home base (band kids, yearbook kids), you go there to catch up with the same people that you were texting with six hours ago. You organize your lunch around seeing your friends. Your main concern about your new schedule is who you have classes with. You plan your path between classes based on seeing friends. 

For students, the social aspect of school is not some disconnected extra--it's central to the whole school experience. And it absolutely will affect the academic elements.

Students check out in class when they're pre-occupied and upset about a fight with their friends. And the amount of academic disruption caused by interpersonal drama! Lordy (and, for the record, teenaged LGBTQ drama is just as dramatic as straight cis drama). A major--if not THE major--reason that students dropped out to home school or private school was not some sort of academic concerns, but issues like not feeling like they had any friends at the school. 

None of which means that teachers and staff should be actively trying to manage or engineer this stuff (I've said my peace about formal SEL instruction), but to imagine that you're going to set your classroom high on a mountain where it will never be touched by the waters of students' social lives is a foolish dream. It rains everywhere, and sooner or later everything gets wet.

I think of this every time somebody (who invariably does not work in education) declares that we should get Back To Basics and just teach the three Rs and not mess with any of that other stuff. 

For students, the social aspect of school is inextricably bound up in the school experience. Folks who imagine that the way school works is that students show up, sit down, and go about their daily learning tasks like good little meat widgets on an assembly line are living in some kind of fantasy world. That is not how this works. That is not how any of this works.

I am not arguing that every academic class should come with a group therapy session. One of the valuable things that teachers can model is how to go about setting aside your personal stuff and getting on with Doing The Work. But if you think school can somehow be conducted without any personal and social aspect of student lives intruding, I have bridge built by unicorns over a swamp to sell you. And if you think that you can eliminate some of the social and personal stuff by telling some students that their type of person doesn't exist and is never to be mentioned, I am going to give you your change from the bridge purchase in Monopoly money. 

I am not saying that formal SEL instruction should supplant academics. But dealing with soft skills and social skills and the tools for being a human being in the world is necessary to get to those basics, and insisting that a school should address the three Rs and nothing else is like insisting that a school is only about classrooms, not doors, and therefor a school should be built without any doorways at all--just walls. Before you can sit in a classroom, you have to navigate your way into it, and for that, doors are as necessary as the rooms themselves. 

It is, like virtually everything in education that matters, a constant shifting balancing act. Anyone who tells you that one end of the pole is the only end that matters is selling something, and it's nothing very helpful.