On paper, Social and Emotional Learning sounds like a good idea. It has been proven to prevent drug use, violence, bullying and dropout rates. This curriculum helps develop student’s social and emotional skills early in life.

SEL Core Competencies include self-management, self awareness, responsible decision making, social awareness and relationship skills.

These lessons are taught weekly starting with elementary school through junior year of high school, seniors are allowed time for college applications.

We as a staff believe that these kinds of lessons should be implemented in elementary and early on in life.

Many of these lessons are childlike and should be aimed at a lower age level such as children and preteens.

Another problem with these lessons are what they actually teach. It starts from simple things like how to shake hands and learning the proper way to help reach academic achievement in the classroom.

The SLANT lesson teaches students to sit up, lean forward, ask questions, nod and take notes. Then they ask for students to practice doing this during the advisory period.

Just imagine watching students practicing sitting up straight in a proper manner and nodding seems a tad ridiculous.

These particular sets of skills are developed at a much younger age in elementary school and at home.

The district aims to help students feel safe and teach them how to deal with things like stress and bullying, but we don’t see how teaching high school student’s what they already know will help do this.

Younger students who don’t have these supports at home would benefit most because they are being exposed at an earlier age.

If juniors get into a lot of trouble don’t have very good relationships with teachers and do not get along well with others, they are not suddenly going to participate in one of these activities, realizing that they shouldn’t be doing these things and learn how to deal with their troubles.

An elementary student who has a lot of trouble at home needs to know they are supported and how to deal will self-management, self-awareness, decision-making and social awareness.

As teenagers we begin to realize right from wrong because we are surrounded with different people that go through different things around us.

Younger students typically don’t understand what’s really going on and this is why they need to be taught all of these social and emotional techniques

These lessons have a huge potential to help children who are a part of broken homes, struggling in school and who are not sure how to deal with their problems.

This initiative isn’t only to help students focus on academics, but also help them articulate feelings and learn how to deal with their academics.

Social and emotional learning is something that schools have been lacking and it’s been needed for a while. However, we believe that a more specialized curriculum is needed for high school advisory classes.

We need advisory lessons that teach us how to do our taxes, balance our check books, pay bills and skills that we need later in life.