Monday, February 21, 2011

Emotional Baggage


It used to be that when you were going to school there were one or two students in a class that had emotional baggage, meaning they had endured a rough home life. Now you walk into a classroom and 40% of the class is coming in with emotional issues that have developed from their environment. As educators you spend seven hours a day with these students and your job is to provide them with the best education possible. What do you do though when their environment and emotional state interferes with educating these young minds? Students are coming into classrooms younger and younger with more baggage, which is causing more behaviors to arise and less instructing to occur in the classroom. As an educator it makes it very difficult to implement a lesson when you have a student screaming in the classroom while you are teaching or a boy rolling on the floor because he is looking for attention. These behaviors could arise because these students aren't getting enough sleep at night because their parents are fighting or they are expressing their frustrations because they missed a visitation with a parent. As an educator we can only do our best to get these students through the day and hope that they take something we have taught them home. It's unfortunate but we can't pack ourselves up into their backpacks to be their for them when they deal with this emotional stress at home.

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