Feelings and Learning -What's the Connection?

Do you remember sitting in a classroom and daydreaming? Or your parent shouting at you or threatening that when you get home from school you would be punished for something which you didn't do? All day long all you could think of was what would happen after school! Your stomach would lurch or you would shake with fear everytime you thought about it.

Do you remember looking forward to seeing your special friend or going to a party on the weekend? The closer it got to Friday the harder it was to "keep your mind on your work". Some of us who have experienced the divorce or separation of parents while we were at school will remember the many days and nights we spent worrying about what would happen to us. And frequently our teacher would complain that our school work was falling behind.

Whenever a child is worried, anxious, scared or sad the school work is the first area to suffer. This is when it is easiest for the child to "borrow" some attention to deal with the problem at hand. The child can still fake it and look like she is paying attention to her school work. She can still go to school everyday but no one knows what is happening in her head while she is sitting in the classroom. She can keep her eyes fixed on the teacher and not be hearing a thing. She can sit in her room for hours with a book opened but only staring at the words. It's only at the end of the term, at test time, that we can see that something has been wrong.

Emotions do interfere with learning. In any experience emotions are stored in our memory along with the information or knowledge. When the information is required later the emotions are also pulled up and they can act as controllers of the new situation. They get in the way of fresh thinking about the new information. The energy and attention allocated to dealing with the emtions take away from the attention and energy for learning.

Children need help understanding their feelings and making sense of other people's feelings and reactions. They also need help identifying and verbalizing their feelings appropriately. This is the first step in dealing with the feelings. Teachers and parents need to spend time talking to children about their feelings, what caused them and deciding on alternative actions. Reading books with children about emotions help. At the beginning of the school day teachers need to help students clear out any negative feelings they may have brought to school, e.g. something may have happened at home the night before or they may have seen something disturbing on the way to school. Similarly at the end of the school day parents can offer the child the opportunity to talk about what happened in school, so that attention is then availabe for homework and extra studying.

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