Our work continues

Dear Readers. Welcome to the New Year. I hope that this year is a healing one for all of us. This is a time for reflection and planning for whatever lies ahead of us. It would be good for us to be armed with the mental and emotional (if not the physical) strength to cope with life and its twists and turns. Our aim continues to be to develop our emotional intelligence, whether we are teaching in a classroom, parenting and so supporting our young people through school, or being an ally to a young person or an adult who is a care giver to a young person.

You may know that there are some changes coming to the Suite. I take them as another challenge. I want to continue to offer these writings and information on Social and Emotional Learning .I consider it a very important issue in our lives, and there is much for us to learn and use as we keep our commitment to provide a rational world for our young people to grow up in.

This topic of Social and Emotional Learning has taken many directions since I started here fifteen months and twenty eight articles ago. My aim has always been to provide information that is easy to digest and apply both to teachers and parents, and even to students themselves. Over the past year we have looked at the issue of abuse in schools. This was an important issue to me because of the discussion in our government about banning corporal punishment in schools. The issue is still not resolved, by the way. But the topic of violence in schools has dominated education systems all over the world in the past few years. And the events of September 11th have highlighted it even more. Out of every bad comes some good. There has been a heightened focus on social and emotional learning in schools as teachers, parents and students have tried to cope with the grief, anger, frustration and hopelessness that arose out of that tragedy. It has forced us to address issues in schools such as racism. Hopefully the efforts will continue and grow even stronger.

The incident of the death of my daughter’s friends caused me to focus more on how we support our children emotionally. As parents we do have to learn different strategies of dealing and communicating with our children who are influenced by the environment in which they are growing up; environments that are so different from the ones we grew up in. School is different for them.

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