Wholly Human

It is time for a rant, people!!

The concept of teaching the “whole child” is not new, but the approach suggested in this article rather rubs me the wrong way. In fact,

I hate it.

I mean, “Encourage adults to model desired behaviors” —

so far so good —

“such as drinking water throughout the day.”

WHAT????

(And get a UTI when those adults can’t pee — throughout the day?)

It’s not that I’m against drinking water. I’m totally for it! It’s that I understand, if you want to integrate physical, mental, and intellectual wellbeing — the goal the article encourages and I heartily approve of — then the desired behaviors we should be modeling go deeper than water bottles. They include

• aligning our relationships

• experiencing and processing real emotions

• offering corrective action

• talking through maladaptive experiences

• using not some pre-packaged SEL curriculum or a list of statewide standards or superficial behaviors but the fully embodied SEL content each of us brings into the classroom

every day.

Why do we need to collect people from disparate regions of the school — including “at least one classroom teacher who is passionate about whole-child education” —

wait: what other type of teacher is there?

— to form a “Whole-Child Wellness Team”? What have we got now? “Partial-Child Education” led by partial people teaching in silos? (Hunh. Maybe yes.)

Are we not wholly human? Always? Everywhere?

If any teacher walks into her classroom NOT thinking, “Today I am a whole human being and so are my students,” then

WTF?

End of rant. For now.