SEL, or Social-Emotional Learning, has been a guiding framework and set of ideas and skills students (and all human beings) should be exposed to, taught, and made use of throughout their lives. Prior to teh COVID crisis, shutdown, and reopening, SEL has taken on new life and widespread interest among school districts and educators because of the need to help so many students and adults recover from emotional damage and baggage caused by and during the global shutdowns. But also more recently, SEL has become part of the political culture war, as many conservatives and Republicans feel SEL is part of attempts to teach our children about DEI and 'wokeness', indocrination of students, and other reasons that have given SEL a black eye for many around the country.
I say the SEL has the letters in the incorrect order - try ELS instead, meaning Essential Life Skills. Since students, and all human beings, need the skills everyday, we get EELS, or Everyday Essential Life Skills!
Here are some of my thoughts about renaming/rebranding SEL as EELS. I include graphics any teachers can use immediately as handouts, posters, or to add to student assignments and literature, reasoning behind all this, and evidence as to why EELS are essential for student growth and learning. Teachers of all ages and grade levels are encouraged to include EELS in all aspects of your classroom culture and curricula - and teachers are already using numerous skills, likely without knowing the skills are associated with traditional SEL models. So these are not new, but instead a foundational part of every classroom! Check it out.
Yes, this title is correct. I've been inspired by quantum mechanics to develop a different mindset about how to think about my students, and human beings in general! What on earth does this mean?!
If you know anything about quantum mechanics, it is probably the core concept you've heard of (usually this comes up in a chemistry class in high school, but usually not much is done with it except a mention of the concept): particle-wave duality.
This is the notion that something like an electron, which most people think of as a tiny solid ball, or particle, can actually, under the right conditions that we're observing the electron, can act as a wave. Or that a photon, which is light and most would think of as a wave, can actually, under the right conditions that we're observing the photon, can act as a particle. An example of an electron or other similar pieces of matter, acting like particles is shown below.
This is from an old photo in my classroom of particles moving in a bubble chamber at Fermilab. Each track is an individual subatomic particle moving through a medium. Particles do this; at least in this type of experiment or observation. The same electrons in this photo, if observed in a different way, like moving through a small hole or slit, will look like this:
This is an electron beam in a cathode ray tube in my lab. The alternating rings we see are electrons undergoing diffraction, which only waves can do!
The important question to consider is: when an electron is just moving through space, and we are not observing it, is it a particle or a wave????
The answer is, in quantum mechanics, both! When not being observed, we cannot know what state the electron is in, and mathematically we create a wave function that has the two possible states in the function, along with coefficients that are related to the probability of being either a particle or a wave!
Probabilities, and a mix of possible states when not being observed, is where I start relating this to my students. Also, the notion that the way we observe an electron helps 'select' the state we actually observe the electron, is key (some say that an observation 'collapses the wave function' into one specific state of the object, which is the state we observe...either a particle or a wave, if it's an electron).
Here's what I mean for human beings. Think of all the emotional or mood states in which a human can be observed. We can be happy, sad, angry, curious, bored, excited, annoyed, and so on. However, can we know, exactly, which of these particular states our best friend is in at a specific moment in time, when he or she is not with us? If we cannot observe them in any way, of course the answer is we cannot know for sure. The best we can do is give the odds, or probabilities, of them being in a particular state at a given moment. This is no different than how we treat electrons in quantum mechanics.
And then, when our friend walks into our room and we can actually now observe him or her, then we see one of those possible states 'crystallize' or 'collapse' into one specific emotional or mood state! And, the way we observe them can have an effect on which state we see. If we are in a room that is dark, damp, and depressing, and/or we are in a bad mood, this will affect which state we see our friend in - they may have been in a good mood just before walking in, but became more depressed or concerned for us when they see us and our mood, or the environment of the room! Again, this is similar to quantum mechanics, where the way we observe an electron (i.e. the experiment we do), selects the specific state, particle or wave, that we actually observe.
So I think of my students as 'quantum critters', who are some complex mix of possible emotional or mood states, all superposed with each other when I have not yet seen the students. When they are in the hallways walking to my room, I do not have a clue what mood state they are in - I can only assign probabilities that they are happy or sad or angry, etc., at any given moment before stepping into my room. This is like an emotional or mood wave function. What's more, and makes this even more complex a situation, human beings have unique, complex emotional/mood wave functions! We are all different from each other, because we have a unique set of probabilities for being in a given emotional state. My students are not at all like the way we traditionally have thought about humans for over a century - where, just because they are the same age, all 3rd graders are basically identical to each other (and this can be said for every grade level). Even if you say this is ridiculous, it is certainly how we have treated them for a century in nearly all schools. All 8 year old kids coming to school are put in the same 3rd grade classroom, given the same supplies and books and resources, do the same activities and lessons for the same amount of time on the same day, take the same assessments, and are expected to learn the same things and do equally well. Even if some kids do poorly, not much time is taken to fix the problems, because the class has to move on to the next topic in order to complete the curriculum in the same amount of time, regardless of how well any one student is or is not learning.
This sounds like we think of students as being identical to me! And it is ridiculous!
Thinking of students, and all human beings, as unique, complex mixtures of possible states, with unique and complex mixtures of talents and strengths and weaknesses and interests and intelligences (such as the eight intelligences defined in Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences), is a more realistic view of a human being! This type of mindset for a teacher is invaluable because it forces us to think differently than the traditional approach to education, teaching, and learning - and it forces us to set up our classes differently, and provide a better mix of teaching techniques, better variety in activities and types of lessons, and allowing for more student input and opportunities for them to learn more and better. It forces us to think about and add more SEL skills, or as I call them, Everyday Essential Life Skills (EELS), which all humans need to be strong in for everyday life.
A strange diagram helps show how I think about a student, or every human being - a complex, unique mixture of possible emotional/mood states:
WE ARE ALL DIFFERENT!! SO WE NEED TO SETUP SCHOOLS AND CLASSROOMS TO DEAL WITH THIS BETTER THAN WE HAVE, SO EVERY STUDENT HAS A CHANCE TO MAXIMIZE THEIR LEARNING AND SKILLSETS!
We are NOT all the same, where the traditional (i.e. standardized) teaching method is to give everyone the same things at the same times and doing the same lessons to take the same assessments on the same days, while expecting the same results...this does not work for all students, and way too many are left behind!
Let's change the mindset from traditional education to a 'quantum education' approach, where we identify, accept, and work with the FACT that EVERY STUDENT IS COMPLEXLY UNIQUE!
There's more about all this given in my TED Talk, with an example of doing this with new levels of (unprecedented) success when addressing the issue of racial academic achievement gaps that plague so many diverse districts across the country, in something we called Project Excite.
This is an interesting report from NPR about the birth rates in the US and all over the world. Women and families are having fewer babies than they were decades ago, with more and more families making the conscious decision to not have babies. This is beginning to create significant changes in global population projections, but more immediately this is affecting economies and national planning around the world. Most significantly, here in the US, as well as China, many European countries, and elsewhere, there are not enough young workers to help the rapidly increasing number of elderly people. The big question is, is this sustainable? More and more countries and states are now below the replacement rate for sustaining a stable and growing economy, which will cause disruptions in nations. Another question is how will this affect future climate models and change the predicted global demographics, which then affect the future course of the human race?
These are important questions, and mix in with the questions being faced with the advent of AI, advanced robotics, and climate change. This is an inflection point in human history, with an unknown pathway ahead of us.
Questions that come to mind include:
- here and in other countries with aging populations and declining work forces, what is the future in quality of life for the elderly? We already know that program like Social Security and Medicare are financially unsustainable with the present funding model and reality. Fewer young workers will accelerate the financial pressures on retirement, how to deal with more and more elderly, the health care system, and other sectors of the economy.
- Combining AI and robotics into the mix, since all of these big issues are obviously connected and inter-related: AI and robotics are disrupting the job marketplace in most sectors of the economy already, and soon these will have an effect on all aspects of jobs, daily life, and the economy. With more and more human jobs being taken over by AI and robots, the prospects, and, possibly, the quality of life for many young people, could be in decline. What jobs will young people have available to them? With even more uncertainty for young people, will this be a feedback loop that causes even further declines in birth rates? With uncertainty of jobs, how and why would we expect young people to be able to have and afford kids, even if they want to have children? And will this likely be a new pressure and discouragement to having babies? If this were to happen, it feeds into a worsening of the elderly situation.
- Will the rapid and continuous improvements and advancements of AI and robotics (and soon to be quantum computing networks) provide the solution to the job markets' stresses, but at the same time only increase our reliance and need for more and more AI and robotics, which puts more pressure on what is available for humans to do? This is another likely (negative) feedback loop with unintended consequences for young people.
- For today's teenagers and pre-teens who are seeing all of this in front of them, what will this do in terms of having hope? We have what may be a perfect storm of an aging society, climate change, AI and robotics changing economies and causing disruptions and vast uncertainties in job markets, nationalistic politics and possible authoritarianism in the US and other western countries, a 'war' on immigration that is creating further pressures on declining numbers of workers within the US economy, drastic and rapid increases in the wealth gaps between the uber-wealthy and average citizen, and questioning about what purpose humans can find within all these changes happening at once. Does anyone have good models for understanding all these massive changes at once? How can we deal with this when today's leaders are not even talking about and recognizing the complexity of all this change, let alone any possible solutions?
There is MUCH TO PONDER and digest here, and all of this is progressing faster than humans have been capable of keeping up with in terms of predictions, policy, planning, and processing to keep up with the changes.
This is a recently published report showing evidence of climate change and global warming. Check it out if interested; it is always a good idea to actually see why scientists have been predicting and measuring climate change, induced by humans, since the late 1960s, when oil companies, of all entities, developed the first climate models.
Although this develops a very dark, maddening, and scary scenario for the future of humanity, it is the reality of our time that AI, and the quest of a handful of companies to "win the race" of AI dominance, is leading us down a potentially ridiculous pathway that limits human beings in what they will be able to do, and how one will be able to find purpose in life.
This conversation between Jon Stewart and Tristan Harris is worth the watch - although terrifying, it is something we all should see, think about, debate, and take action by telling our representatives to actually WAKE UP and DO SOMETHING about developing guidelines, policies, regulations, and laws about what we want to happen with AI (and its integration into robotics and quantum computing). This will not be easy because it will fly in the face of what the AI Tech leaders want, who are all Mega-wealthy and powerful and integrated into the political world already, BUT WE HAVE TO TRY to build in something that still allows human beings to have purpose in this world.
Keep in mind that just a few days prior to this post, Amazon announced it will be reducing its workforce by as much as 600,000 (one-third of its present workforce) by 2033, as they will be replaced by robots; they plan on automating 75% of its operations. This is happening in the present, and is no longer just a 'sci-fi' type possibility.
The GoFundMe site for the EMPATHY Project is up and running. Please consider ANY amount, even something like $5 is around 8500 kwacha, and all of this adds up quickly to help multiple schools feed their children for the entire school year! Everything helps, and is appreciated by everyone involved!
Check this out to learn more about the EMPATHY Project, where we help feed children for the school year in Malawi.
Also, the spring planting season is fast approaching in the southern hemisphere, so this is an ideal time to contribute funds to help purchase seed and fertilizer!
THANK YOU for your consideration! Below is a photo of a field of corn one of the schools owns and maintains, and the harvest is used to feed kids throughout the entire school year! We help support two dozen schools, and thousands of children.
For the educators out there - if you have students who have an interest and passion for wanting to try actual science research, but they do NOT have access to professional laboratories and universities (which is the VAST majority of high schools in the country, and globally), perhaps the CABS site can be useful and help find novel research questions students and teachers can pursue WITHOUT professional labs and equipment! There really are countless legitimate, discovery level projects students can take on by using equipment most high schools have, and can build the experiments in school or even in their own house!
If you have students who are into coding, there are endless options for developing computational studies on just about any phenomena in any discipline. There are also online databases and datasets, as well as citizen science options, students can make use of! All these types of resources can be found with the CABS sites. For examples of actual student papers from their research studies, check these from former students.
I am breaking out two new animated resources that are most useful for elementary teachers.
The first is a STEM story I wrote some years ago, but just had the text. It is entitled Little Sue and the Rock, and is a story for children in grades 1-3. The goal is to introduce to younger children the concept of atoms, and what atoms are made of. It goes through electrons, and a nucleus, and then that a nucleus is made of protons and neutrons. But then it introduces the fact that protons and neutrons are made of still smaller pieces called up and down quarks! Quarks are typically unknown even to high school science classes, and therefore high school students, which seems silly to me since I think it is fundamental we present the most basic ideas of what the world is made of in simple, and accurate, terms. By the way, it is fun to encourage and challenge students to write stories that try to explain a science or math topic!
The second resource has to do with Social-Emotional Learning, or SEL. Most schools in the country have made it a goal, at some level, to bring in more SEL to deal with some of the issues we've been dealing with with children and teenagers since the Covid pandemic, specifically mental health issues. But SEL has become politicized and is under attack in many regions of the country, and has begun to be frowned upon by many educators. The trouble is, the skills described and contained in traditional CASEL SEL are actually essential life skills any parent would want their children to be strong in, in order to have a healthy and successful life! I am proposing and pushing for a re-branding of SEL to EELS - Everyday Essential Life Skills needed for success! This is a short booklet with animated pages that introduce and define what the EELS are, and I ask all who are parents to decide if the skills shown are part of "left wing indoctrination", or if they are skills you yourself use every day of your life, and are skills any parent would want their kids to know and be strong in. I have yet to find anyone who does not want kids to be strong in the listed skills!
