What I Saw As A 4th Grade Teacher That Proves Schools Need More Emotional Education
Last October, I sat across from Leo’s mom at my parent-teacher conference table, the surface still sticky from the caramel apple a student brought me that afternoon. She pulled out Leo’s latest math benchmark, a 92% scrawled in red pen at the top, and started crying. She said she had no idea he’d been eating lunch in the bathroom for three months. He never mentioned it at home, and no one from the school had thought to tell her. Leo aces every test, never talks back, and never disrupts class. To our current school system, that means he’s doing fine.
I’ve been teaching 4th grade at this public elementary school for seven years. Every year, we spend more time on test prep, more time analyzing reading fluency scores, more time checking boxes for district requirements. Last year, our scheduled monthly social emotional lessons got pushed back four times, then canceled entirely to make room for state testing practice and a mandatory fire drill marathon. No one was surprised. We’ve all been told a hundred times that emotional intelligence is a “nice to have,” that there just isn’t time for it when we have to get kids caught up on academics after the pandemic.
After that meeting with Leo’s mom, I decided to carve out two extra minutes every morning for one-on-one check-ins with each kid, rotating through the whole class every week. I didn’t have a fancy curriculum, I just asked “what’s one thing that’s been on your mind lately that isn’t school work?” The things that came out stunned me. Mia told me she counts how many times her parents raise their voices at night, and she can’t focus on her spelling tests because she’s waiting for them to say they’re getting divorced. Javi said he feels stupid because he can’t run a mile as fast as the other boys in PE, so he stopped turning in his art projects because he figured no one cared about anything he made. Even the kids who get in trouble for talking in class told me they act out because they don’t know how to say they’re bored or scared or lonely.
It took three weeks of quiet check-ins before Leo said anything about what was bothering him. One Wednesday, after I asked how his week was going, he mumbled that his best friend moved away over the summer, and all the other kids already have their groups at recess. He didn’t know how to ask someone to play with him. We didn’t do any big, formal session. I just paired him with another kid who loved the same Minecraft server for our next group project, and a week later I saw them sitting together at lunch eating goldfish crackers. That’s all it took, but it never would have happened if I hadn’t stopped to ask.
People often say emotional education is parents’ job, not the school’s. But most parents I talk to don’t know how to teach this stuff, and kids spend seven hours a day here. It’s not like emotional education takes time away from academics, either. I’ve found that since I started those daily check-ins, I have fewer disruptions during reading block, fewer kids shutting down when they get a bad grade, fewer fights on the playground. Small, consistent checks don’t require a big budget or hours of training. Schools can start with a 60-second feeling check during morning announcements, where kids hold up one finger for “good,” two for “okay,” three for “having a hard day,” no one has to share publicly if they don’t want to. Teachers can keep a small feelings chart by the door, so kids can point to how they’re feeling when they walk in, no words needed. For parents, swapping one question when your kid gets in the car after school can make a big difference: instead of “how was your test?” try “what was the hardest feeling you had today?”
I heard from a former student a few months ago, she was valedictorian of our school a few years back. She told me she had her first panic attack during her first year of college, after she failed her first chemistry test. She said no one ever told her it was okay to not be perfect, that it was okay to ask for help when you’re struggling. She got straight A’s her whole life, but no one ever taught her how to handle a bad day. That’s the thing we’re missing right now. We’re so focused on what kids know that we forget to teach them how to be with themselves and other people.
Our school just added one 20-minute emotional education period a week this semester. It’s a start, but we still cancel it when testing week rolls around, and most of us never got formal training on how to lead those classes. Leo plays recess with his new friend most days now, but some weeks when he’s tired or misses his old friend, he still eats in the bathroom. That’s okay. We don’t have to fix every bad feeling in a day. The point is just that we’re asking, that we’re paying attention, that we’re teaching kids their feelings matter just as much as their test scores. There’s still a lot to figure out, but it’s past time we started trying.
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