Why Schools Need to Prioritize Emotional Education Over Test Scores, From a 4th Grade Teacher
Last Tuesday, I was halfway through my 4th grade math warm-up when I saw Leo’s pencil stop. He stared at his worksheet for 30 seconds, then crumpled it into a tight ball, tossed it under his desk, and dropped his forehead into his crossed arms. A few years ago, I would have stopped by his desk, asked him to grab a new sheet, and reminded him to get back to work. If he’d refused, I would have sent him to the office to cool down, marked a minor behavior disruption in our school system, and moved on to get through my lesson plan. That day, I just knelt down beside his desk, kept my voice low so the other kids couldn’t hear, and asked, “What’s that big feeling you’re carrying right now?” He lifted his head, his eyes shiny, and said, “It’s here, in my stomach. I know I’m slow, and everyone’s already done, and I’m gonna get all the answers wrong anyway.”
I keep a stack of printed emotion cards on my desk, simple drawings of faces with labels like “overwhelmed”, “embarrassed”, “scared”. I pointed to them, and he tapped “overwhelmed” twice. I said, “Okay, let’s try two things. First, take three slow breaths with me, right here. Second, you only have to do the first two problems today, and we can work on the rest together after lunch. Does that help?” He nodded, uncrumbled his paper, and got to work.
Leo loves dinosaurs, can name every species from the Jurassic period, and reads at a 7th grade level. He’s not bad at math. He just can’t handle the loud, tight feeling of being behind, and for the first three years of his school life, no one stopped to ask him to name that feeling. We just told him to hurry up, or punished him for shutting down.
This isn’t a one-off thing. I’ve been teaching for 12 years, and the last three years, our school has slowly shifted to carve out 10 minutes a day for emotional check-ins, instead of packing every minute with test prep. I’ve seen what that small shift does. Last spring, two 5th grade boys got into a fight at recess over a four square spot. A few years ago, both would have gotten three days of detention, their parents would have gotten an angry call, and that would be the end of it. This year, our counselor sat them down after, and asked each to say what they felt before the first punch. One said he’d felt invisible all week—his best friend had started hanging out with someone else, and when the other boy took his spot, it just felt like the last straw. The other said he’d been angry all morning because his mom had been laid off two days before, and he’d taken it out on the first person who annoyed him. Neither got detention. They apologized, and last month I saw them playing four square together at recess.
A lot of administrators and parents push back, saying we don’t have time for this, we need to focus on reading and math scores to keep our school funding up. But what people don’t talk about is how much time we waste dealing with the fallout of kids who don’t know how to handle their feelings. Last year, I spent an average of 15 minutes a day stopping instruction to deal with disruptions, meltdowns, or small fights between kids. This year, that number is down to 5 minutes. That’s 50 extra minutes of instruction a week, which adds up to more than 25 hours a school year. That’s way more time than we’re putting into the daily check-ins.
You don’t need a fancy expensive curriculum to do this. All I did was print out 50 emotion cards for a dollar at the library, and carved 10 minutes out of our morning silent reading time that was already mostly kids finishing breakfast or sharpening pencils anyway. For teachers who don’t know where to start, just change one question: instead of asking “Why did you do that?” when a kid acts out, ask “What were you feeling when you did that?” That’s it. No extra training, no extra time. For parents, you can do the same simple thing at dinner: just go around the table and ask everyone to share one word for how they felt that day. You don’t have to fix it, just let them name it.
I got an email from Leo’s mom last week. She works two jobs, has a 2-year-old at home, and told me she never has the energy to work through big feelings after dinner when everyone’s tired. She said Leo came home from school last week, instead of yelling at his little sister for knocking over his dinosaur model, he said “I’m really angry right now, I need to go sit on the porch for five minutes.” She said she almost cried, because she’d been trying to get him to do that for years, and it just clicked when a teacher at school practiced it with him every day.
We’re not perfect at this. Last week, I pushed a quiet girl to share her feeling when she clearly didn’t want to, and she ended up crying at her desk. I apologized, told her she never had to share if she didn’t want to, and that was that. We’re still learning, still adjusting, still figuring out how to fit this into a school day that’s already packed full. Last week, Leo turned in his math quiz, and he came up to my desk after class to show me he got an A. He said, “I was really overwhelmed before I started, so I took three deep breaths like we practiced. It worked.”
That’s a small thing. It doesn’t show up on any standardized test score. But it’s the kind of thing he’ll need when he’s 15, when he’s 25, when he has a bad day at work or a fight with a friend. Schools are supposed to prepare kids for life, right? Right now, we’re preparing them for tests. Emotional education isn’t something extra we have to squeeze in. It’s the base that lets everything else grow. We’re still a long way from making this a standard part of every school day, but every 10 minute check-in, every question about feelings, is a step in the right direction.
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