Marshmallow (Social-Emotional Management: Part II)
Social-emotional classroom management is a failure because it irrationally and irresponsibly focuses on explaining and understanding student behavior instead of correcting it. It facilitates a classroom environment where unwanted behaviors are tolerated, ignored, or even permitted instead of being swiftly ended or rectified. The absurd emphasis on behavior analysis, rather than effective corrective intervention, has fundamentally redefined the role of teachers, transforming them from authoritative classroom mentors into de facto mental health professionals. Consequently, educators have been stripped of the commanding presence and assertiveness necessary to effectively manage children and maintain order. The end-result of social-emotional learning indoctrination and the management that is derived from it is that far too many classrooms are led by meek and diminutive teachers completely unable to act with the appropriate power, presence, tone, or confidence necessary to maintain classroom control and deliver meaningful instruction. That critical dilemma is rooted in the fact that social-emotional learning indoctrination, by design, does not equip teachers with an adequate managerial mindset or framework with which to quickly address, and put to an end, unwanted behavior. Instead, teachers are compelled to absorb student disrespect, prioritize empathy and emotional safety, and eat shit.
To illustrate this managerial fuck-uppery, imagine a student, irritated by a simple request, emphatically telling their teacher to shut the fuck up or to leave them the fuck alone. Or muttering that their teacher is a white-bitch-fat-ass-marshmallow-belly-having-motherfucker. Or declaring how much they don’t fucking care about a phone call home. Contrary to the tenets of social-emotional learning, the appropriate response from the teacher is not to build a better relationship with that student, to attempt to empathize the student’s behavior away, to send that student to a safe seat or a buddy room, or to sit in a fucking restorative circle talking about how everyone feels about it. Furthermore, the appropriate response does not require an administrator, a counselor, a clinician, or a parent to assist, separate, or intervene. Yet, these are the tools social-emotional learning theories provide teachers. When attempts at relationship-building, empathy, emotional safety, and buddy rooms inevitably fail to enact meaningful change in unwanted student behavior, teachers are left with no recourse but acts of helplessness: sending students to the office, radioing for assistance, or shamefully resorting to bribery.
As a profession, we need to understand that public disrespect of teachers requires forceful public admonishment from teachers. However, social-emotional management renders teachers unwilling and unprepared to reprimand children in a way that effectively ends unwanted behavior and decisively retains classroom control. More accurately, teachers are required to surrender in these crucial battles of dominance with students, and thus, they must constantly lose face. In other words, teachers are required to endure student-distributed disrespect, eroding their authority and undermining their ability to teach. It is a toxic dynamic that results in teachers losing both student deference and their own dignity. In turn, classroom terrorists become the dominant personalities and leaders of the classroom, meaning genuine education ceases. The result is a complete breakdown of order and a descent into educational anarchy where the bar for success is set to accommodate the weakest. We can all see the results on social media.
