On the first day of kindergarten every year, public school teachers and administrators stand at their school portals with arms opened wide to embrace every child.
Teachers comfort every student readying their cerebral blank slate to be filled with the three R’s — reading, writing and arithmetic.
There is only one problem.
Kids don’t come to kindergarten with a tabula rasa mind, a blank slate of perceptions, ideas, thoughts and emotions. This may be true for the three R’s, but the experiences that have branded their brains from the moment of birth to that first day of kindergarten can make or break a kid’s chance for academic achievement.
What many educators don’t understand, much less are equipped to overcome, is the emotional baggage these little people bring to their classroom. Baggage that is not readily visible to us adults, but contains emotional pain that hurts so much inside those little brains that learning the three R’s becomes a titanic feat. The painful baggage dominates their thoughts, impeding their learning, and sends them on a trajectory toward an emotional iceberg waiting to sink them in adolescence.
[For more of this story, written by Judge Steven Teske, go to http://jjie.org/it-takes-zero-...e-in-schools/275632/]
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