Shouldn't socio-emotional learning be taking place in health class? I'm not trying to rip into you. It's great that kids are interrupting math class to gain some tools for living more grounded lives. This whole conversation and your specific observations on your students and what is being done to help them has left me in shock at what I was taught in highschool health class. Highschool health was very outside of the body. Draw a fire escape plan, don't do drugs and use a condom. Maybe you were unlucky enough to have Mr. Bolton as your health teacher. He was a compulsive lier and a straight up strange fellow. I've learned more about being a good human from my pets. I learned more about being a human in every literature class I've ever taken than I did in highschool health. Health class seems like an incredible wasted opertunity that lacked any practical focus on the totality of what really includes a healthy life. Maybe it's better now a days.
Health class? No ripping, good question. Our middle school doesn’t have the resources for that right now. Some kids do take the high school course in the 8th grade for credit, but not all of them. We settled on math as we have doubled up math and language arts and math courses. For example, I’ve got a second/third hour, fourth/fifth hour, and sixth/seventh hour math classes that are 90 minutes. One 30 minute social-emotional lesson per week barely makes a dent. I find it improves things as math is the most demanding of middle school subjects and my most socially adjusted kids end up in the advanced math courses. They’re the kids that can face setbacks, make goals, and progress toward those goals with success. Mathis patterns and puzzles waiting to be discovered and solved. Kids that see that can move math mountains. A colleague of mine, a PE teacher does teach our high school credit health class. It has evolved way beyond Mr. Bolt-dick’s scare tactics pseudoscience nonsense, like girls can get pregnant through their navel. Kids learn about personal nutrition, health habits, recognizing and managing stressors, goal setting, and psychology basics as Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and personal problem resolving strategies. Much better than the old days.
Ours was called "Critical Issues in Modern Living." You didn't have to take it if you took two years of a foreign language. It was quite clearly and obviously intended for the underclass - a patronizing move by the school board to say "my kids are fine but your kids? Yeah, they're the ones we worry about." I was in there because I graduated a semester early to get out of that shithole, which meant I only had a year and a half of a foreign language, which meant I had to take it. In one 45-minute class we covered "how to escape a hotel fire" (always book rooms on the first two floors) and "how not to catch AIDS" (always wear a condom, mmmmmkay). If you were not in "Critical Issues in Modern Living" you got NOTHING. So I get how everyone's all fuckin' horrified at the state of manlymanlyness and our acceptance of vulnerability in this modern era or some shit but FUCKING HELL IT'S NOT LIKE THAT'S NEW. I grew up playing "Smear the Queer" and had friends who liked to "beat up fags" for fun (spent a fine Friday evening evading the cops after he smashed up a convenience store while I was in the bathroom - everyone knew exactly who it was but because the convenience store clerk was hispanic no charges were ever filed) and things are SO MUCH BETTER now. But the kids are worse off in an entirely different direction: because so much of their lives are online they aren't learning how to deal with people face to face. And that has been studied at length, and that has the backing of science and journalism, and that is something that has definitely changed for the worse, and that is definitely something with a negative impact on women But because it's Orenstein, we get to wring our hands over "toxic masculinity."