Cognitive Labour in the Classroom

While the board hasn’t specifically instructed teachers not to discuss their labour dispute with students, it has asked principals to make sure teachers don’t let their frustrations rub off on students.

 

 

Now, we're starting to get somewhere! 

 

Education is the front-line of civil life - the equivalent of the working world for adults.  Teachers are front-line managers, ensuring their charges have the tools and training necessary to do their job, which pretty much translates into passing tests and getting good grades, enabling them to get further training and decent jobs.

 

As such, schools are both a springboard and a microcosm of society.  The skills students learn (and don't learn) in school and the examples they see around them will form the tone of their adult lives.  It's really enlightening to watch school-yard shenanigans, because they're a much more honest portrayal of behaviour we see in the rest of the world.  "But he hit me first" is, from a youth's point of view, an acceptable response for bad behaviour.  Bullying is a method of reducing competition for resources and attention.  Kids haven't bought into the notion that they're supposed to have spilt work/life personalities, so they naturally bring stresses from home to school and vice versa.  Office politics, cliques, etc. all exist in the adult world, too - we just deny this and confabulate justifications for behaviour we chastise in our youth.

There are cognitive differences between children and adults (see sensory fusion), key among these is the fact that they are more resilient and adaptable; it's actually adults that have a harder time making distinctions, despite the social pressure to do so.  Kids will move past emotional wounds more quickly; they'll get over colds more quickly, too.  Part of the reason for that - we let them.  When a child's parent dies, we don't tell them they get two days off and then are expected to be back at peak performance.  If they've had a big fight with their parents or best friend, we don't tell them to get over it immediately and focus on their work.  Good teachers will serve as counselors, too, helping their students learn to cope with and manage through personal and familial challenges, helping to build social emotional skills along the way.

Teachers bridge the gap between the emotional honesty of the playground and the suppressed individuals of the working world.  The best ones are deeply involved in the emotional lives of their students, because they have to be.  Understanding their students is the only way to reach them, and it's only through that connection that knowledge can effectively be transferred.  When teachers refer to their students as "my kids," it's less like a boss referring to a team than it is a parent referring to their family.  Yet teachers themselves are being told to leave their personal baggage at home and not let the work-related stresses that weigh on their minds impact their teaching.  It's impossible to switch selves, so what teachers are really being asked to do is repress their cognitive stresses. 

We're asking teachers to shovel water; it simply won't work.  It's not a coincidence that teaching ranks among the top ten stressful careers.  Again, schools are a microcosm of the working world at large - the mental health challenges that we're recognizing in schools also impact teachers.  In fact, we have a growing mental health crisis in all sectors that's burning out Canadians, dragging down economic growth, dominating insurance claims and placing an ever-growing burden on our health system.

 

A key part of addressing the mental health crisis is to stop using the "suck in up" and "separate work and life" memes as excuses for ignoring the social stresses that lead to mental illnesses like depression and anxiety.  Doing so isn't about ignoring problematic behaviour, but about empowering everyone to develop the internal resiliency tools they need to manage stress better and to start designing work and work environments that are conducive to strong cognitive labour performance. 

 

This is going to be a hard lesson for all of us to learn - but like all education, it's going to start in the classroom.