Most of us can probably think of times when intense emotions have affected our ability to learn. Sometimes the effect is positive, such as being motivated by a mentor or teacher who helped us to feel good about ourselves and our abilities, or just being in a really good place psychologically, so that we can focus on the task at hand without extraneous worries and thoughts getting in the way. Other times, the effect is negative. Our anger, frustration, or melancholy “turns off” our access to learning. We are stuck, cut off from effectively taking in or applying new information or skills.
I wonder, however, if we fully respect the connection between emotions and learning when it comes to our children, even if we pay it lip service.
Some parents and teachers might be wary of using feelings or mood as an excuse for not trying. After all, don’t the most persistent among us put down their heads and plow through, no matter what, putting aside and compartmentalizing feelings so as to get to the business or task at hand? We all know people who do this. Is that what we should expect from our children in our success-obsessed culture as we do all we can to prepare them for “the real world”?
Or, as Drs. Fernette and Brock Eide explain, might we be mistakenly applying yet another “one size fits all” model to education, a model that penalizes the learning preferences of some children? This is from their blog post Feeling, Learning, and the Brain: Why Lefties and Dyslexics Need Emotions to Learn and Remember
“When performing an auditory word memory task, lefties (mixed dominance / left-handedness are more in dyslexics, individuals with spatial talent…), activated their emotions (amygdala) and personal relevance (left hippocampus) areas when remembering. This pattern is likely why we see such a personal (i.e. not impersonal or rote memory) preference among dyslexic students in our clinic.
It explains why some students really struggle to learn in classes where they feel their teacher doesn’t like them, or why others may become paralyzed with the studying process when they have never been told (or can’t understand) how the information presented relates to them. It’s not just an unnecessary add-on; it may be essential.”
In other words, some students (such as lefties and dyslexics) might be more affected by their emotions in the classroom or while learning at home than other students. This is not necessarily a bad thing. If these children can learn to understand better the connection between how they feel and how they learn, perhaps they can tap into a potential previously unimagined.
And it might be that even the Spocks among us may do themselves no favor. A Psychology Today article suggests that continually suppressing emotions may actually hinder our ability to remember.
What can we learn from this? Maybe the answer is to assume neither that children can push their way through or past emotions, nor that we need to try to give them an ideal, constant happy or calm learning environment (an impossibility). Instead, we can encourage young learners to be more aware of how their emotions affect their ability to learn and to focus, and help them at a young age to learn to understand and to manage, to the extent they can, their environment, schedules, emotions and self-talk.
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