Giving Teachers Permission To Feel

Story Source: Edutopia ~ Go to Original Article

How are you feeling?

It’s not a trick question. But it’s more complicated than it sounds. We’re always feeling something, usually more than one thing at a time. Our emotions are a continuous flow, not an occasional event. Inside each of us there’s a river—placid and contained sometimes, but raging and overflowing its banks at others. There’s a lot to navigate.

We humans have a long history of disregarding our feelings. It goes back millennia, even before the Stoic philosophers of ancient Greece argued that emotions were erratic, idiosyncratic sources of information. Reason and cognition were viewed as higher powers within us; once, the idea of “emotional intelligence” would have seemed inconceivable, a contradiction in terms………………………