On student's social conditions

During our discussion, I brought up the idea that the social aspect is most centrally located in the social interactions between the students. I noticed that in most of the talks about how to change the NCLB and in general about the social well-being of the child, it has always been about trying to get them out of poverty. I understand the reasons for the interest; no one would want students to come to school poor or unhappy because of their home situation. But without the government taking over the entire raising of children, this cannot necessarily be stopped by social programs. I believe in extra help programs for these issues like shelters and free breakfast from the local social science groups to be connected to the school so students can use these resources if need be. However, all students deal with the social aspect within schools and therefore it is important to deal with that issues, especially since the school environment is easier to control than the environment at home. Students deal with drama with friends, fighting, bullying, stalking and romantic drama. All of these effect what a student is doing in class, especially on their ability to pay attention. Students are strongly affected by the interactions with students and sometimes really negative experiences with other students can cause really big problems.

I was told that it is really difficult to get rid of these problems in the classroom, that if a teacher is focusing on that aspect as a teacher it might detract with teaching regular information. I don't believe that is true. If you reinforce the idea that all students are respected in your classes it is relatively easy to keep correcting wrong actions while focusing on the academic aspect of the school. For instance, the teacher could assign people into the groups for small group projects rather than the students themselves to make sure that the students aren't leaving anyone out. Or the teacher could talk about how if students leave someone out or don't agree to work with certain people that the students would be kept after the bell. No kid wants that so everyone would quickly get into groups and to make sure to include everyone. Even if this is an affective way of stopping students from excluding people, it would be better for the students to reason out why this is right and work hard to follow the idea to respect their classmates.