I’m calling BS on Social Emotional Learning. Taut away what a “be nice, be kind, be inclusive” environment you have, dear grammar and middle school principals. Know how I remember how to spell principal? Cuz it ends in pal, as in you’re the leading charge pal befriender to the student body. Problem is what schools need is a principle. I’m not saying your job ain’t tough. It takes a special kind of crazy to purposefully avail oneself of the teenage general public school population. But here’s the problem. You promote SEL. Talk about being empathetic with your kids. Lead by example. With the goal to raise good kids. All good until the good kids get bullied by the bad kids and you don’t lower the boom in any way meaningful. We can’t kick him out for driving your kids face into the bus floor? We can’t enforce the same PDA policy because she says she’s gay even though she calls my kid homophobic for being straight (despite being the kid that has partnered to champion gay rights legislation)? What you really mean is you don’t because you won’t. Not because you can’t. If you had a backbone, you’d know the cardinal rule of school administration in upscale Mayberry where everywhere full of families that all want to look good and hide behind the “it’s just boys being boys” line until it’s their boy on the receiving end: you want a kid’s behavior to change, you make it REAL uncomfortable for their parents. It’s propaganda by which the rules really only apply to those you choose.

This is why you gotta push your kids to excel. Because the bullies of the world are typically also the morons. The great public school escape is advance level classes that the bullies can barely pronounce. You gotta be doing by 8th grade what the exceptions hope to be doing by high school graduation. You gotta lead the pack – it can be the auto pack that can fix an engine or the robotics pack that can program legos or the cross country team careening trails or the academic pack in a way that the rest are so far behind they don’t even realize they’ve been lapped as the dust is long settled by the time they attempt to reach turf you long ago tackled. The double standards of bully enforcement disgust me. They prey on the good kids, the ones whose parents actually give an F about raising respectable human beings. And the fact that this is allowed to happen with willful blind eyes turned away versus standing up for the teachers that have to put up with these kids who bring the racist bigoted chauvinistic morals from home into our schools. As we said at my geek u university: that’s all right. that’s okay. you can work for me someday. We just gotta get you there.

Here’s the battle cry royal: stop wasting time giving kids every standardized test under the sun while taking away meaningful class time. And stop making excuses to waste even more time on SEL bulletins that are, at best, propagandist efforts.