Your Kids Are Learning Tons of Soft Skills Right Now
When my son asked me yesterday afternoon to help him with math in third grade, my first impulse was to slowly back out of the room. We have a tense relationship with mathematics. But it turned out that he can count ; it was a damn program on his Chromebook that didn’t work, preventing him from choosing what he knew was the right answer.
This is a problem I see with friends texting all day long. A friend told me today that she usually shouts “SEND!” for her fourth and sixth graders, because the work they do is lost every time they forget to press that crucial button at the bottom of the screen.
The truth is that we all don’t have the knowledge, skills, or time to teach our kids what a teacher could do – that’s all we can do right now to manage the scheduling and technology needed to combine classroom conference calls and online assignments. It is easy to feel that children are not learning enough at the moment – as if they are falling behind. But they are learning. What they are learning right now may stay with them longer and serve them better than we think. They learn soft skills.
Writer Laura Devris explains about Scary Mommy :
Soft skills are the “humanity” of the job, and hard skills are educational and technical knowledge. While hard skills are important, they can be learned easily throughout your child’s life. These are soft skills that develop through experience, role modeling and real-life challenges.
Ask yourself … do you really remember algebra in 9th grade, or do you remember the teacher who taught you compassion, laughter, and self-esteem? Do you remember the history lesson in 5th grade or the life lesson you learned during recess?
I shed a tear when reading Devris’ article because she put into words a feeling that I had, but I could not articulate. It started when I was out with my son at lunchtime last week. He was desperate to explain how he needed to learn various Latin and Greek words because he should have known them by the time he got to fourth grade, and the fourth grade teachers wouldn’t stop to teach him because he already needs to. know. then.
We talked about how this is a unique time and how these expectations will need to be corrected, because none of his classmates will know Latin or Greek. And yet I had this feeling boiling under the surface: what he had learned in those nearly four weeks of physical distancing was far more necessary than the handful of words he would learn and just as quickly forget.
Right now, our kids are taking a crash course in patience, resilience, communication, conflict resolution, compromise, creative thinking, empathy, and mindfulness. These are soft skills that we practice with them every day to a certain extent, but things have escalated now. They need to learn to be patient with parents who can’t get off the conference call to serve them snacks (or they need to figure out how to get a snack for themselves). They resolve conflict with their siblings every four minutes. They try to find ways to cheer a friend on their birthday in the quietest way possible .
I think the best soft skill we’ve worked on over the past month was our positivity. A month ago, my son would have told you that “let’s go for a walk” was the most boring word combination imaginable. But when your world suddenly shrinks, small things grow. Now we hate to miss a day’s walk. On windy days, we say we are glad there is no rain; on cloudy days we are grateful for the absence of wind; and on warm, sunny days, we hardly believe in our luck.
Of course, sometimes they practice these soft skills so much that we think our heads might explode from incessant screaming, whining and crying. And none of this means that the situation in which we now as parents – at home all day, every day during a terrible pandemic – is easy or funny, or worth all the stress or any fear.
But if, in the end, our children can recognize and appreciate the beauty of a spring day in a way that they simply could not before … I think this is more important than a few words from a vocabulary list or a one-time math assignment. Whether it was posted or not.