This is as unacceptable and dangerous as if the teacher performed root canals on these kids during recess. She absolutely should be fired and never work in education again.
At my university we are routinely pushed to act as homegrown psychotherapists to students, and nobody except for me seems to understand that it’s not OK. We are told that it’s a sign of empathy to want to help people in psychological distress. As Byung-Chul Han says, appeals to empathy are used to exploit us and wring out of additional work beyond our contractual obligations.
Clarissa's Blog 
You let a bot get you upset, Clarissa.
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The Provost at my university is definitely not a bot, and she’s been trying to force us to provide psychological assistance to students for two years. And not a single person supports my opposition to this travesty.
Clearly, you don’t support me on this either, and that’s sad.
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The tweet you linked to was posted by an account that has 12 followers and no defining information in its bio. Hence: likely a bot.
I agree with your overall point, though, regarding teachers taking on inappropriate therapeutic roles. It is wrong for you to indicate that I don’t.
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That’s good to know, thank you.
It doesn’t matter who posted it if the reality the post points to exists. And it absolutely does exist. SEL is obligatory in elementary and secondary education. Teachers aren’t given much choice in whether to apply it.
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The SEL lesson plans I’ve seen amounted to a different name for teaching children manners. Regardless of whether it’s a formal curriculum or not, the teachers in elementary schools have to do that before they are able to teach anything else.
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“routinely pushed to act as homegrown psychotherapists to students”
Cynical me thinks that the goals are to teach students to actively worry about mental illness so they can be trained into mental illness…
Why do they want to do that?
Where I am it’s a bit more blunt, they haven’t been hectoring instructors to psychoanalyze students but they’ve begun a bunch of mental illness… promotions seems to be the best word for it and some students readily respond and claim various mental health problems…
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“Ask your doctor if bipolar is right for you!”
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“if bipolar is right for you”
Yeah, they’re definitely commodifying and commercializing mental health conditions.
Everything in the world today is just hateful and nasty…. nothing but scams on top of scams on top of more scams….
Part of me thinks a real economic crash is necessary though the other part realizes a lot of innocent people will suffer terribly and the scammers will float away….
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Necessary, yes. Painful, yes. But also completely inevitable, at this point. We’ve been running the entire economy on unsustainable debt pyramids, propped up by inflation. It just sucks wealth out of everybody at the bottom, and funnels it up to the people at the top, who can borrow from the FED at interest rates less than the actual inflation rate, use the money to buy assets (like real estate), and then essentially pay back less than they borrowed, at some later date (the numbers aren’t less, but the value is).
If that doesn’t die, and fairly soon, we will have replaced an economic system that for a long time functioned fairly well for most people, with a gross technofeudalism that barely allows us to be human.
We will suffer. It’s necessary. And there’s at least a chance it’ll get better after.
If we avoid it, there is no chance of the getting better.
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at some school they encourage this.
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