A complete volume of mental health for sixth grade students

“"Am I a good child?" "What if I can't keep up with everyone?" "Will my life be over if I don't get into a good junior high school?" There is no universal solution, and all content must be dynamically adjusted according to the child's true state.

Speaking of which, I just finished the sixth grade group activity at a public primary school in Xicheng last week, and something happened that just hit the core of these three confusions. The little boy wearing black-rimmed glasses and always tugging at the cuffs of his school uniform was hiding in the corner of the classroom. I asked him what was troubling him. He held it in for a long time and said with red eyes that he didn’t make the top ten in the class last time in the math mock test. Several friends who usually play ball with him He said, "You can't even pass the key classes, so we won't take you to play any more." When he got home, his parents were still chanting at the dinner table, "You're going to be in trouble when you're promoted to junior high school." He didn't even dare to raise his head in class during those two days, always feeling that the whole class was laughing at him.

Don’t think this is an exception. I have been a primary school psychology teacher for eight years. Seven out of ten children in sixth grade are stuck in this triple confusion. There are actually two different voices in the academic community regarding psychological intervention at this special stage, and there is no absolute right or wrong. One group is a researcher with a positive psychology orientation. They believe that children at this stage have just begun to establish their self-identity and should be given more positive feedback to help them build their self-confidence that "I have a shining point." I have seen a class teacher follow this idea and create a "merit bankbook". Every time a child does something worthy of recognition, he or she will get a stamp, and they can exchange it for a small prize at the end of the period. Indeed, many children who usually have low self-esteem gradually dare to raise their hands to speak. The other group are realist-oriented educators who feel that they cannot blindly give "sugar-water encouragement". The primary school students have to face screening, so there is no harm in letting the children adapt to setbacks in advance. If they coax them now and say "you are the best", the gap will be even greater when they reach junior high school. Some schools also hold "frustration sharing sessions" based on this idea, allowing children to take the initiative to talk about things they have messed up recently. On the contrary, many children feel that "it turns out that everyone has failed in the exam" after finishing the talk, and their anxiety is reduced.

I encountered a big pitfall in the past two years. When I first started teaching this course, I always followed the teaching instructions. I told the children what the ABC theory of emotions is and how to rationally regulate emotions. The children in the audience either picked out erasers or secretly passed small notes. After half the class, not many people listened. Later, I simply changed the class to "Emotional Elimination" and asked everyone to write down their recent troubles on sticky notes and put them on the blackboard. Whoever had a solution would tear it off and give advice to the other person. One little girl wrote, "My mother always compares me with my cousin who got the key points. I don't even dare to look up when I eat." Three children gave it to me that day. She came up with ideas, and some people said, "Next time, tell your mother that your cousin can't do your best handiwork yet." Some people said, "My mother said the same thing, it goes in one ear and out the other." At the end of that class, the little girl came over and told me that she felt that the stone that had been blocked in her heart for a long time suddenly disappeared. You see, there is no need for any high-level theories. Children's emotions are like a faucet that has not been tightened. The harder you plug it, the more it will leak. It is better to loosen the hole and let it flow for a while, and it will clear up on its own.

It’s quite interesting to talk about. Nowadays, many people complain that the mental health class in sixth grade is either taken up by the main subject teacher, or it has become an ideological and political class. The two views are quite quarrelsome. Some people say that this is because the school does not pay attention to the psychology of children, and they are still so utilitarian even in pre-adolescence. Others say that the pressure to enter the sixth grade is already high, and asking two more questions is better than anything else, and it is all for the benefit of the children. I don’t think there’s any need to argue about right and wrong. Last time, a sixth-grade teacher told me that she didn’t dare to occupy the entire psychology class, so she reserved 15 minutes of the last class every Wednesday for a “bottomless complaint meeting.” She didn’t allow complaints or judgment, and she said whatever she wanted. As a result, the average score of the mock test in that class was 3 points higher than other classes in the same grade, and the children were less distracted in class. Really, when the mood is smooth, the learning efficiency will naturally increase. This is actually easy to figure out.

Not long ago, I received a postcard from a sixth-grade child I took care of last year. She is now in the first grade of junior high school. She said that when she first entered school, she was so nervous about her first monthly exam that her hands were shaking. Suddenly, she remembered the "four-second deep breathing method" I taught before. Inhale for four seconds and hold for four seconds and exhale for four seconds. She calmed down after doing it three times in a row. Now she is the class monitor and has taught this method to other students in the class who are easily nervous. I looked at the crooked words on the postcard and suddenly felt quite emotional.

In fact, to put it bluntly, this so-called "full volume" has never been the rules and regulations printed in textbooks. When you open the last page of a regular textbook, it is often blank, which is left to each child to fill in by himself. Some people wrote, "I beat the whole class in running at the sports meet." Some people wrote, "I finally dared to tell my mother that I don't want to compete with my cousin." Some people wrote, "It doesn't matter if I don't pass the key points. I want to be a cartoonist in the future." These messy, real and little things that are not "correct" at all are the most valuable content of this book.