The Hymel, Schonert-Reichl and Miller reading for this week has to be my favorite reading in the course so far. This is because it reinforces our cohorts’ beliefs in that it gives such an importance to social and emotional learning. Through the five main reasons as to why social and emotional learning should be prioritized in schools, I believe the authors give such comprehensive information that there is at least one point, idea, or statistic that any reader can relate with. In my opinion, the statistics really helped my understanding of the article because they sort of add an element of reality to the topic. For example, they write that 14% of 4-17 year olds “experience some type of mental health disorder” (p.152) and then they give an actual number count – 800,000 plus children. This really stood out to me because usually we think of mental health disorders as predominantly occurring in the older population – but, as the authors explain, this is definitely not true. My favorite part of the article was reason 3: “The ultimate goal of education is to create good citizens, not just good learners” (p.158). If it were up to me, this would be plastered all over schools. I think in the midst of trying to teach our children academic content – times tables, ancient civilizations, cursive writing and so on – we sometimes forget the importance of the citizenship skills outlined in this article. For me, this side of education has always held great value because I believe schools and more importantly educators can and should help to build a strong and positive foundation to good citizenship skills. While reading this I thought how will I be able to do this as an educator and I hope I am able to answer this question at the end of our program.