wait until high school and then try to teach violence-prevention, you're already too late."
In one fourth-grade class at Thorpe, Oliver blew bubbles while the kids exercised self-control and concentration by resisting the impulse to burst them. "We draw analogies between the bubbles and an object like a gun," says Oliver. "Kids may be tempted, but hey shouldn't touch it." "I'm sold on the program," says Bob Brinkley, Thorpe principal. "I'm learning from Kids here that Skills for Life is making a differnce, not just in the
playground but also outside of school. they're telling me that kids aren't shoving each other." Oliver believes that children can be taught to behave responsibly, even if they see bad role models in real life and in the media. "If they se adults using guns or drugs, they have the internal skills to avoid following what to see, " says Oliver. "We're helping break the cycle of violence." He adds that self-control could have helped prevent tragedies like the
Columbine shootings or the Michigan slaying of a first-grader by a classmate. At Welch Elementary School in Peabody, Mass., Jordana Cordosa, a fifth-grader, describes how her behavior has changes: "Before, when I got mad at somebody, I'd always get into a fight. Now I've learned to use my self-control and deal with it." The program also teaches confidence. Jonathan Heller, a teacher at Welch and a soccer coach, recalls how
it helped one student in a citywide tournament: "He was so nervous before the first game that he wanted self-control time. The other kids didn't know what he was doing-but he played an outstanding game. By the end of the tournament, everyone was doing it." At Welch, things were so bad that teachers contributed their own money to sponsor the program. Today, Welch-with a high proportion of kids form single parent families, many of them inpoverished, has
changed from a teachers nightmare into a dream. A study by he Harvard School of Public Health found that teachers, parents and students all noticed less fighting after Skills for Life began. Harvard plans to do more projects with Lesson One. And in a national study of violence prevention programs, Phillip Heymann, a former deputy attorney general, concluded: "One or two things stand out form the review. Lesson One is one of them." |