Impulse Intelligence & The Flickerlings

  Impulse Intelligence in 23 seconds.   We need to start acknowledging the impulse as the instigator rather than lumping impulse’s peer pressure onto emotion.

  The book explicitly separates emotion from reaction That distinction creates the possibility of a pause,  a nd the pause is where choice lives. One of the LibraryThing's Early Reviewer reviews of Rusty Ruins the Fort and Other Important Things says: “Maybe it’s me, but I found this book to be really confusing. Emotions have cutesy names that I found difficult to keep straight and which ones belonged to which child. It seemed to be a story about 4 boys but one was imaginary or an alter ego or something? The story itself would have been fine on it’s own, the ‘lessons’ self evident, but instead I felt it complicated children’s emotions and thought processes needlessly. I’m a retired teacher and grandparent of many and would not try to read this book with kids because I would find it too difficult to explain.” There is a serious conceptual problem embedded in this review, and it is important enough that I want to address it directly. The reviewer says: “Emotions have cu...

  The moment is where Impulse Intelligence begins.                                                                 There is actually a substantial body of children’s-literature scholarship examining something very close to what I’m seeing in these reviews: the tendency of adults to decide in advance what children can understand. One particularly interesting line of scholarship examines what has been called an “adultist” approach—the tendency for adults to theorize about children’s reading while paying insufficient attention to how children themselves actually respond to and make meaning from texts. That matters because adults don’t simply bring a book to a child. They bring assumptions about what a child should understand, how a children’s book should work, what constitutes an appropriate lesson, and how much interpreta...

  There is a fundamental conceptual collapse happening in some of the reviews of Rusty Ruins the Fort and Other Important Things : THIS is the  Impulse Intelligence proces s: emotion → emotional reaction → impulse → behavior THIS is the collapse : emotion = emotional reaction = impulse = behavior That is precisely the distinction the book is asking the reader to recognize. An emotion is not the same thing as the reaction it produces. An emotional reaction is not necessarily an impulse. An impulse is not the same thing as the behavior that ultimately follows. They can be connected without being identical. And once those distinctions are collapsed, the Flickerlings are easily misread. A reviewer sees an emotional event, sees a Flickerling respond, and concludes: Flickerling = emotion. But that isn’t the framework the book presents. The Flickerlings exist to make the activity occurring between an event and a person’s eventual behavior visible. They can represent thou...

Impulse Intelligence TM Challenges SEL Head-On Because of Its Deficiencies If SEL has recognized impulse control from the beginning, why hasn’t the field developed a more granular process for understanding what happens between emotion, impulse, and behavior? Not because SEL is trying to do something wrong. Because it is too simplistic. We have been looking at the wrong thing. SEL often starts with emotion and asks: “How do we manage this feeling?” Impulse Intelligence starts one step later and asks: “What is this feeling making me want to DO—and deeper still, why am I having the urge to do it?” That distinction changes everything. The Flickerlings process is: EVENT → EMOTION → FLICKERLING / REACTION → NAME THE IMPULSE → PAUSE → CHOOSE Because emotion isn’t behavior. Feeling angry isn’t the same thing as hitting someone. Feeling frustrated isn’t the same thing as yelling. Feeling afraid isn’t the same thing as running. The emotion happens. Then something wells up i...

  SNEAK PEEK TO A GREAT READ ALOUD: "And building a fort meant being prepared.Ethan carried a coil of rope from the garage slung over his shoulder and his mother’s small garden trowel tucked through his belt. It wasn’t much, but Ethan figured real builders always had tools. The rope could tie things. The trowel could dig holes for posts. That made it official. A few tiny Flickerlings buzzed awake around Ethan. These loudmouths of excitement showed up the moment a big idea took shape. Boast swelled with pride. “Look at that! Proper equipment! Clearly the mark of a great leader!” Punster slipped in, “Careful!with tools like that, we might actually dig ourselves into success!” The others groaned.When they were waiting for the rain to stop, each boy wrestled with choosing which of his treasures to bring to the fort. The plan was that the fort should protect real treasure." -RUST RUINS THE FORT AND OTHER IMPORTANT THINGS Look at what is happening here. Ethan has an event: the...