Impulse Intelligence & The Flickerlings

  Introduction to Impulse Intelligence Instead of writing a long-winded Impulse Intelligence exposé, I chose a different approach. I took my middle-grade fiction book, originally written to engage the reader in a story, and turned it into the starting point for a conversation about Impulse Intelligence. Then I excavated it. I used the following questions to evaluate each chapter and uncover its treasures: impulses, impulse behaviors, and their influences. For each chapter, I asked: Does it introduce a new conceptual distinction? Does it deepen something already established? Does a Flickerling interaction reveal something we haven’t explicitly excavated yet? Does it advance the student’s understanding of emotion → impulse → choice/behavior? Does it provide material for an exercise or application? Or is it primarily story, humor, characterization, or reinforcement we’ve already covered? If a chapter was primarily story, humor, characterization, or reinforcement we had already cover...

  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...