So there I was thinking I'd be blogging every day of the 90 day challenge. Life took over. The 90 day challenge itself has been eclipsed: a colleague is doing a whole year. Could I do a year? I'm not sure.
I bought a dress today in Brown Thomas. It's for an upcoming event I can't talk about here. It was expensive by my standards (although there was a nice 25% off) and I did feel extravagant. I popped into Café Nerro on my way to the car and bought a panini. Now which was the more extravagant purchase? I also bought a Diet Coke at multiples of the amount one from a multi-pack would have cost me, because none of the cans at home had been in the fridge. That was my most extravagant purchase of the day because I didn't even drink it until I was at home.
That is Rule No.9 on my version of "12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Control". Buy the dress, don't buy the sandwich.
Have been good at buying nothing from TKMaxx, although less good at staying out of there. Product wise, my only real slip-up so far has been a Clinique bonus. I'm using the lipstick; the rest is in storage, added to my enormous stash. The key thing is that it's dwindling at a slightly faster pace than it's accumulating. And I'm also thinking more, which is good. Am almost tempted to embrace minimalism, at least in a minimal way. I am minimally tempted. Not very.
Saturday, 24 February 2018
Wednesday, 17 January 2018
Okay, I've Lost Count Now
It's a couple of weeks in and things are going well as far as the 90 day challenge goes. Haven't bought anything except for books. Will be in Dublin on Friday so that will be a harder, but I won't have a lot of shopping time and I have one or two make-up items that need replacing so can get those without breaking the 90 days.
Going to write my own Twelve Rules of Life.
Rule No.1: make your bed before leaving the house.
Going to write my own Twelve Rules of Life.
Rule No.1: make your bed before leaving the house.
Saturday, 31 December 2016
Resolutions for 2017
1. Keep the house clean and tidy to a high standard.
2. Start an MA in Education.
3. Join some kind of exercise class in February.
4. Blog at least monthly.
5. Continue with current exercise schedule (light but regular).
6. Invest more in my life outside work.
7. Look at the bright spots.
2. Start an MA in Education.
3. Join some kind of exercise class in February.
4. Blog at least monthly.
5. Continue with current exercise schedule (light but regular).
6. Invest more in my life outside work.
7. Look at the bright spots.
Sunday, 25 December 2016
Habits of 2016
In my journey towards the mountain (does anyone ever get to the mountain?) I've focused a lot on habits and developing the architecture of my life. Trying to build better habits, although I now see trying always to be a "better version of me" is actually a bad habit. There is no better version of me, and self-improvement leads counter-productively to isolating narcissism.
Still, developing good habits has been helpful. I read a lot of self-help books and once taken with a pinch of salt they can work. I've read "Grit" this year, and my favourite "Deep Work" by Cal Newport. Last year's book was "Better Than Before" and I've been keeping the Better than Before journal.
Some habits I thought were bad habits were really good habits. I had a habit of keeping a diary which I'd mostly write in the mornings and usually fill three A4 pages. These were the morning pages from The Artist's Way. They had failed miserably in their intended purpose of getting me to write more, and they often took up to an hour to write as I ruminated and mentally digressed. So I said I'd give them up and switch instead to just keeping my Moleskine notebook. Things unravelled. First slowly, and then faster and faster until yesterday found me kneeling in my hallway, having dented my expensive front door with a kick of impotent rage, I had my head in my hands. I felt completely powerless and not sure what to do next. I think now my habit of writing was actually a good one, and it's one I think I'll go back to. Reflection is good.
I made a list last December of habits I would develop for the year. How many have stuck? Doing a few abs exercises in front of the telly. Putting on 20-25 minutes on the timer at least once a day and having a tidy-up. Unfucking my habitat at the weekends. Putting out my clothes for work the night before. Leaving the staffroom and finding somewhere quiet to work (this can be a challenge, both the leaving and the finding somewhere quiet). Taking five minutes to tidy up before leaving work. Reading classic fiction rather than watching television. Putting my Diet Coke in the fridge at night, and my breakfast in my handbag. These have all stuck, more or less.
What habits haven't been as sticky? Keeping better homework records. I've gotten better at this but it's still not as perfect as I'd like it to be. Sorting the laundry on a Friday. Getting blowdries. Keeping the fone charged. Getting the bus into town. Writing in cafés. Running. Bringing things in out of the car. Marking things on the calendar. Cooking my own food. Taking iron tablets. Writing. Going out on a Saturday.
There are some I've given up on, like meditating. I reckon going for a walk on my own fulfils many of the purposes of meditating. Also, I've shoved writing into certain periods i.e. the summer holidays. That is my writing time. This is after reading Newport's book, where he says there is a choice. You can do something every day, or allocated intensive blocks. I always felt guilty about not getting up early to write/ writing in the evening but this alternative way of looking at things - I'm either in writing mode or teaching mode - works better. Other things I've given up on are keeping the ironing board in the kitchen (why?), using a stamper (a habit I invested in by purchasing stamper) and sitting nearer the front in staff meetings.
There is still a week to go before deciding on next year's habits. Contenders from last year include going out on a Saturday night (have signed up to lots of meet-ups),being more materially generous (this is a bit of a vague habit), opening the post (I know!) and going for walks. The two-kilometre walk I do is better than the three-kilometre run that I don't. I'm considering joining a gym to do fitness classes but want to avoid the New Year rush and high prices. I reckon mid-February might be a time to do that. In the meantime, will walk and do my Minnie Mouse exercises at home.
Everything is alright really. I don't need to change who I am. There is no perfection, just excellence in the small things. There is reading. There are other people. There is the world, out there.
Still, developing good habits has been helpful. I read a lot of self-help books and once taken with a pinch of salt they can work. I've read "Grit" this year, and my favourite "Deep Work" by Cal Newport. Last year's book was "Better Than Before" and I've been keeping the Better than Before journal.
Some habits I thought were bad habits were really good habits. I had a habit of keeping a diary which I'd mostly write in the mornings and usually fill three A4 pages. These were the morning pages from The Artist's Way. They had failed miserably in their intended purpose of getting me to write more, and they often took up to an hour to write as I ruminated and mentally digressed. So I said I'd give them up and switch instead to just keeping my Moleskine notebook. Things unravelled. First slowly, and then faster and faster until yesterday found me kneeling in my hallway, having dented my expensive front door with a kick of impotent rage, I had my head in my hands. I felt completely powerless and not sure what to do next. I think now my habit of writing was actually a good one, and it's one I think I'll go back to. Reflection is good.
I made a list last December of habits I would develop for the year. How many have stuck? Doing a few abs exercises in front of the telly. Putting on 20-25 minutes on the timer at least once a day and having a tidy-up. Unfucking my habitat at the weekends. Putting out my clothes for work the night before. Leaving the staffroom and finding somewhere quiet to work (this can be a challenge, both the leaving and the finding somewhere quiet). Taking five minutes to tidy up before leaving work. Reading classic fiction rather than watching television. Putting my Diet Coke in the fridge at night, and my breakfast in my handbag. These have all stuck, more or less.
What habits haven't been as sticky? Keeping better homework records. I've gotten better at this but it's still not as perfect as I'd like it to be. Sorting the laundry on a Friday. Getting blowdries. Keeping the fone charged. Getting the bus into town. Writing in cafés. Running. Bringing things in out of the car. Marking things on the calendar. Cooking my own food. Taking iron tablets. Writing. Going out on a Saturday.
There are some I've given up on, like meditating. I reckon going for a walk on my own fulfils many of the purposes of meditating. Also, I've shoved writing into certain periods i.e. the summer holidays. That is my writing time. This is after reading Newport's book, where he says there is a choice. You can do something every day, or allocated intensive blocks. I always felt guilty about not getting up early to write/ writing in the evening but this alternative way of looking at things - I'm either in writing mode or teaching mode - works better. Other things I've given up on are keeping the ironing board in the kitchen (why?), using a stamper (a habit I invested in by purchasing stamper) and sitting nearer the front in staff meetings.
There is still a week to go before deciding on next year's habits. Contenders from last year include going out on a Saturday night (have signed up to lots of meet-ups),being more materially generous (this is a bit of a vague habit), opening the post (I know!) and going for walks. The two-kilometre walk I do is better than the three-kilometre run that I don't. I'm considering joining a gym to do fitness classes but want to avoid the New Year rush and high prices. I reckon mid-February might be a time to do that. In the meantime, will walk and do my Minnie Mouse exercises at home.
Everything is alright really. I don't need to change who I am. There is no perfection, just excellence in the small things. There is reading. There are other people. There is the world, out there.
Tuesday, 9 February 2016
On Not Gving a F**k
In an irreverent move I have decided that this year's Lenten penance will be giving up giving a fuck. As soon as I write that, it seems coarse and vulgar and not how it felt in my head. Seeing the word "fuck" isolates it, and makes me think of its literal meaning, whereas the phrase hung as a unit in my mind. I was waiting to respond to the next person who asked me "What are you giving up for Lent?"
"Giving a fuck."
What do I mean anyway? Worrying? Caring? Caring what other people think? It's hard to pin down. Caring so much about non-existent or potential observers maybe. Or calculating the knock-on effects of my actions, or more usually inaction, to the nth degree. Maybe.
Yesterday I was asked, by you can guess who, what advice would I give to myself at the age of eighteen, or nineteen, or twenty. I normally skip over these ages as a time where little would've helped, preferring to castigate my sixteen year old and twenty-five year old selves. So what would I say to my twenty year old self? Twenty is harder than eighteen or nineteen.
Give yourself a chance. You are worth more than this miserable existence you're enduring. I think the latter is harder to say; you can't say it, you can only make people feel it. I go back to give yourself a chance.
Take a chance on yourself. Take a chance that if you work hard it'll work out. I was an awful slacker, almost the definition of a self-saboteur. I can see myself in Kristen Neff's book "Self-Compassion" in the character who leaves buying black shoes until the morning of his wedding. I've always been a Last Minute Lucy, hoping for a miracle or accident to save the day. Neff writes "Failure of some sort is inevitable when we only make a half-hearted effort." I would say to myself: I know you hate the pastoral section of the 16th century poetry course, but don't bank on mutability coming up. Remember Leaving Cert Irish when you left out "Fill Aris" and that was the poem on the paper? All the work you did (at least 90% of the course) was a waste because you didn't cover all the bases.
Give yourself a chance, as much as you give others a chance. So what if none of your friends are doing French and the classes are on at awkward times in awkward locations? All that matter is that you are doing French.
Focus on you. This is your time to focus on you. Stop being hung up on the parents/the family/ your mental health/ Sylvia Plath. In fact if there is one piece of advice that would benefit not just myself at half the age I am now, but millions of other post-adolescent young women it is this: You Are Not Sylvia Plath. Focus on you now, and as a result you'll eventually have more interesting things than yourself to focus on.
Take a chance. Go out with that nice boy who likes you. Take a chance. Eat those dinners and stop propping that exit door ajar. There's an awful draught.
"Giving a fuck."
What do I mean anyway? Worrying? Caring? Caring what other people think? It's hard to pin down. Caring so much about non-existent or potential observers maybe. Or calculating the knock-on effects of my actions, or more usually inaction, to the nth degree. Maybe.
Yesterday I was asked, by you can guess who, what advice would I give to myself at the age of eighteen, or nineteen, or twenty. I normally skip over these ages as a time where little would've helped, preferring to castigate my sixteen year old and twenty-five year old selves. So what would I say to my twenty year old self? Twenty is harder than eighteen or nineteen.
Give yourself a chance. You are worth more than this miserable existence you're enduring. I think the latter is harder to say; you can't say it, you can only make people feel it. I go back to give yourself a chance.
Take a chance on yourself. Take a chance that if you work hard it'll work out. I was an awful slacker, almost the definition of a self-saboteur. I can see myself in Kristen Neff's book "Self-Compassion" in the character who leaves buying black shoes until the morning of his wedding. I've always been a Last Minute Lucy, hoping for a miracle or accident to save the day. Neff writes "Failure of some sort is inevitable when we only make a half-hearted effort." I would say to myself: I know you hate the pastoral section of the 16th century poetry course, but don't bank on mutability coming up. Remember Leaving Cert Irish when you left out "Fill Aris" and that was the poem on the paper? All the work you did (at least 90% of the course) was a waste because you didn't cover all the bases.
Give yourself a chance, as much as you give others a chance. So what if none of your friends are doing French and the classes are on at awkward times in awkward locations? All that matter is that you are doing French.
Focus on you. This is your time to focus on you. Stop being hung up on the parents/the family/ your mental health/ Sylvia Plath. In fact if there is one piece of advice that would benefit not just myself at half the age I am now, but millions of other post-adolescent young women it is this: You Are Not Sylvia Plath. Focus on you now, and as a result you'll eventually have more interesting things than yourself to focus on.
Take a chance. Go out with that nice boy who likes you. Take a chance. Eat those dinners and stop propping that exit door ajar. There's an awful draught.
Saturday, 16 January 2016
Why Buying Books is Okay, Even When You Already Own a Copy
One week into the 90 day challenge and how's it looking? Today - the first real test - was a partial success; I used two parking discs rather than paying for the multi-storey car-park; I escaped from TKMaxx with nothing more than an item of practical underwear, even though tempted by array of bargain-some beauty product. Why did I even go there in the first place? It's my habit: a habit compounded by the shop's addiction-forming variable-reward system.
I'd had lunch at home and met a friend for hot chocolate before caving and stocking up in M&S. At that stage I was tired and knew full well that that was willpower-depletion. I could have chosen to push through, to go buy some real food from local businesses. But sometimes knowing why you're doing something doesn't make it easier to not do it. Or, it doesn't make it easier enough.
I also bought a book. Buying books is allowed, as I have rarely regretted buying a book. Even awful self-help books that seemed - on inspection in Waterstones - to hold the secret to transforming my life only to be lots and lots of wasted ink and dead tree. With books you have to kiss a lot of frogs. Not only will you meet some Book Princes, you will over time develop a sixth sense for a book's amphibian-factor. The book I bought today is a Prince. I knew it would be, being "Better than Before" the latest from Gretchen Rubin. Not only have I read Rubin's previous two books, I'd also read this book. I bought it last month. I am a Book-Buyer-Lender-Buyer. Lending books to other people is one of my life's greatest pleasures. It's akin to the hobby of match-making, although there is a downside. This is that a book on loan is not a book on the shelf. And a book on loan may sometimes become a book lost. So every now and again, I will deliberately buy a book rather than resent the very book-reader relationship that I myself set up.
I like Rubin's book. It's witty and thought provoking and I like that she eschews playing amateur cognitive psychologist (although there's plenty of reference to actual research) in favour of anecdote and personal musings. I even like that she neatly insists that since I disagree totally with her unscientific division of humanity into four habit types (Upholders, Rebels, Obligers and Questioners), this very resistance indicates that I'm a "rebel".
I'd had lunch at home and met a friend for hot chocolate before caving and stocking up in M&S. At that stage I was tired and knew full well that that was willpower-depletion. I could have chosen to push through, to go buy some real food from local businesses. But sometimes knowing why you're doing something doesn't make it easier to not do it. Or, it doesn't make it easier enough.
I also bought a book. Buying books is allowed, as I have rarely regretted buying a book. Even awful self-help books that seemed - on inspection in Waterstones - to hold the secret to transforming my life only to be lots and lots of wasted ink and dead tree. With books you have to kiss a lot of frogs. Not only will you meet some Book Princes, you will over time develop a sixth sense for a book's amphibian-factor. The book I bought today is a Prince. I knew it would be, being "Better than Before" the latest from Gretchen Rubin. Not only have I read Rubin's previous two books, I'd also read this book. I bought it last month. I am a Book-Buyer-Lender-Buyer. Lending books to other people is one of my life's greatest pleasures. It's akin to the hobby of match-making, although there is a downside. This is that a book on loan is not a book on the shelf. And a book on loan may sometimes become a book lost. So every now and again, I will deliberately buy a book rather than resent the very book-reader relationship that I myself set up.
I like Rubin's book. It's witty and thought provoking and I like that she eschews playing amateur cognitive psychologist (although there's plenty of reference to actual research) in favour of anecdote and personal musings. I even like that she neatly insists that since I disagree totally with her unscientific division of humanity into four habit types (Upholders, Rebels, Obligers and Questioners), this very resistance indicates that I'm a "rebel".
Saturday, 9 January 2016
90 Day No-Spend Challenge
Inspired by a post on that really scientific, factual site www.mindbodygreen.com, I've decided to go on a spending diet. For the next 90 days, which'll roughly take me up to 10th April, I will not buy any of the following;
-clothes
-shoes/bags
-make-up [apart from replacements]
-toiletries[apart from replacements]
-M&S ready-meals
-multi-storey parking
-magazines[ I hardly ever buy these anyway]
-decorative household items
-lunch out unless I'm meeting some-one
This is mostly to stop frittering away money on things that really don't give me much pleasure. I have a freakish stash of toiletries - shower gels, cleansers, gift-with-purchase miscellanies - that needs using up. I have very poor clothes buying habits. I wouldn't even have thought of clothes buying as habitual before seeing this. Not that I'm an awful spendthrift, if anything I'm too slow to "invest" in good quality, high-use items like coats and bags. I buy things because they're discounted but they don't go together. I also buy things for the Unreal Me. Unreal Me wears lots of dresses, which I buy for her but rarely wear myself. My motto for 2016 is "Accept Who Your Are, Change What You Do", and I have to face the reality that I'm just not some-one who's ever going to be a regular dress-wearer.
I'm also doing this to stop frittering away time browsing through the shops where I live. There's nothing wrong with this, but it's my default Saturday-with-nothing-on activity. I can still go into town, but the plan is to bring the notebook and write. Shopping/consuming is a mostly soulless pastime. I really enjoyed Judith Levine's "Not Buying It" and I really like the idea of a total spending fast, but there are a few things I'll be consuming more, not less, of
-books
-cinema/theatre tickets
-trips out of Dodge
-meals/drinks in company
-regular haircuts instead of waiting until I'm the brunette Rapunzel
And finally, I'm doing this for the challenge. It's not climbing Everest, or even Carrauntoohil, but it will involve changing what I do. Am looking forward to it, if I'm honest.
-clothes
-shoes/bags
-make-up [apart from replacements]
-toiletries[apart from replacements]
-M&S ready-meals
-multi-storey parking
-magazines[ I hardly ever buy these anyway]
-decorative household items
-lunch out unless I'm meeting some-one
This is mostly to stop frittering away money on things that really don't give me much pleasure. I have a freakish stash of toiletries - shower gels, cleansers, gift-with-purchase miscellanies - that needs using up. I have very poor clothes buying habits. I wouldn't even have thought of clothes buying as habitual before seeing this. Not that I'm an awful spendthrift, if anything I'm too slow to "invest" in good quality, high-use items like coats and bags. I buy things because they're discounted but they don't go together. I also buy things for the Unreal Me. Unreal Me wears lots of dresses, which I buy for her but rarely wear myself. My motto for 2016 is "Accept Who Your Are, Change What You Do", and I have to face the reality that I'm just not some-one who's ever going to be a regular dress-wearer.
I'm also doing this to stop frittering away time browsing through the shops where I live. There's nothing wrong with this, but it's my default Saturday-with-nothing-on activity. I can still go into town, but the plan is to bring the notebook and write. Shopping/consuming is a mostly soulless pastime. I really enjoyed Judith Levine's "Not Buying It" and I really like the idea of a total spending fast, but there are a few things I'll be consuming more, not less, of
-books
-cinema/theatre tickets
-trips out of Dodge
-meals/drinks in company
-regular haircuts instead of waiting until I'm the brunette Rapunzel
And finally, I'm doing this for the challenge. It's not climbing Everest, or even Carrauntoohil, but it will involve changing what I do. Am looking forward to it, if I'm honest.
Tuesday, 9 June 2015
Everywhere I Hear the Cry of Birds
 |
| Borris House in Carlow, scene of last weekend's Festival of Writing and Ideas |
I missed the start of the conversation between Michael Harding and AC Grayling that was one of the highlights of the Sunday of the Borris Festival of Writing and Ideas. (Will write more on the festival later). I was there for the end though, when Grayling recited a poem in Chinese. This is the translation I wrote down quickly:
"We awake expecting to see the blossoms of Spring
Only to find the rains of autumn are already falling"
I like this, and thought perhaps that Leonard Cohen was right when that "a single line of Chinese poetry could change forever how blossoms fell". I went looking for the poem on Google, but couldn't find it. I found this though, which may be the same poem, translated differently.
"I slumbered this spring morning, and missed the dawn,
From everywhere I heard the cry of birds.
That night the sound of wind and rain had come,
Who knows how many petals then had fallen?"
And it is my life, right there. Everything. It's not that there any flowers left. I'm not infirm, yet. Many would call me a young woman, but only if I did something like die. Forty is young to die. It's old to do most of the things I want to do.
Now is the afternoon, when others' thoughts are turning to rest and the evening. They have done the work, some rising even before dawn. Their garners are full for the winter ahead, their young around them.
This is envy, a self-destructive emotion. I have thing that others envy and there is no balance-sheet in the sky. There's no metric for a good life, for happiness. I've been trying to follow Paul Dolan's advice in his excellent book "Happiness by Design" and focus less on the evaluating self which tots up the points on the life-satisfaction inventory and look instead at what I'm doing every day, at the experiencing self. I'm trying as well, relatedly, to consider how it feels more than how it looks when it comes to making decisions.
And I feel always that it's too late. And I feel always that I can't give up. And I know the most dangerous way of all to think of your life is that it's like a story. Especially a story from a film. The movies have spoiled us all into imagining narrative arcs where there is only rational chaos. I think, is this the critical moment, the turn of the screw, the second challenge our heroine must face and if she succeeds we will have resolution and the falling action of contented old age. This all depends on the screenplay and all too often I sit back and wait to see what will happen. All around me I see confirmation that for most people, like in most movies, there's a reasonable chance for a good outcome. These observations aren't a reliable guide. I could, for example, be the only one of my peers whose film is playing at the art-house cinema instead of at the Omniplex.
I got lost on my way to Borris. I got lost on the way home. I sought the meaning of trying to work out a shortcut instead of going the suggested route. On the way home I had decided, decided I tell you, to take the Waterford route only to get to the first T-junction and take the other road. I expend myself in such useless challenges, like trying to break the six-stone barrier (My goal when I was twenty). These roads were built that way for a reason and you have to accept risks if you turn off them.
What's my useless challenge now? I spent a long time navigating the Carlow/ Kilkenny countryside, driving in circles through the narrow streets of the confusing towns, thinking I was on the right road, thinking wrongly that I was on the wrong road, doubling-back and sucking it up, and eventually I re-joined the main road and then I knew where I was and could breathe.
I'll never known what might have happened if I'd stayed on the road I'd decided on. I'll never see the petals that bloomed while I slept, though I torture myself with imagining. What would really be unreasonable would be to go back to bed in a huff, or to forget that soon enough the rain and the wind will truly and earnestly blow all signs of life away.
Tuesday, 2 June 2015
"The Upside of Stress" by Kelly McGonigal
"Probably nothing is more universal than the experience of stress. Nobody gets through life without experiencing physical pain, illness, disappointment, or loss. The specifics may vary, but the underlying experience is a human as it gets."
This is the week the State exams begin, and every article you read about them contains some version of the advice "chill out", or worse "it's not the end of the world". The ESRI even brought out a report this week on the harm that stress is doing our students, especially the girls. Great timing.
Stress is toxic. It damages girls' performance in exams, and when they get a bit older, damages the performance of their ovaries. Every article you ever read (if you read them) about fertility will include the importance of avoiding stress. Advice about skin conditions tends to say the same thing. Not to mention mental health, where a whole industry has been built around the notion that stress is bad for you.
So how happy was I when I clicked on the Twitter link to this 2013 TED talk by Kelly McGonigal? I was soon a fan, looking at other talks and interviews she's given and ordering her book "Maximum Willpower" (for some reason not published in Europe under its original title: "The Willpower Instinct"). "Maximum Willpower" is now one of my favourite self-help books, and I've been awaiting the publication of McGonigal's follow-up "The Upside of Stress" with anticipation.
This is a much quicker read than "Maximum Willpower", a book whose density of research findings belies its bargain-book title. "The Upside of Stress" has also got a touch of the Louis Theroux about it, as there are several vignettes of McGonigal in this lab, or meeting that researcher, or going for a run with a group of teens and adults. It's what you'd expect from Michael Mosley or Alice Roberts; you know, here I am in an MRI machine/ here I am on a zip-wire so my saliva can be tested afterwards. There's lots of that here and it kind of reminds me of a tv tie-in book.
The overall premise of the book is revolutionary, yet entirely common sense. In fact, it proves the saying that common sense isn't that common at all and that things we think are common sense are closer to nonsense. We all know that stress is harmful, we just know it at this stage. We know we should avoid stress, yet we fail. For anyone who's ever had a brush with mental illness, the spectre of stress is especially frightening, as we are told that part of minding ourselves means minimising stress in our lives.
What if all these things were wrong? Much of what McGonigal writes is convincing. The best example is also the simplest. You know the stress response you get before standing up to speak in public, or before sitting an important exam? The butterflies and the shakes and the racing heart? This is your body helping you rise to the challenge. It is to be welcomed and harnessed, not suppressed. I have tried to do this when faced with insta-stress such as last Thursday when making a speech in front of the entire staff. It is hard to do, really hard to think "this is my heart giving me courage" rather than "must.calm.down.or.else" and I can't say it worked 100% but I think it helped.
Although novel, this is unlikely to cause controversy. Most of us can see that kind of stress response as not that harmful to health. We're more likely to label chronic stress as harmful, or else traumatic stress from a major event. What about the stress of "suffering"? Here McGonigal's claims seem a little wilder. Even the most stressful of life events have an upside. There is a danger here of Nietzsche-inspired complacency towards the suffering of others and one of the papers she cites is actually called "Whatever Does Not Kill Us". There is a caveat that this research showed a U curve where experiencing extreme adversity harms much more than it benefits. It may be more accurate to say "what challenges us beyond what we thought we could do makes us stronger" but that's not quite pithy enough. Rather than The Upside of Trauma, the section on serious suffering is better looked on as suggestions on how to deal with the aftermath of decidedly undesirable events. For example providing opportunities for volunteering can lessen the impact of PTSD. She does admit that "in some cases, stress is harmful" and writes that childhood abuse, for example, can impair the "tend-and-befriend" instinct. You have to look hard for these admissions in the book, but they're there. The breezy tone can sometime be at odds with the subject matter; a section dealing with child survivors of the Rwandan genocide is an example. This cheeriness can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, she's probably been advised to lighten it up and increase the anecdote-to-science ratio to ensure the book's commercial success. On the other, it risks making the book's thesis easier to dismiss by those who make decisions in healthcare and other areas.
And it is an important argument. I have written earlier about the prevailing dread of stress that exists in the Irish education system, but McGonigal writes of the importance of "stress inoculation". Young people, and even children, need to experience some stress in order to activate their own resilience and, I would add, to learn from adult models how to deal with stress. Therefore we shouldn't be too worried about the fact that children experience stress. The notion that children should not be under any stress at all leads to policy being dictated by inane studies that ask children what the greatest source of stress is in their lives. Predictably they mention exams (the Junior Cert is a negative form of assessment, which causes stress), making friends and the transition to secondary school. This last is now perceived as a huge problem mostly on the basis that fifth and sixth class pupils report it as their main cause of stress. Seeing stress as less of a problem and more of a learning opportunity in itself would not only ease the transition but would help reverse the trend to making secondary school more like primary.
Fear of stress also permeates advice given around mental health. "Recognising and managing stress early will help prevent it leading to more serious problems such as anxiety, depression or high blood pressure" says the HSE's own mental health website. The notion that stress can be "managed" is slipped in there very innocuously but is perhaps the most dangerous stress belief of all. It's what keeps thousands of people chasing their own mental-health tail, caught in a never-ending personal campaign to protect their fragile mental health (yes, the HSE actually sponsors ads that tells people their mental health is "fragile), curtail the amount of stress they're under and dampen down their stress response through endless relaxation exercises.
A typical memory I have of my time in mental-illness care is being told to be "a human being, not just a human doing". I was exhorted to spend time "just being", even though I was unemployed at the time and really, really needed to spend more time "doing". If I started a job or a course, at the first hint of trouble I'd be encouraged to quit or drop out on the basis that "nothing is more important than your health".
This is where a book like "The Upside of Stress" would have come in handy. The difficulties I was experiencing could have been reframed as training in resilience. I have also come to realise that "put your health first" is often a euphemism for "put the organisation first". Quitting is promoted as an act of self-care, when perseverance might be the more selfish, yet wiser move.
While I think the book has much to offer the individual, I shudder at the ends to which this research might be put. McGonigal writes early in the book about a "mindset intervention" as a company was about to make 3,000 employees redundant. Such interventions are fine if conducted by a disinterested, outside party such as a group of researchers. They're less cosy and more creepy when sponsored by the companies themselves or used as subtle advertising by mental-health groups. No company or institution should think that it's okay to rack up the stress on employees, or others, or that a "stress mindset intervention" cancels out inhumane or unfair practices.
What I like most about "The Upside of Stress" was its link between stress and meaning. Meaning, or purpose, is the true upside of stress. And meaning can come from choice; either a project of our own choosing that we know will incur an inevitable amount of stress, or the choice to respond to stress in a the best way you can.Quitting your job or dropping out of a course or giving up on a goal for the sake of your health can make that health seem fairly meaningless. McGonigal writes "Rather than being a sign that something is wrong with your life, feeling stressed can be a barometer for how engaged you are in activities and relationships that are personally meaningful". When you have no meaning, then even small amounts of stress seem unbearable and learning is hard.
So the title of the notes books "Less Stress, More Success" is totally misleading, not just when it comes to exams but in life in general. That's not to say that "More Stress, More Success" is necessarily the case either, or that stress is all good. "Seeing the upside of stress isn't about deciding whether stress is all good or all bad. It's about choosing to see the good in stress can help you meet the challenges in your life."
My resolution for June is to embrace stress and see stressful events (past and present) as learning opportunities. Funnily, this last resolution (learning from stress) is one that has driven me absolutely mad when others have suggested it to me. It can be very, very insensitive and ill-timed, so I'm going to recommend you actually read this book for yourself and maybe give it to other people when they're not actually in full-stress mode.
We'll see how well the stress-embrace is going in two weeks time when I'll be waist-deep in Leaving Cert exam scripts.
This is the week the State exams begin, and every article you read about them contains some version of the advice "chill out", or worse "it's not the end of the world". The ESRI even brought out a report this week on the harm that stress is doing our students, especially the girls. Great timing.
Stress is toxic. It damages girls' performance in exams, and when they get a bit older, damages the performance of their ovaries. Every article you ever read (if you read them) about fertility will include the importance of avoiding stress. Advice about skin conditions tends to say the same thing. Not to mention mental health, where a whole industry has been built around the notion that stress is bad for you.
This is a much quicker read than "Maximum Willpower", a book whose density of research findings belies its bargain-book title. "The Upside of Stress" has also got a touch of the Louis Theroux about it, as there are several vignettes of McGonigal in this lab, or meeting that researcher, or going for a run with a group of teens and adults. It's what you'd expect from Michael Mosley or Alice Roberts; you know, here I am in an MRI machine/ here I am on a zip-wire so my saliva can be tested afterwards. There's lots of that here and it kind of reminds me of a tv tie-in book.
The overall premise of the book is revolutionary, yet entirely common sense. In fact, it proves the saying that common sense isn't that common at all and that things we think are common sense are closer to nonsense. We all know that stress is harmful, we just know it at this stage. We know we should avoid stress, yet we fail. For anyone who's ever had a brush with mental illness, the spectre of stress is especially frightening, as we are told that part of minding ourselves means minimising stress in our lives.
What if all these things were wrong? Much of what McGonigal writes is convincing. The best example is also the simplest. You know the stress response you get before standing up to speak in public, or before sitting an important exam? The butterflies and the shakes and the racing heart? This is your body helping you rise to the challenge. It is to be welcomed and harnessed, not suppressed. I have tried to do this when faced with insta-stress such as last Thursday when making a speech in front of the entire staff. It is hard to do, really hard to think "this is my heart giving me courage" rather than "must.calm.down.or.else" and I can't say it worked 100% but I think it helped.
Although novel, this is unlikely to cause controversy. Most of us can see that kind of stress response as not that harmful to health. We're more likely to label chronic stress as harmful, or else traumatic stress from a major event. What about the stress of "suffering"? Here McGonigal's claims seem a little wilder. Even the most stressful of life events have an upside. There is a danger here of Nietzsche-inspired complacency towards the suffering of others and one of the papers she cites is actually called "Whatever Does Not Kill Us". There is a caveat that this research showed a U curve where experiencing extreme adversity harms much more than it benefits. It may be more accurate to say "what challenges us beyond what we thought we could do makes us stronger" but that's not quite pithy enough. Rather than The Upside of Trauma, the section on serious suffering is better looked on as suggestions on how to deal with the aftermath of decidedly undesirable events. For example providing opportunities for volunteering can lessen the impact of PTSD. She does admit that "in some cases, stress is harmful" and writes that childhood abuse, for example, can impair the "tend-and-befriend" instinct. You have to look hard for these admissions in the book, but they're there. The breezy tone can sometime be at odds with the subject matter; a section dealing with child survivors of the Rwandan genocide is an example. This cheeriness can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, she's probably been advised to lighten it up and increase the anecdote-to-science ratio to ensure the book's commercial success. On the other, it risks making the book's thesis easier to dismiss by those who make decisions in healthcare and other areas.
And it is an important argument. I have written earlier about the prevailing dread of stress that exists in the Irish education system, but McGonigal writes of the importance of "stress inoculation". Young people, and even children, need to experience some stress in order to activate their own resilience and, I would add, to learn from adult models how to deal with stress. Therefore we shouldn't be too worried about the fact that children experience stress. The notion that children should not be under any stress at all leads to policy being dictated by inane studies that ask children what the greatest source of stress is in their lives. Predictably they mention exams (the Junior Cert is a negative form of assessment, which causes stress), making friends and the transition to secondary school. This last is now perceived as a huge problem mostly on the basis that fifth and sixth class pupils report it as their main cause of stress. Seeing stress as less of a problem and more of a learning opportunity in itself would not only ease the transition but would help reverse the trend to making secondary school more like primary.
Fear of stress also permeates advice given around mental health. "Recognising and managing stress early will help prevent it leading to more serious problems such as anxiety, depression or high blood pressure" says the HSE's own mental health website. The notion that stress can be "managed" is slipped in there very innocuously but is perhaps the most dangerous stress belief of all. It's what keeps thousands of people chasing their own mental-health tail, caught in a never-ending personal campaign to protect their fragile mental health (yes, the HSE actually sponsors ads that tells people their mental health is "fragile), curtail the amount of stress they're under and dampen down their stress response through endless relaxation exercises.
A typical memory I have of my time in mental-illness care is being told to be "a human being, not just a human doing". I was exhorted to spend time "just being", even though I was unemployed at the time and really, really needed to spend more time "doing". If I started a job or a course, at the first hint of trouble I'd be encouraged to quit or drop out on the basis that "nothing is more important than your health".
This is where a book like "The Upside of Stress" would have come in handy. The difficulties I was experiencing could have been reframed as training in resilience. I have also come to realise that "put your health first" is often a euphemism for "put the organisation first". Quitting is promoted as an act of self-care, when perseverance might be the more selfish, yet wiser move.
While I think the book has much to offer the individual, I shudder at the ends to which this research might be put. McGonigal writes early in the book about a "mindset intervention" as a company was about to make 3,000 employees redundant. Such interventions are fine if conducted by a disinterested, outside party such as a group of researchers. They're less cosy and more creepy when sponsored by the companies themselves or used as subtle advertising by mental-health groups. No company or institution should think that it's okay to rack up the stress on employees, or others, or that a "stress mindset intervention" cancels out inhumane or unfair practices.
What I like most about "The Upside of Stress" was its link between stress and meaning. Meaning, or purpose, is the true upside of stress. And meaning can come from choice; either a project of our own choosing that we know will incur an inevitable amount of stress, or the choice to respond to stress in a the best way you can.Quitting your job or dropping out of a course or giving up on a goal for the sake of your health can make that health seem fairly meaningless. McGonigal writes "Rather than being a sign that something is wrong with your life, feeling stressed can be a barometer for how engaged you are in activities and relationships that are personally meaningful". When you have no meaning, then even small amounts of stress seem unbearable and learning is hard.
So the title of the notes books "Less Stress, More Success" is totally misleading, not just when it comes to exams but in life in general. That's not to say that "More Stress, More Success" is necessarily the case either, or that stress is all good. "Seeing the upside of stress isn't about deciding whether stress is all good or all bad. It's about choosing to see the good in stress can help you meet the challenges in your life."
My resolution for June is to embrace stress and see stressful events (past and present) as learning opportunities. Funnily, this last resolution (learning from stress) is one that has driven me absolutely mad when others have suggested it to me. It can be very, very insensitive and ill-timed, so I'm going to recommend you actually read this book for yourself and maybe give it to other people when they're not actually in full-stress mode.
We'll see how well the stress-embrace is going in two weeks time when I'll be waist-deep in Leaving Cert exam scripts.
Tuesday, 23 September 2014
Side Effects
It was my best friend's fortieth birthday. My own is fast approaching. We were walking through our local department store, looking at the fancy face creams. I am a product junkie and spend far too much money on jars of gunk that never live up to the promises on the lovely, embossed cardboard boxes.
My friend is a pharmacist and in a successful effort to avoid temptation I asked her "Is it true that if any of these worked they'd be on prescription?".
"Absolutely" was the reply. "If they did what the claim to do [reverse skin damage, slow cell degeneration] that'd be a medical effect and there are no effects without side effects."
When we think about psychotherapeutic interventions in education, we shouldn't seek reassurance in studies showing that this therapy or that therapy is effective in a clinical setting. Rather any such effectiveness should be taken as a warning that such an intervention is probably unsuitable in schools. School is not, and never will be, a clinical setting. If something is potent enough to have a measurable and predictable effect, then its effects on the general population (who are fine) may be, on balance, negative. Its effects on the vulnerable, when administered outside a clinical setting by people whose training is in an entirely different discipline, may be catastrophic.
Nick Rose (@turnfordblog) has written recently on proposals to utilise Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy on a widescale basis in UK schools. Rose writes on his http://evidenceintopractice.wordpress.com blog that:
" My concern is that CBT and mindfulness are forms of psychotherapy which are being gently scaled into schools in the name of developing ‘resilience’ or ‘well-being’....Part of the push towards psychological interventions in schools (I’d include ‘Growth Mindset interventions in this list) is to develop children’s self-regulation strategies and improve attainment. If the suggestion was to offer low doses of a therapeutic drug to help children in school, teachers would be up in arms – yet, we appear remarkably blasé when low doses of ‘talking therapy’ are being offered. If the aim is to improve well-being, then there are still important questions to answer. Do all children need psychotherapy to maintain their well-being within school? How do we screen for the children who would benefit from a psychological intervention and which children would not – and most importantly, children for whom it might have a negative effect?"
I don't have experience of MBCT but to me it seems entirely sensible. I have never found the traditional CBT description of thoughts as "negative" convincing. I have met people in hospital and elsewhere plagued with the conviction that if only they could control and eliminate these negative thoughts then they would be restored to health. Except such control and elimination are impossible.
My own experience is with Dialectical Behaviour Therapy, a forerunner of MBCT. It is currently being rolled out around Ireland within a mental health care setting, a move which I wholeheartedly welcome. I was dismayed, however, to hear Marsha Linehan, speaking at UCC last year, refer blithely to plans to extend DBT "into the schools".
Those who work in mental health promotion, like those who work for campaigns for sexual health, road safety and drug-abstinence often see schools as a golden opportunity. All those malleable young minds with nothing else to be doing all day besides absorbing healthy messages like "just say no to drugs/ binge-drinking/ unsafe sex/burning fossil fuels". Nothing new here.
The move to embed mindfulness in the curriculum is a new departure, one that sees the lines between education and mental health-care provision blur to obscurity. This is not psychotherapy in schools for well-being, this is psychotherapy in school for learning. Learning and well-being are increasingly seen as one and the same thing. The highlight of this year's Feilte Irish Festival of Education is touted as a panel discussion of Well-being featuring educationalists and teachers such as Bressie and Eoghan McDermott. It's the Mind, Body, Spirit Festival brought to you by the Voice of Ireland and sponsored by the Teaching Council.
Interventions like mindfulness are seen as entirely benign, to be rolled out in school by teachers with little or no training or else by outside facilitators. A private enterprise, Bright Sparks Coaching, is offering a two-hour course that will allow teachers to "understand [mindfulness'] application in the classroom". The work of this company is supported by education centres and they have conducted "mindfulness training" in schools. Their website states
Brain words and neuroscience aside, the idea that this intervention can sort out children's pesky emotional complexity and "negative emotions" so they can learn better and faster is naïve in the extreme. The reference to "negative and destructive emotions" is also a red flag to anyone even slightly acquainted with mindfulness, as one of the primary aims of the practice is to not judge emotional states or classify them as harmful. The first item on a list of the benefits of mindfulness training in schools is that it "saves time". Yes, it's annoying how much time and patience goes into teaching and learning. How convenient it would be to have a class of thirty little Zen masters with rapid-growth mindsets and bullet-proof resilience.
For most students the worst outcome of mindfulness training in school-time is the opportunity cost of educational time. Some may even derive modest benefits, but those benefits have to be weighed against the potential harms. What about students who could benefit the most from mindfulness training? Shouldn't they get the training in school, where their lack of mindfulness is having an undeniable impact on their education? Not if you consider the reasons that children come to school with a mindfulness deficit serious enough to be interfering with their learning.
If we look at where mindfulness interventions have been successful clinically, we can see that a mindfulness deficit is associated with trauma, depression, eating disorders and other serious issues. Linehan's "Skills Training Manual for Borderline Personality Disorder" reports that approximately 75% of the patients who met the criteria for the original intervention had been sexually abused. Emma Seppala at Stanford University recently reported meditation as a successful intervention for combat trauma. This is potent, serious stuff and we should, as Rose, suggests, no more think of applying it in schools than we would hand out psychoactive drugs in the canteen.
Linehan writes "Mindfulness to current emotions means experiencing emotions without judging them or trying to inhibit them, block them, or distract from them. The basic idea here is that exposure to painful or distressing emotions, without association to negative consequences, will extinguish their ability to stimulate secondary negative emotions". Eliciting painful emotions while protecting vulnerable people from their negative consequences is a hard task for a trained psychotherapist. Eliciting painful emotions in an SPHE discussion, or encouraging them to surface in an RE guided meditation, and sending a child off to Maths when the bell rings borders on cruelty. Allowing mindfulness trainers (no matter how vetted and qualified) into schools to offer psychotherapy in a whole-class setting is irresponsible. We must remember, always, that the students we know are at risk are not the only students who are at risk.
As my friend pointed out, if things work they need to used judiciously and their supply controlled. I believe that mindfulness based interventions can offer much to young people who need them, and that an important benefit is that it can enable them to be present (physically and psychologically) enough in school to gain an education that will give them the same life chances as their peers. But teachers are not the people to do this, and school probably isn't the place to do it in. Mindfulness for teachers themselves is probably a good thing and I don't doubt that a mindful approach to teaching can be as useful as a mindful approach to any job. But implicitly fostering mindfulness in the classroom is quite different from didactically teaching its precepts as scientific fact, or attempting lift-all-boats interventions that are ultimately amateur, unstandardized and potentially harmful.
Postscript: I wrote the above post before Feilte 2014 which featured Ann-Marie Ireland from www.chilloutireland.ie. ChillOutIreland appears to be a similar business to Bright Sparks Coaching, but has achieved much greater influence and acceptance within Irish education.
My friend is a pharmacist and in a successful effort to avoid temptation I asked her "Is it true that if any of these worked they'd be on prescription?".
"Absolutely" was the reply. "If they did what the claim to do [reverse skin damage, slow cell degeneration] that'd be a medical effect and there are no effects without side effects."
When we think about psychotherapeutic interventions in education, we shouldn't seek reassurance in studies showing that this therapy or that therapy is effective in a clinical setting. Rather any such effectiveness should be taken as a warning that such an intervention is probably unsuitable in schools. School is not, and never will be, a clinical setting. If something is potent enough to have a measurable and predictable effect, then its effects on the general population (who are fine) may be, on balance, negative. Its effects on the vulnerable, when administered outside a clinical setting by people whose training is in an entirely different discipline, may be catastrophic.
Nick Rose (@turnfordblog) has written recently on proposals to utilise Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy on a widescale basis in UK schools. Rose writes on his http://evidenceintopractice.wordpress.com blog that:
" My concern is that CBT and mindfulness are forms of psychotherapy which are being gently scaled into schools in the name of developing ‘resilience’ or ‘well-being’....Part of the push towards psychological interventions in schools (I’d include ‘Growth Mindset interventions in this list) is to develop children’s self-regulation strategies and improve attainment. If the suggestion was to offer low doses of a therapeutic drug to help children in school, teachers would be up in arms – yet, we appear remarkably blasé when low doses of ‘talking therapy’ are being offered. If the aim is to improve well-being, then there are still important questions to answer. Do all children need psychotherapy to maintain their well-being within school? How do we screen for the children who would benefit from a psychological intervention and which children would not – and most importantly, children for whom it might have a negative effect?"
I don't have experience of MBCT but to me it seems entirely sensible. I have never found the traditional CBT description of thoughts as "negative" convincing. I have met people in hospital and elsewhere plagued with the conviction that if only they could control and eliminate these negative thoughts then they would be restored to health. Except such control and elimination are impossible.
My own experience is with Dialectical Behaviour Therapy, a forerunner of MBCT. It is currently being rolled out around Ireland within a mental health care setting, a move which I wholeheartedly welcome. I was dismayed, however, to hear Marsha Linehan, speaking at UCC last year, refer blithely to plans to extend DBT "into the schools".
Those who work in mental health promotion, like those who work for campaigns for sexual health, road safety and drug-abstinence often see schools as a golden opportunity. All those malleable young minds with nothing else to be doing all day besides absorbing healthy messages like "just say no to drugs/ binge-drinking/ unsafe sex/burning fossil fuels". Nothing new here.
The move to embed mindfulness in the curriculum is a new departure, one that sees the lines between education and mental health-care provision blur to obscurity. This is not psychotherapy in schools for well-being, this is psychotherapy in school for learning. Learning and well-being are increasingly seen as one and the same thing. The highlight of this year's Feilte Irish Festival of Education is touted as a panel discussion of Well-being featuring educationalists and teachers such as Bressie and Eoghan McDermott. It's the Mind, Body, Spirit Festival brought to you by the Voice of Ireland and sponsored by the Teaching Council.
Interventions like mindfulness are seen as entirely benign, to be rolled out in school by teachers with little or no training or else by outside facilitators. A private enterprise, Bright Sparks Coaching, is offering a two-hour course that will allow teachers to "understand [mindfulness'] application in the classroom". The work of this company is supported by education centres and they have conducted "mindfulness training" in schools. Their website states
"The ability of children to be able to self regulate has a profound impact on their ability to learn. It has been proven that negative & destructive emotions inhibit our ability to learn and hold information. It is therefore an invaluable asset to teach our children the ability to recognise and manage their emotional lives. Furthermore it is now understood that our brains are elastic and continues to grow, develop and shape itself throughout our childhood and adolescents. During the process of growth, our brain has the capacity to be shaped and wired in a way that supports the development and activation of Pre Frontal Cortex, which is responsible for the integration of all areas of the brain that create optimal health."
Brain words and neuroscience aside, the idea that this intervention can sort out children's pesky emotional complexity and "negative emotions" so they can learn better and faster is naïve in the extreme. The reference to "negative and destructive emotions" is also a red flag to anyone even slightly acquainted with mindfulness, as one of the primary aims of the practice is to not judge emotional states or classify them as harmful. The first item on a list of the benefits of mindfulness training in schools is that it "saves time". Yes, it's annoying how much time and patience goes into teaching and learning. How convenient it would be to have a class of thirty little Zen masters with rapid-growth mindsets and bullet-proof resilience.
For most students the worst outcome of mindfulness training in school-time is the opportunity cost of educational time. Some may even derive modest benefits, but those benefits have to be weighed against the potential harms. What about students who could benefit the most from mindfulness training? Shouldn't they get the training in school, where their lack of mindfulness is having an undeniable impact on their education? Not if you consider the reasons that children come to school with a mindfulness deficit serious enough to be interfering with their learning.
If we look at where mindfulness interventions have been successful clinically, we can see that a mindfulness deficit is associated with trauma, depression, eating disorders and other serious issues. Linehan's "Skills Training Manual for Borderline Personality Disorder" reports that approximately 75% of the patients who met the criteria for the original intervention had been sexually abused. Emma Seppala at Stanford University recently reported meditation as a successful intervention for combat trauma. This is potent, serious stuff and we should, as Rose, suggests, no more think of applying it in schools than we would hand out psychoactive drugs in the canteen.
Linehan writes "Mindfulness to current emotions means experiencing emotions without judging them or trying to inhibit them, block them, or distract from them. The basic idea here is that exposure to painful or distressing emotions, without association to negative consequences, will extinguish their ability to stimulate secondary negative emotions". Eliciting painful emotions while protecting vulnerable people from their negative consequences is a hard task for a trained psychotherapist. Eliciting painful emotions in an SPHE discussion, or encouraging them to surface in an RE guided meditation, and sending a child off to Maths when the bell rings borders on cruelty. Allowing mindfulness trainers (no matter how vetted and qualified) into schools to offer psychotherapy in a whole-class setting is irresponsible. We must remember, always, that the students we know are at risk are not the only students who are at risk.
As my friend pointed out, if things work they need to used judiciously and their supply controlled. I believe that mindfulness based interventions can offer much to young people who need them, and that an important benefit is that it can enable them to be present (physically and psychologically) enough in school to gain an education that will give them the same life chances as their peers. But teachers are not the people to do this, and school probably isn't the place to do it in. Mindfulness for teachers themselves is probably a good thing and I don't doubt that a mindful approach to teaching can be as useful as a mindful approach to any job. But implicitly fostering mindfulness in the classroom is quite different from didactically teaching its precepts as scientific fact, or attempting lift-all-boats interventions that are ultimately amateur, unstandardized and potentially harmful.
Postscript: I wrote the above post before Feilte 2014 which featured Ann-Marie Ireland from www.chilloutireland.ie. ChillOutIreland appears to be a similar business to Bright Sparks Coaching, but has achieved much greater influence and acceptance within Irish education.
Tuesday, 5 August 2014
Students, Pupils and Learners
I've been looking at www.juniorcycle.ie instead of getting a life and enjoying the holidays. I mean, I am enjoying the holidays but feel compelled to season this enjoyment with the piquant sting of looking at where Irish education is headed. I blame the Twitter. We really should have a gentleman's agreement to suspend school-related content, at least for August.
One thing - among many - that strikes me about juniorcycle.ie is the recurring reference to students as "learners". For example:
-"learners' overall well-being must be supported alongside their intellectual development."
-"This skill [working with others] helps learners develop good relationships and to appreciate the value of cooperating"
-"The learner's junior cycle programme builds on their learning to date and actively supports their progress in learning"
I've been asking myself where I stand on this. On the one hand, I'm all for it. It's not ungrammatical and it reinforces the idea that that's what school is for: learning stuff. Learning is also something students do for themselves, so the emphasis on learning and learners should, in principle, recognise the responsibility of students for their own effort.
So far, so positive. A little doubt niggles away at me that the intended benefits of renaming students as "learners" may soon be lost. I'd say it'll be lost the day they start referring to themselves as "learners". For example we might soon hear "We, the learners, demand that our individuality be recognised and catered for through personalised learning" or more likely "We, the learners, object to the removal of Lucozade from the vending machines". When we make "learner" a synonym for "student" the word no longer implies that the learner is doing any learning. Soon all you will have to do to be a learner is enrol in, and perhaps attend, a secondary school. I can think of a few pupils I've had, particularly early in my career, whose school life was unfortunately not characterised by learning but by other activities.
You might say the same about "student", which implies that the person does some studying. Again, this term is presumptive but nowhere nearly as much as "learner". You can study without learning anything, if you study badly. For example you could read a chapter of "Discover History" ten times the night before a test. You'd have studied but it's unlikely you'd have committed anything to your long-term memory. I would say, in fairness, that all those in secondary school do some study, at some point. If you're studying you know you're studying but if you're learning you don't necessarily know you're learning. I don't mean this in an "I'm having so much fun in this engaging, group activity that I didn't notice the stealth fact-attack". I mean learning happens at a subsensory level and we only really know we learned something when we try to remember and succeed. "Trying to remember" itself could be a sign of partial, or imminent, forgetting.
Learning is hard. It takes a lot more than just showing up for school (though that's a start that far too many are failing to make).
When I was in school "students" attended third level. We were "pupils" as we were stillin prison at school. As far as I know that's how children in primary school are still referred to. I can see why we've moved on from there as the term, at least to my mind, does not recognise the input a person should, by the time they're a teenager, be able to put into their own education. I'm sure there was an analogy in "First Aid in English" that said "Teacher is to pupil as shepherd is to sheep", or "Pupil is to teacher what shrub is to gardener". So I'm fine with "student" as long as it means secondary student and not "young adult who's entitled to wander in with a take-away coffee and take an
à la carte approach to the timetable".
I've noticed that I've begun to use "learning" quite a bit, especially in language classes where methods of acquiring and practicing new vocabulary are taught as a matter of course. I talk about becoming an "effective language learner", as acquiring another language requires effort and technique. But the key word here is "becoming". MFL is one of the few areas that the phrase "learning to learn" has meaning. The skills of language-learning are almost infinitely transferable, a reason why there's absolutely no need to worry if a student chooses a language other than their parents' preferred option.
Really though, "learning to learn" is a misused aphorism that confuses "learning to drive" and "learning to swim" with what students do in school. Students in school learn (hopefully) and the more you know, the easier it is to learn new things. "When it comes to knowledge, those who have more gain more" Daniel Willingham writes in "Why Don't Students Like School" There are more and less effective ways of studying but learning itself, thankfully, is an innate ability of the human brain. You don't need to learn to learn, any more than you need to learn to think
"Learning to learn", if interpreted as it is here by former Minister Ruairi Quinn at 2 minutes in, has the potential to seriously damage education. The phrase can be used to suggest that it doesn't matter what students learn in school as long as they're learning the skills of learning. Quinn for example states that "learning to learn" has taken over from "learning to remember". This new definition of learning does not seem to involve memory, which is extraordinary. Students can leave school with no knowledge as long as they have acquired the skills of learning. Of course, as teachers, we know this is nonsense as you can't acquire the skills of learning by any other method than practice and if you've learned something you remember it. Nevertheless the concept of learning without remembering persists. Take today's call from the ESRI, for " a greater use of project and team work to equip young people with the type of skills they need for lifelong learning and the labour market". Whether it's Chinese or Klingon, programming or origami, European geography or the Enneagram- so what? School is really only an apprenticeship for the adventure that is life-long learning. As such it doesn't really matter what learners do or if they do it badly. We'll allow for false starts and abortive attempts. If a child does a project on earthquakes and still can't tell the Richter scale from the Beaufort, does it really matter once he or she has selected an area of interest, done some collaborative research and produced a nice multi-media presentation? After all, we don't have teenagers in charge of monitoring these things.
Does this change in language matter? I'm not sure. I know that teaching in a single-sex school obviates the need for a term for our charges as we universally refer to them as "the girls", and our counterparts in the other-gender school across the road refer to "the boys" or"the lads". Colleagues at mixed schools do tend to use "students" more often. Very few use "pupils". Will "the learners" catch on, outside of official literature? I think it could be case of the Department attempting to make something so, by saying it is so. If we phrase things so it sounds like children are taking responsibility for their own education, they'll step up to the plate. And if we call all the young people enrolled in our schools "learners", well they must be learning something.
One thing - among many - that strikes me about juniorcycle.ie is the recurring reference to students as "learners". For example:
-"learners' overall well-being must be supported alongside their intellectual development."
-"This skill [working with others] helps learners develop good relationships and to appreciate the value of cooperating"
-"The learner's junior cycle programme builds on their learning to date and actively supports their progress in learning"
I've been asking myself where I stand on this. On the one hand, I'm all for it. It's not ungrammatical and it reinforces the idea that that's what school is for: learning stuff. Learning is also something students do for themselves, so the emphasis on learning and learners should, in principle, recognise the responsibility of students for their own effort.
So far, so positive. A little doubt niggles away at me that the intended benefits of renaming students as "learners" may soon be lost. I'd say it'll be lost the day they start referring to themselves as "learners". For example we might soon hear "We, the learners, demand that our individuality be recognised and catered for through personalised learning" or more likely "We, the learners, object to the removal of Lucozade from the vending machines". When we make "learner" a synonym for "student" the word no longer implies that the learner is doing any learning. Soon all you will have to do to be a learner is enrol in, and perhaps attend, a secondary school. I can think of a few pupils I've had, particularly early in my career, whose school life was unfortunately not characterised by learning but by other activities.
You might say the same about "student", which implies that the person does some studying. Again, this term is presumptive but nowhere nearly as much as "learner". You can study without learning anything, if you study badly. For example you could read a chapter of "Discover History" ten times the night before a test. You'd have studied but it's unlikely you'd have committed anything to your long-term memory. I would say, in fairness, that all those in secondary school do some study, at some point. If you're studying you know you're studying but if you're learning you don't necessarily know you're learning. I don't mean this in an "I'm having so much fun in this engaging, group activity that I didn't notice the stealth fact-attack". I mean learning happens at a subsensory level and we only really know we learned something when we try to remember and succeed. "Trying to remember" itself could be a sign of partial, or imminent, forgetting.
Learning is hard. It takes a lot more than just showing up for school (though that's a start that far too many are failing to make).
When I was in school "students" attended third level. We were "pupils" as we were still
I've noticed that I've begun to use "learning" quite a bit, especially in language classes where methods of acquiring and practicing new vocabulary are taught as a matter of course. I talk about becoming an "effective language learner", as acquiring another language requires effort and technique. But the key word here is "becoming". MFL is one of the few areas that the phrase "learning to learn" has meaning. The skills of language-learning are almost infinitely transferable, a reason why there's absolutely no need to worry if a student chooses a language other than their parents' preferred option.
Really though, "learning to learn" is a misused aphorism that confuses "learning to drive" and "learning to swim" with what students do in school. Students in school learn (hopefully) and the more you know, the easier it is to learn new things. "When it comes to knowledge, those who have more gain more" Daniel Willingham writes in "Why Don't Students Like School" There are more and less effective ways of studying but learning itself, thankfully, is an innate ability of the human brain. You don't need to learn to learn, any more than you need to learn to think
"Learning to learn", if interpreted as it is here by former Minister Ruairi Quinn at 2 minutes in, has the potential to seriously damage education. The phrase can be used to suggest that it doesn't matter what students learn in school as long as they're learning the skills of learning. Quinn for example states that "learning to learn" has taken over from "learning to remember". This new definition of learning does not seem to involve memory, which is extraordinary. Students can leave school with no knowledge as long as they have acquired the skills of learning. Of course, as teachers, we know this is nonsense as you can't acquire the skills of learning by any other method than practice and if you've learned something you remember it. Nevertheless the concept of learning without remembering persists. Take today's call from the ESRI, for " a greater use of project and team work to equip young people with the type of skills they need for lifelong learning and the labour market". Whether it's Chinese or Klingon, programming or origami, European geography or the Enneagram- so what? School is really only an apprenticeship for the adventure that is life-long learning. As such it doesn't really matter what learners do or if they do it badly. We'll allow for false starts and abortive attempts. If a child does a project on earthquakes and still can't tell the Richter scale from the Beaufort, does it really matter once he or she has selected an area of interest, done some collaborative research and produced a nice multi-media presentation? After all, we don't have teenagers in charge of monitoring these things.
Does this change in language matter? I'm not sure. I know that teaching in a single-sex school obviates the need for a term for our charges as we universally refer to them as "the girls", and our counterparts in the other-gender school across the road refer to "the boys" or"the lads". Colleagues at mixed schools do tend to use "students" more often. Very few use "pupils". Will "the learners" catch on, outside of official literature? I think it could be case of the Department attempting to make something so, by saying it is so. If we phrase things so it sounds like children are taking responsibility for their own education, they'll step up to the plate. And if we call all the young people enrolled in our schools "learners", well they must be learning something.
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