Category: Personal World

Good Relationships are Built on Verbal Communication

Leslie Becker-Phelps highlights a study (pdf) that showing that couples who delayed having sex (showed “sexual restraint”) ended up with more successful marriages.

Why?

Because early sex may indicate less commitment to the long-term relationship. Also, it may undermine the couple’s ability to communicate verbally. The study’s authors speculate:

… we speculate that the rewards of sexual involvement early on may undermine other aspects of relationship development and evaluation such that individuals may not put as much energy into crucial couple processes such as communication and may stay with partners who are not as skilled in these processes, thereby resulting in a marriage that is more brittle.

—Busby et al (2010) (pdf): Compatibility or Restraint?: The Effects of Sexual Timing on Marriage Relationships

This is an important concept for adolescents to grasp, as Becker-Phelps points out:

These are the very messages that adults often deliver to adolescents who want to begin exploring their sexuality. Wait, they say. If you are meant to be together, it will happen. In the meantime, get to know each other and grow together. Decide whether this relationship really is right for you before you become sexually involved. It’s great advice.

— Becker Phelps (2011): Premarital Sex — Why Wait? on The Art of Relationships Blog

Variations on a Theme

102. Hipsters - Rotterdam 2008 from Exactitudes.

In seeking their identity, adolescents try out a wide variety of different personas. These are often closely associated with changing appearance and style. What I find interesting is how the different styles increasingly cross cultures and other traditional divides (like race). This is evident in Ari Versluis and Ellie Uyttenbroek’s photographic series Exactitudes.

There’s something sad about the loss of local cultural uniqueness to globalization; it’s a bit similar to the feeling you get when you hear about another interesting species becoming extinct. Curiously, however, when Versluis and Uyttenbroek tile together photographs of different people from the same subculture striking identical poses, they not only highlight the similarities between very different people, but also the minute variations that individuals employs to make the subgroup’s “uniform” their own.

26. Preppies - Rotterdam 1999 (from Exactitudes). Girls, "... at Montessori school."

All 128 pictures sets are thought provoking and worth a look. I think they would make useful subjects for students to reflect on (though, warning, there is a little nudity in one of the sets).

(via Brain Pickings)

Self-compassion: Learn from Mistakes, Don’t Beat Yourself Up

Compassion is sensitivity to the suffering of self and others and a commitment to do something about it.

— Paul Gilbert (a researcher at Kingsway Hospital in the United Kingdom) in Nixon (2011): Self-compassion may matter more than self-esteem

Robin Nixon has an excellent article on why “[…] self-compassion may be the most important life skill, imparting resilience, courage, energy and creativity.”

She cites the work of Kristin Neff who says self-compassion has three parts to it:

  • mindfulness: accepting your thoughts and feelings without being carried away by them,
  • common humanity: the recognition that everyone goes through similar hardships, frustrations and disappointments, and,
  • being kind to yourself: by being aware (mindful) of your anguish, and recognizing that others have shared similar feelings, you can commit to actions that reduce suffering in the future.

Kindness and Community

Just as each species in a biological community contributes something that helps sustain the community, people need to contribute to each other in their communities to to keep them stable, productive, and happy.

We’ve been talking about social action this cycle. Students have been finding and reading articles, and thinking about what they could do — themselves right now — to promote social justice. The articles have come from a number of different places: local stories from the Memphis newspaper, the Commercial Appeal; national articles from the New York Times; and even international things from the from BBC. Now, for Personal World, they’re thinking at the really small scale, about what they do for their classroom community.

The objective is twofold. First, I want them to contribute more to each other, and think about what they’re contributing, to maintain a healthy community. A little self reflection should help them realize if what they think they’re doing for others is actually helping. But, secondly, I also want them to recognize the efforts of their peers for what they are: attempts, even if futile or misguided, to be helpful.

It’s sometimes easier to think about doing charitable things for people far away, because it’s impersonal. There’s little risk of being embarrassed. But even the smallest groups need some altruism to grease the wheels of community.

Why go to College? Not for the Money.

If learning is not for its own sake, it isn’t liberal learning. It’s a utilitarian calculus for material self-advancement. The important things are not worth knowing because they are useful. They are worth knowing because they are true. [my italics]

–Andrew Sullivan (2011): Education For Its Own Sake

This quote, feeds off a plea by Freddie DeBoer against our constantly putting things in terms of dollars, cents and economic value. It argues against much of the premise of behavioral economics (and much of environmental economics too), which tries to better understand human nature by translating everything into money.

The economists themselves will tell you that this remains just one part of the story, and the work brings us to a better understanding of how humans behave and what they really value, but, living in a very capitalist society, it’s easy to lose track.

Courage

Watch the full episode. See more FRONTLINE.

With the different outcomes of the protests in Tunisia and Egypt compared to Libya and Syria (and Bahrain), it’s important to recognize the courage of the protesters out there on the streets. It’s not really courage if there is nothing to risk. These men and women are risking everything.

Just like the lonely man who stood in front of a line of tanks during the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. No one knows what happened to him.

About midday, as a column of tanks slowly moves along Chang’an Boulevard toward Tiananmen Square, an unarmed young man carrying shopping bags suddenly steps out in front of the tanks. Instead of running over him, the first tank tries to go around, but the young man steps in front of it again. They repeat this maneuver several more times before the tank stops and turns off its motor. The young man climbs on top of the tank and speaks to the driver before jumping back down again. Soon, the young man is whisked to the side of the road by an unidentified group of people and disappears into the crowd.

To this day, who he was and what became of him remains a mystery.

— FRONTLINE, 2006: The Tank Man: The Memory of Tiananmen June 4-5, 1989.

What does it take to show such courage? We’ve talked about how your situation in life, like poverty, can affect the ethical choices you make. We’ve also seen how different social and demographic conditions can force countries toward revolutions.

So it’s worth taking a moment to think about the protesters. And about ourselves. What do we value so much that it would overcome our fear to risk our lives?

Social Loafing Update: The Student Perspective

I presented my post on social loafing as a Personal World lesson. For the rest of the week students are supposed to reflect on their own habits, and think about when and why they loaf and how to avoid doing so.

We had a good discussion during the lesson. We’ve had a few obvious examples of social loafing over the year with soccer. We started off with one person versus the rest of the class, and every time one of the teams wins two games in a row, the losing team has to pick someone from the winning team for the next game.

In the first few games, the smaller team played their hearts out and was able to hold it’s own remarkably well, but as the year progressed, and students improved their technique and teamwork, the greater numbers began to tell. But as the teams grew it was pretty clear that some of the people who were working really hard before, were taking it easy.

So students are going through the list of reasons why people socially loaf and reflecting on which apply to themselves. Of course when I went over the list during the lesson, I asked if there were any other reasons they could think of based on their own experience. Our resident expert in social loafing had a very Montessori suggestion about why a student might “seem to be” loafing during group work, “What if you want the other students to learn more?”