Well I managed to step in it quite nicely today. Up to the knees and then I had to start bailing.
The lesson on being proactive versus being reactive had been going so well. Proactive people “make it happen”, while reactive people “get happened to”. Proactive people are “can do”, while reactive people are “can’t do”. Proactives are “change agents”, while reactives are “victims”. Etc, etc ….
The pattern you notice from the lesson is that proactive equals good, while reactive is bad.
He was probably proactive ...
So can you give some examples of proactive people and reactive people? Yes, yes, Osama bin Laden, reactive. … Well…. Um… no, maybe not, … not necessarily? He did, he was a change agent, he made it happen. And thinking about it now, I’d be willing to bet Hitler was pretty proactive too.
... but so was he.
So I started to bail, trying to convey the idea that being proactive was about personal empowerment, and just because the bad guys are proactive doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing. I hope I got that across. What I think I should have added, and I’ll have to remember to do so tomorrow, is that if the bad guys are proactive, it’s all the more reason for the rest of us to be proactive too.
We’ve been really lucky to have the artist Mary Cour help us out with our classroom mural. She came up with the idea about two cohorts of students ago to paint students’ outlines on the wall and let the students fill them in with words and images that were meaningful to them. Early adolescence is a time of self-discovery and exploration, so this type of project is a wonderful way to encourage self reflection. I let students work on their silhouettes during personal reflection time, and they’re always eager; it’s easy to see why Facebook is so popular with this group.
The mural became quite the marker for the students and for the school, so now, every two years, we add the new group of students to the wall. The new outlines are superimposed over the older ones so you can still see previous generations of students, a tangible reminder of their legacy in the classroom.
10,000 hours of deliberate practice is what it takes for great achievement. That’s a lot of time to put in on anything, especially if you’re constantly pushing yourself to improve, which is necessary for the 10,000 hour rule to work. You’d better be really interested in what you’re working on.
Michael Nielson has a slightly different take. He points out a number of people, like Werner Heisenberg who discovered quantum mechanics, who did not spend that much time on the specific subject. Instead, they had focused on broad background in subjects that they were interested in and were able to apply that expertise in one specific domain. So instead of dedicating 10,000 hours to on subject:
[P]ick a set of skills that you believe are broadly important, and that you enjoy working on, a set of skills where deliberate practice gives rapid intrinsic rewards. Work as hard as possible on developing those skills, but also explore in neighbouring areas, and (this is the part many people neglect) gradually move in whatever direction you find most enjoyable and meaningful. The more enjoyable and meaningful, the less difficult it will be to put in the time that leads to genuine mastery. – Nielson, 2010
However, he does point out that if you were really interested in a particular subject, like being a concert pianist, you should probably put in the hours.
Conversation, c. 1881. by French Impressionist Camille Pissarro. (Picture from Wikimedia Commons).
[A]s a general rule, conversations about how people have or will interact are interesting, and conversations about objects are dull. So steer toward topics that involve human perceptions and feelings, and away from objects and things. – Scott Adams, 2010.
You’ve heard of the Kevin Bacon game, where every actor is just a few connections away from Kevin Bacon. Likewise, you almost always have something interesting in common with every other person. The trick is to find it. As with the Kevin Bacon game, you’d be surprised at how few questions it takes to get there.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
– from The Layers by Stanley Kunitz
I tend to like violent games, the same reason that I’ve worked as a war correspondent, the same reason I wrote a book about a war. I’m interested in violence.
That said, there are some games that have interesting stuff to say about violence and some games that just treat it mindlessly. And, you know both can be fun. But the ones that really affect me are the ones that actually try to address the subject. – Tom Bissell on On The Media.
In particular, he highlights “Far Cry 2”:
There’s a game called Far Cry 2 that takes place in a contemporary African civil war. It’s extremely beautiful.
And yet, it is just the most unrelentingly savage game I think I’ve ever played.
Most games that are violent give you the gun, push you in the direction of the bad guys and say hey, go kill all those guys, they’re bad. You’ll be rewarded. Good job.
Far Cry 2 does something really confounding. Going through the game, quote, “getting better at killing,” the game kind of introduces slowly that you’re actually not helping things, that, in fact, you’re kind of the problem.
Everything you’re doing is just making this conflict worse. So by the end of the game you’re just a wreck. You’re progressing through the game because that’s what the game’s asked you to do, but it’s also throwing all of this stuff back at you that’s actually shaming you a little bit for being participant in this virtual slaughter. And I love that about it. – Tom Bissell on On The Media.
Is he reading too much into violent video games trying to justify his own habits? Perhaps, but he does have a point.
When my students were telling me about Call Of Duty:Modern Warfare 2, one of the first things we talked about was the infamous airport mission. The player is an undercover agent with a terrorist organization and has to participate in shooting civilians in an attack on an airport. Jesse Stern, the scriptwriter for the video game says the mission was intended to be provocative:
People want to know. As terrifying as it is, you want to know. And there’s a part of you that wants to know what it’s like to be there because this is a human experience. These are human beings who perpetrate these acts, so you don’t really want to turn a blind eye to it. You want to take it apart and figure out how that happened and what, if anything, can be done to prevent it. Ultimately, our intention was to put you as close as possible to atrocity. As for the effect it has on you, that’s not for us to determine. Hopefully, it does have an emotional impact and it seems to have riled up a lot of people in interesting ways. Some of them good. Some of them bad.
– Jesse Stern in Gaudiosi, 2009.
There is a difference between vicariously becoming a participant in violence when a novelist lets us see the world through the eyes of a killer, and actually having to pull the virtual trigger yourself, but it seems as much one of degree as anything else. While I’ve seen some initial evidence that violent video games are bad, I’m not familiar at all with the evidence that violent novels are also bad.
Perhaps, however, when we start treating video games, particularly violent ones, in as pedantic a way as literature is sometimes treated, maybe they’ll lose some of their appeal. Or maybe, they’ll just become more educational experiences. Stern again:
When we tested the level, it was interesting. …people would get angry or sad or disgusted and immediately wonder what the Hell was going on here. And then after a few moments of having that experience, they would remember that they were in a video game and they would let go. Every single person in testing opened fire on the crowd, which is human nature. It feels so real but at the same time it’s a video game and the response to it has been fascinating. I never really knew you could elicit such a deep feeling from a video game, but it has.
We want students to spend some time in introspection, but it is sometimes difficult to focus and understand what we’re trying to accomplish. The other day I ran across a small mirror, about 10 cm in diameter, sitting in the closet. It was our half hour for Personal World so I handed it to a student who was still trying to settle down and said, “Reflect.”
After the obligatory eye-roll, the student went on with their introspection, twirling the mirror around in their hands. A few days later, the student mention the event in their newsletter article, where it came to the attention of one of our parents, who an Educational Psychologist at a near-by liberal-arts college. She mentioned it to one of her colleagues who’s a social psychologist, and it turns out that there’s a lot of research on the psychological effect of looking into mirrors. In fact, mirrors are an important tool for researchers, but much of the research has found that people are most often negatively affected by mirrors.
social psych has studied extensively the impact of mirrors on people—they increase a state called “objective self awareness” where you become aware of yourself as a social object. It is usually associated with negative affect because it causes us to compare ourselves to our internal standards (and we usually fall short of them). We then make attempts to “escape self-awareness” by doing physical distractions (or even abusing drugs) or by repairing our image by doing good deeds or trying to live up to our standards.
Some of the research is fascinating. Mirrors are extensively used in ballet training, yet Radell et al., (2004) found that ballet dancers performed better after classes in rooms without mirrors. Scheier and others (1981) found that mirrors made people more likely to withdraw from fearful situations.
[A] state of heightened self-awareness can be created when an object in one’s environment, like a mirror, focuses an individuals’ attention on one’s self. This state of self-awareness causes the individual to compare one’s self to ideals presented in the environment. In a ballet class, this could be other students’ performances or a teacher’s demonstration. If the student feels she is not matching the ideal characteristics presented to her, then negative self-evaluation may result. – Radell et al., 2004.
There is some suggestion that heightened self-awareness, though not necessarily attained only through the use of mirrors, does have positive effects, but I’ve barely been able to scratch the surface of the literature.
The mind tend to wander when working at repetitive tasks that don’t require much brain processing. So the brain just switches over to thinking about long-term things. There is even a specific part of the brain, called the “default network” that starts up when we zone-out. That, at least, is what I summarize from looking at some neuroscience research by Malia Mason and others (2007) on wandering minds.
What’s interesting is that the default network tends to be used for “certain kinds of self-referential thinking, such as reflecting on personal experiences or picturing yourself in the future” (Zimmer, 2010). That means introspection. Introspection is the point of Personal World, so it follows that we should want our students’ minds to wander during Personal World.
So how do we design the Personal World time and environment to encourage daydreaming? Repetitive tasks aid mind-wandering, as will anything that is rote that does not require acute cognitive focus. Raking the garden, doodling should be encouraged, in fact, anything that encourages boredom.
I would think also, that reducing the cognitive load would also be beneficial, which might also mean no music. Yet music helps isolate the individual, particularly when they’re using ear buds. Perhaps quiet, “boring” sounds would be best, coming a shared radio so students can’t choose to listen to something else. Of course, if you’re listening to the music on your mp3 player then you tend to tune out the songs anyway so maybe it all falls out in the wash.
Of course this could all be malarkey, based as it is on a single study, so I’ll end with the words of caution that coms at the end of the article:
Although the thoughts the mind produces when wandering are at times useful, such instances do not prove that that the mind wanders because these thoughts are adaptive; on the contrary the mind may wander simply because it can. – Mason et al., 2007.
