Focused work. We like to see our students focused on their work and we give them long blocks of time to do so. It is hard, however, for anyone to stay on task for two hours straight. You have to allow for a certain amount of mind wandering and daydreaming. What a lot of neurologic research is uncovering is that zoning-out is an essential part of putting the pieces together and helps with learning.
When we are no longer even aware that our minds are wandering, we may be able to think most deeply about the big picture. – Zimmer (2010)
“It’s going to be a constant question for us as a society and for the military whether or not, as they become more game-like, that creates an effect that makes it easier to kill people in a way that you might not want to make it easier to kill people.” – Clive Thompson on On The Media (2010)
On The Media had one of the most though provoking pieces this weekend that I have ever heard. It was based on the video footage of the tragic killing of two Reuters journalists in Baghdad, and the wounding of two small children in a van that came to rescue the injured, by a US helicopter gunship. The program dealt with the tragedy itself, the question of war crimes and the propriety of Wikileaks in publishing the video.
They also addressed the marked similarities between the video footage and scenes in modern video games. What was most interesting was that the interviewee, Clive Thompson, argued not that video games were becoming too much like war and desensitizing players, but that war is becoming too much like video games.
It’s been generally acknowledged that the further away the person is, the less you can see them, the more they’re just a blip on the screen, the easier it is to pull the trigger. – Clive Thompson on On The Media (2010)
To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, … counting up the sins of commissions and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice, or carelessness. However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously uncomfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves. – Joan Didion (1961), via Word on the Street (2010)
Unlike Dalrymple, Joan Didion figured that self-respect is built on self-knowledge rather than the reflected assessment of others. She saw character, which is built upon self respect, as the ability to use that knowledge to be aware of and face consequences of your actions.
The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others – who are, after all, deceived easily enough; – Joan Didion (1961), via Word on the Street (2010)
What Dalrymple and Didion agree upon is that a sense of entitlement is diametrically opposed to self-respect:
I had not been elected to Phi Beta Kappa. This failure could scarcely have been more predictable or less ambiguous (I simply did not have the grades), but I was unnerved by it; I had somehow thought myself a kind of academic Raskolnikov, curiously exempt from the cause-effect relationships which hampered others. Although even the humorless nineteen-year-old that I was must have recognized that the situation lacked real tragic stature, the day that I did to make Phi Beta kappa nonetheless marked the end of something, and innocence may well be the word for it. I lost the conviction that lights would always turn green for me, the pleasant certainty that those rather passive virtues which had won me approval as a child automatically guaranteed me not only Phi Beta Kappa keys but happiness, honor, and the love of a good man; lost a certain touching faith in the totem power of good manners, clean hair, and proved competence on the Stanford-Binet scale. To such doubtful amulets had my self-respect been pinned, and I faced myself that day with the nonplussed apprehension of someone who has come across a vampire and has no crucifix at hand. – Joan Didion (1961), via Word on the Street (2010)
Didion’s ideas are wonderfully expressed in her essay ‘On self-respect’ that has been reproduced by Mallary Tenore on her blog Word on the Street (found via The Daily Dish). It’s a long essay, written in 1961 so some of the references may be dated (though time and the Twilight Series have given some of the references potency again, at least for the middle school crowd). I don’t think I can recommend the whole essay for my students, but reflecting some excerpts might be a useful Personal World exercise.
People with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. – Joan Didion (1961), via Word on the Street (2010)
[S]elf-esteem is but a division of self-importance, which is seldom an attractive quality. That person is best who never thinks of his own importance: to think about it, even, is to be lost to morality. Self-respect is another quality entirely. Where self-esteem is entirely egotistical, requiring that the world should pay court to oneself whatever oneself happens to be like or do, and demands nothing of the person who wants it, self-respect is a social virtue, a discipline, that requires an awareness of and sensitivity to the feelings of others. It requires an ability and willingness to put oneself in someone else’s place; it requires dignity and fortitude, and not always taking the line of least resistance. – Dalrymple, 2010.
Self-respect is earned, while self-esteem is not. That at least is the argument of Theodore Dalrymple, who defines this interesting distinction between self-esteem and self-respect based on his observations as a prison psychiatrist. What people want is a “just appreciation of one’s own importance and of one’s own worth.” To assume that one is entitled to respect because of one’s intrinsic strengths is destructive because it says that you don’t have to do anything to get respect. But respect is earned. Both importance and worth are values that are ascribed by others, by society, and to earn them requires effort and achievement. Self-respect is the appraisal of oneself based on one’s contribution to society.
It’s an interesting argument in semantics at the very least, but the fundamental argument at least aligns with the proper way to use praise and rewards. By praising the effort you acknowledge the importance of work in achieving goals, building self-respect, rather that praising intrinsic abilities (“you’re so smart”) that engender a sense that the student is entitled to do well.
One has only to go into a prison … to see the most revoltingly high self-esteem among a group of people … who had brought nothing but misery to those around them, largely because they conceived of themselves as so important that they could do no wrong. For them, their whim was law, which was precisely as it should be considering who they were in their own estimate. – Dalrymple, 2010.
Theodore Dalrymple is a conservative in the dictionary sense of the word. He argues the importance of tradition and personal responsibility. He also strongly believes that healthy culture must satisfy the need of people to belong to something larger than themselves. So much so, that despite being an atheist, he argues that religions, some types of religions at least, have an important role in society.
Adolescents like to tick you off. Push all of your buttons to see what happens. And you want to ask, “Who are you really?” and, “Do your really not care?” We probably did the same when we were that age, but do you also remember how idealistic we were? The video below, from Penguin Publishing (found via The Dish) captures a bit of that duality of the adolescent mind. The use of white space and of just simply words also ties it quite nicely into our ongoing discussion of poetry in a “spark the imagination” kind of way.
I remain fascinated by the Brazilian study that found that kids living in homes without electricity did not have the same sleep deprivation issues as those with electricity. I thought of it again recently when I ran across the term “nature-deficit disorder” in Oak Hill Montessori school’s newsletter.
Unstructured nature time is so important because children live through their senses. When they are right there in the forest, they are getting a primary multi-sensory experience of nature as opposed to the secondary, often distorted, dual-sensory view presented by TV. – Daniels, 2009 (p. 4)
The idea of nature-deficit disorder comes from the book “Last Child in the Woods” by Richard Louv. Written in 2005 and updated in 2008 with a bunch of practical things you can do to change things, Louv’s book advocates for more time in nature because, “a growing body of research links our mental, physical, and spiritual health directly to our association with nature.” Not only does it affect our individual health, but directly experiencing nature also helps increase environmental awareness (which ties into the Montessori peace curriculum). Louv argues that children have a fundamental right to walk in the woods:
Science sheds light on the measurable consequences of introducing children to nature; studies pointing to health and cognition benefits are immediate and concrete. We also need to articulate the underlying “first principle”—one that emerges not only from what science can prove, but also from what it cannot fully reveal; one that resists codification because it is so elemental: a meaningful connection to the natural world is fundamental to our survival and spirit, as individuals and as a species. Louv (2009)
I can’t say I disagree very much with this diagnosis. My adolescents are too often opting for technology rather than being outside, especially if it’s in nature. This is one reason my students are building the nature trail. The trail has been coming along slowly though, but the seasons are changing and we’ll spend more time outside in the warmer weather. The timing is also nice because we’ve just finished covering simple machines in physics. There are logs and junk to be moved and saplings to be cleared.
Note: Louv has a long list of links to print and broadcast articles on the whole “nature-deficit disorder” concept.
Looking through the Greater Good Science Center‘s blog post on how to raise kind children, I was struck, as I usually am, by the somewhat counter-intuitive finding that we should not reward good behavior (helping in this instance).
Very young children who receive material rewards for helping others become less likely to help in the future compared with toddlers who only receive verbal praise or receive no reward at all. This research suggests that even the youngest children are intrinsically motivated to be kind, and that extrinsic rewards can undermine this tendency. – Carter (2010)
While I have not yet looked to see if there is any direct research on this topic with regards to adolescence, this is part of the Montessori philosophy. Lillard (2007; Ch. 5) has an entire chapter on Extrinsic Rewards and Motivation that gets to the same point. She cites the research that gets to the specific point that extrinsic rewards, rewards that come from the outside such as praise, tend to demotivate once the rewards are removed.
Engaging in a well-liked activity with the expectations of a reward led to reduced creativity during that activity and to decreased voluntary participation in that activity later. (Lepper et. al., 1973) in Lillard (2007; Ch. 5)
Rewards have negative effects when they are clearly stated, expected, and tangible; read this book and you’ll get $5; or do this work and you will get better grades. However, rewards can work if you’re dealing with subjects that students find uninteresting and there is a very clearly specified set of steps that they can learn by rote.
“[R]ewards are often effective at the moment of their offering, so if there are no long-term goals, rewards help without causing harm down the road.” Lillard (2007; p. 157)
Rewards can help with basic learning, like memorizing facts, but intrinsic motivation is essential for tasks that require higher-level more creative thinking.
I try to praise or give tangible rewards very rarely, though it is often hard. Students look for praise sometimes (and sometimes for the oddest things), so when I do complement I try to use what Carter calls growth-mindset praise and say something like, “See, practice really pays off.” Praise the effort, not some intrinsic value the students have.
In researching the benefits of sleep to assist a student interested in sleep deprivation, I came across the work of Matthew Walker from UC Berkley. His papers have some rather intriguing titles. One of them (Walker and van der Helm, 2009), called “Overnight Therapy? The Role of Sleep in Emotional Brain Processing” finds that lack of sleep seems to result in us retaining more negative memories and emotions, and reduces our ability to act rationally (Yoo et al., 2007):
[S]tudies indicate that prior sleep loss significantly impairs the ability for effective next-day learning of new experiences across numerous species. Furthermore, sleep loss appears to disrupt the learning of different affective categories to varying extents, potentially creating an imbalance in negative emotional memory dominance. – Walker and van der Helm, (2009)
Walker’s also synthesized the current research on sleep and finds sleep is important in other types of memory as well. During sleep we organize information in our brains, finding context for the data we absorbed while awake, which is why we remember things better after we sleep.
[S]leep serves a … role in memory processing that moves far beyond the consolidation and strengthening of individual memories and, instead, aims to intelligently assimilate and generalize these details offline. – Walker (2009)
Walker’s bibliography is a treasure trove of information about research on the affects of sleep on our emotional and intellectual well being. These articles will, however, probably need a lot of translation for the typical middle schooler. For that reason, using the press reports on this work would be a much better alternative for students.
