Why Not Practice Mindfulness?

I just read a great article on how teaching mindfulness and social-emotional awareness to students improves the atmosphere and learning in a classroom or a whole school. There is also an interesting website (WKCD- What Kids Can Do) that the founding principal of my former school, Dr. Dave Lehman, recommended, which provides student views on how social-emotional learning greatly impacted their lives. I recommend both resources. I also recommend the practice of mindfulness.

 

In discussing “why practice mindfulness” with people, I frequently say, “Why not?” Most people I know sincerely want to do something positive with their lives, want to help their students or fellow workers and friends. So, why not do it?

 

“It’s too hard,” some people say. Or “I don’t have the time. How can I fit it in?” It is difficult to rearrange your schedule. That’s often true. But I also know that the times I doubt myself, feel in emotional pain, get lost in worry and anxiety, can take way too much time. Would it be worth putting five minutes into mindfulness so you spend five minutes less worrying?

 

And five minutes is all you need to get started. After you get up in the morning and stretch, or after you take a shower but before you eat. Or when you get home from work, and need quiet time for your self to let go of or process the events of the day. For five minutes, do nothing but a little mindfulness.

 

Then some people say, “Mindfulness is just a way to forget pain, forget the oppression in the world, to be selfish.” Acting to reduce oppression, inequity, injustice is important work. But what happens if you can’t recognize how hate, fear, or the desire for revenge affects your thinking? Do you want to have people leading a movement who have no insight into what drives them and little ability to control their emotion? Emotion can be a motivator for action, but it needs to be observed with some clarity and focus so your thinking can be clear and focused. When you do compassion practices, you don’t just develop compassion for yourself. You are readied to act for the well-being of others.

 

“I don’t know how to do it. You had a background in meditation; I don’t.” It’s true. I meditated for many years before I used it in classes, or used it regularly in classes. However, how many times do you use a technique at work or in a class that you were taught to use but had little experience with? Or you read about but hadn’t tried more than a few times? So, why not do the same with mindfulness and emotional awareness?

 

One important point with mindfulness is that you practice it on your own, before, during, and after you do it with your students. It’s important that you don’t pretend to be other than who you are. If you are just learning, share that with students. But you need to also open yourself to continuous learning. You take classes. You read books. You find an experienced teacher. And you listen to your students or fellow workers and learn from them how to teach them.

 

Also, encourage your students to⎼ and do this yourself⎼ study how they respond to different practices so they find ones that develop a clarity of mind and a sense of comfort and autonomy in their body. Instead of pressuring students, invite them to join in however they can. Allow them to sit silently or write in a journal if they don’t feel comfortable with a practice.

 

You don’t do mindfulness to forget the world. You don’t do mindfulness to improve grade scores or productivity or even to reduce anxiety. You do it just to do it. You do it because of what happens in you when your attention is focused clearly on what you are doing and nothing else. As a result, it just happens to be true that you think more clearly and deeply and you feel better about your abilities. It just so happens that you appreciate your life more.

 

By taking action to change your life, just doing little things, you learn how to take action in other areas. You learn you can act.

 

So, how do you begin? One way is to partly or fully close your eyes and just feel your breath. Or do this with your eyes open. Feel the air entering your body. Feel the sensations in your body of taking a breath in, and out. Your body makes slight adjustments with each stage of the breath. Notice those adjustments and changes. How does it feel to breathe in and out?

 

Or open your eyes. Look outside right now. Here, now, it is morning, and raining. When I look at the sky, I see places that look almost black, others gray and hazy. And one place where a little sunlight appears. I see drops of rain strike the window. Each drop, for barely a second, is one with the window, a tiny dome that reflects what’s around it—colors, shapes. Or put your hand on the window and just feel the window—the temperature, the texture, the hardness or softness, how your hand coheres to the window. If its raining at your home like it is at mine, hear the raindrop against the glass. Notice how you feel when you focus intently on the raindrop. How does it feel when you listen to and hear the rain hitting the window or dropping onto the street or the roof of your house?  Just calmly notice what you observe. Then return your attention to your breath.

 

If a thought arises, notice it like you noticed the raindrop, with open interest. Watch it, then move on to the next moment, of rain or whatever. When you do this, rain will no longer be only something to resist, an interference. Instead, it will be something to observe, appreciate and learn from. By doing this, your life will continuously be something to take in and appreciate and learn from.

 

That’s one way to begin.

 

If you’d like more resources, check out my links page and:

Building Emotional Intelligence: Techniques To Develop Inner Strength in Children, by Linda Lantieri and Daniel Goleman

A Still Quiet Place: A Mindfulness Program for Teaching Children and Adolescents to Ease Stress and Difficult Emotions, by Amy Saltzman

Planting Seeds: Practicing Mindfulness with Children, by Thich Nhat Hanh and the Plum Village Community

Compassionate Critical Thinking: How Mindfulness, Creativity, Empathy and Socratic Questioning Can Transform Teaching, by Ira Rabois (Soon to be published.)

The Metaphor of Life as a Journey

When I was young, I had a distinct feeling that my life was to a large extent planned out for me. I knew the outline of this plan but not the details. There was a distinct schedule that I had to keep. At first, I thought the schedule was created by my parents, but it was much bigger than them.

 

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, in the book Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought, discuss how we use metaphor to structure our perceptions. One complex metaphor is of life as a journey, like a train trip with a timetable and destinations. You have expectations and assumptions. You imagine that to have a meaningful life you need goals and a plan and you need to stick to it.

 

And this journey is tied to a concept and identification of self as a traveler, the hero, saint or sinner on the journey. But this “self” transcends “me.” It is a cultural artifact, embedded in a cultural story in which this journey of a self comes alive. We imagine this self is who we are. Thus we might think we are the way others see us, or we think we are the persona or face we live for others. We think we are this traveler identified by cultural destinations like school, marriage, job. This self is a cultural identity as much as a personal one.

 

We do the same with understanding our own mind and experience. We have this cultural metaphor that mind is the same as the brain or somehow lives in the brain. Maybe we imagine the mind travels in the brain like a passenger on a train, some in first class, some in coach, and we imagine this is just the state of nature, not the state of cultural metaphor.

 

So when I felt the urge to rebel and couldn’t figure out how to make the transition from college to job, to support myself in a way I found ethical and meaningful, I could no longer stay on schedule. I panicked. I felt a sense of dread. It wasn’t just that I couldn’t find a way to make a living. I wasn’t just a traveler who had missed his train. My very sense of self seemed to dissolve. The underside of the life-as-a-journey metaphor was exposed. When before I was “on track” I was now “off track.” I was “lost.” I had fallen off the train. Confusion was not an acknowledged train stop.

 

But after falling off the train, I eventually began to see the metaphor as a metaphor. I began to see the implications. If love, success and retirement were the big destinations on the train route, then wasn’t birth the first stop and death the last? The existential shook up the cultural. There was a whole universe of moments I was missing by focusing on destinations instead of feeling the motion of the train and the colors, scents, relationships of all the beings riding along with me.

 

My mind is not a passenger riding my brain. It is the whole landscape of meaning in which I come alive. It is embedded not only in a body and a culture, but a universe. So, if one way to understand our lives is with metaphor, what is the metaphor we want to live? What story or poem do we want to write with our life? And we need to re-write the cultural story to include the “gap years,” time to “find yourself” or time to step off the train and ride a camel on the silk road. Time to value restructuring society instead of just fitting in.

Brussels

The attacks in Brussels shake my mind. I read the details of the attacks, 35 dead in two locations, of explosions from suicide bombs, of nails embedded in the bombs, and imagine the feeling of nails striking me. What do these attackers feel? Are they too wrapped up in their doctrines to feel the pain of others? Does the pain of the people of Belgium and other nations somehow alleviate their own pain? And what do our leaders say and feel? Do they think that fueling anger, fear and hatred will stop the violence?

 

It doesn’t. The pain continues. The attacks continue. The “ventilation fallacy” in psychology says “venting” anger does not alleviate it. You might imagine if you just expressed and let loose your anger, the pain of it will be lessened, but it only increases. More dimensions of pain are added to the original emotion. The consequences of the angry outburst, the people you hurt, the guilt is added to the original feeling. There is a gigantic world of possibility between unrestrained expression and suppression. When the emotion expressed is hate, the consequences of expression are in a different league altogether than anger and they spiral out in wider and more chaotic circles.

 

When I hear news of such awful violence, I easily feel the social network and the goodness and beauty of the world are falling apart. Maybe you feel the same. It is too easy to hide away in fear or to let the news of all the attacks numb you to what is happening. But the horror of each attack is not diminished with a new one.  When children are faced with the news of such attacks, what do you, as a parent, teacher, or friend do? I wrote a blog about this in November, following the attacks in Paris, Beirut and Mali. About the need for learning how to be strong in mind and body so as to not meet hate with hate and ignorance, but with understanding, compassion, a critical intellect and a readiness for appropriate action. I would add to what I said earlier the need for a critical inquiry into the force of communion and relationship that makes a community and society possible. When students say there is so much hate, ask them about what they enjoy most in their life. If they love music, ask them about all the people who made the music they hear on their ipod possible. If they love food, ask about all the people who had to work together to make their lunch. Ask them about what makes a class or a friendship work. Ask them what they find beautiful.

 

But even more, educate students about mindful action. They can write to children in Brussel’s schools, as well as in other schools in their area. They can do community service, learn about the effects of inequity and abuse, study the frustration, anxiety and anger in their own communities and learn steps to be taken to improve the social-political network. When faced with fear and hate, they can learn how to recognize the love and cooperation that makes their lives possible. They need to feel the connection they have not only to the victims but to all humans. Instead of giving in to the forces of distortion and destruction, they need to understand that without relationship, no society or community is possible.

Testing For Social-Emotional Skills?

A trend I find encouraging in schools is consciously teaching social-emotional skills. This is often, but not always, accompanied by mindfulness education, or teaching how to be aware of your emotional and thought processes moment-by-moment. So, guess what administrators and politicians want to do with these programs? According to an article by Kate Zernike in the New York Times, “Testing for Joy and Grit? Schools Nationwide Push to Measure Students Emotional Skills,” they want to use standardized tests to assess students in these programs. I mean, such tests have proven so beneficial with measuring other forms of learning and promoting learning in general, why not test a student’s “grit?”

 

No! Despite the fact that there are many indicators that demonstrate the value of social-emotional learning and mindfulness training in the classroom, all such testing will do is undermine the learning. Testing means teaching to the test. It is the test that indicates whether the standards or indicators of learning have been met. As Zernike asks in her article, how do you incorporate into a standardized test indicators of emotional awareness? Patience? Kindness?

 

Standardized testing motivates students to do well largely through fear of a bad grade. If they don’t pass, students might not move on in grade or complete high school, or their teacher might get a bad evaluation. Fear can undermine any form of learning, so it’s particularly perverse to use it to assess how well students understand their own emotional responses.

 

But wouldn’t a test motivate students to learn “grit” or hardiness in the face of fear? First, you can’t reduce emotional intelligence to having “grit.” Grit is one emotional trait that is very helpful in certain contexts but can be destructive in other contexts. As educator Alfie Kohn pointed out in a critique of “grit,” students need to question if the task they are being asked to persist at completing is worth the effort. Stick-to-itiveness and persistence is only valuable when combined with knowing how to prioritize what should be pursued and with empathy for the implications and consequences of a pursuit. It needs inner awareness of one’s motivation and the ability to critically examine the task itself.

 

Second, social-emotional learning and mindfulness do help students face fear more productively. But such learning does not happen through fear of punishment or a concern with how others assess your skills. To look within, as emotional intelligence requires, means finding your own intrinsic motivation to do so. If you are overly focused on how others assess you, as often happens with standardized testing, you will never learn to accurately perceive what is within you. You will always look in the wrong place. You look at yourself as you imagine others see you, not as felt by yourself.

 

As Zernike points out, in education, what is tested is what is valued. As things stand in the educational establishment, only if students are tested in a subject will it be valued. But this is the problem, not the solution.

 

Many people exercising power and influence over public education in this country, despite all the protests over recent years, think of tests and the simple numbers they generate as the tool for assessment, and they use it to nail down students and teachers. They have what appears to be a learning disability, or rigidity in thinking, as despite the lack of evidence to demonstrate that standardized testing promotes learning, they persist in their behavior. Psychologist Abraham Maslow called it the law of the instrument. “If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to treat everything as a nail.” Tests generate numbers that can be used to rank students, but just because you have a number doesn’t mean that the number signifies anything. Without such proof, test scores are an illusion of relevance.

 

You need numbers and other data to evaluate the effectiveness of these new programs. So, instead of tests look at drop out rates. Look at attendance. Look at student projects. Look at reduced rates of violence in the classroom. Look at the joyfulness of students. But don’t try to bury emotional learning in irrelevant, if not destructive, test scores.

The Mythology of Politics

I think the act of choosing a representative or President or any political leader is an amazingly interesting and complex psychological act. Think about it. You’re choosing someone “to speak for you” or “represent you” and act in your interest, to be who you can’t be.

 

Back in the birth places of democracy, whether it was native American or Athenian or elsewhere, you represented yourself. Citizens voted directly on policies, although even in the height of Athenian democracy, there were still political leaders and not all residents could vote. Women, for example, had little to no political power. Representative democracy is a compromise between monarchy and direct democracy. A President is partly a King, partly a servant.

 

I am not a scholar of Carl Jung and do not agree with all the elements of his psychological theories, but still find them helpful. He talked about archetypes or psychological predispositions to perceive the world in certain patterns and to represent those patterns in images. These patterns are seen in myths, literature, relationships, even religion. The movie Star Wars, for example, very consciously picks up on archetypal mythical and religious imagery, the “force” as the Tao or spirit, the battle of good against evil.

 

Jung also described how we deal with qualities in ourselves that our culture defines as inappropriate to our gender. These qualities do not just disappear but form a more hidden or unconscious identity or image of ourselves. (Jung called these projections an anima or animus.) When we fall in love, we project onto the loved one this unconscious image fashioned out of all that we have denied in ourselves in relation to gender. This creates a “fascination” or attraction. The person appears to us as our “soul-mate.” But to have a real and lasting relationship, we have to take back the projected qualities and claim them for ourselves. We can’t be who another person expects us to be; we can’t expect our lover to live solely to fulfill our needs.

 

How you perceive any leader is influenced by the light cast by projected archetypal patterns and expectations. The President or Senator you perceive is a projection of you, your yearnings and possibly your denied power and needs, onto the political stage. Because of these projections it is very difficult to understand who any political figure really is.

 

The politician becomes an actor in a play scripted by the unconscious needs of citizens. We talk about political theatre. It really is theatre and, of course, the popular media, other corporate interests and wealthy donors, play this up for their own profit. The mythical or religious dimension just adds to it. Drama itself emerged from religious ritual and maintained a religious meaning for a time even after modern drama began to develop. The early dramas were enacted myths or stories, about death and the afterlife, about gods and goddesses. The Greeks used masks in their early plays, to represent different personalities or genders. Other cultures used masks to represent the power of a god or spirit or to take part in the story of creation. This is not just putting on a costume. It is putting on a different identity, at times an identity of a mythical or spiritual being. This helps explain why followers of a political candidate can be almost as devoted to their candidate as followers of a religious doctrine or leader.

 

Our political leaders put on the mask fashioned out of who they think we citizens want them to be. They get us to act out a drama with them as the star. But this political theatre can be deadly serious. Our environment, our health care, our wages, the possibility of being treated justly, the lives of ourselves and of all living beings on the planet are at stake. It is not just Donald Trump or Ted Cruz who plays a role and seems to think he is the King he portrays. All of the politicians and all of us can get caught up in the drama. We need to own our projections, let go of the “fascination” and not imagine any leader is a savior.  As much as possible, we need to keep for ourselves the power to act, to think critically about any candidate or policy, and we need to remember all humans are our neighbors.

 

*Photo of amphitheater in Ephesus, Turkey.

Education as Adventure

As a child, I dreamed of being an adventurer. My parents traveled every year to different places and countries, and this stimulated my imagination. So, for me college was not just a time to learn a profession or for intellectual study. It was an opportunity for the possibilities of life to reveal themselves and blossom. It was a time to take chances, to discover who I am and the type of life I could lead.

 

I celebrated my nineteenth birthday in London. I had decided I would spend four months traveling, mostly hitch-hiking through Europe, with few things pre-planned except the time and place of arrival and departure. I had to depend on myself, alone, to a degree I never had before. And this was 1966, before such traveling was common. The first night, I panicked. What had I done? Here I was in Europe where I knew no one for thousands of miles. The only way I was able to fall asleep that night was by promising myself I would call my parents the next morning.

 

The next morning, I went to a café for breakfast. It was relatively sunny for London. To make a call back then, you had to wait on a line for a public phone with an overseas extension. As I was waiting, I realized—if I was desperate enough to call home my first full day in Europe, I could be courageous enough to befriend a stranger. So I left the line, walked up to a stranger who looked like someone I could talk to, and did just that. We became good friends for a few days and I didn’t call home. I sent a postcard.

 

I think all of us have this yearning to grow, to know we can dare to engage life, to know what calls to us and be able to respond openly to it. And this is what education can be. Each teacher can ask him or herself how learning in their particular subject can be more of an adventure and excite students to learn. This is not just about taking students on trips out of the classroom, although that can obviously be a stimulating way to learn. Nor is this simply a content question. It is not just asking what books or issues or questions might students find stimulating, although these are important. It is also a pedagogical one: what makes any study stimulating and meaningful? What forms of study support a child’s natural curiosity and desire to learn?

 

Having some choice and sense of control in what you study is one factor. The book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, examines the “process of achieving happiness through control over one’s inner life.” By documenting the link between achieving optimal experiences and happiness, it gives us clues to motivating and improving learning. Make learning a challenge, something demanding your full concentration, but not so challenging you can’t handle it. Have clear goals with immediate feedback. In some way, involve other people in the work. Get so immersed that you step out of time. While I was in Europe, I stepped out of thoughts of the future and my life schedule, of high school to college to job, and was immersed in now. I think optimal learning often involves working on a skill that you yearn to develop but which you doubt you have.

 

Another way to do this is to ask: What are the emotional and intellectual needs of my specific students? Teaching to the personal and developmental needs of children not only provides necessary cognitive tools but helps them feel recognized and valued. Educator and author Kieran Egan elucidates different kinds of cognitive tools and ways of understanding the world, from the somatic (physical), mythic, and romantic, to the philosophical and ironic. It is important that children develop the cognitive tools appropriate to their stage of development as fully as they can. Two to eight year olds might see the world in terms of mythic struggles of good versus evil. Structuring lessons in terms of such binary opposites will make learning more digestible and exciting. Children from eight to fifteen look for self-definition, detail, standing out. They want to know the limits of experience. Structuring lessons with stories of romance, wonder, and awe, rebelling from the old and breaking free from dependence makes education come alive to them.

 

Analyze what makes learning an adventure for you so you can make learning more exciting for your students. Or, if you’re not a teacher, consider how to conceptualize your work or anything you do as an adventure, so each moment becomes an opportunity to make life more meaningful.

Teaching About Grief

Grief is painful. No getting around that. So how do you face it? You can’t ignore it; or you can try to ignore it, but then it comes back to you in unforeseen ways.

 

Teaching students about their own emotions, especially painful ones like grief, is one of the most important studies a school can provide. By facing what is difficult, painful, even fearful you learn you can do it. You are empowered. But it must be done in a way that honors the value of the emotion as well as the student’s own experience with the emotion. Each emotion has a use, although the usefulness of the emotion can be easily lost when you get caught up in it. Teaching about emotion must be done with heart and sensitivity, so the discussion is real—but not so real that a student suffering their own grief feels overwhelmed. The teacher must first study his or her own emotional nature before asking the same of students.

 

When you feel grief, it can be so powerful that you lose sight of the fact that it, like everything, comes and goes. It can feel like it defines who you are. If your thoughts and feelings of the person you lost can come and go, then they are not all of who you are. There is something more. What is it? Meditation provides a way to study emotion moment by moment. When you take a few breaths, and allow yourself to mindfully notice whatever arises in your mind, you find an answer.

 

One book that helped me deal with grief is Leaning Into Love: A Spiritual Journey Through Grief, by Elaine Mansfield. The author shows you how to face grief and learn from it. She shows you grief is part of love. You grieve because you love. It is not something to hide away. By facing it head on you learn to live and to love head on.

 

I feared her book would depress me. Instead, it filled me with life. Elaine’s writing is direct and honest. She goes into detail about the last years and seconds of her husband Vic’s life and the three years that followed. She gives us her life as an example and thus guides us in fashioning our own lives. She shows us the importance of friends and ritual in facing grief. She shows us her feelings so we can feel our own.

 

At one point, she describes the moments after Vic’s death. Ms. Mansfield says, “Even though his hands and feet are cold, warmth emanates from his heart.” I felt like crying. Maybe I was beginning to feel, not just hear her words. That warmth made the loss and the importance of living honestly so real. What a gift!

 

I taught the novel Ordinary People, by Judith Guest, published in 1976, in a high school English class. Although the book portrays an upper middle class life many students thought was fading away, the insight it presents into the importance of facing your feelings as honestly as you can is extremely valuable. Fear of emotion made one of the characters in the novel turn away from grief and turn away from her family. The novel thus gives students insight into how emotion shapes experience and opens the classroom to discussions of grief, guilt, depression and love. It also presents a very positive view of psychotherapy.

 

Grief reveals the intensity of loss. It can lead to obsessive thoughts and anxiety, but it is not just pain. It is a valuable and necessary part of healing and living. It requires time. It can be a mirror to reveal how your mind and emotion works. Grief can give the moments of your life tremendous feeling and meaning and thus studying it can give a class tremendous meaning. And this is one function a good education should fulfill. We can learn to better help each other face the pain, and joy, of living together.

 

*Photo of cave in Cappadocia, Turkey.

Books, Bookstores and Histories

I like bookstores, especially when I feel like browsing or am not sure exactly what I want to read. There is a sense of mystery in browsing. As I look, I discover my own heart and mind. I discover what grabs my attention. When I am really awake, I walk into a bookstore and there, on the display table, is a book that answers some question that has been nagging me or fulfills some desire for adventure.

 

But bookstores are disappearing. The light they represent is winking out. Some evil force is stealing their light. Some might say this is a good thing. Another form of consumerism is gone. Another reason for cutting down trees is ended. I love trees and breathing, so I certainly would like to limit tree cutting.

 

But the loss of bookstores can lead to several negative results. An article in the New York Times called Our (Bare) Shelves, Our Selves, by Teddy Wayne, recently spoke to the negative consequences of this disappearance. Not only bookstores are disappearing, but books, records, CDs are disappearing in homes. Children today no longer get to see the musical or literary history of their parents displayed on their shelves or in their collections. Teddy Wayne cites research that supports the view that children who grow up without books in their homes are likely to not do as well in school—adjusting for economic and other factors (I presume).

 

There are still school and public libraries, outposts of adventure and wonder. Yet, they too are going more and more digital. Without a library of displayed choices to wander through that you can hold in your hand and explore, is it more difficult to know what is available and what is possible? I hope the new ebooks are as satisfying for other people as the paper ones are for me. Online the number of choices of what to read is so vast it can make it too easy to decide to simply read what’s popular and what your friends read. This can result in feeling the universe of choices narrowed to what is in vogue now. You easily feel alienated if what’s popular does not fit with who you think you are.

 

When school standards emphasize STEM subjects (math and science) and diminish literature and history, or emphasize nonfiction in English classes and reduce the reading of fiction, the same narrowing of focus in time and possibility can occur. Literature is not just a good story, not just a sideline to a good education. It is vitally important. It is an entrance into the lives, viewpoints, and possibilities exhibited by other people of distant time periods and cultures that could not be accessed as well any other way. History is not just a descriptive list of what happened in other places and times. It is a narration of the human mind and heart extended over vast periods of time. It reveals the roots of the present so the range of possible actions now and in the future are expanded. It also reveals how actions in the present create future situations and how what you think is possible shapes the range of political and social power you exercise. Without a sense of history, you can feel the problems of today have always been there, so why bother to act to change anything.

 

I was lucky. I grew up in a home filled with books and live now surrounded by them. I also grew up with a sense that each person has some responsibility for shaping the world we live in. I hope we don’t make the mistake of depriving our children of these opportunities and depriving them of a sense of empowerment and responsibility.

Ideas, Perceptions and Feelings

We all form ideas about reality. It is a normal and necessary component of experiencing a meaningful world. However, the idea can seem to us as the reality, even though it’s not. I had two experiences recently which brought out this discrepancy. In one case, it turned an inconvenience into a difficult situation. In the other, it converted joy into loss.

 

In the first situation, I had arranged to use a space to hold a class. I had all the paperwork in and had used the space on and off for years. Then during the class session, another group came in half way through the class and said they had the space reserved. I was annoyed at the interruption and astonished by their claim.  I calmed down and let them use part of the space for the last twenty minutes of the class, even though my class was relatively quiet and theirs noisy. Then the next day, I checked in with the person in charge of scheduling the space and was assured the room was mine, not theirs. So, in my mind, I formed this idea that the other group was lying or taking advantage. That was my interpretation of what had happened. When I saw the leader of the group again, he even looked to me like a liar. But I was wrong about him. I later found out the person in charge of scheduling the space had double booked it.

 

In a totally different type of situation, I noticed recently that as I got older, I centered my life less on my work. I thought of friends and family more. I began to see my family more often and wanted to spend more time with friends. And with both, I am lucky. My family is supportive. I have close friends who care about and accept me. When I am with them, there are distinct ups and downs, but generally my moments with them are some of the finest moments in life. But I sometimes add something to the joy that changes its nature. I add this yearning to keep them close to me more of the time. Even though I have my own life and each of them has theirs, I dream of more time together. Instead of taking this dream as simply an extension of the joy and something to learn from, I sometimes take it as an indication that something is missing. Joy is then converted into clinging and loss.

 

Our emotions integrate the different elements of our world. They can do this for good or ill. They begin with what the author and child psychiatrist Daniel Siegel calls an initial “orienting response” or awakening of attention, grows to include memories, likes and dislikes, interpretations, until we get fully ripened emotions and inclinations to act.

 

It can be difficult to spot when distortions in our understanding occur, or understand what the distortion is. But it helps to know how emotions and perceptions are constructed. It helps to be mindful and keep in touch with the feeling underlying emotion. It helps when we notice if we are acting out of fear or a sense of threat so we can step back from the fear and more clearly consider if there is really a threat.  Or step back from an idea and evaluate if it accurately mirrors the situation. To take a breath and ask ourselves: “How am I viewing the other people in this situation? What is motivating the action I imagine?” It helps to realize that the perception I have of others is created along with the idea I hold of myself.

 

Life is so much fuller when I take time to absorb and cherish the reality I am presented with, whatever it is, but especially when it involves the friends and family I am close to.

 

*Photo from Cappadocia, Turkey.

“Teaching As A Subversive Activity”

The year that I graduated from college, a book was published that greatly influenced how I viewed education. In fact, many books and authors influenced my early view of education: John Dewey, Paulo Freire, J. Krishnamurti, A. S. Neill, John Holt, Jonathan Kozol. But one stood out in terms of supplying specific techniques I used in the classroom — and almost ended my teaching career before it began.

 

I was in graduate school to get my Masters in Teaching English. It was the summer of 1971. I had finished most of the graduate courses in English and education, and one course remained which was supposed to get me ready for teaching in September, my first teaching job in the U. S. (I had already taught in the Peace Corps.) The course was called something like “Teachers As Agents of Change.” I was excited to learn how to meaningfully change the world with teaching. But when I arrived in class, the professor handed us a syllabus with assigned course work and research– and nothing looked subversive. Nothing asked us to challenge the status quo, do something about inequity, or be anything other than basically a passive recipient of his knowledge. So, I asked him, “When will we learn how to be agents of change? And how can we learn how to do it if we don’t practice it?” He said that we would have a discussion of this question in a class at the end of the summer. This shocked me. How could we learn to be “agents of change” by learning through the same methods that we wanted changed? And time was limited. In September, we would all have to step into classrooms. We needed to prepare.

 

Many of the students agreed with me. It was a different time period. Rebellion was in the air we breathed. The class revolted. Instead of kicking me out of the class (which he looked ready to do at first), the professor negotiated with us. The students were divided into four groups. Each group would have to design their own curriculum, arrange speakers and assignments, come to a better understanding of the state of education and how to improve it in a classroom, and then teach these strategies to ourselves.

 

The book that started this personal revolt was Teaching As A Subversive Activity, by Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner. The book began by stating the authors beliefs about the main problems in American society, most of which would be familiar to us today, even though the priorities might be different. The first problem mentioned was, “The number one health problem in the United States today is mental illness…” (Mental illness conceived as a result of social conditions and not solely as a personal problem.) Then there were a whole litany of other problems described, including crime, frauds perpetuated by large corporations, the “credibility gap” or the spread of misinformation, Civil Rights (or the denial of such), the environment (pollution), etc.  And international problems, like the Bomb, the war, the Middle East. The other belief they held was that something could be done about these problems. The majority of the book was about what a teacher could do to improve education and thus contribute to solving overall social problems.

 

The authors called for eliminating content standards and replacing them with questions that focus instruction on process and active learning. Such questions include: “Will your questions increase the learner’s will as well as his capacity to learn? Will they give him a sense of joy in learning? … Will the answers help the learner to sense and understand the human condition and so enhance his ability to draw closer to other people?” The prevailing viewpoint at the time was that content and pedagogy were entirely separate. Content was what students were supposed to learn and existed prior to and independent of any particular student or group of students. The method of teaching was also separate. It was considered merely how the content was taught. The content, not the method, was what determined the importance of a course. Postman and Weingartner wanted to change this.

 

The first skill they discussed was “crap detecting,” being able to critique social, political, and other cultural forces, and discern the lies, deceptions and biases. They emphasized learning through inquiry and questioning. They had students study how language structures what they saw as real and analyze the effects of rapid social change. They discussed “the medium is the message.” Marshal McLuhan wrote his famous book of that title, although the phrase was first introduced in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, in 1964. McLuhan’s message was, as  summarized by Postman and Weingartner, “The most important impressions on a human nervous system come from the character and structure of the environment within which the nervous system functions.” Or, borrowing from educator John Dewey, what you do is what you learn.

 

This book influenced my whole career education (and influenced the book that, I hope, I just finished writing and is scheduled to be published in October), inspiring me to learn how to get better at teaching through asking questions and not just imposing answers. When teachers lead students into substantive inquiries into relevant aspects of their lives, they learn about their world in-depth, learn how to uncover questions and construct answers. In this way, they develop strong intellectual skills. They also discover one of the keys to mental health, namely creating meaningful and deep mental, physical and emotional lives based in supportive relationships.

 

What books have greatly influenced your working life and emotional well-being?

 

*Mural by LACS students.