A Random Collection of Life Lessons

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you know that I do not care about New Year's resolutions or New Year's at all.  But, I am always ready to reflect.  A few months ago, I listened to an audio recording of Amy Pohler's memoir, and there was a section in which she just threw out statements of things she has learned in her years on this earth. There is no explanation or context, just a list of thyougts.  I thought that seemed like something I would enjoy doing, so you will find my list below.  While it is not an exhaustive list, these are the things that came to mind when I started typing.  They are in no particular order.  Feel free to add your own lessons in the comments.

• You can enjoy things you aren't particularly good at, so enroll in that wine and design class or take up knitting.  You don't have to perform to enjoy.
• Overtip servers.  It won't make that much difference to you, but it may make a huge difference to them.  This is especially true if you are a difficult customer.  They've put up with you.
• You don't know what you missed because you thought you were too cool to join the chess club (or fill in the blank with a group you think you aren't fit for). 
• Keep your promises.  People need to know you mean what you say.
• Don't let "self-care" be the reason you don't follow through on a commitment.  Let it keep you from making the commitment in the first place.
• "I'm sorry, I can't do it" can be an answer.  You don't have to justify it with a reason you think they'll accept.
• Nothing is ever less expensive than when you have a student ID.  Use it to try new things like the symphony or the ballet.  If you don't like it, you haven't lost much.  But it may turn out that you find a new source of joy in your life.
• Don't let the fear of something being hard keep you from doing it.  You can do harder things than you realize.
• If you have the option to do something in person or digitally, do it in person.  It's a different experience.
• I lived for 47 and a half years quite peacefully without a cell phone.  I'm not saying you should do that, but it is okay to leave it behind every now and then.  Leave it in the kitchen at night. (Alarm clocks are cheap.  Buy one.)  Even thought I have a cell phone now, it is not with me all the time.  
• Don't just walk over a piece of trash in the hall.  Pick it up and throw it in the nearest trash can.
• You don't know more than the experts in their field.  Listen to them when they speak within their field.
• Expertise is domain-specific.  Don't put a lot of credence when an expert in one field speaks about a different field.  Just because someone is smart about rockets doesn't mean they know about viruses, but an expert in viruses probably doesn't know anything about classroom management.  Einstein likely didn't say the thing about the definition of insanity; but even if he did, he didn't know anything about psychology, so it is not the definition of insanity.
• Don't use bigger words than needed for the situation.  You aren't impressing people.
• Have a morning routine.  It could be making the bed or listening to a song.  It could be doing a crossword puzzle or reading the Bible.  But have something that starts your day.
• Pray in the car - just don't close your eyes to do it.
• Read a lot. Even if you don't like books, read blog posts or articles.  
• For most things, the generic version is fine.  Equate headache relief works just as well as Excedrin.
• For a very few things, it is worth being brand loyal.
• Keep learning new things.  There is so much to learn, so listen to podcasts or read random articles on Wikipedia.
• Eat your lunch outside sometimes.  Fresh air and sunshine are nice.
• Life is a good balance between expressing your feelings and pulling it together.  Know when and where each is appropriate.
• Don't tell people to smile.  If they felt like smiling, they would already be smiling.  It's condescending when you tell them how to feel (or worse, tell them they are "so much prettier" when they smile.  Uggh!)
• If you ask someone, "How are you," stop and listen.  It shouldn't just be an extension of "Hi," so if you don't have time to listen, don't ask.  You can just say "Good morning."
• Surround yourself with smart people (at least a few of whom you disagree with).
• While I am at it, find someone who will disagree with you well.  By that I mean, neither of you will think the other one is stupid or immoral when the conversation is over.  Both of you will have gotten more perspective and perhaps deepened your own thoughts.
• Use the restroom before you leave (I think I got this one from Larry David). You don't know what traffic will be like.
• Sometimes, you can't avoid debt.  But pay it off as quickly as you can.  Always overpay on your mortgage payment, even if it is just rounding up to the nearest 10 dollars.
• Write goals on a list.  It feels great to cross them off.
• If you have the opportunity to be kind to a child, take it.  It doesn't have to be big.  Smile at them.  Tell them you like their shoes.  Listen to them count to 100.  Laugh at their terrible joke.
• Never resist a generous impulse.  Yes, you will get ripped off occasionally, but more often than not, you'll feel good about generosity.
• Small gestures matter.  Jostens once sent me a coffee mug, and I walked around with it for months because it made me so happy.  
• The hardest thing to live with is regret.  Don't do things you know will make you feel guilty later.  Do good things, so you don't have to regret not doing them later.
• At least once in your life, find a place with no light pollution and see what the stars really look like.  I didn't know how life-changing this would be.
• Everyone is tired.  It's not a competition.
• During severe weather, keep your shoes on.  (My Oklahoma friends would also say to keep your teeth in and your bra on.  If the newspeople come after a tornado, you don't want to be on the news without them.)
• When you find yourself in a no-win situation, choose whichever option is the kindest.
• Don't feed the crazy in other people.  If you feed it, it will grow.
• If you can't make what you love a career, that's okay.  Work a 9-5 job and do what you love at night and on weekends.
• Don't judge something the first time you try it.  Everything is difficult when it is new.  Give it at least three chances.
• If you answer the phone, and the person doesn't start speaking right away, hang up.  It's a telemarketing call.
• When you call a business to complain, remember that it is not the fault of the person who answers the phone. 
• If you can afford it, go see a live performance this year.  It's a more powerful experience than streaming a movie.
• If something isn't your business, don't waste brain cells dwelling on it.
• Love your co-workers, and you will love coming to work.
• Make sure the people who are important to you know that they are. 
• When someone compliments you, accept it.  Don't be self-deprecating just to seem humble.  They told you for a reason, so be encouraged by it.
• Mail handwritten notes.  They have more soul than an email, and it doesn't take as long as you think to write them.
• In spite of what I just said, send an email to someone this week to thank them for who they are to you.  It will make their day when they are in the middle of business emails.
• If someone compliments your friend, pass it on to them; they need to know.  If someone criticizes your friend, keep it to yourself; they do not need to know.  
• You can't make God love you any more or less, so stop trying.  Love Him, and act out of that love, not out of some weird belief that you can earn something from the Creator of the universe!

Reflections on Learning and the Brain Conference - Part 3 - Well-Being and Happiness

Each year, when I attend the Learning and the Brain conference, I return with a very full brain, and much of what is in it is disconnected.  So, in order to process all of it, I look for themes and write about them.  This year, there will be three.  The first was on thinking and learning.  Last week was about meaning and purpose, and this final one is about well-being and happiness.  

It's no surprise to any teacher that we are in a crisis of student anxiety.  While the pandemic didn't help, it also didn't start this crisis.  Reports of unhappiness, loneliness, fear, and worry were on the rise starting about five years before Covid.  It seems to line up pretty well with the onset of smartphone ubiquity.  A student's ability to have their device on them at all times meant there was no escape from bullying and FOMO and no time to process anything before we were expected to comment on it.  According to Dr. Richard Davidson, author of The Neuroscience of Compassion, The Emotional Life of Your Brain, and The Science of Meditation, among many other books, isolation is now classified as an epidemic based on studies from 2003 to 2020.

The bad news is that lack of social connection is a major risk factor for many chronic health problems.  From hypertension to obesity to the premature onset of Alzheimer's disease, there are few conditions that aren't exacerbated by the absence of deep and meaningful relationships.  

The good news is that well-being is a skill, so it can be learned and practiced.  You can train yourself to be present in the moment (Mindfulness doesn't have to mean yoga).  You can take a few minutes each week to assess how connected you feel to your coworkers and your surroundings and take steps to improve them by taking a walk with a work friend during lunch (making your more connected to people) or do something to fill a need at work or church (making you feel more of a sense of place).  The number one factor in staying connected is having a sense of purpose because it helps you to imagine the future and your part in it.  This is the reason why some retired people thrive and others die soon after.  Those who use the time to volunteer, care for children, or effect change in their community live much longer than those who view retirement as a time of extended vacation.

Learning new things and making meaning of what you are learning also improves your sense of well being and helps you live longer.  Teachers, we have the ability to help our students view their learning as more meaningful than passing a test or job training.  We can help them see the awe and wonder that we do in our content.  And, if everyone in the class is seeing it, there is power in the feeling of belonging.  Their learning schema and their social schema overlap, giving a deeper and more complete understanding of the world.

In an 85 years long (and still running) study on happiness, there were four trends in the people who reported more sustainable happiness.  They were

• social support. 
• the freedom to make life choices. 
• the opportunity to be generous with time, money, effort, or expertise.
• high trust level in those around them.  

Notice that money is not on this list.  It did show up in reports of loneliness, which did correlate with those making below $24,000 per year.  (My conclusion - not those of the researchers - from that correlation is that people making very low amounts of money are probably working a lot of hours and perhaps at odd times and, therefore, have less opportunity for social connection.  It's not caused by lack of money but by the circumstances.)  Money spent on experiences rather than stuff is a better investment in well-being.  Being curious is a free way to gain social interaction.  If you go to a free event at your local museum about something you find interesting, you will also find other people there who find it interesting as well.  You could strike up a conversation with someone about that shared interest and find well-being in the process.  That may be the only conversation you ever have with them, or you might find that you share so much you start a club.

The other good news is that you don't have to make a major life change to make this happen.  You can take small repeated actions.  Text a friend you haven't seen in a while.  Have a weekly lunch with a colleague.  Donate to a cause (a small amount monthly might be better for you than a larger one time donation); if you don't have money, make a point to volunteer one day per month.  Visit the free or low cost events in your area (museums and libraries and churches hold a lot of them) on weekends.  

The point is that we can structure our lives in such a way that we combat isolation with small sustainable changes.  Take one action today.

Reflections from Learning and the Brain Conference - Part 2 - Meaning and Purpose

Each year, when I attend the Learning and the Brain conference, I return with a very full brain, and much of what is in it is disconnected.  So, in order to process all of it, I look for themes and write about them.  This year, there will be three.  Last week's was on thinking and learning.  This second one is about meaning and purpose, and the third will be about well-being and happiness.  

If you ask teachers or school leaders to think about what they want for their students, the word purpose is likely to arise.  The GRACE vision statement talks about God's plan for our students' lives.  Look at the surveys of empty nesters or the recently retired, and you will find that they initially struggle because, unless they are intentional about redirecting, they have lost their sense of purpose (having defined it wrongly in the first place).  Professional athletes like Tiger Woods won't retire because they don't know who they are without their sport.  It's the only purpose they feel they have.  This is not true and represents job idolatry, but that's a rant for a different post.

It turns out that research into how we learn also involves a sense of purpose and meaning.  According to the work of Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, the way kids make meaning out of the things they witness enables processes of adaptive change in their brains. It influences the white matter of their cerebral cortex and makes more connections between neurons.  So the psychology of learning has a biological effect, and biology has psychological effects.  Even between people, there is feedback between the emotions of one person and the biology of another.  We've all had the experience of a friend's tears or a supervisor's anger making us feel sick.  When a baby focuses its gaze on us and smiles, there are physical changes in our heart rate.  Petting a dog or cat is thought to lower a person's blood pressure.  Since we aren't carved up pieces, we cannot separate physical neurology from psychological change.

What does this mean for my classroom?  Quite a few things, actually.  It shows us that a teacher's emotional state influences the class' physical atmosphere.  If I remain calm, students are less likely to spiral into a hormonal spin.  If I let them work me up, we create a dangerous cycle.  In past posts, I've called this "feeding the crazy."

It also means that I should carefully approach how to help my students make meaning of their learning.  This doesn't mean I am going to ask them how they feel about Newton's Second Law, but it might mean I should put them in the problem.  If they can get a physical sense of applying a force (even just in their minds), they can make the meaning of it more real.  

In her keynote address, Mary Helen Immordino-Yang showed a poem that her daughter wrote to her baby brother, Teddy.  She told him that she loved him "more than the whole earth-size."  Having just learned they lived on a very large ball of dirt that floated through space and moved around the sun, this second-grader connected her love for her brother, which she couldn't quite wrap her head around to the size and movement of the planet, which she also couldn't quite wrap her head around.  Making these connections is a natural process, but we can leverage it to make better use of it for our lessons.  We can connect the slope of a graph to a slowly or rapidly changing process that is common to students (or ask them to suggest a connection).

Daniel Willingham also discusses how having a student connect content to deeper meaning helps their memory.  He recommends a relatively slow process for using flashcards.  We typically fly through them pretty quickly if we are getting the answer right, but he suggests stopping after each card to ask yourself a why question.  So, you have answered the question "What is the relationship between volume and pressure?" with "Inverse."  Now, ask yourself why is that relationship inverse rather than direct?  Connecting to the meaning creates a more complex story that may involve emotion (e.g. The balloon will pop if the pressure is high enough, which will startle me) and will cause more change in the brain.  

Students have long wanted to understand the purpose of what they are learning.  This is one of the reasons we get asked the question "When am I ever going to use this in real life?"  There are a lot of ways to handle that question, but you don't actually have to convince them that they will use it as an individual.  It can be enough that they know this information is used by someone.  As John Almarode says, "They just need to know that it means something more than the grade in the grade book."  If engineers use it, tell them.  If poets, artists, doctors, CPAs, factory workers, or receptionists use it, your students will benefit from knowing that.  It will help them see purpose and meaning in what they are learning.  

By the way, it is unlikely they will admit it in that moment, so don't get your hopes up for them to say, "Oh, great.  Now, I'm cool with doing the hard thing you have asked me to do."  Just know that your explanation did have a deeper long-term effect on their brain than what you are seeing.

Reflections from the Learning and the Brain Conference - Part 1 - Thinking and Remembering

Each year, when I attend the Learning and the Brain conference, I return with a very full brain, and much of what is in it is disconnected.  So, in order to process all of it, I look for themes and write about them.  This year, there will be three.  The first is on thinking and learning.  The second will be about meaning and purpose, and the third will be about well-being and happiness.  

Teachers have a thousand goals each class period.  We are responsible for the safety and well-being of our students, charged with knowing and valuing them as human beings, and on our best days, are meant to inspire them to love learning.  Obviously, though, our primary daily function as teachers is to have our students learn the content we are teaching them.  We want them to remember, not just long enough to take a test, but to really remember.

Encoding - Learning begins with the process of encoding sensory information from our environment by connecting it to the network of things we already know (schema).  Your schema is the interrelated knowledge you have on any given subject.  It could be as simple as everything you know about dogs to something as complicated as all of the knowledge you have about math.  A good teacher knows what they

want to connect to and begins their lesson by activating the schema in the minds of their students.  It is obviously impossible to know what all of their prior knowledge is, but we can make fair guesses about common knowledge.  Also, the benefit still exists even if the student pulls up knowledge that is different than we expect them to in order to use it as a metaphor.  (A physics teacher, for example, may compare electrical current to the flow of water droplets in a river, while a student may think instead of the flow of students down the hallway.  Both work as analogies, so both can be powerful ways of encoding the knowledge of electrical current in a student's mind.)  

Because working memory is limited, building an extensive schema in long-term memory is useful.  Because it is interconnected, it might take up only one space, providing a foothold for the reach to new concepts.  Experts in any field are simply people with extensive, complex, and overlapping schema.  We don't encode things that are too easy to learn, so find the sweet spot known as "desirable difficulty."  Hook students in with a challenging problem or a curiosity-provoking question, and the dopamine release that comes later will help to cement the encoding of the content.

Examples and non-examples are also your friends when it comes to encoding.  "This is a triangle" should be firmly rehearsed through multiple, varied examples.  But it should also be followed up with "This is not a triangle" with a discussion of the ways in which that example doesn't fit the definition.  There should also be a "close call" example because it will define the boundaries of the concept.  

Making it Stick - Once information is encoded, your brain has to find a way to store it in such a way that it can be retrieved.  There are a number of ways to make this happen, from connecting it to symbols like hand motions and pictures to creating stories, which Daniel Willingham calls "psychologically privileged" to asking students to relate personally to concepts.  Essentially, making meaning makes learning sticky.  As an example, understanding multiplication as a system of repeated adding will make it easier to learn a multiplication table than rote learning it without that understanding (Note that I did not say a student shouldn't learn a multiplication table; I'm just suggesting that making it meaningful is a way to make it easier to remember.).   

The most powerful tool for making information stick is the practice of retrieving it.  Think of an actor learning lines.  They don't do what students most commonly do when they study - rereading the script according to student surveys.  They run their lines.  They put the script down and try to remember the next line.  I also learned at the conference that most of them don't start trying to learn the lines until the scene has been blocked because they can then connect the lines to their physical movement as well.  My theatrical students told me that the day they first go off-book is called "crash and burn day," a piece of information I love knowing because it allows me to talk to them about how powerful the experience of trying to remember, getting it wrong, and getting feedback can be.

Did you know that the brain is part of your body?  The latest research confirms that to be true, so if you want to do things that are good for your brain, do things that are good for your body.  These include 

• Proper nutrition - to have healthy blood flow with cell-supporting vitamins and minerals
• Exercise - to get oxygen to the cells and grow the hippocampus and pre-frontal cortex
• Quality sleep - the chemical wash that happens during REM sleep strengthens rehearsed knowledge, eliminates non-rehearsed knowledge, and helps change episodic memories into semantic memories.

Speaking of your body, you can offload some of your brain's mental processes by using your hands and body movements to help you think.  I already mentioned actors memorizing lines that have been blocked.  Having students act out abstract ideas can also make them feel more real and give the mind something to connect to.  Teacher gesturing draws student attention to both emphasis and meaning, so use it liberally.  Point to physical objects, like charts, graphs, and maps, and have students point to them as well.  Connecting movement and knowledge is a great way of helping them remember it.  It's also a great way to increase their alertness level when you know their attention is flagging.  

Designing lessons in such a way that we can accurately encode the right procedural and essential information, ask them to perform a learning task with meaning, and practice retrieving across time will grow our students' brains, improve their performance, and help them to remember content longer; so we must be thoughtful about how we construct each day.