The "Easy" Teacher and the Paradox of Motivation and Anxiety

Every Thursday, I receive an email newsletter from Peps McCrae, called "Evidence Snacks." If you aren't enrolled, go do it now. They are short, and they are fantastic.  The one a week ago was about motivation, a complex subject that benefits all teachers and students.  There's a part that has stuck with me because it's a bit of a paradox. As a physics enthusiast, I love a good paradox. Here's the summary. If you are familiar with Growth Mindset, it will sound familiar.  If a student engages in a task and is successful, they will motivated only if they "attribute their success to their own effort, ability, and approach."  If they attribute that success to anything external (the test was easy, the teacher likes me, or luck), they have no reason to feel more motivated because those factors are not within their control. I know you aren't seeing the paradox yet because it wasn't in the email; it was in my mind. His newsletter was about motivation, and this post is largely going to be about anxiety, but the two are related, so let me walk you through my thought process. Teachers and schools are currently dealing with an anxiety crisis in students. If you look at the data on reported anxiety levels, it remains pretty flat up until 2012-2015, depending on age group, when it makes an upward shift. The graph then increases in slope in 2020 due largely to pandemic concerns.  What happened in the time between those years? The smart phone became ubiquitous.  It was invented earlier, but for a while, it was only in the hands of wealthier adults, mostly businessmen (remember calling the Blackberry a "crackberry" and people wondering whether President Obama would be allowed to use his?). Around 2012, we started putting them in the hands of 16 year olds so they could call their parents if they were in a car accident or had an emergency. Each year after that, the age started getting lower and lower and the anxiety in younger kids (sadly, not shown in this graph) started climbing. Schools can't really address the source of the problem (24/7 access to social media and constant distraction) because we don't control when students are given these things. We can make rules restricting their usage at the school, but that is only minimally helpful to the anxiety problem if they are on them the rest of the hours of the day and losing sleep as a result.  So, we look for other ways to reduce their anxiety - things we can control at school.   Maybe if we didn't give them homework, they would have some down time, so school start setting stricter limits on the assignments teachers can give. Does it help? No. They have test anxiety because they didn't properly prepare for it with deliberate practice.  Also, they don't tend to use their down time as down time. They either schedule something else or hop on their phone, exacerbating the problem. Maybe we include breathing exercises in PE. It certainly doesn't hurt, but it's effects are rather temporary. It doesn't result in much meaningful reduction of anxiety after the few minutes they have done it. Feel free to do it, but don't expect massive results. Maybe we should make the tests easier, so they feel more successful. Here's where Peps' newsletter came to my mind and created a paradox. (Oooh, if it ever becomes a thing, we have to call it the Peps Paradox.) Making it easier will make them less motivated, especially if they know we have made it easier.  The best way to deal with anxiety isn't breathing exercises (again, I'm not saying not to do them); it isn't to have lots of free time (anxiety lives in our heads and we tend to ruminate on it when we aren't doing other things); it isn't even a trip to the spa (nice, but temporary help at best).   The best way to deal with anxiety is to reflect on the success you have had overcoming difficult things. It reminds you that you are stronger than you feel you are. When you have one of those weeks where it seems like there is a test in every class, reminding yourself that it didn't kill you trains your brain to fear it less the next time. It helps to reflect on what made you successful - you studied with good techniques, you spaced out your study time over several days instead of cramming. You paid attention in class instead of playing games on your computer. If, according to the studies cited in Peps' newsletter, a student attributes their success on a test to the test being easy, they will not feel good about their success, and they will have no ability to reflect on their strength. Thus, motivation will not be increased and anxiety will not be decreased.  Teachers, don't misread me.  I am not saying to go out and overwhelm the working memories of students in the name of rigor. I am not telling you to be mean to them.  I am saying that, if you believe lowering your standards will help them with their motivation or their anxiety, it will not. Don't fall into the trap of thinking you can help by being an "easy" teacher. Continue to hold the same standards you did before, but then walk students through the process of reflecting on the fact that they CAN and DID do hard things.

Our Role in Their Anxiety

Look at any psychological study, and you will find that we have been in a pandemic for a while.  No.  Not that one.  We are in an anxiety pandemic.  It started before Covid, but the events of 2020-2021 certainly didn't help.  

The blame is usually laid at the feed of the smartphone and social media.  And I don't disagree.  That is certainly a large part of it, which I will address later in this post.  But I also think we, as adults, like to blame the phone so that we can avoid the hard work of taking a look at ourselves.  As long as it is the phone's fault, it's not my fault.  But that's not going to fix anything.  We need to look at what WE can do to help reduce the anxiety in our teens, and that cannot happen until we look at the role we unwittingly play in it.

They need adults to be parents and teachers, not friends - A few decades ago, there was a weird shift in parenting.  Parents started referring to their kids as their friends and said their goal was that their kids would be happy.  This is a big contrast to the previous generation who said their goal was for their kids to be good citizens.  Teachers sort of adopted that attitude too, and we started seeing changes in classroom management as well as parenting.  It sounds loving, but kids don't respond well to this approach.  On the surface, they would probably articulate that they want easygoing adults who don't tell them what to do, but deep down, they know that parents and teachers are supposed to be the safe people who set loving boundaries.  Without that, they are left to figure out what this beneficial and what is dangerous about the world on their own, and that is scary.  As for happiness, it's too elusive to be a goal.  There are objective measures that can be observed to know if you have achieved the goal of being a successful citizen, but there isn't a way to know if you have "achieved" happiness.  If I accomplish something,  I'll likely be happy about it, so setting achievable goals might be the way to lead to happiness rather than making happiness the goal.  Not knowing whether or not they are happy increases their anxiety.

Too Much (Adult) Information - Since parents viewed their kids as friends, they started talking to them like they talked to their friends, including adult topics to big for kids to handle.  Prior generations worried about having the money to send their kids to college, but they didn't tell their kids about that worry.  People started placing such value on authenticity that they stopped recognizing that kids' brains aren't able to handle adult problems.  They can't help you with your marital problems, so they don't need to know about them.  The phrase "age appropriate" used to be a thing, and we need to restore that concept because treating them like short adults is only serving to increase their anxiety.  

Overpacking Their Schedules - I hear adults complain frequently about the amount of chauffering they have to do, taking their kids to music lessons, dance lessons, and practice for their year-round soccer team.  They get their kids home in the evening and then complain that the school has assigned homework because now their kids don't have time to ride their bikes and play.  Some of these same parents want to have their students dual enrolled in high school and college simultaneously.  The common phrase is "there's not enough time to . . . "  Yet, we have the same 24-hour days and 7-day weeks that people had back when they had to do everything by hand.  We have made choices for ourselves and our kids about how to spend time.  Extracurricular activities are good.  Pursuing passions is good.  But, time is like money; there is only so much of it, and it must be spent thoughtfully.  If you have spent time on one thing, that time is no longer available for something else.  Ask yourself why they are involved in so many things.  Is it because you think they HAVE to be involved in everything to get into college.  Let me tell you some stories of very happy kids who got into college without packing their schedule full of everything under the sun.  Recognize that there is no prize for finishing college early, and let them be in high school while they are in high school.  If all of this scheduling is about pursuing their passion, chances are they care a lot about one of the things, not all of them.  Prioritize that one.  Your child will graduate with better mental health and head into adulthood just as well as those who are frazzled.

Pressure - Watch the news.  The world is not in good shape.  From environmental issues to acts of mass violence to political division, things are very much not as they should be.  Kids know this more than we did at their age because they have access to so much information.  They also know this is the world they will inherit, and they see that adults are more concerned with their own rights than they are about fixing anything.  Kids feel that they are going to be required to "save the world" and know they don't have that capacity.  Teachers, we must be careful not to communicate to them that it is their job to fix it.  That's not fair, and it's not good for their developing brains.

Limit Phone Use - The phones and screens are, in fact, a problem.  Prior to Covid, a lot of parent and teacher discussion was about limiting screen time.  That went completely out the window during lockdown (and understandably so).  It's time to revive that discussion.  Kids cannot buy themselves a phone, and you have the ability to resist giving them one.  I know it is hard to think they won't have what other kids have, but the evidence of every study shows that delaying their access to phones and social media is best. Perhaps a group of parents can get together and make a pact to delay purchasing phones for them until 9th grade.  Then, you wouldn't have to worry about your child being "the only one."  At the very least, get it out of their bedrooms.  Back when computers were larger, we put them in public areas of the house and installed filters for accountability.  The same should apply to the small computer in their pocket.  Boundaries are healthy.  

None of this is easy.  I'm not going to pretend otherwise.  But it is necessary.  We cannot keep raising kids steeped in anxiety.  We just can't.

We Don't Know Yet

Do you know anyone who grew up during the Great Depression?  Pause for a moment and think about that person.  Think about the ways in which they are different from other people.  Listen to their stories, and you will understand that their childhood experiences very much formed their current personality and way of living.  They save things the rest of us throw away.  They find joy in small things the rest of us don't notice.  While no one would have wanted them to endure the struggle they had to endure, it also made them the most gritty, resilient, and resourceful generation America has ever produced.

The 24-hour news media runs out of new ways to talk about the pandemic, so they have switched gears.  They are now bringing on psychologists to predict what our kids will be like when they are adults as a result of masking and remote learning.  Given that neuroplasticity takes time, there is no way to know what is happening.  They might as well bring on a psychic to have an argument with an astrologer to talk about what these kids will be like as adults.  

The truth is we do not know what impact this pandemic will have on our students.  For that matter, we don't know what the experiences they were having before the pandemic were having.  We know they are experiencing high anxiety, but I also remember that we were talking about their high levels of anxiety before the pandemic.  What we don't know is what effect living through that anxiety will have.  Perhaps, it will make them fearful adults, or perhaps the recognition that they persevered through it will make them strong adults.  We went into remote learning almost overnight, so it is possible this will produce adults that fear sudden change is always around the corner.  It is also possible that change won't be the scary thing for them that it has been for others because they have lived through adapting to them.  The biggest fear seems to be that masking will make them all unable to interpret facial expressions and social cues.  I suppose that is possible, but it could also be that they will be better listeners or people more adept at looking people in the eye to read social cues.  Perhaps they will care more about equity.  Perhaps they will be resourceful in ways we cannot imagine.

What is most likely is that there will be a mix of people coming out of this, some more resilient and resourceful, others more fearful.  There will be some who respond to change well and others who don't.  While we like to speak in broad generational terms (like I did while speaking of the kids of the Great Depression), the reality is that they are individuals.  They will respond, react, and adapt in their own individual ways, just as they would have to whatever might have happened if there hadn't been a pandemic.  

Let's stop pretending we know the future and deal with what is in front of us.  For now, masking is necessary to keep them safe.  Could there be mental health issues that result from that?  Certainly, there could be.  What gets left out of that discussion is the mental health effect that comes from the death of a classmate.  In some places, remote learning is still the norm.  Will there be long-term impacts from that?  Of course, there will be.  It's just arrogant for us to think we know what those impacts will be.

So, instead of attempting to predict the future, let's deal with the present.  If there is a student in front of you that is struggling, support them through it.  If there is a student who is fearful, encourage them.  If there is a student who is showing resilience, cheer that on.  Do what you would have done if a student had been fearful or struggling or showing resilience before the pandemic.  It's all you can do.

Tell the Whole College Story

When I was a kid, my dad liked to tell my brother and me stories about his college classes.  He told us about professors who wrote with their right hand while simultaneously erasing with their left with students just expected to keep up.  I remember thinking, "I'm a good student, but I'm not good enough for that."  I was warned about professors who didn't care and classes with 300 people in them.  I was told of oral exams with questions that couldn't be answered.  The end result was fear.  I wasn't sure I would be able to handle college.

Then, I went to college and found that, while there were a few oddball professors, they were a small minority.  The vast majority of them were normal people who taught in normal ways.  I had a class or two in a massive lecture hall, but I also had classes with only seven people in them.  I had a few professors who couldn't have picked me out of a lineup, but I also had professors who knew me well and loved me and rooted for my success in their class, and they used their office hours to help their students do just that.

The first week after Christmas break is alumni week at GRACE.  It's when we have the most visitors on campus (which was nice this year after not being able to have them last year).  We have a reception for them at the first basketball game after we return, which is a fun time to catch up with their lives.  And, in our chapel service this week, we had an alumni panel.  They did a great job answering questions that had been submitted by our juniors and seniors, but they also repeated what many before have done.  They told stories of professors who didn't care and talked about giant lecture classes where no one knows them.  As we headed back down the stairs, some members of my sophomore community-building class said, "Well, now I'm scared to go to college."  My plan for this week's community-building class is to balance things out a bit.  

It's fun to tell stories about the weirdos; it's not a good story if you tell about a normal person behaving in expected ways.  It's only a good story if it is unusual, but we should probably make sure we tell them that it is unusual.  If every one of my dad's professors had written and erased at the same time, he wouldn't have survived it.  I had a P-Chem professor who talked so quietly that we strained to hear him even though there were only seven of us in the class, and we were all on the front row.   I like telling stories about him and trying to mimic the things he said at the volume he said them, but if I couldn't hear any of my professors, that would cease to be an amusing story and become a tale of how I wasn't educated.  

Something can be true without being the whole story, a lesson a try to teach my 8th-grade students when I show them the website banddhmo.org, a site which tells a lot of scary things about a chemical called dihydrogen monoxide without ever mentioning that the chemical in question is water.  It's important that we give our students a more complete picture of college.  If we only talk about how great it is, they will be disillusioned when they have difficulty with a class or have a fight with someone in the dorm.  If we only talk about the struggles, they will be afraid to apply to college at all.

So here's the whole story.  Yes, you will have some professors who are only there to do research and don't want to teach at all.  But, you will also have professors who deeply care about education and work hard to make their lessons what you need them to be.  Yes, I had a chemistry professor who didn't know who I was when I bumped into him in the hall.  I also had Dr. Halsmer, a thermodynamics professor, whose tiny office was so packed with students he was helping that one was sitting on top of the file cabinet.  In the dorm, I had some of the stupidest fights I've ever had in my life, but I also bonded with people in a way that can't happen without sharing a bathroom during exam week.  Those are the extremes, but most days are just normal days.  You'll go to normal classes where you will learn in normal ways.  You will have normal meals with normal friends and have normal conversations.  You will have a mostly predictable life peppered with a few amazing moments and a couple of horrible ones.  It's important that when we tell kids stories about college that they know we are only sharing the dream moments and the nightmare moments but that those are only the extremes.

Learning and the Brain Reflections - Turning Down the Volume on Anxiety

We might as well face it.  Anxiety is going to be the word we hear most for the next few years.  We were already on our way there prior to the pandemic, but 2020 and 2021 have broadened the scope because more people have more to worry about.  For that reason, the theme of this year's Learning and the Brain Conference was "Calming Anxious Brains."  There were several speakers on this topic, so this post is my attempt to synthesize several speakers into a cohesive message.  There will also be a second post on using anxiety to accomplish good because of I put all of that in one post, it will be way too long.  As Andrew Watson wrote, "our students aren’t little learning computers. Their emotional systems — when muddled by the stress and anxiety of Covid times — influence learning profoundly."  Anxiety will influence more than a student's personal life.  It will affect his learning, so as teachers who care about a student as a whole person, we will have to address it.  

Let's start with this.  Anxiety isn't always bad.  To neurologists, it is not considered good or bad, simply inevitable.  Change, whether a good change or a bad one, is stressful.  Without stress, living things die, so don't read stress as bad either.  Change also bring uncertainty, and uncertainty makes us fearful.  

Another important thing to note is that we call a lot of things anxiety that are not that.  Anxiety is persistent fear and worry, but we tend to label any feeling that isn't perfectly calm as anxiety.  The semantics of that may not seem like a big deal, but identifying our emotions is helpful in responding to them.  We respond differently to anger than we do to sadness, and we respond differently to sadness than we do to fear.  If we can't describe our emotions, it is difficult to choose a proper coping strategy.

It is generally only considered to be a negative thing if it is chronic (never able to take a break from it) or traumatic (severe enough to break the dams of your coping mechanisms).  So, in spite of what the wellness industry tells us, our goal should not be to eliminate anxiety, but to turn the volume down on it so that we can function in our daily lives.  The worst thing isn't to be stressed.  The worst thing is to be numb.  

Fear serves a purpose in our lives.  We need only look to those with a rare pituitary dysfunction that leaves people without the ability to experience fear to see how dangerous a lack of fear is.  It alerts us to danger and helps us prepare to respond to it (the well-known fight, flight, or freeze response).  It's how our ancestors stayed alive in the face of bigger threats than we face.  One difference between us and them, however, is too much access to fear-feeding information.  A prehistoric woman who experienced fear when she saw movement in the grass, fearing a saber-toothed tiger, would return to her calm state after finding the sound was caused by a bird or rodent.  A modern woman who experiences fear when she hears a sound in the back yard does not return to a calm state after seeing that it was a rabbit because she thinks about the news report she saw earlier on local burglaries, googles crime statistics in her area, reads a blog post written by a rape victim, and texts a friend who affirms her fear and tells her that she can't help her feelings (which is not true, but that's for another time).  So, this thing that is meant to be a gift for our safety becomes a source of crippling worry. 

So how do we turn down the volume on our anxiety and help our students turn down the volume on theirs?  It's a complicated answer, so I'm not going to address everything here.  I would recommend a couple of books - Dr. Lisa Damour's books Untangled and Under Pressure, are based on research with teenage girls, but the strategies in them would help anyone.  Dr. Wendy Suzuki's book, Good Anxiety, has some great ideas as well.  What I will talk about below are some of the simpler things we can do and possibly implement in our classrooms, but it is by no means a comprehensive list.

1. Limit News - I know we all want to be informed, but there is a difference between being informed and doomscrolling.  As I mentioned earlier, the difference between the good anxiety our ancestors experienced and the ability we have to stew over a situation for hours is largely caused by our access to scary information.  For them, danger was a binary situation - "tiger - not a tiger," but we find ways to turn "not a tiger" into fifty hypothetical tigers by continuously linking from one fear to another.  Choose a time period in which to get your news, and be rigorous about staying to that time.  Don't read the same story on three different platforms, or your brain will think it happened three times, leading to a belief in higher frequency than in reality.

2. Recognize Reality - Anything that can be monetized can be used to manipulate us.  The Wellness Industry is heavily invested in our belief that something is wrong if we don't spend all of our time feeling great.  Since that is not possible for anyone, we will then look for something to "solve the problem," whether it is an oil, an herb, a weighted blanket, an adult coloring book, a scent diffuser, they make billions of dollars every year by perpetuating the idea that we must always be caring for ourselves as though the biggest problem in the world right now is selflessness. (By the way, none of those are bad things, but they aren't solutions to a problem.)  One of the best things I heard at the Learning and the Brain conference was when Lisa Damour said, "It is healthy to expect our emotions to represent reality.  When things are bad, the healthy response is that we feel bad about it."  We and our students have bought into the idea that we should never feel anything bad, and it leads us to pretty unhealthy responses.  Perhaps, a good approach would be to write down the trigger of our feeling and decide if our emotion matches the reality.

3. Write it Down - One of the things our brain does when anxiety is chronic or traumatic is to over-estimate the threat and underestimate our ability to cope with it.  This is due to a stress hormone called cortisol.  Our brains are only meant to experience a quick rush of cortisol during the fight, flight, freeze response, so when it is in our brains long term, our brains don't respond appropriately to the degree of the threat.  This is where writing is helpful.  It forces us to slow down long enough to think about the threat rather than just feel about it.  Write down exactly what the threat is and rate its level of danger (not everything is a level 10, but sometimes respond to everything at that level).  Sometimes, the identification alone is helpful because we don't always know what we are responding to.  

Second, write down any tools you know you have that you could employ in response to the threat.  You will then respond with more confidence.  Teaching students to do this will give them a skill they can use for the rest of their lives, so it is worth the investment.

4. Recognize the Worst-Case Scenario - We are often pumping up the power of positive thinking so much that we only allow ourselves to expect the best.  The problem with that is that the reality is rarely only the best-case scenario.  It seems counter-intuitive, but it is also valuable to consider the worst-case scenario.  For one thing, having a mental dress rehearsal of the worst-case might give us a chance to practice using our tools and figuring out what the consequences of that case would be (I often ask kids if they think I will stop loving them if they fail a test.  They giggle a no, so I remind them that their parents won't stop loving them either and that Jesus won't stop loving them even if they make a zero.)  The other benefit of considering the worst-case scenario is that we give ourselves a chance to realize that it is as unlikely as the best-case.  Reality is usually somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, so realizing that the worst might not happen can be calming.  Talking through this with students can break a worry spiral, and rehearsing it can help them break their own future spirals.

5. Breath Control - Much of our stress response happens in the autonomic nervous system.  That's difficult to consciously control, but we do have one connection - breathing.  Intentionally slowing your breathing (four-count inhale, hold, four-count exhale, hold) lowers your heart rate and blood pressure.  Counting the inhale and exhale gives you something to think about besides the trigger.  The best part is that it can be done in any situation without anyone knowing you are doing it.  Two or three rounds of breathing control during a test or a stressful conversation can be enough to turn down the volume on your anxiety to a manageable level.

6. Express and Contain - I remember an episode of Mr. Rogers in which he sang a song about expressing our anger.  It was called "What Do You Do with the Mad You Feel?" and advised punching a bag, pounding some clay, playing tag, running as fast as you can.  It acknowledges that you might have planned to do something wrong and tells you it is great to stop and do something else.  In other episodes, he talked about drawing pictures and writing our feelings.  He was a big believer in healthy expression.  We need to help kids with finding healthy expression.  For some, it may be talking, but for others, it might be throwing a tennis ball against a wall for a few minutes.  A good cry might work for some while a nice loud, controlled scream might be what others need.  It is, however, unhealthy to express all the time and in every place.  Learning when and where and for how long to express leads to healthy containment.  Dr. Damour defined containment as "pulling yourself together" in order to do what needs to be done.  She advised that we identify what the student needs help with by observing what they are doing.  If they are expressing a lot, they need help with containment.  If they are too contained, they need help with expression.  Both are needed.

7. Movement - Our brains were designed to operate in rhythms.  Morning and evening, class periods, the cycle of a week, mealtimes, etc. keep us all in a kind of sync with one another.  One of the things that happens to the brain of a traumatized person is that those rhythms are broken.  They suffer sleep disruptions, appetite changes, and disruptions in their understanding of time (We've all experienced this during the pandemic).  Helping students re-establish a sense of rhythm isn't as hard as you might think.  Having students do some synchronized movement at the beginning of the day can bring them back into sync with their surroundings.  It doesn't have to be a big involved yoga experience.  It can be as simple as having everyone take a deep breath at the same time, a stretch we do together.  You can connect it to your content by doing hand motions to show the particle movement of solids, liquids, and gases, having them show you the shape of a graph using their arms, or having a little chant about parts of speech with a hand clap attached.  Any movement that everyone does together will be helpful.

8. Routine and Predictability - One of the best gifts we can give to our students is a predictable routine.  For me, that looks like starting class the same way almost every day.  I run through the plan for the day, read a scripture, and pray before we start.  I continued to do that during remote teaching because it was one thing I could keep predictable.  In some classes, it looks like ten minutes of reading.  In other classes, it may be a quiz every Friday.  Schedules may not seem like a big deal to most of us, but for a kid experiencing anxiety, it means security and safety.  During the summer, I am the photographer at a camp for children in the foster care system.  One of the things we do for them is to post the schedule in a lot of places and ask the counselors to carry the schedule with them at all times.  Kids ask to see it frequently because it is calming for them to know what is coming next.  It doesn't mean there won't sometimes be changes or that you can't surprise your kids, but those should be interruptions to a regular routine, not a constant state of upheaval.  

Coping with anxiety is part of being human, and we should treat it that way.  We should teach our students to treat it that way.  It can even spur us to good action when it is not excessive.  I'll talk about that in another post.   It's hard in our culture not to feel like we are "failing at wellness," leading to an even higher state of unrest, but we should remind them that responding to reality is healthy.  Bringing anxiety to a productive level, not trying to eliminate it altogether, will help our students know they are human.  And that's something the wellness industry will never give them.