No One Wants to Feel Incapable, Apathetic, or Ineffective

People do not choose to fail or disappoint. No one wants to feel incapable, apathetic, or ineffective. If you look at a person’s action (or inaction) and see only laziness, you are missing key details. There is always an explanation. There are always barriers. Just because you can’t see them, or don’t view them as legitimate, doesn’t mean they’re not there. Look harder.

Laziness Does Not Exist

I’m a social psychologist, so I’m interested primarily in the situational and contextual factors that drive human behavior. When you’re seeking to predict or explain a person’s actions, looking at the social norms, and the person’s context, is usually a pretty safe bet. Situational constraints typically predict behavior far better than personality, intelligence, or other individual-level traits. . . .

It’s really helpful to respond to a person’s ineffective behavior with curiosity rather than judgment. . . .

And when you don’t fully understand a person’s context — what it feels like to be them every day, all the small annoyances and major traumas that define their life — it’s easy to impose abstract, rigid expectations on a person’s behavior. . . .

If a person’s behavior doesn’t make sense to you, it is because you are missing a part of their context. It’s that simple. . . .

For decades, psychological research has been able to explain procrastination as a functioning problem, not a consequence of laziness. When a person fails to begin a project that they care about, it's typically due to either a) anxiety about their attempts not being "good enough or b) confusion about what the first steps of the task are. Not laziness. In fact, procrastination is more likely when the task is meaningful and the individual cares about doing it well. . . .

People do not choose to fail or disappoint. No one wants to feel incapable, apathetic, or ineffective. If you look at a person’s action (or inaction) and see only laziness, you are missing key details. There is always an explanation. There are always barriers. Just because you can’t see them, or don’t view them as legitimate, doesn’t mean they’re not there. Look harder.

People do not choose to fail or disappoint.

source

Be normal.
Be yourself.
Doubt
everything.
Live in fear.

A fun website is Merriam-Webster's Time Traveler, that lists words first used in print by year. Some of the words that were born alongside me:

• Asperger's syndrome
• Beatbox
• Cheap shot
• Dominatrix
• Fajita
• Homophobe
• Kickboxing
• Loony tunes
• Megacorporation
• Mental health day
• Micromachine
• Motherboard
• Needle-nose pliers
• Nonsexist
• Overdiagnosis
• Passive smoking
• Performance art
• Post-racial
• Reboot
• Rest area
• Sexual assault
• Sexual harassment
• Sex worker
• Subdirectory
• Tight-ass
• Username
• VCR
• Visual literacy
• Wiseass

Hmm. Maybe I need to try writing a story that incorporates all of those.

source

Dream
about
boredom

The Key To Raising Brilliant Kids? Play A Game

NPR Education reporters and Life Kit hosts Anya Kamenetz and Cory Turner talk with Hirsh-Pasek about the "six C's" that kids need to succeed — collaboration, communication, content, critical thinking, creative innovation and confidence — and why raising brilliant kids starts with redefining brilliant. . . .

Let's look at what counts as success. Give me your take on these two definitions:

One is your child's success is to be a good reader, a good writer and really good at math. We'll call that the traditional view.

Two is what I call the 21st century view of success: a happy, healthy, caring, child who grows up to be a collaborative person, a creative innovator, a thinking person and a social person, while also being a good citizen. . . .

Everything goes through the social. Everything we learn starts with collaboration and relationships. When you think of it, we aren't born ready to hop out of the womb and into the world. We have a lot of learning to do, and the learning is social. . . .

There are fun games you can play that build on the six C's and get the motivation up.

It turns out that you learn better when things are joyful than when they're not joyful. . . .

Play is active, not passive. And it turns out the way we learn is active, not passive. When we're sitting there like a couch potato we aren't learning as much as when we're doing.

It should be meaningful as opposed to meaningless, so when we're memorizing flashcards stuff, that's not play.

Generally, play is socially interactive as opposed to solo.

And it's iterative. That means each time you revisit it, there's something new to discover about it. I think you can have true play where the kid is the director, not the adult. And adults out there, don't interfere by jumping in and deciding what's going on with your child's play. Help by setting the environment and going with their story and supporting it.

The "six C's" that kids need to succeed: collaboration, communication, content, critical thinking, creative innovation and confidence.

Every Child Can Become a Lover of Books

Martin’s philosophy is that all children can become lovers of books, but that it’s an educator’s job to help them find the stories in which they can see or imagine themselves. In 2017, a study published by the American Library Association indicated that in the United States, some 87 percent of librarians were white. The pool of American teachers, meanwhile, is about 80 percent white, and children’s literature as a genre is also overwhelmingly written by, and about, white people. Yet only half of American children are white—and Martin has taken note over the years of the ways in which the whiteness of school libraries and classroom book collections can alienate students of color, resulting in missed opportunities to foster a love of reading. . . .

Martin emphasized that what she and her staff teach at Camp Read-a-Rama is less reading and more the enjoyment of reading. In Martin’s experience, reading becomes a more appealing prospect to kids when “you put them in an immersive environment where they’re surrounded by books that they like,” she said. “You’ve got a book that all of a sudden becomes an activity: You read about the wet dog, and then you’re acting it out on the stage, or you’re outside splashing around just like the wet dog did, for example.” Martin refers to this approach as “reducing the distance between books and life.” . . .

In addition to teaching children and graduate students, Martin routinely advises librarians who want their libraries to better serve children and families of color. . . .

Martin says participants in these workshops often tell her afterward that she got them thinking for the first time about how certain books might resonate differently, or fail to resonate at all, with kids of various backgrounds. Rizzuto, too, counts this among the key lessons she’s learned from Martin: “She showed me that childhood doesn’t look the same across cultures, classes, or races.”

The ways in which the whiteness of school libraries and classroom book collections can alienate students of color, resulting in missed opportunities to foster a love of reading.

source

You're as amazing as a
bread bin

How to Talk About Race, While White

Talking about race can be difficult and uncomfortable. It’s also essential, especially for white people. . . .

In any conversation and particularly in conversations about race, we have to give consideration and weight to the imbalance of power that pervades our society. That imbalance of power, where white people are advantaged over people of other races, permeates everything, even and maybe especially, our conversations about race. It’s one of the central reasons that talking about race is fraught with challenges, especially in multi-racial groups. . . .

The first rule of Anti-Racist Club is “Please DO talk about race and racism.” It’s uncomfortable and unfamiliar for most white people to talk about race. We tend to pause and stammer before using racial words because we’ve been so conditioned NOT to use them. But it is essential for us to engage in these conversations. We can’t understand it if we don’t talk about it. . . .

We tend not to think about our own racial identity very much. But of course, our race has real implications both for ourselves and for people of other races. It’s important that we think about and identify our racial identity, just as people of color are forced to, so that we can begin to level the relational playing field. . . .

The conversation isn’t about you. If you have a relevant personal story to tell, tell it, but don’t make yourself the hero or the point of the story. And if a person of color tells a story from their own experience, resist the urge to respond to it with a story of your own. Let their story stand, ask questions, encourage them to expand on their story. . . .

A common dynamic in multi-racial groups is for white people to ask or expect the people of color to educate them about race and racism. That expectation may place an emotional burden on people of color, and it’s a burden that many of them are tired of carrying. Understand that nobody owes you that education. We need to do our own work. . . .

When we cause harm or offense, or when someone points out racism implicit in something we said or did, one common defensive response is to pull back and disengage from the conversation. Please don’t. Disengagement is a manifestation of white fragility and an exercise in privilege. We have the luxury of disengaging from discomfort around race. Those moments are the ones loaded with the most potential for growth. Stay in the conversation. Lean in. Listen intently. Give yourself the material and space for reflection and growth.

Disengagement is a manifestation of white fragility and an exercise in privilege.

source

Search
for
solitude
and you might
achieve a happy
life.

How Freedom Divides

By its nature, society membership entails a loss of freedom. . . .

People must look and act appropriately, adhering within accepted limits to whatever differences set us apart from them. I call such distinctions markers of identity. These markers, which other primates lack, can include devotion to a particular flag, manners of dress, hairstyles, languages, gestures, moral attitudes, and even slight differences, detected subconsciously, in how we walk and smile. These traits are so numerous and ever-present that human beings are walking billboards for their identities.

We feel free insofar as our actions and appearance fall within the socially sanctioned bounds of these sometimes unstated rules (weighing some of them more than others), our expressions of our identity adhering to our commitments to the society and to our station and status within it. Generally speaking, the more privations a society has undergone, the more rigid the expectations put on its people.

In a thriving democracy, persons with radical takes on faith or dress retain citizenship, but things can get nasty for those who don’t conform to the required markers when times are tough. Further, the repulsion felt toward social deviants can be so profound that we treat them more harshly for the same offense than we do a foreigner—an overreaction known in psychology as the black sheep effect. Outliers poorly matching what is “normal” are ostracized, stigmatized, pressured to change or treated as foreign, depending on the kind and extent of the aberrance. Such censure puts a rein on what goes on in a society.

Extremist regimes aside, by and large citizens everywhere gladly embrace the restrictions placed upon them, believing in the rightness of their society and finding comfort within the restraints it imposes. A society’s members seldom have to be sold on why their ways are best: They absolutely know how things should be, and for them a life arranged that way is worth living. The return from the society is substantial: a sense of ease, even camaraderie, around like-minded others; security and social support; access to resources, choices for employment, suitable marriage partners, the arts, and much more.

Human beings are walking billboards for their identities. . . . Outliers poorly matching what is “normal” are ostracized, stigmatized, pressured to change or treated as foreign.