Move Over, ‘Stranger Danger’→

Joe Keohane, writing for the Boston Globe, highlights multiple studies that emphasize the widespread fear of talking to strangers is largely unfounded and that such interactions can help young people develop critical social skills and reduce their reliance on technology:

"According to a growing number of psychologists, talking to strangers confers a host of benefits that will lessen the malaise affecting young people... studies she [Sandstrom] and others have conducted have consistently found that talking to strangers makes people happy, enhances a sense of belonging and connectedness, and alleviates feelings of loneliness, isolation, and distrust. This holds for men and women and introverts and extroverts across a wide range of ages."

I abandoned grading my students and stopped taking attendance. Here’s what happened→

J. W. Traphagan, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, abandoned traditional grading and attendance requirements, opting for a self-evaluation system that eliminated busywork and replaced grades with an assessment of participation and a score assigned by each student to reflect their performance. Here are his takeaways:

First, I often hear that students are apathetic about learning these days. This is inaccurate. Students are, in fact, excited about learning.

However, they’re indifferent to or even bothered by the educational system’s incessant emphasis on quantitative measures and assignments that seem to have little or no value. Most students want to learn, but don’t see the conventional educational approach as providing a particularly good framework for learning.

Second, many students have experienced enormous stress and anxiety. High school can be a pressure cooker focused on grades, test scores, GPAs and getting into the right college. As a result, learning seems like a side effect of education rather than the goal.

My students consistently note that when they don’t have to anticipate the expectations of their professor, they can focus on taking chances in their writing and thinking. And taking chances often leads to true learning and mastery of a topic.

Finally, this experiment has forced me to think about intellectual rigor in the classroom. Is a system designed to generate stress through piling on work and being “hard” — whatever that means — rigorous?

Or is rigor about creating an environment where students enjoy the learning process and, as a result, willingly engage in broadening their horizons and thinking about their lives?

I think it’s the latter.

It's Called Languishing→

The topic of mental health comes up so frequently in conversation about our response to the ongoing pandemic. It is clear that people are not doing well and that we must do more to support our collective and individual well-being. This article by Adam Grant summed up the state of things so well. I can’t stop sharing it.

In psychology, we think about mental health on a spectrum from depression to flourishing. Flourishing is the peak of well-being: You have a strong sense of meaning, mastery and mattering to others. Depression is the valley of ill-being: You feel despondent, drained and worthless.

Languishing is the neglected middle child of mental health. It’s the void between depression and flourishing — the absence of well-being. You don’t have symptoms of mental illness, but you’re not the picture of mental health either.

Why videoconferencing can feel so exhausting→

Dr. Jena Lee explains why spending so much time on Zoom and other videoconferencing platforms is leading to increased fatigue, tiredness, worry, and burnout:

“However, on video, most [social] cues are difficult to visualize, since the same environment is not shared (limiting joint attention) and both subtle facial expressions and full bodily gestures may not be captured. Without the help of these unconscious cues on which we have relied since infancy to socioemotionally assess each other and bond, compensatory cognitive and emotional effort is required.”