NEGATIVE VIRTUE SIGNALLING IS A FORM OF GAS LIGHTING

“Virtue Signalling” is a recent buzz word that denotes the actions of a person who is trying to demonstrate, usually in a conspicuous manner, their own moral virtue.   It often has a connotation of being an empty gesture, but that doesn’t have to be the case.  It can be mildly annoying to very negative in its effects.

There is, however, a negative version of virtue signalling which doesn’t get much discussion.  For lack of a better term, let’s call it negative VS.  This is when somebody accuses somebody else of poor morals, virtue or political correctness.  A few basic examples of this might be when someone behind you yells, “thanks for not holding the door” if you are exiting a store and don’t see someone behind you, or if you encounter a friend and they say, “thanks for not asking how I’m feeling” in a sarcastic way.  I suppose that there are times when one might be legitimately shamed for not holding a door open, such as when a person with a walker or a cane is struggling and you are obviously aware of it.  However most of the time I find this to be a petty and exploitative action.

I ask myself how I would feel if I were to say such a thing to a friend or stranger.  If someone in front of me neglected to hold a door, or if I encountered a friend and they didn’t begin the conversation by asking how I was feeling, and I immediately drew attention to either of these, how would I feel?  To put it bluntly, I would feel like an ass.  I would feel like I was deliberately applying a negative judgement and trying to make the other person feel less virtuous and less confident, often without really understanding the entire picture.

This is an act of tearing someone else down, trying to make them feel self doubt about their worth.  While there may be some specific cases where that is justified, I don’t feel that this would be the majority of cases and, if ever,  should be done very carefully, deliberately and instructively.  In most cases it is done to bolster the self righteousness of the person making the comment and to fabricate a reality where the other person should be feeling badly or lacking in moral virtue.  This kind of formatting of reality is nothing less than gas lighting.  It is stealing energy from the target of the comment and is one of the many kinds of social vampirism that is related to gas lighting.

I have found that at this time of year, many of those who are disposed towards normal virtue signalling can easily fall into the negative sort.  I don’t lecture those who do it (as it would likely be a waste of time), but understanding the process allows you to protect yourself from any guilt or self disparaging thoughts.  It protects you from the energy leeching that is at the heart of the practice.  –Not to say that one can never be criticized or corrected.  But this practice is unhealthy for both parties concerned.

Screen Addiction

Commentary on This Is Life with Lisa Ling, S5E4, “Screen Addiction”

I made a point of watching this particular episode of This Is Life because I strongly suspected that it would shed light on the thesis of my book, The Tao of the Wild.  The episode takes a close look at the case studies of two young people who fell victim to screen addiction.  The first led to a tragic suicide while the second led to attempted suicides and eventual therapy.  Both stories have a lot to say about the influence of social media on individuals with poor identity structures and conflicted Multiple Selves within their personality.

My central thesis is that all of us have personalities constructed of Multiple Selves, a perspective held by Hal and Sidra Stone in their book The Divided Self, and supported by a multitude of others in the psychological community along with the current Zen Buddhist community.  I have explained and expounded on this thesis extensively in my book.  These Multiple Selves can be in a state of anarchy, where they take turns steering the ship.  If there is a captain, then there is some order and coordination, but if there is not then there can be conflict and confusion within the personality.  Throughout it all, there is a striving for identity, whether it be one Self dominating the others, a “Captain Self” or Controller which can bring order and some unity, or even a higher, Aware Self which can reify identity and self control.

It goes without saying that a developing adolescent lives in a state of turmoil with regard to their inner life and the dominance of various Selves.  Not only is their state of development at an early stage, with the whole system being soft and malleable, but a teenager’s life is full of various roles that they have to navigate and which are often at odds.  This, of course, is true to varying degrees with some teens coping better than others.  However, all go through identity pangs and tribulations, risking depression, sometimes frantically looking for feedback or validation from external sources.

Enter Social Media.  Teens have always risked placing themselves in negative feedback loops through a poor choice of friends, gangs or even involvement in cults.  However with social media, this risk becomes magnified tremendously.  The case studies in this TV episode clearly show teens who had normal self doubts and teenage angst but who discovered negative and depressing social media sites where they could, in the first case of the suicide, indulge their own dark impulses and get regular, powerful validation from depressing sites and other like minded people.  This is all done in secret, with parents not really knowing what is happening, and even friends often being locked out of the social media loop.  It becomes a separate life because it hijacks separate Selves within the adolescent.  One Self finds validation and gains superiority over the others, especially if it is a teen with an already weak or confused identity structure.  Without a Controller/Captain there is little self awareness, observation or diagnostics.  The validated Self is one acting in a self reinforcing narrative of desperation.

In the second case study a strong academic and athletically successful boy became addicted to gaming, finding easy self validation on line in various video games.  He often spent consecutive, sleepless days online.  This, of course, can’t happen without sacrificing real, face to face, social interactions.  Isolation is inevitable, as is a disengagement from normal social activities like team sports.  It is a double dose of disconnection, relationships and activity, with real life consequences.  Those consequences can only complicate life, often driving the teen further into their gaming and isolation.

In this second case we see the same result on the Self and Personality structure of the screen addicted person.  What starts as a healthy personality, with diverse and engaged Selves, becomes seduced by the screen into a more and more narrow Self structure.  “Seduced” is an apt word, as the boy in question admitted that viewing pornography played a significant role in his screen time.  One Self, The Gamer, strongly supported by a Sexual Self, totally dominates his Personality to the exclusion of almost everything else, while barricaded in his bedroom.

The mother of the girl who committed suicide states emphatically that her daughter would still be alive if it were not for social media.  There is some truth to that, as it was the feedback loop from the depression web sites and chat rooms that undoubtedly fed Selves that are not abnormal in adolescents, but which become abnormal when fed regularly.  Teens often have to overcome depressing thoughts and complicated situations.  They do so by engaging with their environment, including family, friends and other help when necessary.  Reinforcement of only the negative along with isolation may make the teen think that they have a “real identity” in the long run, but it is really just feeding one of many Selves, -and not the healthy one.

So what can be done?  The first temptation is to blame Social Media, and there has been a lot of talk lately about how sites are contrived to addict or subliminally engage users, much like a gambling casino.  There should be steps taken to minimize that effect.  However I don’t think that will ever really happen.  The dark websites that the girl visited would not disappear in that scenario, nor would the porn sites or gaming sites that enticed the boy.

By understanding the mechanics of personality, we can see that a big part of the problem is shallow identity structure, -very much in synch with the idea of shallow values and connectivity that I have explained in my book.  Strengthening that identity structure is something that is completely ignored in our education system.  In fact it was completely ignored in the therapy that the boy eventually participated in.  I was stunned to see that there was no internal therapy as part of their program.  There was no meditation or mindfulness exercises, -the exact measures that would create self reflection and would strengthen the Captain of the ship, so that the adolescent would have a wider perspective than that coming from their various screen lives and Selves.  This, I believe, is the more practical answer.  Social media is a business model that is not going away, and which honestly has a lot of potential benefits for the people who can engage in it more objectively.  So, let’s start giving our teens, and people in general, the tools and wider perspective necessary to cope with their technological world.  Lets start educating people to have a stronger and deeper connection to their own personalities and identities.

That will not only help prevent screen addiction, but will have many other positive consequences.

More on The Cult of Trump

There are many simplistic definitions of a CULT that provide a very broad and general meaning.  I’ve researched the material and come up with a more narrow and specific definition, which I think points to more dangerous cults more effectively than a broad definition.

It rests on 7 essential principles:

1. It has a very strong leader, based on personal, emotional identification and an extreme feeling of allegiance and compliance.
2. There are demands, pressures and pledges of allegiance to that extreme leadership figure or group of people.
3. There is a central religious or ideological foundation that is rigidly adhered to.
4. Some form of impending doom is involved, whether it be apocalyptic or some other sort of catastrophe.
5. That impending doom is used as a vehicle to mobilize fear as a strong motivator.
6. There is a routine suspension of reason and a dismissal of facts, with severe rationalization being obvious.
7. There are paranoid tendencies dismissing all sources outside of the cult as conspiracies opposed to their one right way of seeing things.
8. There is a strong pressure and often serious consequences forcing members to not leave the cult.

 

[postscript]   There’s one other characteristic of most cults that I want to add after watching some of the televangelists this Easter Sunday morning.  (I’m normally not in the habit of doing that, but GPS was a rerun, so I ended up flipping through channels.) Cults present arguments in calculated increments that are designed to convince people with weak reasoning skills to go deeper and deeper into ideological or religious beliefs.  They’re half reasonable (if appealing to a more semi-rational group) or deal in gradations of emotional ecstacy with the less rational and more emotional group.  They believe that if you repeat something, however ridiculous, often enough eventually many people will believe it.  The facts around it aren’t important, but you still have to pull the con job in gradual increments so that cognitive dissonance can take hold. Whichever strategy is present (and sometimes all are), it is calculated and deliberately designed to inch the potential cult member towards the desired goals.  It is different from “education” per se in two ways.  First of all the strategies are diabolical and designed to minimize personal awareness rather than maximize it.  Second, it is done in the context of the eight characteristics mentioned above.

 

Do with that what you will.  Personally I have no trouble seeing Donald Trump’s supporters as falling in line with most of these to a rather extreme degree.  Granted, you could make a case for any political movement being a cult, however by comparison I honestly don’t see Sanders supporters in the same fanatical light.  There are some pretty easily identified differences between charisma and fanaticism.  There are some pretty easily identified differences between speaking purely emotionally and putting forth rational arguments.  Easy, at least, for those that are not embraced by the cult.

More and more, as I’ve watched Trump surrogates on news talk shows, I see blank eyes and totally uncritical minds.  I’ve talked to many individuals who have come from bonifide cults, and Trump surrogates most certainly have “the look”.  It has gotten to the point where some of their advisories on these panels seem like they want to physically go over and shake sense into them, and I can’t blame them.  Recently several panel discussions actually cut the mike of Trump supporters because they just couldn’t stand the nonsense that they were spewing.  I think that marginalizing reason and suspending critical thinking are a slippery slope for some people, aided by incremental brainwashing and the calculated use of logical fallacies.  Once you start doing it, cognitive dissonance takes over and you end up going all the way down the rabbit hole.

 

Fortunately, a cult leader who is an outright narcissist is likely to consume himself and the cult in time.  Also, unless there is some kind of societal psychosis, the cult should have a ceiling, reinforced by the aversion to that narcissism.  That’s starting to happen now.  But watching these people embarrass themselves as they are drawn into this hypnotic state is almost too weird to believe.  I am hoping that it will be a socially transformative experience when it is all over, …and in a positive way.

REFOCUSING THE PATH MEDITATION

About 30 years ago my first serious exposure and training in meditation came from the Native American Shamanic tradition as taught by Tom Brown Jr. in the Tracker School. It was the model that I used when integrating meditation skills into my youth wilderness programs, with about ten groups and one hundred youth having gone through the process. I won’t take time here to outline the original program. If you went through it either with me or at the Tracker School, you know what I’m talking about. Others will be able to follow along without too much difficulty.

Very briefly, The Tracker meditations involved guided meditation that walked down a path, stairs and eventually through an archway to a spiritual domain. The path was the realm of the unconscious mind while the stairs and beyond had a more metaphysical focus. Tom Brown spent little time developing the skills of the path, spending most of his training time on the more spiritual skills. I found that the skills associated with the path were the easiest and most practical skills to teach, so while I still spent a lot of time on the farther reaches, I had a strong interest in developing those of the path. Not only were they more down to earth and less controversial, but they also seemed, to me at least, to form a prerequisite for the more advanced skills. Balance and harmony within one’s own mind might be a necessary foundation before examining the balance and harmony of the rest of existence. Originally you walked along the path encountering a series of clearings or stations, each of which allowed you to exercise a particular skill. Beyond a cursory explanation, I don’t remember any course material that focused on these subconscious skills.

And so in my own research and reading over the years I began to piece together additional exercises and extensions to the existing skills, trying always to remain faithful to the original teachings. From Dan Millman I learned about Huna traditions and the power of the subconscious, which was very consistent with the things Tom Brown taught. From Dr. Hal Stone I learned about Divided Self Theory, which has since been adopted by the American Zen Association as a major focus of meditation. Other people such as Jon Kabat-Zinn and Dr. Dan Siegel extended the value and domain of meditation even further, reaching into an integration with neuro psychology and biology.

And so, after 30 years of working with the original meditations and being afraid to violate their structure, I finally decided that I could alter them to include many of the lessons I’d learned. As I began to do that, I noticed a flow that ran through some of the new skills that I wanted to add. What follows is a description of that new structure and the associated flow.

*    *     *     *     *

The heart of basic meditation is an inner stillness, uncomplicated by thoughts, emotions, judgements and physical sensation. To accomplish this we focus on breath and surrender. One of the first meditation exercises I like to use to introduce the practice is to simply count your breaths in loops of four, exclusively thinking about the counting and nothing else. When other thoughts or feelings arise, you push them aside after acknowledging them. Accept and dismiss. This is the heart of meditation. Later the counting can be replaced just by attention and awareness of breath. Guided visualizations are also used in meditations. The aim when using these is that the act of visualizing something becomes the single focus of attention, replacing breath (although the breath can be returned to at any time in order to reinforce the meditation).

When first entering the meditation I ask subjects to visualize themselves at the beginning of a familiar path, retaining this structure from the original Tracker practice. (A path and a journey is a useful archetype.) The beginning of the path can have two purposes. The first is just the basic grounding of pure meditation and the values that come with it. The second is that it is a place to do the basic meditation based on Siegel’s Wheel of Awareness meditation (the modified version of which I described in the previous entry). The beginning of the path means the journey has not begun and the meditation has not yet been involved with any sort of intention other than to experience the silence of meditation. This silence or pure meditation has its own value, often overlooked or skipped by Shamanic traditions. Never in any of the Tracker classes was this pure meditation either practised or valued. As I state in the previous entry, doing this version of the Wheel of Awareness meditation has its own benefits, and is essential in both deepening the meditative state and forming the mind body integration which will continue to trend through the other stations on the path.

The second purpose that can be employed at the beginning of the path is as a visualization staging area. In order to begin the transition of focus from breath to visualization I will often have them imagine picking up an object and experiencing that object using multiple senses. Not only what it looks like, but what it feels like, its texture and temperature, what it sounds like if you tap it, even what it smells or tastes like, if appropriate. The idea is to engage and strengthen the visualization before heading down the path.

Moving down the path to the first actual station/clearing means leaving the complete silence of the breath oriented focus and introducing some intention into the meditation. It becomes like a lucid dream, still connected to the silence, but also accepting the impulses from the subconscious in a non-judgemental way. That first station is the place of All Personal Memory (again retaining the original structure from the Tracker school). APM can have several roles in meditation. It can be a place where you retell yourself a story of an incident in your life, re-experiencing it in memory but also depicting it in words. This is particularly valuable with an emotional incident that you may have trouble accepting or understanding. By reliving it and retelling it in words, according to Dr. Siegel, it becomes integrated into various parts of the brain’s neurobiology, including the Pre Frontal Cortex, which is the rational part of the brain that makes sense of things. This is not to say that all emotional experiences need to be rationalized or reduced to rational components. What it means is that experiences need to be made available to all parts of the brain in order to best understand and learn from them. Putting the experience into words helps the brain integrate the experience more completely. (And, as I outlined in another previous entry, this is very similar to an exercise that Tom Brown suggested called Tree Preaching).

The second function of this station is a more direct connection with memories and past experiences, allowing you to revisit them and benefit from them. Examples of doing this might involve finding lost items or remembering the particulars of conversations. Using a screen on which to project your memories and thoughts is a good device here, which was used by Fool’s Crow in his shamanic visions.

The central theme of the APM station is the vividness of memories. In order to both elicit and integrate memories it is important for them to be fully vivid and multi-sensory. (In some of the more advanced uses of this station, which I’m still exploring, using it with various NLP techniques will involve the manipulation of the vividness of the memories.) The energy of the vividness of memories is then carried along to the next station on the path.

Moving down the path to the next station or clearing brings you to the place of Body Control. (This is a change from the original setup done for several reasons which will be explained later.) In Body Control, you communicate with your sub-conscious in order to get its assistance in controlling autonomic responses in your body. This can be anything from increasing body temperature and metabolism in the cold, to visualizing yourself as healthy and healed in the case of sickness or injury. I firmly believe that everything from metabolism to immune responses to phobias can be influenced by the conscious mind if it knows how to get the subconscious mind on board.

Effective communication with the subconscious mind rests on proper visualization of the outcome and empowering it with positive emotional intention. That proper visualization rests on the work done with memories in the APM station. To visualize a warm body, for example, you have to have a strong memory of a time when you were warm, drawing that memory forth to use it. When I want to be warmer, I will visualize myself standing beside a campfire or, better yet, slipping into a hot tub. In order for those visualizations to work, it is very helpful to have actually had those experiences and to be able to call on them. Memory facilitates my intended visualization of feeling warm. The skills of APM are an important foundation on which to build the visualizations of BC.

Self Healing, which was a separate station in the Tracker format, is combined with Body Control, which I don’t think Tom Brown would actually be upset with as he’d many times referred to self healing as just a form of body control. It uses the same kind of envisioning and, to my mind, the same level of intentionality.

Farther down the path, we come to the third station/clearing, which I’ve chosen to modify considerably from the original format. For lack of a better name, this is the place of Selves. As memories and intentionality combine, they create patterns of response which create the multiplicity of Selves that often rules our minds. We are not one Self, but many, having a different set of responses, attitudes and values depending on external stimuli. There is a self that tries to be responsible and another that strives to be fun-loving and wild. There is the self that is the parent and another that is the child. There is a self that is confident and another that is a critic. These, in turn, create alliances within our mind to produce Meta-selves. The Selves and the Meta-selves arise in our lives, often automatically, to rule our actions and desires. (This interpretation of mind comes from Dr. Hal Stone and a lot of Ken Wilber’s work, including the Zen applications developed by Genpo Roshi and “Big Mind”. It can also be traced back to the works of Georges Gurjieff and P.D. Ouspensky, who insisted that man was a mechanical manifestation of multiple selves way back in the beginning of the 20^th Century.)

The station of Selves offers a lot of opportunities to work with these selves. By using techniques pioneered by Dr. Stone in embodying isolated selves, and learning to use them within a meditation, one can have a board meeting of selves, to discuss events or plans from multiple perspectives. One can have a conversation between one’s own Child Self and Adult Self, or between a Critical Self and a Confident Self. Just recognizing that they exist within a broader framework is often enough to create a better perspective on things. This is very similar to those old visuals of the angel sitting on a person’s right shoulder and the devil on their left shoulder, but this is more specific and individual. I have many times identified an emotional reaction to a situation as my Child Self sulking, thereby allowing me to address and hopefully resolve the situation. You can do this at a boardroom table or a court room or whatever other method of dialogue works for you.

Two additional Selves are important within this station. One is Primal Self, which was jumped over earlier on the path. Primal Self is the animalistic, lower brain function, unencumbered by higher reason. It is the one you want to bring forth when there is an emergency survival situation, or you have to build a shelter in record time, or you have to carry a person to safety even if you feel physically unable to. I like to empower the Primal Self with an animal totem (or several). Moving and reacting the way a majestic animal would can help you connect with the primal powers of your mind, which are still very much present even though we keep them chained up much of the time. Unleashing Primal Self becomes a conscious decision when it is done in this way, although Primal Self can also emerge when someone is drunk or angry, unwanted and uncontrolled. Learning to bring it forth consciously will make it much less likely to pop up in unwanted or random situations, as you learn to develop a positive relationship with it.

The other facet of this station is the Shadow Selves. One of the most important components of mindfulness and mental awareness fostered by meditation is an awareness of Shadow Selves. These are the repressed and buried selves collected through life that linger and fester within the mind, waiting for the time that it can slip in and cause trouble. When you are dealing with a situation and suddenly have an intense emotional reaction against a decision or a person, a reaction that seems disproportional to the situation an which you can’t quite figure where it came from, that is very often a Shadow trying to break out of its confines. If you do something irresponsible, out of context with your normal personality, and you are confused as to how it happened, that’s a Shadow. When you should be able to make a relationship work, but keep finding ways to sabotage it (or feel that the other person is sabotaging it), the Shadow may be putting in an appearance.

This is a huge and important area of work, pioneered by Carl Jung but brought into its own in Divided Self Theory and also in Ken Wilber’s work. There’s a lot more to be said about it than I can easily include here. But this station of Selves is definitely the right place to do a lot of the work. Shadows need to be confronted, accepted and reintegrated into the mind’s consciousness. A person who goes out and gets into trouble at wild parties may be dealing with a repressed “Wild Self” that wants to have fun, but is constantly kept in check by a more conservative or sedate set of Selves. Figuring that out, and thinking of ways for the Wild Self to manifest itself in ways that are acceptable to all or at least most of the Meta-Selves is something that can happen within a meditation.

 

These are the new stations on the path that I am currently using in meditation training. I like the way that it flows, with each station resting on skills practiced in the previous one. I like its richness and its ability to connect with real life problems and situations. I like that it also connects with modern neurological and brain research. It provides a whole arsenal of tools to use balancing the mind and reconnecting with all aspects of mind body and spirit. I see it as an essential prerequisite to the more spiritual tools and skills that can be found on the stairs and beyond. So many of those skills depend on Inner Vision and the kind of deep intuition which can only be found in the harmonious mind. Dan Millman and the Huna tradition actually say that one can only access the Higher Selves through the Subconscious. The Higher Selves don’t respond well to the Logical Mind. That’s an embedded part of the Tracker meditation training as well.

The final thing that I like about it is that it takes the woo factor out of meditation. Spiritual skills are controversial and often rub people the wrong way. These skills are very grounded and scientifically based. They shouldn’t grate against the rationalist or the religious. It gives skeptics a chance to familiarize themselves with meditation before approaching more controversial exercises, -if they ever do. And if they don’t, well they have still accomplished some very important things at this level.

Comments on “The Wheel of Awareness”

This is the first of two entries in which I will attempt to revise some of the meditation exercises that I’ve been teaching for the past 20 years or so, which were originally based on the teachings contained in Tom Brown Jr’s Tracker Philosophy courses.

A major part of the revision comes from the neuropsychology work of Dr. Dan Siegel, and I would like to start here by examining his Wheel of Awareness exercise.

When I first read about it, I felt that it would be valuable addition to the Tracker “Path” meditations (which I will explain more in the second entry). However, after attempting to use and teach it I came to the realization that, while it is a great exercise, the perspective it uses would benefit from a little tweaking.

Siegel’s Wheel of Awareness exercise has you meditate from a calm, peaceful centre, which he regards as the hub of a wheel, and then focus outward to senses, thoughts, emotions and interconnectedness on the rim of the wheel. Personally, I found this very difficult due to the fact that the conscious intention of focusing outward to specific stimuli interfered with the openness of the meditation. It was too much thinking. And yet, I knew that within the exercise was a very valuable lesson.

So I tried flipping it inside out. Meaning that instead of going from the hub to the rim with an active intention of identifying distractions in different categories, I allowed the distraction to come from the rim to the hub. Instead of looking for particular distractions to your calm centre by cycling through the various categories as Siegel’s exercise suggests, I just stayed in the silence and acknowledged the distractions as they arose on their own, calmly recognizing each for what “type” they were, -emotional, thinking, sensory-, before accepting them and then dismissing them. I know that this is really just a description of a classic meditation technique, but it has the slight twist of acknowledging the distracting impulses as coming from a particular place of origin, whether it be a physical or emotional irritation, or just a stray memory. That’s important in that it plays to the neurological integration goal that Siegel intends for his exercise. While this is definitely meant to be a meditation exercise (or “mindfulness” as it has been rebranded in the past while), the explicit goal is to encourage neural integration and plasticity. That’s just a scientific way of saying that the goal is to get in touch with all parts of your mind and body. The activity builds links which eventually allows for more awareness and more self control.

So, to summarize the new exercise, I begin with the standard “breath to surrender”, which is basically centering on awareness of your breath as the single focus of your awareness to the exclusion of all other distractions. This centering on breath is a trigger that has been established in prior exercises linking breath to deep states of relaxation. Of course, unless you are highly proficient in meditation, that focus on breath is going to be interrupted by various distractions. As the itch or the distant sound or the memory of an argument pop up, I briefly recognize them as coming from my senses or my body or my emotions or my mind’s activity. In a sense, I’m recognizing from which part of Siegel’s Wheel of Awareness the impulse or distraction has arisen. Then I let it go and return to the silence and focus on the breath. And I do this for all of the distractions as they arise, allowing them to arise on their own rather than trying to go and look for them. I recognize them, dismiss them and consciously return to the quiet of my breath, over and over again.

In doing this I not only strengthen the various benefits of meditation such as building powers of concentration and learning how to calm my mind, but I also become acquainted with that mind and the facets that are constantly striving for attention and dominance. I get the benefits of the meditation and I also become more connected to the fact that I have a body, a mind, emotional impulses and interpersonal concerns. The package gets tied up with a nice bow of mindfulness, which leads to a more mindful, aware self.

 

 

THE CONTROVERSY AROUND THE PROPOSED NEW SEX ED. CURRICULUM IN ONTARIO

Let’s start with some facts. Something which some news media outlets don’t consider important.

1. There is very little specific information about the content of the new curriculum available to the general public. That is not surprising as it has been made clear that it is still in the formative stage, with parent input still being sought and utilized. With such a politically and socially charged topic, parading it too early in the media would only lead to a circus which would hinder any kind of intelligent discussion. It eventually must be presented to a wider audience, before implementation and as a final formative stage, but at this point in time it would be counterproductive. Take the Sun Media pouncing on the “Anal 101” graphic behind one of the posters, with absolutely no context or explanation involved. Sex education is an easy target for sensationalism. Case in point, the Charles McVety attacks back in 2010, supported and advanced by the Ontario PC part, subsequently condemned by the Canadian Boadcasting Standards Council as shamelessly bigoted. Currently we see the same kind of shamelessness. It is interesting that a thorough Google shows that only SUN News and the various blogs that have simply cut and pasted their article, have any mention of the “Anal 101” issue. I find this unusual in that SUN is not the only conservative media outlet in Ontario, …just, I guess, the only tawdry one.
   The fact seems to be that parents are still being invited to provide feedback and input regarding this curriculum. If there are suspicions that this might not be a fair vetting, then address that and ask for a better representation of parents in that process. One parent from each school seems to be a good deal, although I can see how some religious groups might fear being left out of the process. There is a Catholic School system in Ontario, though, so they should easily be able to manage adequate representation. The truth of the matter is, though, that many of these religious groups would not be satisfied with anything less than abstinence based education and little more. Their cries of “secrecy” at this stage are not valid, and weren’t with the 2010 document where, clearly, enough was revealed about it to result in protests leading to its cancellation.
   However, I admit that after proper vetting, the provincial government does have a responsibility to release the final document to the public for more general scrutiny. There’s no scenario where that will go well. We live in a social structure with too many divergent values and world views. However, if the majority agrees (-not a majority of parents, but a majority of our society-) then moving ahead with it is the nature of social progress.
2. This is an old story. As part of Wynne’s campaign when becoming leader of the provincial Liberal Party, she made it clear that she’d supported the scrapped 2010 curriculum document and that it was her intention to reintroduce it in some form. There are news articles to that effect prior to the last provincial election, and yet the Liberals won a majority. There are no transparency issues here. One can’t help but wonder to what degree Wynne’s own sexual orientation may be playing a role in the views of some more conservative critics.
3. Most educators agree that the 15 year old Sex Ed. curriculum is woefully outdated for the changes that have taken place in that time. A little statistical research (not to mention anecdotal) shows how much of a shift there has been in the level of access to sexual material as a result of social media. Sexting and cameras on everything from home computers to laptops to tablets to phones are a game changer. Attitudes towards sexual engagement have changed and become more open, with the very definition of sexual activity having changed with terms like “wheeling” and “friends with benefits” becoming common place for lunch room banter. Access to pornography has become progressively easier and more commonly sought out than ever before, with most parents powerless to block it short of simply denying kids access to any form of technology. (And then they still have to contend with access that friends may have, -or as I’ve often hear, kids finding it on their parents computers, not realizing that kids are more tech savvy and better able to investigate search histories and hidden files than are the parent.) Having been a teacher (now retired) and a leader of several youth groups, I can say with a degree of authority that I’ve noticed a dramatic and significant shift in this whole area specifically over the past ten years.
4. When creating and vetting a curriculum guideline, while parents certainly have the right to provide input, so should education experts and teachers. The indication is that most education experts feel that the new curriculum is largely a good thing. Now, I can hear the protest out there, the old adage of “What do experts know, anyway.” Well, I’m sorry but I’m reluctant to bow to the right wing, anti-intellectual movement that seems to be so prevalent in the U.S., and give experts the respect that they are due. It is too easy to disagree by simply dismissing the words of those who have made it their life’s work to study and understand education. What do you replace it with; folk lore and religious dogma?? I can assure you that while such people might be busy asserting such “values”, it will make no difference to the sexual activities of their children. The states in the U.S. with the most dogmatic and repressive attitudes towards sexuality and sex education are also those with the highest incidence of teen/unwanted pregnancy. In Canada it’s Quebec, which, coincidentally, has a largely Catholic school system.
   It is a sad fact that many parents, and especially the parents of kids that are in the highest risk category for early sexual activity, pregnancy and STDs, do not adequately exercise their responsibility of providing information and guidance in sexual matters. At the same time, they are often, though not always, the same people who object to sex education in schools. In many cases this is because they feel that exposing children to information about sex will encourage them to become more promiscuous. As stated above, the statistics are clear the ignorance about sex is directly related to unwanted pregnancy and STDs. By contrast to more conservative areas in the United States and Canada, in The Netherlands, where attitudes about teen sexuality are very open and liberal, teens are 15% more likely to use protection when having sex and the teen pregnancy rate is one sixth what it is in the States. There is one third the STD rate and The Netherlands has less than 1% the incidence of Gonorrhea. Ignorance does nobody any good.

I some ways it can be said that the need for the schools and the sex curriculum to step in is necessary for the very reason that many parents are ill equipped or often unwilling to do it themselves. If they were, the school curriculum would be less essential in properly equipping students to cope with the social media world. It needs to be done tactfully and with a measure of consensus and sensitivity, but it needs to be done.

Verbalizing Feelings and “Tree Preaching”

One of the insights that hit me a short while ago came as I was reading a part of Daniel Siegel’s book, Mindsight.  In it he talks about how younger children and teenagers (and I would suspect adults as well) can help to integrate feelings and other mental experiences into a wider awareness in their brains/minds by verbalizing them.  Siegel calls it “Telling The Story” when relating the technique to kids, but that about sums it up for anyone.  By going over an emotional incident and relating it in words to others or self, it provides the brain/mind with the opportunity to integrate the experience into the more rational parts of the brain, thereby giving that rational part more control over both the experience and the consequences of the memory.  Or in plain terms, it leads to better understanding and self control.

After reading this I immediately thought of a story told by Tom Brown Jr. in his Tracker classes, where his mentor, Stalking Wolf, would tell him to do something unusual whenever he turned up angry about something or emotionally preoccupied. Stalking Wolf would direct Tom to “go tell the trees”.  So Tom would go to a secluded place in the forest and proceed to rant at the trees, expressing his emotions, sometimes yelling at them.  It would, he said, always make him feel better.

It is interesting that this practice, suggested by someone following an ancient aboriginal tradition, is so similar to a practice suggested by a modern neurologist.  The practice and the outcome are identical.  It is only the conceptual perspective that is different.  In “tree preaching” the understanding was likely that the trees would listen to your problems and provide you with soothing understanding and energy.  The trees were seen as animate and helpful in and of themselves.  In the verbalization practice suggested by Siegel the explanation is a neuroplasticity and an integration of brain function.

From an Integral Studies point of view I find this fascinating.  It is an example of a single practice that functions the same at different world views.  The “tree preaching” is looking at it from a Mythical or Magical perspective, while “telling the story” is from a rational and scientific perspective.  The truth of the matter, though, is probably that the mythical practice predates the scientific one by centuries.  A lesson to be learned that those ancient practices deserve great respect in spite of the fact that their context may no longer seem valid in our scientific world view.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

Can Wisdom Be Taught?

Recently a friend and colleague made an interesting comment when saying, “You can’t teach wisdom.” We were talking about the idea that parents and teachers who are concerned with the developmental evolution of young people, had a responsibility to seek the same kind of evolution and development for themselves. They needed to both work on the rough edges that they themselves might have as a result of their own past development, and also should embrace the idea of personal development by recognizing that it continues throughout life. But when I suggested that this be a required part of teacher training and ongoing professional development, that’s when the “You can’t teach wisdom” comment came up.

I don’t agree. I think there are at least three methods available for “teaching wisdom”, specifically in so far as it applies to personal development and understanding the development of others.

 

1. While lecturing and instructing about wisdom may not be effective, it is generally understood that life experience is the main way that life wisdom develops. Such experience can be random events, or can be directed by carefully considered events. When a young troubled person is sent to a demanding program like Outward Bound, which forces them to confront personal challenges in a controlled environment, it is the experience that does the teaching as that person grows new insights. This is why corporate training activities including everything from laser tag to teambuilding games are persued by companies. It is why the social climate and day to day process of interaction should be carefully considered in schools.

Authors such as Jon Young and Mark Morey have done a lot of work concerning Rites Of Passage and their importance as people progress through the stages of life. They have identified several through childhood and adolescence, but have also pointed to many others spanning lifelong development. Each important life stage, they say, should be accompanied by a rite of passage that symbolizes and celebrates the new skills and responsibilities achieved. We often think of the adolescent rites of passage, with some cultures having maintained them, like the Jewish Bar Mitzvah, but often these are anchored in religious responsibilities rather than societal ones. For many adolescents, the only rite of passage that they experience is getting a driver’s license, getting drunk or losing their virginity, -of which only one comes anywhere near the defining requirements of symbolizing and celebrating new skills and responsibilities.

I am speaking about adolescent rites of passage because it is the one we are most familiar considering, but there are many achievements both earlier and later in life that equally demand such recognition.

 

2. Related to the engineering of experience is the role of the mentor. A mentor is a person who has already achieved some of the qualities of development which may still be lacking or weak in the person being mentored. A mentor not only engineers experiences which might assist a person in their development, but also can be a sounding board and feedback system in day to day life. It is generally accepted by psychologists and sociologists that people develop more effectively if they have good feedback that encourages them to reflect on their progress. In many arenas of life we call this a coach.

Mentors are used a little in the teaching profession, although my experience is that they are not used effectively or deliberately. They are sometimes introduced in situations where a teacher is experiencing difficulty. The idea that all teachers, even the best ones, might benefit from mentors (and may act as mentors) is dealt with very superficially. The idea that parenting might benefit from mentors is all but absent, except maybe for the sometimes good, sometimes bad advice that might come from grandparents. It’s basically a crap shoot.

Both teachers and parents would benefit from formal mentoring programs with established standards and goals.

 

3. Those standards and goals could come from a variety of sources, but there are a few that I’ve come across in my own development which I think are extremely valuable.

As I’ve noted in previous posts, there has been a lot of brain and neurological research and discovery done in the past two decades. In addition, and in a way that compliments that work, there has also been a surge in the consideration of mindfulness and meditation, largely spearheaded by Jon Kabat-Zinn. His book, Wherever You Go there You Are is a foundational block in this work. Over the past few years I have been researching a lot of material on these two subjects, most notabley Eagleson’s Incognito and some of the work done by the Integral Life people. Also, I’ve been strongly influenced by the work of Hal and Sidra Stone on multiple self theory.

So it was a delight to find a psychological writer and theorist who combined all of these different facets into one main model. Dr. Dan Siegel has written a several books over the past decade on an approach that he labels “Mindsight”, including The Mindful Brain, Brainstorm and Mindsight. In this model Siegel combines recent advances in brain theory and neurology with theories about the mind and how we experience influences and impulses from different parts of our brain. To that he applies the practices of mindfulness and meditation, noting their relationship to the idea of neuroplasticity, which is the ability for conscious intention to have an impact on the neural connections in the brain. Reading this material was like a vindication of so many of the ideas that have guided my own teaching over the past decades. It seems to be a distant cousin of NLP theory, although Siegel never mentions it.

The application of this model and its well laid out techniques and practices, would be a formidable tool for self development and evolution. It is also a demonstrated method of encouraging empathy. I would easily argue that these kinds of personal advancements qualify as a way of “teaching wisdom”.

 

Ken Wilber’s Integral Life theories and techniques are also relevant here. Integral Theory, based on Spiral Dynamics, is a road map for personal evolution. Siegel’s work actually dovetails excellently with Integral Life Theory, although he doesn’t mention it at all in his writing. Integral Theory lays out stages of personal development in a hierarchical fashion (which some people find hard to accept) and describes ways in which to advance through those stages. Here, mindfulness and meditation are also important to the process, although Siegel does a better job (for me at least) in providing the specifics of the means for doing this. An advantage that Integral Theory has is that the larger model can be applied to almost anything imaginable. It is relevant to personal development and world economics, equally. In addition, another facet of Integral Theory is the 4 Quadrant view of epistemology and reality, which Siegel uses extensively, although never really describes it.

Here, then, are the maps and means of “teaching wisdom”. It is perhaps the most important thing to teach, and it is seldom given the priority that it deserves. School curricula pay lip service to it if they don’t outright ignore it. Parents are expected to absorb these kinds of parenting skills as if they were genetically implanted, which we all know they are not. For the most part, random experiences rule, when deliberate consciousness is what is needed.

I think any 21^st Century initiatives in education have to seriously consider these issues and practices.

EQAO Test Release – What does it show?

In my teaching career there were many years where as a Gr. 6 teacher I had the “pleasure “ of administering the EQAO tests to my students. Today the Ontario results are released to the public and to students. Lists ranking schools become public knowledge, and placing students on percentile ratings are released to parents. All of this is done in the name of “accountability” and feedback, but that hinges on whether the tests are actually accurate indicators of student performance.

In light of that question, I wanted to relate one story from my classroom, during preparation for the test where we were using the questions from the previous year’s test. The math question seemed fairly straight forward. A man wanted to dig a hole in the ground with certain dimensions and move away the soil. He had a truck, also with dimensions provided, with which to drive away the soil. The question was how many trips would he have to make with the truck in order to remove all the soil. The question specified that the truck would be loaded so the top was flat, which was a good idea as without that info it would not be a doable question. The idea was to divide the volume of the hole by the volume of the truck and recognize that any remainder would require an extra trip. But there was no remainder, -a fact that became an issue. So we did the problem and it worked out handily that the truck would have to make eight trips. Problem solved.

Except that one boy’s had shot up and said, “That’s wrong.” Now, this boy was one of several in my class who was receiving Special Ed. assistance for math, but I like to think of myself as an enlightened teacher, so I was curious as to what he wanted to say. He said, “Everyone knows that if you dig a hole and then fill it up again, the soil takes up more space because it is not packed down. The truck would have to make more trips because the dug up soil would take up more space than it did in the hole.” Dead right!! And after that I began to look more closely at many of the questions that were included in the test, both in the Math and English sections. I noticed that there were always questions that had slipped by whatever passed for quality control and the EQAO writers.

Add to this serious concerns about the marking process for the more subjective parts of the test and the whole question of the suitability of standardized testing to measure anything accurate, and you begin to understand why many teachers are skeptical of EQAO. Add to that the fact that the process often removes two weeks of instruction time, for testing and preparation, from the school year. Add to that the philosophical question of what we are doing to our children by rating their schools publicly and individual performance privately.

Some may argue that this kind of feedback allows schools and teachers to focus resources on needy areas and schools. This has not been my experience. And when it does result in resource allocation it is often in the wrong way. For people obsessed with statistics, it is odd that EQAO proponents haven’t taken into consideration the Bell Curve. As teachers we all know that there are waves of classes that are either more or less capable. The random distribution of academic ability, social or family stability and other factors fluctuate on the Bell Curve. There are classes that have a mix of students who cause the class to be more challenging than others. Teachers know this and try to mobilize the available resources both for individuals and for the class in general. But if this class takes an EQAO test, feedback usually applies to that teacher and that grade rather than following the class as would be practical. I’ve seen EQAO results for the same school and teachers which have varied widely from one year to the next.

In short, the tests don’t really work and take up a lot of time that could be used for valuable instruction in something other than how to take a test. Whatever feedback that arises from the tests is often misunderstood or misplaced. However EQAO tests do benefit one group of people. The businesses that publish them have made a fortune. Publishers have benefited from selling new textbooks and resources that supposedly address the concerns raised by the testing. It’s quite the industry.

Journeying Down the River of Brain Development

Water, as a useful metaphor for the journey of life, has been an idea I’ve been attracted to and thinking about since my teenage years. (Which would be about 40 years ago.) From my earliest days of interest in Taoism (more a philosophy than a religion) water obviously played a central role. In fact, the title of one of Alan Watts’ books is Tao, The Watercourse Way. As Lao Tzu says, “Nothing is softer or more flexible than water, yet nothing can resist it.” In my initial courses in meditation and Native American philosophy with the Tracker School, water, comparing the clarity of a lake with the clarity of thoughts, became a central image. Later, as I became proficient in flat and whitewater canoeing, leading youth groups on wilderness expeditions, the dynamics of water made a further impression on me. I will explain all of this in more detail later, but I begin with it in order to elucidate why the Siegel metaphor that I’m going to start with had such an immediate impact on me.

Daniel J. Siegel has published a series of books in the past decade which examine brain development and neuroplasticity, especially as it pertains to developmental psychology. I came across the books in my recent research on brain development and its implications to education, and found them to be central to the thesis that I was pursuing.   In The Whole-Brain Child, by Daniel J. Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson, they put forward a metaphor for brain activity.

They begin by outlining the various levels of the brain, such as the more primitive parts of the brain responsible for things like intuition and emotion, and the more advanced parts of the brain responsible for such things as decisions, abstract thought and self control. The primitive part often manifests as more impulsive, intuitive and pleasure related urges, while the more advanced brain reflects on self control, moderation and long term consequences. Looked at this way, one can easily see that this is the battleground of the adolescent. There is the desire to experience new things and have fun, countered by the need to make practical decisions, be rational, and show self control. Each originates and is associated with different parts of the brain, with the more developed part, more often than not, undergoing renovations during adolescence. In counselling youth it is all too easy to emphasize the rational part (as it is the weaker link) and neglect to take into consideration the more primitive part. In my opinion, falling into that trap is one of the reasons why adult advice to teenagers is often regarded by them as rather shallow. One of the central themes of Siegel’s book Brainstorm, primarily about adolescent brain development, is that all parts of the brain need to be respected and that adolescent development is as much about creating a relationship with the vitality of living as it is with reason and self control.

The Siegel river analogy has you cruising down the centre of a river, in a state of balance and awareness. “…you feel like you’re in the water, peacefully floating along in your canoe, you feel like you’re generally in a good relationship with the world around you.” On one side of you are rapids, faster water and lack of control. On the other side are shallows, calm water and low lying tree branches, logs, deadheads, etc. Siegel characterizes one as “CHAOS” and the other as “RIGIDITY” although I like the term STAGNATION better. One is out of control, while the other is too much control. The more your course strays to either side of the river, the more extreme the conditions become. Both sides have obstacles and are potentially dangerous.

Looking at it from a subjective perspective (UL Quad, for Integral Theorists), the message is to balance the excitement, fun and new experiences with self control, awareness and a longer term view. Too much of either becomes a problem, as I’ll point out below. Looking at it from an objective perspective (UR Quad), it becomes a balance between the primitive and the developed parts of the brain, -emotional impulsiveness juxtaposed with the rational and aware-, and with balance being achieved through the integration of neural pathways within the brain various compartments by the hippocampus. The more these compartments can talk to each other, the better the harmony and balance will be.

Let’s look at the pros and cons of each side of the river in this analogy.

The CHAOS side has fast flowing water and rapids strewn with rocks. It is exciting (as anyone who’s done whitewater canoeing can testify) and challenging. It can be very fun if done right, and there is an atmosphere of the adventurous and the exotic in it. There is a danger of getting hung up on one of the rocks or capsizing in the rapids, though. This could stop or derail your progress, and the danger of injury or even death is very real.

This would correspond in real life to making impulsive and dangerous decisions. Driving too fast, doing drugs irresponsibly, risky sex, even over-partying to the point where it impedes any other progress in life. (The first examples would be akin to capsizing the canoe, while the last would be getting hung up on a rock.)

On the other hand, I want to go beyond the comparison presented by Siegel, into the greater richness of this analogy. Those of us who have done whitewater, along, I’m sure, with everyone from skateboarders to rock climbers, know the value of extreme sports. The challenge and the rush can be an important component in evolving self esteem, personal development and just plain fun. It involves a sense of vitality to add meaning to life (if you don’t progress to the point of becoming an adrenaline junkie). Playing in the rapids can be a productive and an invigorating thing. But you have to know how.

I’ve sat many times beside a fast river, reading the rapids, trying to understand the dynamics of the forces involved in the flow of the water. When canoeing through them, I realize that you can’t fight the forces of the river; you have to merge with them, understanding their power and how you can use that power to reach your own goal. When ferrying across a current, a minimum of paddle power is required and the river does most of the work. When entering and resting in an eddy, the river’s force can rage around you, and you know that your eddy is an island of calm. The river holds you in it. When reading the river, tell-tale signs on the surface reveal to you where the dangerous rocks are, hidden beneath that surface, unnoticed by the untrained eye. You understand the necessity of making a wide detour around fallen trees, knowing that they are death traps. If you have the skill and awareness, you can navigate or even frolic in the rapids. Without that skill and knowledge, you’re at the mercy of the river’s chaos, and that can be disastrous.

 

It is the same with our journey through life. There is nothing inherently wrong with the chaos. It is there for many reasons. One can party. One can imbibe in the pleasures of life. One can even have an evening of relative abandon, just having a great time, experiencing the vitality of existence. But if it is done without the proper awareness or skill in negotiating the pitfalls of life, it can be disastrous. When people make mistakes in rapids, sometimes you just get wet and get flushed out the bottom. Sometimes the canoe becomes damaged or destroyed. Sometimes people die. Sometimes that happens even when people are skilled and aware. But it certainly is more likely if approached without the proper preparation or attitude. To get those skills in life allowing you to take advantage of the chaos means becoming more self confident, aware and knowledgeable. Mistakes made with awareness can hurt, but are instructional in the long run. In the objective, brain terms that Siegel likes to use, that means being more integrated in the connections between the various parts of the brain, valuing not only the rational cortex, but extending that awareness to all parts.

The converse of all of this is to stray too far to other side, the side of shallows and stagnation. When approaching a bend in a river the canoeist knows to avoid the inside of the bend. Water travels more slowly there allowing the build up of sediment, and the river tends to have sand shoals and debris that will hinder the canoe. It is not exactly dangerous, but it is frustrating, time consuming and sedentary. Without challenge and without forward momentum, there is a tendency to move towards stagnation.

In living this happens when we approach life too cautiously, with too much control and too little risk taking. It can be a life of inertia, or rigidity.

And yet, again, there are times that tranquility in life is highly desirable. If the canoeist wants to stop for a leisurely lunch, or just to bask in the sun, one pulls over to the shallows for a rest. Sometimes you need to just lie on the beach, or just waste away an afternoon in pleasant idleness. And, again, perspective and awareness allows you to avoid lingering in stagnation for too long, becoming comfortably numb in your inactivity. It prevents you from doing the same ineffective strategies over and over again.

 

The key is that one navigates the river deliberately and with awareness. Being swept into the rapids or shallows unawares is not the same as approaching each with will and skill. And yet that deliberate approach does not mean that one fights the river. By understanding the river, one can drift through it in an enlightened way, allowing the power of the river to both take you where you want, and, to a degree, where it wants. Because one may use an eddy or a shallows to rest, the river decides where that point will be. You can utilize it, but you can’t change it. You can navigate through various options and courses, but you can’t change where those options are. You can decide how long to linger, or whether to bypass it, but the river holds the final say in much of it.

The problem is, of course, that part of the adolescent experience is that they automatically believe that they poses that awareness and skill, whether they do or not. The answer to that dilemma is obvious. Give them that awareness and skill as part of their education, at least to the best of our ability. There should be a pervasive initiative to involve the development of these life skills as part of education from grade 6 and up, with a particular emphasis on grades 7 – 9, where the neurological development is greatest. Decisions and behavioral patterns made in those years (and, to a lesser degree, for the next decade of life) influence the hard wiring of the brain and can establish a foundation that lasts a lifetime. The content and nature of such an educational initiative is a topic that I’ll discuss in subsequent writing.

In the end there is a magical interaction between your will and the will of the river. You learn to trust the river, yielding to its power while at the same time negotiating with it to reach your own goals. From this relationship we can learn a great deal about how to navigate the journey of our own lives.

And there are other ways in which identifying with water can be valuable. Becoming the water in the river is the next step, eliminating the duality between the canoe and the water. Lakes have much to teach as well. Like ourselves, the lake has surface and depth. A calm surface reflects reality accurately, but a stormy, agitated surface distorts it. Although a storm on a lake can be breathtaking in its power and beauty. But these are topics for another day.

[These are stock photos, not ones I have taken.]

BRAINSTORM by Daniel Siegel, Book Review

Lately I’ve been finding that much of my non-fiction reading kind of interlocks and contributes to the research on pedagogy and education that I’m exploring for what may, optimistically, turn into a book. That shouldn’t be surprising as when I read an article or listen to a podcast and a book is mentioned, it will either peak my interest or slide by.

I’m just finishing the first chapter of one such book and so far it is just blowing me away. Every once in a while you encounter a book where you say, “I wish I’d written this,” or perhaps “I could have written this.” Brainstorm by Daniel J. Siegel is one such book. It is about research in adolescent brain development and its implications. As I’m reading the first chapter, I’m constantly saying to myself, “I’ve been saying that for years.” There are passages and sentences that I have, in fact, spoken or written in the past, such as:

“For males especially, who seem to biologically need to court danger, in some fashion to “come of age” as young men, to test limits and face risk to prove they can come out alive, there must be some culturally sanctioned rites of passage we can reinvent that don’t involve a two-ton weapon barreling down the road with innocent victims in its wake.”

The first chapter, which, honestly, is as far as I’ve gotten so far, brings forth another idea that has dominated my life for decades. Adolescence is not something to be endured, but rather one of the most important developmental periods in our lives. While there are critical periods in early childhood for sensory, motor and conceptual development, adolescence is a critical period of its own. It is the period where we make important decisions about ourselves involving vitality of life, self improvement, creative exploration and social engagement. Such things are strongly affected by the adolescent years and are fairly crystallized and established by the time we’re twenty-five. Research shows that, usually, it alters very little again until after age fifty. Because of it’s volatility, the adolescent mind can thrive or crash and burn. But there are things that can be done to stack deck in a positive way.

“With awareness, the power of the adolescent mind can be utilized to benefit oneself and others. … The push against traditional ways of doing things and of thinking about reality can yield ways of thinking outside the box that enable new and creative ways of doing things to emerge.”

It is wonderful to find support for the ideas that have molded the youth programs and groups that I’ve fostered over the past four decades. It’s a great feeling to read a few paragraphs and then quietly pump my arm and say, “Yes!!”

I’m very much looking forward to the rest of this book and highly recommend it to those who have, work with, are or have been adolescents.    …Going back to my reading now.

 

STUDENT PHYSICAL FINTNESS

One of the points in the new Liberal platform is to encourage more physical activity among students to increase health. I’m all for increased physical activity, but when I was a teacher the DPA (Daily Physical Activity) that was instituted by the Board of Education was a bit of a joke. It involved trying to do physical activity somewhere inside, usually in the crowded classroom or in the hall. The program was changed from DVPA to DPA after the extremely unfortunate occurrence of a student having a heart attack while exercising. The student reportedly had a congenital heart problem, but the end result was to take the “V” out of DVPA. The “V” stood for “Vigorous”. So running stairs was curtailed in favour of doing the Macarena in classrooms, in spite of the fact that evidence shows that sudden cardiac death does not occur more often during exercise.

Other drawbacks that I found with the DPA program was that given its informal structure, the kids that needed it the most were inevitably the ones who put in the least effort. That was true in my class and it is true in classes I’ve observed since, even when the teacher has every serious intention of engaging everyone. Kids were exercising in their regular clothing in the middle of the day, getting hot and sweaty. Seeing as it was an informal activity, finding time to do the program almost always meant stealing time from another subject, such as Math, Science or Art. I’m not saying that exercise is any less important, but a teacher should not have to squeeze a 40 minute lesson into 20 minutes due to questionably effective exercise. In most cases the exercise time is not scheduled.

This was clearly introduced as a band aid approach to a very real problem. Such problems are usually only effectively solved by more sweeping and systemic changes.

So what can be done to increase student physical activity? Here are a few ideas:

1. Where possible, have students walk to school. I am amazed at the fact that most students outside of urban areas (and many within them) are bussed. When I was a kid (-insert ironic laugh here-), my Public School was three blocks away from my home and I walked it every day, four times. By the time I went to a Middle School (grades 7 & 8) it was two kilometres that I biked every day, even in the winter. Ironically, this is a suggestion put forth by the Drummond Report.

2. Emphasize two 20 minute outdoor recess periods every day, only cancelled for the most inclement weather. The students weren’t that keen on coming in, once outside.  Students being provided extra help, or serving a detention should always be guaranteed at least one of these two periods for physical activity. Investment can be made in outdoor games equipment and training to help encourage actual physical activity rather than texting.

3. Physical Education classes should be scheduled at least three times a week. One school I was in had a problem with too many classes to accommodate in the Gym, so they set up a room for physical activity, with appropriate resources. If there is a scheduling problem, one of the three classes could be in such a room.  during physical activity classes participation should be highly encouraged.  When I see classes in the gym, often there are a hand full of students on the sidelines or stage not participating.  Sometimes it is for medical reasons; sometimes it is because they are not prepared with proper gym clothing.  Ironically, those sitting out the activities are often those that need it the most.

4. One wise old teacher that I encountered early in my career said something to me that stuck. “If you want to add something, you have to subtract something else.” You can’t just impose a new program and not expect it to impact on the existing ones. If you add 20 minutes of exercise each day in the classroom, you’re going to lose 20 minutes of something else. As a teacher, with all of the other interruptions to my days (-that’s a story for another time-) it was hard enough to cram what I needed to do into the time given. It often meant abandoning a high interest, more novel approaches in order to just communicate the basics. Quality is sacrificed. There were many hurdles to my effectiveness as a creative teacher. It’s why I retired. Perhaps, if you want to add 20 minutes of program to each day, then the school day needs to be extended.

However should schools be primarily responsible for physical exercise and activity? When I was kid (-laughter again-) I was often outside in the neighborhood until dark. The old complaint that parents had about being home before the street lights came on is no longer a concern. Kids don’t go outside like they used to. This is what Richard Louv calls “Nature Deficit Disorder”. Videos and computer games can result in a child locking themselves in their room for hours after school, rather than being outside. Even when children are enrolled in team or organized sports, the few hours of activity each week are no replacement for regular daily activity. I admire the kids who go out and skateboard or who build ramps for their bikes.

It has to do with lifestyle and general attitude more than it has to do with what schools can provide. Until those issues are changed, no matter what the school does, the impact will be limited.