The Strengths Movement

This is interesting and righteous – something from the States called “The Strengths Movement” which is very much on the same page as we different fish are. Here’s an intro to the founder, Jenifer Fox, a school she runs, and the Strengths-based curriculum.

Forgive the hokey music and the infomercial tone. The ideas are solid.

All of it is based on the clever idea that strengths are more useful than weaknesses, and teaching kids what they’re good at is better for them – and for everyone – than concentrating on what they’re not.

Some ideas are so clear and good that they seem inevitable – after they’ve gained enough momentum: Doctors should wash their hands; People should choose their leaders; Kids should be encouraged.

I look forward to reading Fox’s book Your Child’s Strengths, and to checking out the Affinities program. Looks exciting.

How To Stop A School Fight

The sample images below are selections from How To Stop A School Fight, aka Paping No.13, by John Mejias. I found this silkscreened gem at last year’s Toronto Comic Arts Festival – each copy screened onto a cut up map of NYC. Mejias is an Art teacher there, and here relates his tricks and tips as to how to deal with the inevitable fights that break out in schools.

This exact book is sold out, according to his site (www.paping.org) but he has a Paping  Teacher’s Edition available there – follow this link to see it – collecting the stories about schools he’s published.

Nothing much to say about it, except that I like it.

Close Your Mind and the Rest Will Follow

One of the earliest arguments I remember having with my father (with many more to follow) was about poetry. He maintained stubbornly that if it didn’t rhyme, it was not a poem. I told him that that was ridiculous, just on principle – I was nine or ten and surely didn’t really know why – if you’ve paid any attention to anything poetic in the last hundred years, but that’s what he’s like. It’s what a lot of people are like, in fact – and reading The Brain That Changes Itself, it seems there’s a good reason for it: it’s easier.

It makes intuitive sense, and I know I’ve heard it before, but the paths that are formed by thinking (or doing, or anything else requiring the brain) become smoother and more influential the more we repeat them. This is pretty helpful to think about when trying to break a bad habit or build a new one, and applies nicely to the usefulness of pre-visualization and rehearsal too.

I was complaining a few posts ago that a friend had declared turntable music “not music” out of hand, and how that was just simple closed-mindedness and a lack of humility – Jazz, which he loves, was seen as “not music” by plenty of people when it popped up. (I read an article about Edison’s inability to accept Jazz the other day – he declared that it sounded better backwards than forwards; this short-sightedness killed his very early record label.)

It’s the difference between, essentially, the liberal and the conservative mind, isn’t it? The conservative mind likes things the way they are, and the liberal is intrigued by the possibilities of change. Every political argument has plenty of this dynamic at its root, and I find it useful to keep in mind, especially when the foremost arguments aren’t seeming to make sense, like last year’s knee-jerky reaction to electoral reform here in Ontario.

And neither side is actually better – this is me growing up here, by the way. I have always been a lefty and sympathetic towards new things and underdogs. That’s why, for example, I was well-prepared to acknowledge the worth of turntablists (that’s the term they use) long before I could hear anything attractive in it. I’d LIKE to think that it’s because I’m nice and conservatives are mean, but that’s self-flattery; conservatives like to think of themselves as Smart and Realistic (and not Dopey and Soft) by the same token. But without the two impulses straining against each other – if one side were to Win – what would happen?

The Canadian situation of late – of minority governments needing to compromise to get things done – is turning out to be a very nice situation. Not perfect, naturally, but better than, say, Ontario’s Harris experience, where one-side bulldozed the other and the province suffered because of it. I’m sort of hoping that minority governments will continue – even if the progressives and liberals were to take office. If Layton had the power to bulldoze, Canada would pull out of Afghanistan (so he say, anyway) and people there would suffer brutality worse than they are now. If Harper had full power, he’d stay in, spend more money on the military, and not bother to tell us anything about it. This is, by the way, why I favoured the MPP  MMP (Mixed Member Proportional) system proposed to reform the election process in Ontario: because more options would open, more minority gov’ts would be likely, and so more compromise would occur. And I’m reasonably sure that compromise is healthier than conflict.

It leads me back to the idea of Humility: if conservatives and liberals alike were more often able to acknowledge their personal tendencies and that neither were Holy or Better, more conversation (and less arguing) might occur.

What led me to this little rant, by the way, was this: I was eating breakfast and listening to a record new to myself and realizing that I actually prefer lyrics that rhyme. And how my Dad and I are actually in agreement about that, thirty years later on. If our initial argument had been framed differently – in terms of preference, and not fast rules and polar opposites, what might have happened with us?

Adam Cox on Executive Control

Yesterday I was able to attend an interesting workshop thanks to my current job: Dr. Adam Cox, who has written a book called No Mind Left Behind: Understanding and Fostering Executive Control–The Eight Essential Brain Skills Every Child Needs to Thrive – which, despite having at least one too many titles, sounds like an interesting book. I haven’t had a look at it yet, but I will. The talk itself was pretty fascinating, though.

Executive Control (also called Executive Function) seems to be a newish concept – I’d heard of it first in the context of ADHD. What it is, in short, is the CEO of the brain – in charge of, essentially, self-regulation and organization. A lack in executive control leads to a lot of things that make life harder – disorganization, social maladjustment, and learning problems.

Adam Cox’s approach, outlined in the lecture and elaborated in his book, is to consider eight subfactors of executive control discretely, and to deal with each directly. It’s a great approach – less broad and clunky than a simple diagnosis of ADHD, which, like “learning disability”, seems more complicated and individual the more we learn about it. (He recognizes, happily, that the problems for learners in schools are frequently problems with the school more than with the learner.) He lays the elements of executive control out as follows:

1. Initiation – the ability to get started on things
2. Attention – the ability to focus attention
3. Cognitive Flexibility – the ability to see from more than one perspective, along with the tempo of the mind
4. Working Memory – the function that moves ideas from short to long term memory
5. Organization – the ability to manage personal space
6. Planning – the ability to manage time
7. Self-Monitoring – the ability to look at oneself “objectively”
8. Emotional Control – the ability to keep emotions in proportion to the triggering events

He offers strategies for identifying issues in each of these areas, and for helping to improve each, which are clear and elegant. (He does one unfortunate bit of lame “brainding” – coining his own “catchy” term for executive control which is neither shorter nor easier to remember, and less descriptive: “… which I call the Ex Factor” but I’ll forgive that; it was probably suggested by the publisher.) Otherwise, he had a solid and reassuringly clear approach. He seems to know all of the theory and science behind what he’s saying, but speaks in practical terms. I bet he’s a great doctor.

He’s also got a book about how to best interact with boys, which I intend to read. Here’s his site, from which you may subscribe to an e-newsletter.

Robert Fuller: Dignitarian

The Long Now Foundation – dedicated to thinking in terms of ten thousand years forwards and backwards, in opposition to North America’s current inability to think past next week – holds a regular series of lectures by clever thinkers.

Recently I listened to one by Robert Fuller – I’d never heard of him prior to this. He spoke about a movement that is also new to me, and it’s hit me right in the heart and mind: dignitarianism.

To be clear, I’m a true child of my time, and wary of Isms in general. But Fuller talks about something I have been seriously thinking about my entire life, and never had an overarching name for: he calls it the problem of Rank.

Essentially it is this: while we need hierarchies in our society in order that the most qualified can use their knowledge and skill. But there’s a dark side to hierarchy – maybe even more of the dark than the light: essentially, it’s called abuse. From parents beating on kids down to subtler things like an executive being rude to a receptionist.

It’s always been the main bug in my butt – always. What justifies an adult dismissing the opinion of a child outright? What justifies a police officer disrespecting a citizen – or vice versa? Why’s the guy who fixes your computer always so damned rude? These questions have been behind my problem with authority and my trouble in school and work, and my disdain for the star-system.

A person deserves the respect she or he has earned, for sure – but not more than that. It doesn’t follow that societal rules don’t apply to the rich or the famous. It doesn’t make sense that, as I’ve ranted about elsewhere, the school system and its teachers are beyond the reproach of its students.

And that’s what Fuller’s on about. His book Somebodies and Nobodies: Overcoming the Abuse of Rank explores this phenomenon and its implications for society in great detail (perhaps too much – like most books about an idea, it makes its point over and over). The “pecking order” we’re all used to is the real trickle-down element in our society: the G8 decide the terms for the rest of the world, politicians flaunt the law, cops talk down to citizens, teachers shit on kids, kids shit on each other, the last kid in line kicks the dog – or kills herself.  The cost is massive, and the phenomenon underlies all of the other Isms we hold in disregard: racism, ageism, sexism, ableism – all are based on what Fuller calls “rankism”.

He argues that while this Ism will be monumentally difficult to battle (probably not even possible as a full concept at once), “rankism” being dealt with would be a sea change advancement for all of us. I’m not sure I like the term*, but I’m glad to know that some old smart dude is thinking and talking about it. And having a name allows the rest of the world to talk too.

I’ll talk more later here about how I think this idea can influence classrooms and school society.

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* I do like the word “dignitarian”. Fuller’s got a tshirt on his site I like with a farmer shaking hands with a scholar, and the caption says “Manifest Dignity”.