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paying attention

What teachers know

March 11, 2010

Today’s grad­u­ates face a new breed of chal­lenges as they enter the work­force. They will con­front messier, intractable prob­lems such as cli­mate change, global ter­ror­ism, antibi­otic resis­tant dis­eases and per­sis­tent mar­ket weak­ness. The same tech­nolo­gies that empow­ered them as learn­ers at the same time also mul­ti­plied the poten­tial for global havoc.

And this has changed the def­i­n­i­tion of an appro­pri­ate education.

Teach­ers know this

Teach­ers appre­ci­ate that han­dling the new, intractable prob­lems requires a new skill set. They require empathiz­ing, imag­i­na­tive cit­i­zens –in touch with their own cre­ative impulses, con­fi­dent indi­vid­u­als who can imag­ine totally new solu­tions. Teach­ers want to facil­i­tate their stu­dents’ growth as artists. But teach­ers know some­thing else as well.

Tomorrow’s man­agers must also be lit­er­ate and numer­ate. As well as being cre­ative lead­ers, reach­ing out and find­ing fresh answers to the prob­lems of the future, they need to know every­thing we grad­u­ated know­ing. And they need to be firmer in their foun­da­tions than we were. The stakes are higher for them and the com­pe­ti­tion for jobs is more fierce.

Inside most class­rooms today you find teach­ers tak­ing an iter­a­tive approach, bal­anc­ing the advan­tages of con­stancy and rou­tine with their neces­sity for exper­i­men­ta­tion and adap­ta­tion. You find teach­ers who are doing the best they can with the resources they have. The demands on teach­ers have never been greater. And they know it.

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The secret of happiness (from Daniel Kahneman and Jerry Seinfeld)

March 6, 2010

I am by day a mild-mannered Econ­o­mist, qui­etly cor­rect­ing stu­dents’ sup­ply and demand dia­grams, dis­cussing the long-term profit pos­si­bil­i­ties in oli­gop­o­lies. But by night, I get to pur­sue my real pas­sion in life: surf­ing –both chan­nel and web. Some­times I do both at once! So I live a pretty full existence.

Some­times on my quests, I unearth a jewel such as this pre­sen­ta­tion from Daniel Kah­ne­man, on our “expe­ri­enc­ing selves” and our “remem­ber­ing selves.” We expe­ri­ence hap­pi­ness, he explains, in the moment and also (often very dif­fer­ently) in our memory.

The two headed happiness-monster

Self-actualization is a process of rec­on­cil­ing these two selves: expe­ri­en­tial and remem­bered. They way this works is sim­i­lar to the les­son told by the ever-sagacious Jerry Seinfeld:

When it comes to Hap­pi­ness we’ve got the spon­ta­neous ‘Now Guy’ and story-teller ‘Then Guy’. Now Guy is your unso­phis­ti­cated, spon­ta­neous younger-self. He’s always got ideas about how to spend your life­sav­ings fly­ing to Vegas for a really wild week­end. But Mon­day morn­ing it’s Then Guy who has to explain the whole thing to your wife. A happy life requires the two to nego­ti­ate and agree.

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The Zen of Useful Distractions

May 25, 2009

Zen TreeInfor­ma­tion is empow­er­ing, but too much can it can also be debil­i­tat­ing.  Infor­ma­tion Over­load costs the U.S. econ­omy $900 bil­lion per year. In this inter­est­ing video a few of the world’s lead­ing man­agers dis­cuss the prob­lem.  In Defense of Dis­trac­tion dis­cusses how our brains are adapt­ing to make the most of the new information-rich envi­ron­ments we live in:

More than any other organ, the brain is designed to change based on expe­ri­ence, a fea­ture called neu­ro­plas­tic­ity. Lon­don taxi dri­vers, for instance, have enlarged hip­pocampi (the brain region for mem­ory and spa­tial processing)—a neural reward for pay­ing atten­tion to the tan­gle of the city’s streets. As we become more skilled at the 21st-century task Meyer calls “flit­ting,” the wiring of the brain will inevitably change to deal more effi­ciently with more infor­ma­tion. The neu­ro­sci­en­tist Gary Small spec­u­lates that the human brain might be chang­ing faster today than it has since the pre­his­toric dis­cov­ery of tools. Research sug­gests we’re already pick­ing up new skills: bet­ter periph­eral vision, the abil­ity to sift infor­ma­tion rapidly.

How­ever, for those of us still strug­gling to keep up, the arti­cle sug­gests meditation:

Neu­ro­sci­en­tists have become obsessed, in recent years, with Bud­dhists, whose atten­tional dis­ci­pline can appar­ently con­fer all kinds of ben­e­fits even on non-Buddhists. (Some psy­chol­o­gists pre­dict that, in the same way we go out for a jog now, in the future we’ll all do daily 20-to-30-minute “sec­u­lar atten­tional work­outs.”) … atten­tion is a lim­ited resource…  our moment-by-moment choice of atten­tional tar­gets deter­mines, in a very real sense, the shape of our lives. Rapt’s epi­graph comes from the psy­chol­o­gist and philoso­pher William James: “My expe­ri­ence is what I agree to attend to.”

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