24 March 2013

Where is your beam of awareness?


I've loved this past week.

I took some leave to accompany my husband on a trip to Queenstown on the southern island of New Zealand. He was to attend a conference and I thought 'what a great opportunity for a little downtime'. My husband is an accountant. The things at work that excite him bore me to tears so when he came home with a spare ticket to the conference I thought 'you must be joking - sit cooped up in a conference centre when I could be out enjoying the mountains? - Not a chance'. 

Anyway, two speakers caught my eye - Dandapani (a Hindu monk) and Natalie Cook (five time Olympian volleyball player and gold medallist at the Sydney Games in 2000). I figured I might just give up mountains for that... And I'm so glad I did!

While they were very different presenters they both talked about the same thing - how to sustain motivation when working towards a goal. How do we as humans learn to give something 100% effort and attention and how do we keep doing that past the honeymoon period.

It's easy to start something new, to focus on a change, and to set a goal - we have renewed vigour and a certainty that we are going to make it this time. As Natalie talked about this, I was reminded of all the diets I've started! But how do we sustain this and keep going? And as parents and teachers how do we teach this skill to our children?

Dandapani's messages about training the awareness, focusing on finishing what you start, finishing it well and doing a little better than you thought you could will stick with me, and I know I will use his 'monk tools' and analogies to make it easy for me to do and easy for kids to understand. Today's children are so distracted - they flit from one thing to another, giving everything only their light attention - a game for a few minutes, a text to a friend, a TV program interrupted by ad breaks and snack stops; sometimes it seems like they don't focus on anything for very long (and then complain they're bored!)


'Proceed with confidence.'
Dandapani teaches that the mind is everything we know, feel, see, touch, taste and hear and our awareness is like the beam of a torch that shines on what we are paying attention to at the time. When our awareness flits around like a search light at sea we get tired, we don't finish things, we appear 'scatty', we're not focused, it's hard to learn well, and sometimes we even get diagnosed with something too!

How good would it be to train our children to shine their beam of awareness for a sustained period of time on one thing and one thing only - this would create powerful learning opportunities and build the metal muscle needed to solve life's trickiest problems.

This week check where you are shining your torch light - is it flitting about or is it trained on one thing at a time? What we practise we get good at; so practising focusing our torches in our mind's eye for ever increasing amounts of time can only be a good thing.

10 March 2013

Kids who love to learn

Last week I circulated a parenting tip sheet from Michael Grose's parenting website called The Pitfall of Using Other Children as Benchmarks.  If you didn't see it, check your Inbox.  It's a great read.

Parent Teacher Student Conferences are on the horizon at Peregian Springs State School. Class teachers will meet with parents and students during the last two weeks of Term 1 to share the learning progress your child has made throughout the term. This is meant to be a celebratory time focused on your child and your child only. It's a time to celebrate how far they have come in relation to their own developmental clocks (and not in relation to how far other children have travelled).

Parent Teacher Student Conferences can be a tense time. Parents sometimes worry about whether their child has learned as much as another child, whether they are on the same reading level as last year, whether a friend's son is faster at their number facts, and even whether their child is as fast a runner as the neighbour's daughter. The fact is that all humans are stretched along a developmental scale and worrying about whether someone is further along the scale than your child tends to lead to anxiety and tension.

As parents, we want our kids to be the best they can be - and this is the trick. We need to think of the difference between being the best they can be, and being better than everyone else. The messages we send our children either directly or unconsciously tells them which we think is more important.

If you want your child to concentrate on their own learning and recognise their movement along the developmental scale then our language must focus on their growth - and not on the growth of other children. A comment such as 'Your reading is much more fluent now than it was a few months ago' is a much better measure of progress than 'You are the best reader in the class!'  Or 'Look at these big numbers you can partition now compared to the small numbers you were working with last year' sends a better message about the learning we are looking for than 'You know more number facts than anyone else in Year 2!'

No matter where your child is on the developmental scale he or she will have taken some steps along it in at least one area and probably many more. Focusing on these will make Parent Teacher Student Conferences a celebration and will go a long way to ensuring your child maintains their love of the learning process. Kids who love to learn will continue to be learners.


03 March 2013

What to do in this weather...

If you are like me, you are probably quite affected by the weather. On a sunny day I feel optimistic and uplifted. Warm sunshine imparts a general feeling of wellbeing. Rain, clouds and cool weather leave me feeling somewhat deflated and at times, quite gloomy.

I have always found that connecting with others generates the same feelings as sunny days - I don't mean connecting on the Internet such as Facebook and email. I mean real connection involving a warm bodied person who laughs along with you, gossips and tells stories.

Games are often at the root of all connection between humans. As a youngster my Grandma taught me how to play 21; a little unorthodox - but my skills and fluency in adding and subtracting numbers to 21, remembering what was left in the deck, and strategising about what Grandma had in her hand was phenomenal. Games were played in our home a lot - Monopoly, Scrabble, draughts and chess were the order of the day. I also remember Boggle, Battleships (my brothers loved that), Mousetrap, Pictionary, Uno and Four in a Row. Playing games was great fun and it taught us kids a lot about cooperation, being a 'good' loser, and the place of competition. We would laugh a lot, look at each other's faces, practice 'give and take', use our manners, and would usually be sitting around a table talking about other things as we played.

On the weekend I read about some research into the educational power of parents*. A group of 125 parents were asked to play a board game one night a week for four weeks with their children. The results were stunning - parents and teachers reported improved concentration, social interaction, and cooperation with siblings. (Doesn't every parent want this last one!) Playing board games also boosted patience, teamwork, sharing, communication, sporting behaviour, critical thinking skills, and fluency in maths and spelling. Family relationships improved and parents were amazed that their children did not need to be glued to the TV or Nintendo.

Parent engagement in their child's learning and development takes many forms - and if you are interested in giving your child's learning, manners, compassion, play habits, kindness and thinking skills a boost, you can't go wrong with a deck of cards and a game of 21! (Perhaps draughts might be a bit more politically correct these days.) And let's face it - our current weather system is certainly giving us plenty of reasons to stay indoors and enjoy the company of our family.

These days I still play games; many on my iPad. These are often designed to play alone or against the machine itself. I still find a way to interact with someone else, even if it means posting a 'Help' on my Facebook page for a 4Pics 1Word puzzle.

* Herald Sun, Wednesday 19 August 2009, p 27