holidays

Gratitude and Appreciation: from Theory to Practice

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Appreciation, GratitudePsy­chol­o­gist Robert Emmons recent­ly told us about the many ben­e­fits of prac­tic­ing gratitude.

- “First, the prac­tice of grat­i­tude can increase hap­pi­ness lev­els by around 25%. Sec­ond, this is not hard to achieve — a few hours spent writ­ing a grat­i­tude jour­nal over 3 weeks can cre­ate an effect that lasts 6 months if not more. Third, that cul­ti­vat­ing grat­i­tude brings oth­er health effects, such as longer and bet­ter qual­i­ty sleep time.”

Thanks­giv­ing flew by for me this year with­out my tak­ing the time to express grat­i­tude to many of the peo­ple who have been so gen­er­ous with their time and advice.

Giv­en that this is a blog, I would like to say Thank You! to the fol­low­ing blog­gers [Read more…] about Grat­i­tude and Appre­ci­a­tion: from The­o­ry to Practice

Growing Super Athletes (each of our students)

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(Thanks for the lead, Tom!)

David Brooks writes a great col­umn (requires sub­scrip­tion) in the NYT titled A Cri­tique of Pure Rea­son. He expands the usu­al restrict­ed under­stand­ing of “edu­ca­tion” to incor­po­rate a wider sense of “learn­ing”, by discussing

1. Where

  • “The cre­ative ones (politi­cians) will final­ly absorb the truth found in decades of research: the rela­tion­ships chil­dren have out­side school shape their per­for­mance inside the school.”
Each of us has one and same brain, for school (or work) and for “real” life. Labels such as “for­mal” or “infor­mal” learn­ing are quite irrel­e­vant from a neur­al devel­op­ment point of view. What hap­pens at home is as impor­tant as what hap­pens in school.
2. What
  • “They will under­stand that schools filled with stu­dents who can’t con­trol their impuls­es, who can’t focus their atten­tion and who can’t reg­u­late their emo­tions will not suc­ceed, no mat­ter how many reforms are made by gov­er­nors, super­in­ten­dents or presidents.”
Skills in that list, that usu­al­ly don’t get explic­it atten­tion, and they should, since they are both crit­i­cal and train­able: [Read more…] about Grow­ing Super Ath­letes (each of our students)