Raising Smart Learners Through Rich Conversations

 

When it comes to children’s learning, are we focusing too much on schools — and not enough on parents?
 

“There is, quite rightly, a cacophonous debate on how to reform schools, open up colleges, and widen access to pre-K learning,” notes a new article, “Parenting, Politics, and Social Mobility. “However, too little attention is paid to another divide affecting social mobility — the parenting gap.”

Given all the roiling debates about how children should be taught, it may come as a surprise to learn that students spend less than 15% of their time in school. While there’s no doubt that school is important, a clutch of recent studies reminds us that parents are even more so.

A study by researchers at North Carolina State University, Brigham Young University and the University of California-Irvine, for example, finds that parental involvement — checking homework, attending school meetings and events, discussing school activities at home — has a more powerful influence on students’ academic performance than anything about the school the students attend.

Another study, published in the Review of Economics and Statistics, reports that the effort put forth by parents (reading stories aloud, meeting with teachers) has a bigger impact on their children’s educational achievement than the effort expended by either teachers or the students themselves.

A third study concludes that schools would have to increase their spending by more than $1,000 per pupil in order to achieve the same results that are gained with parental involvement (not likely in this stretched economic era).

So parents matter — a point made clear by decades of research showing that a major part of the academic advantage held by children from affluent families comes from the “concerted cultivation of children” as compared to the more laissez-faire style of parenting common in working-class families.

But this research also reveals something else: that parents, of all backgrounds, don’t need to buy expensive educational toys or digital devices for their kids in order to give them an edge. They don’t need to chauffeur their offspring to enrichment classes or test-prep courses. What they need to do with their children is much simpler: Talk.

But not just any talk. Although well-known research by psychologists Betty Hart and Todd Risley has shown that professional parents talk more to their children than less-affluent parents — a lot more, resulting in a 30 million “word gap” by the time children reach age three — more recent research is refining our sense of exactly what kinds of talk at home foster children’s success at school.

For example, a study conducted by researchers at the UCLA School of Public Health and published in the journal Pediatrics found that two-way adult-child conversations were six times as potent in promoting language development as interludes in which the adult did all the talking.

Engaging in this reciprocal back-and-forth gives children a chance to try out language for themselves, and also gives them the sense that their thoughts and opinions matter. As they grow older, this feeling helps middle- and upper-class kids develop into assertive advocates for their own interests, while working-class students tend to avoid asking for help or arguing their own case with teachers, according to research presented at American Sociological Association conference last year.

The content of parents’ conversations with kids matters, too. Children who hear talk about counting and numbers at home start school with much more extensive mathematical knowledge, report researchers from the University of Chicago — knowledge that predicts future achievement in the subject. Psychologist Susan Levine, who led the study on number words, has also found that the amount of talk young children hear about the spatial properties of the physical world—how big or small or round or sharp objects are — predicts kids’ problem-solving abilities as they prepare to enter kindergarten.

While the conversations parents have with their children change as kids grow older, the effect of these exchanges on academic achievement remains strong. And again, the way mothers and fathers talk to their middle-school students makes a difference. Research by Nancy Hill, a professor at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education, finds that parents play an important role in what Hill calls “academic socialization”— setting expectations and making connections between current behavior and future goals (going to college, getting a good job).

Engaging in these sorts of conversations, Hill reports, has a greater impact on educational accomplishment than volunteering at a child’s school or going to PTA meetings, or even taking children to libraries and museums. When it comes to fostering students’ success, it seems, it’s not so much what parents do as what they say.

Winning the Psychological War During the Exams

Five Ways to Win the Psychological War During the Exams

To do well in the exams, it's more than knowing your subjects. It's a combination of being exam-smart, understanding your subject matter and winning the psychological war.

Students taking the PSLE will be taking a major exam for the first time in their lives; it's understandable some may get cold feet and panic. Here are five ways to win the mental game.

1. Imagine you are Harry Potter

Taking the papers in the exam hall is one of the scariest experiences for many students. It's terrifying to see hundreds of your peers burying their heads in the papers and vigorously scribbling what-seems-to-be very intelligent answers.

You will start to self-doubt and wonder if they are going to perform better than you. The almost-silent hall doesn't help ease the tension as the tranquility further exacerbates the paranoia.
What can you do? You can't change the location, but you can alter your mindset.

Imagine you are the most powerful wizard out there.
Remove everyone else in your mind. Now, you are the only person in the room. You are doing this like it's a routine assignment at home, except you can't sprawl on the floor.

Feel better?

2. Kiasu

Being kiasu is a merit at times. The hunger to win pushes one to work harder. However that could work against us too.

Some students may overdo it and spend the whole exam fretting about their opponents.
"What if XXX does better than me?"

"I wonder if YYY knows how to solve this problem."

Before the exams, you can find a target and use him as your motivation to study. However, when you are at the exam hall, you have done your best at revising, so your biggest rival is yourself now.

At the exam hall, compete with yourself. Aim to score better than the previous papers. This way, you will have a goal to lean back on and not get unnecessarily stressed.
 
3. Be positive

Don't go into the exam hall thinking you can't do it.

If you are confident, half the battle is won. If you think you are going to fail, you are unlikely going to do well. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

When you are full of hope, you will try your best to answer the questions and you could make the most out of a tough paper. If you had given up from the start, don't think about acing it.

4. Sleep well the night before

There's no way that you can perform if you are tired.
 
Sleep early the night before. You are unlikely to remember much if you were cramming a few hours before the examinations. Get your night's rest and the brain can work wonders if it's fresh and alert.

5. Don't be late

In the same vein, don't be late for the exams. Go to the exam hall early. Even if you are an hour early, that's OK.

It's better to be early than to rush, be all sweaty and fumble in the exams. We need to be calm when we are taking the exams. And getting an adrenaline rush from hurrying to the venue isn't exactly the best way to stay composed.

Good and Bad Studying Habits

Studying is the "major pastime" of our youngsters today with its main objective being to learn more about the people, place, systems, surroundings and everything else around us. However, different people can use different ways to study but most importantly all of them do so to achieve the desired outcomes.

Based on my own experience and advice given by professional educators, parents and students, I have compiled the following rules of good and bad studying habits below: 

TEN RULES OF GOOD STUDYING HABITS

 1. Use recall.

After you read a page, look away and recall the main ideas. Highlight very little, and never highlight anything you haven't put in your mind first by recalling. Try recalling main ideas when you are walking to class or in a different room from where you originally learned it. An ability to recall - to generate the ideas from inside yourself - is one of the key indicators of good learning.

2. Test yourself.

Test yourself on everything. All the time. Flash cards are your friend.

3. Chunk your problems.

Chunking is understanding and practicing with a problem solution so that it can all come to mind in a flash. After you solve a problem, rehearse it. Make sure you can solve it cold - every step. Pretend it's a song and learn to play it over and over again in your mind, so the information combines into one smooth chunk you can pull up whenever you want.

4. Space your repetition.

Spread out your learning in any subject a little every day, just like an athlete. Your brain is like a muscle - it can handle only a limited amount of exercise on one subject at a time.

5. Alternate different problem-solving techniques during your practice.

Never practice too long at any one session using only one problem-solving technique - after a while, you are just mimicking what you did on the previous problem. Mix it up and work on different types of problems. This teaches you both how and when to use a technique. (Books generally are not set up this way, so you'll need to do this on your own.) After every assignment and test, go over your errors, make sure you understand why you made them, and then rework your solutions.

To study most effectively, handwrite (don't type) a problem on one side of a flash card and the solution on the other. (Handwriting builds stronger neural structures in memory than typing.) You might also photograph the card if you want to load it into a study app on your smartphone. Quiz yourself randomly on different types of problems. Another way to do this is to randomly flip through your book, pick out a problem, and see whether you can solve it cold.

6. Take breaks.

It is common to be unable to solve problems or figure out concepts in math or science the first time you encounter them. This is why a little study every day is much better than a lot of studying all at once. When you get frustrated with a math or science problem, take a break so that another part of your mind can take over and work in the background.

7. Use explanatory questioning and simple analogies.

Whenever you are struggling with a concept, think to yourself, How can I explain this so that a ten-year-old could understand it? Using an analogy really helps, like saying that the flow of electricity is like the flow of water. Don't just think your explanation - say it out loud or put it in writing. The additional effort of speaking and writing allows you to more deeply encode (that is, convert into neural memory structures) what you are learning.

8. Focus.

Turn off all interrupting beeps and alarms on your phone and computer, and then turn on a timer for twenty-five minutes. Focus intently for those twenty-five minutes and try to work as diligently as you can. After the timer goes off, give yourself a small, fun reward. A few of these sessions in a day can really move your studies forward. Try to set up times and places where studying - not glancing at your computer or phone - is just something you naturally do.

9. Eat your frogs first.

Do the hardest thing earliest in the day, when your mind is still fresh.

10. Make a mental contrast.

Imagine where you've come from and contrast that with the dream of where your studies will take you. Post a picture or words in your workspace to remind you of your dream. Look at that when you find your motivation lagging. This work will pay off both for you and those you love!


TEN RULES OF BAD STUDYING HABITS

Avoid these techniques - they can waste your time even while they fool you into thinking you're learning!

1. Passive rereading - sitting passively and running your eyes back over a page.

Unless you can prove that the material is moving into your brain by recalling the main ideas without looking at the page, rereading is a waste of time.

2. Letting highlights overwhelm you.

Highlighting your text can fool your mind into thinking you are putting something in your brain, when all you're really doing is moving your hand. A little highlighting here and there is okay - sometimes it can be helpful in flagging important points. But if you are using highlighting as a memory tool, make sure that what you mark is also going into your brain.

3. Merely glancing at a problem's solution and thinking you know how to do it.

This is one of the worst errors students make while studying. You need to be able to solve a problem step-by-step, without looking at the solution.

4. Waiting until the last minute to study.

Would you cram at the last minute if you were practising for a track meet? Your brain is like a muscle - it can handle only a limited amount of exercise on one subject at a time.

5. Repeatedly solving problems of the same type that you already know how to solve.

If you just sit around solving similar problems during your practice, you're not actually preparing for a test - it's like preparing for a big basketball game by just practicing your dribbling.

6. Letting study sessions with friends turn into chat sessions.

Checking your problem solving with friends, and quizzing one another on what you know, can make learning more enjoyable, expose flaws in your thinking and deepen your learning. But if your joint study sessions turn to fun before the work is done, you're wasting your time and should find another study group.

7. Neglecting to read the textbook before you start working problems.

Would you dive into a pool before you knew how to swim? The textbook is your swimming instructor - it guides you towards the answers. You will flounder and waste your time if you don't bother to read it. Before you begin to read, however, take a quick glance over the chapter or section to get a sense of what it's all about.

8. Not checking with your instructors or classmates to clear up points of confusion.

Professors are used to lost students coming in for guidance - it's our job to help you. The students we worry about are the ones who don't come in. Don't be one of those students.

9. Thinking you can learn deeply when you are being constantly distracted.

Every tiny pull toward an instant message or conversation means you have less brain power to devote to learning. Every tug of interrupted attention pulls out tiny neural roots before they can grow.

10. Not getting enough sleep.

Your brain pieces together problem-solving techniques when you sleep, and it also practices and repeats whatever you put in mind before you go to sleep. Prolonged fatigue allows toxins to build up in the brain that disrupt the neural connections you need to think quickly and well. If you don't get a good sleep before a test, NOTHING ELSE YOU HAVE DONE WILL MATTER.

10 Daily Habits That Will Actually Make You Smarter

You might be under the impression that intelligence is a fixed quantity set when you are young and unchanging thereafter. But research shows that you’re wrong. How we approach situations and the things we do to feed our brains can significantly improve our mental horsepower.

That could mean going back to school or filling your bookshelves (or e-reader) with thick tomes on deep subjects, but getting smarter doesn’t necessarily mean a huge commitment of time and energy, according to a recent thread on question-and-answer site Quora.

When a questioner keen on self-improvement asked the community, “What would you do to be a little smarter every single day?” lots of readers—including dedicated meditators, techies, and entrepreneurs—weighed in with useful suggestions. Which of these 10 ideas can you fit into your daily routine?

1. Be Smarter About Your Online Time

Every online break doesn’t have to be about checking social networks and fulfilling your daily ration of cute animal pics. The web is also full of great learning resources, such as online courses, intriguing TED talks, and vocabulary-building tools. Replace a few minutes of skateboarding dogs with something more mentally nourishing, suggest several responders.

2. Write Down What You Learn

It doesn’t have to be pretty or long, but taking a few minutes each day to reflect in writing about what you learned is sure to boost your brainpower. “Write 400 words a day on things that you learned,” suggests yoga teacher Claudia Azula Altucher. Mike Xie, a research associate at Bayside Biosciences, agrees: “Write about what you’ve learned.”

3. Make a “Did” List

A big part of intelligence is confidence and happiness, so boost both by pausing to list not the things you have yet to do, but rather all the things you’ve already accomplished. The idea of a “done list” is recommended by famed VC Marc Andreessen as well as Azula Altucher. “Make an I did list to show all the things you, in fact, accomplished,” she suggests.

4. Get Out the Scrabble Board

Board games and puzzles aren’t just fun but also a great way to work out your brain. “Play games (Scrabble, bridge, chess, Go, Battleship, Connect 4, doesn’t matter),” suggests Xie (for a ninja-level brain boost, exercise your working memory by trying to play without looking at the board). “Play Scrabble with no help from hints or books,” concurs Azula Altucher.

5. Have Smart Friends

It can be rough on your self-esteem, but hanging out with folks who are more clever than you is one of the fastest ways to learn. “Keep a smart company. Remember your IQ is the average of the five closest people you hang out with,” Saurabh Shah, an account manager at Symphony Teleca, writes. “Surround yourself with smarter people,” agrees developer Manas J. Saloi. “I try to spend as much time as I can with my tech leads. I have never had a problem accepting that I am an average coder at best and there are many things I am yet to learn... Always be humble and be willing to learn.”

6. Read a Lot

OK, this is not a shocker, but it was the most common response: Reading definitely seems essential. Opinions vary on what’s the best brain-boosting reading material, with suggestions ranging from developing a daily newspaper habit to picking up a variety of fiction and nonfiction, but everyone seems to agree that quantity is important. Read a lot.

7. Explain it to Others

“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough,” Albert Einstein said. The Quora posters agree. Make sure you’ve really learned what you think you have learned and that the information is truly stuck in your memory by trying to teach it to others. “Make sure you can explain it to someone else,” Xie says simply. Student Jon Packles elaborates on this idea: “For everything you learn—big or small—stick with it for at least as long as it takes you to be able to explain it to a friend. It’s fairly easy to learn new information. Being able to retain that information and teach others is far more valuable.”

8. Do Random New Things

Shane Parrish, keeper of the consistently fascinating Farnam Street blog, tells the story of Steve Jobs’ youthful calligraphy class in his response on Quora. After dropping out of school, the future Apple founder had a lot of time on his hands and wandered into a calligraphy course. It seemed irrelevant at the time, but the design skills he learned were later baked into the first Macs.
The takeaway: You never know what will be useful ahead of time. You just need to try new things and wait to see how they connect with the rest of your experiences later on. “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future,” Parrish quotes Jobs as saying. In order to have dots to connect, you need to be willing to try new things—even if they don’t seem immediately useful or productive.

9. Learn a New Language

No, you don’t need to become quickly fluent or trot off to a foreign country to master the language of your choosing. You can work away steadily from the comfort of your desk and still reap the mental rewards. “Learn a new language. There are a lot of free sites for that. Use Livemocha or Busuu,” says Saloi (personally, I’m a big fan of Memrise once you have the basic mechanics of a new language down).

10. Take Some Downtime

It’s no surprise that dedicated meditator Azula Altucher recommends giving yourself space for your brain to process what it’s learned—“sit in silence daily,” she writes—but she’s not the only responder who stresses the need to take some downtime from mental stimulation. Spend some time just thinking, suggests retired cop Rick Bruno. He pauses the interior chatter while exercising. “I think about things while I run (almost every day),” he reports.

Does practice really makes perfect?

Does practice really make perfect? It's an age-old question, and a new study from Rice University, Princeton University and Michigan State University finds that while practice won't make you perfect, it will usually make you better at what you're practicing.

     

"This question is the subject of a long-running debate in psychology," said Fred Oswald, professor and chair of psychology at Rice and one of the study's co-authors. "Why do so few people who are involved in sports such as golf, musical instruments such as the violin or careers such as law or medicine ever reach an expert level of performance?"

The study, "Deliberate Practice and Performance in Music, Games, Sports, Education and Professions: A Meta-Analysis," reviewed 88 previous studies (more than 11,135 total participants) published through 2014 that investigated relevant research on practice predicting performance in music, games, sports, educational and occupational domains.

Within each domain, the researchers averaged the reported results across all relevant studies. They found that "deliberate practice" – defined as engagement in structured activities created specifically to improve performance in a specific field – explained 26 percent of the variance in performance for games, 21 percent for music, 18 percent for sports, 4 percent for education and less than 1 percent for professions.

"Deliberate practice was a strong overall predictor of success in many performance domains, and not surprisingly, people who report practicing a lot generally tend to perform at a higher level than people who practice less," Oswald said. "However, perhaps the more important contribution of our study is that no matter how strongly practice predicted performance in our findings, there was always statistical room for other personal factors to predict learning a skill and performing successfully, including basic abilities."

Oswald noted that significant amounts of research have already identified basic abilities as also being important to predicting performance, but some researchers tend to minimize them and consider practice as the sole determinant of performance.

The researchers conclude that while practice will not make perfect for all people, it will make almost everyone better. "Other factors matter as well, but even so, no one says that practice will ever hurt you; but be careful if you are walking tightropes," Oswald said.

The research paper will appear in an upcoming edition of Psychological Science.

How Does the Brain Learn Best?

Getting to Know Your Brain’s Memory Processes

Forgetting isn’t always bad.

Most of the time, it’s natural and essential to remembering and learning. According to a theory championed by Robert Bjork and Elizabeth Ligon Bjork at UCLA, forgetting serves as a powerful spam filter: Whenever you’re trying to recall a word or fact, your brain has to actively suppress, or forget, competing information. What’s more, the way memories tend to fade over time actually aids subsequent learning.




Under a principle the Bjorks call desirable difficulty, when the brain has to work hard to retrieve a half-forgotten memory (such as when reviewing new vocabulary words you learned the day before), it re-doubles the strength of that memory.

If you sit down to study a load of material, “of course you’re not going to remember most of it the next day,” Carey said. You do have to go back and build your knowledge. “But it’s not that you don’t remember well, or you’re not a good learner. It’s that forgetting is a critical part of learning.”

The brain is a foraging learner.

For our ancient hominid ancestors, remembering how and where to hunt prey or find shelter was crucial to survival. The human brain evolved to pick up valuable pieces of information here and there, on the fly, all the time, and put it all together, he said. It still does that — absorbing cues from daily life, overheard conversations, its own internal musings. It keeps things in mind that are important to you (an unfinished project, for instance) and adds to your thoughts about them by subconsciously tuning in to any relevant information you see or hear around you. By foraging in this way, the brain is “building knowledge continually, and it’s not only during study or practice,” Carey said. And we’re not even completely aware of that.

We can be tactical in our schooling.

The traditional advice on learning has been to “study hard,” in a quiet place and with the same routine, yet that doesn’t say much about what to specifically do. But pupils today can change the way they study to exploit the brain’s quirky learning processes, using the strategies revealed by memory and learning research. While that science is still maturing, “it’s at a place now where it can give you a specific tactical plan,” Carey said. Students can tailor their preparation with techniques targeting different kinds of content or skills, and manage their schedule to optimize their time. “That’s a powerful thing, because we go through our whole lives never knowing that,” he said.

For example:

– Breaking up and spacing out study time over days or weeks can substantially boost how much of the material students retain, and for longer, compared to lumping everything into a single, nose-to-the-grindstone session.

– Varying the studying environment — by hitting the books in, say, a cafe or garden rather than only hunkering down in the library, or even by listening to different background music — can help reinforce and sharpen the memory of what you learn.

– A 15-minute break to go for a walk or trawl on social media isn’t necessarily wasteful procrastination. Distractions and interruptions can allow for mental “incubation” and flashes of insight.

-- but only if you’ve been working at a problem for a while and get stuck, according to a 2009 research meta-analysis.

– Quizzing oneself on new material, such as by reciting it aloud from memory or trying to tell a friend about it, is a far more powerful way to master information than just re-reading it, according to work by researchers including Henry Roediger III and Jeffrey Karpicke. (Roediger has co-authored his own book, “Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning.”)

Experimenting With Learning Tactics

Anybody can try these methods to see what works best, Carey said. For instance, to prepare for a Spanish test that’s one week away, students could plan to study an hour today, an hour tomorrow — and then self-test themselves next week right before the exam, he said. The book also explores the benefits of sleep (which improves retention and comprehension of what you learn), perceptual learning modules and mixing up different kinds of related problems or skills in practice sessions instead of repetitively rehearsing just one skill at a time.

Carey thinks the science-based learning strategies should explicitly be taught to all students early on, as part of the school curriculum. But kids shouldn’t use them “as an excuse to do nothing,” he added. The message isn’t that they can spend every second glued to their cellphones and still be learning. “You have to be motivated and pay attention and so on.”

Unfortunately, most people, educators included, are unaware of the lessons from the science of learning, Carey said. Education and cognitive science are largely separate worlds that have begun communicating only in the last decade, partly because “teachers see all sorts of reforms come and go, and they’re skeptical — and rightly so — of anyone who comes in and says, “Well, I’m going to tell you how to make the kids learn better,” he said. But some individual teachers who have followed the research may be applying certain strategies in the classroom, he said, such as assigning mixed-up math problem sets.

Knowing the basics of how the brain actually learns can offer breathing room from societal expectations about “good” academic habits. A fidgety teenager who has trouble concentrating and forgets her physics formulas might think, “I’m no good at this” or “I’m not so smart, and maybe it’s not worthwhile for me to pursue this,” Carey said. But that’s not necessarily true, according to the cognitive research. Students need to understand that learning happens not only during reading and studying, but in all sorts of ways, so that they can examine their own habits to know which ones may be helping or not, and make adjustments, he said. Only then can they evaluate whether they’re good at something.

Surviving the Modern Jungle

Ultimately, the value of these learning strategies isn’t just about earning better grades, Carey said. In the modern jungle of society, learning is still about surviving: For young people, it’s about sussing out what they’re good at, what rings their bell, and what they want to do with their lives. “It’s informing you of: Who am I? Where do I place my bets? Do I major in physics or do I major in architecture or design, or do I major in English? Do I belong here at all?” Carey said. Those are important decisions. “Being self-aware about what’s effective learning and how it happens, I think, gives you a real edge in making those choices.”

Carey has fully incorporated the learning techniques into his own life — whether in practicing guitar or getting up to speed on the latest neuroscience research to write a newspaper story. For example, when reading a difficult scientific journal article, “I realize I’m not going to understand a bunch of the stuff right away, no matter how hard I try or concentrate. I don’t let that slow me down.” He runs through it a few times, puts it aside and, spacing out his learning, tries again later, when the material almost always begins to gel.

Deadline pressure often forces him to start writing his article before he even has all the pieces, which is an “extremely valuable way to efficiently pick up the knowledge,” he said. “In effect, you’re testing yourself on how much you know… and you’re trying to write it clearly so you’re sort of teaching it, too. Those are two very effective study techniques.”

He wishes he’d known these learning secrets years ago, when he was in school. “I know for sure it would’ve taken so much of the anxiety and dread out of preparation and study and learning,” Carey said.

Motivation: Reflecting On What To Do When It's Not There

The issue of how to motivate students is an essential one for educators and parents to explore and one that's core to the success of our children. We all know that if students aren't motivated, their journeys will be long and hard. As with so much, sometimes if we start with ourselves -- with reflecting on our own issues with motivation -- we can gain useful insights. I hope to offer some thoughts that may provoke personal reflection and suggest strategies for helping kids to gain motivation.

This blog is inspired by my own lack of motivation right now to write this. This blog is (right now) overdue and I've procrastinated long enough. As I lie on my deck this morning contemplating my lack of motivation and mounting guilt that it isn't done, I start remembering how many times as a student I didn't want to write something, or how many times as a teacher, I felt no motivation to lesson plan or grade papers. "I'm just not feeling motivated," I kept thinking, and then a more useful thought came into my mind: "It doesn't matter. Get it done."

That's Lesson Number One that I wish I knew as a student: Sometimes you aren't going to be motivated but do it anyway -- such a simple lesson that has propelled me into action. Maybe motivation is overrated. Maybe in order to be successful we don't really need a whole lot of it.
Really it's just a shift in perspective: I'm not feeling motivated to write right now. I'm just returning from vacation where I devoured mystery novels, (I'm halfway through one now and it's calling to me to finish it), I hiked and hung out with my husband and son, slept a lot, and worked diligently on my "Play PD." I've started a photography course and a sketchbook class and I'm honoring my commitments to myself to play and create and relax. And then there's this blog -- and other things I've got to do.

Here's the shift in perspective: I'm not particularly motivated to write right now, but I am motivated to honor my commitments (such as this blog). I'm motivated to get it done. And when I say that, I feel a little jolt of energy. Let's do it.

I learned this a long time ago (I just forget it a lot). Some might call what I think I've learned "time management," or "discipline," or something to do with motivation. I call it, "getting things done." As a writer, and someone with a full time job and family, I learned that I might not often feel super motivated to write, the muse is often nowhere to be found and sometimes I might even hate writing. But I do it anyway. I show up, close down my Internet browsers (deadly distractions) and I put my fingers on the keys and I write. I also set a timer for 45-minute blocks and during that time I don't allow myself to get up or do anything other than what I'm supposed to do. After the time is up, I can have a 15-minute break and then I'm on for another 45. That's how I get things done.

Sometimes I think that in schools we focus too much on building intrinsic motivation for learning, or we're working too hard at it. Learning is rewarding and we're all going to feel a certain amount of motivation and reward in different content areas and with different tasks. Sometimes I think it would be useful if teachers helped kids find motivation in getting something done. In balance, of course -- I'm vehemently opposed to all learning being about memorization or rote learning or just getting things done. But sometimes you need your students to just write a persuasive essay and maybe it's not something they really care much about but they could be motivated to just do it. Add it to the list of things they know how to do and that they've done. And if they can do it in a reasonable amount of time, and the quality is decent, then that's fantastic.

Another thing I know about getting things done: They don't always have to be done really well. I am grateful that I've never been plagued by perfectionism. If I'm tasked with doing something for which I struggle to feel motivated then I'm quite satisfied if the outcome is satisfactory or decent. If it's something I pour my heart and soul into, then I hope the outcome is really good. But I'm the judge of this; I evaluate my own input and product. I don't get caught up on "Is it perfect?" I ask myself, "Is this good enough, right now, given what you've invested?" And usually the answer is "Yes."
And so, if this blog isn't amongst the best I've ever written, I'm okay with that. Sometimes you just got to get something done.

This is liberating, this idea. You don't always have to feel inundated with creative juices and motivation. You just have to honor your commitments to yourself and others. Agonizing over what you have to do and how you don't want to do it and how you just want to wait until you feel motivated is a waste of time and energy. Just do it. Set a timer, think about how great it'll feel when you're done, and do it.

And with that, I'm done! And I feel good! And now I can return to my mystery novel and enjoy!