I apologise if you were expecting some exciting lessons like that robot teacher appears to be delivering! In fact, this post is actually advocating the opposite of exciting lessons…
I was recently delivering a session on emotional intelligence to parents via a school I often work with. We were briefly exploring the idea about how the emotional-systems we evolved to keep us safe as hunter-gatherers, don’t always suit modern living.
My favourite example to illustrate this is the reward or pleasure/pain system that I have written about before here and many other times! This biological system was perfect for times of scarcity – to drive us to hunt for hours to get the reward of a kill so we didn’t starve. However, now we don’t live in times of scarcity (in the western world at least), we have tampered with this system’s natural balance by delivering to ourselves rewards more frequently and easily than the system is designed for.
The result is that if we are constantly seeking and receiving pleasures, the system (that nature prefers to keep in a gentle balance) is off-kilter. The constant triggering of pleasure (through screens, biscuits, wine etc.) has a payback of ‘pain’ (as anxiety, agitation and low mood) as the off-balance tries to level out.
As we were discussing it, the teacher (who also attends the sessions) suddenly had an aha! moment. She shared,
‘Perhaps we are erroneously tampering with this system by constantly trying to make lessons super-exciting and engaging.’
She continued,
‘As I sit there teaching phonics, I actually feel like I am torturing the children, because phonics can be hard to make exciting all of the time’.
She had made a very good point. Schools are feeling pressure to keep up with a hyped-up world when in actual fact, it might be wiser and more beneficial to tone things down.
If the means (methods we use to teach) becomes so much more important than the end result (e.g. learning to read), we might inadvertently be giving children an unhelpful message. In this example, ‘having fun is more important than learning to read.’ It’s intrinsic motivation that we might also be tampering negatively with!
My lessons at school as a child were not often exciting. I didn’t expect them to be. But I knew learning was good for me (even if I wasn’t great at it) and I didn’t expect to be entertained by teachers. When something exciting did happen at school it stood out, was highly enjoyable and created a lasting memory.
This idea links strongly to something I often speak about. We need to help children acknowledge, accept, endure and manage unenjoyable emotions – including the boredom and discomfort that can be part of trying to master or learn something new. There are many beneficial achievements in life that do require us to endure feeling the opposite of excited and entertained, and remaining motivated in these times, needs us especially to ‘ride’ the experience of unenjoyable emotions. We might not be even aware that we no longer expect children to acquire this disposition.
So it’s just a thought – but maybe we all could do with a greater amount of hyping-down and this applies to schools too- especially as they are somewhat buzzy places already!