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All day at school [your kid is a Radish-Eater] burning up willpower on academic tasks and obeying rules and reining in behavior. Many kids then arrive home with very little self-discipline left to apply to homework.

And if your child has ADHD, a LD, or any other learning challenge, the school day is tapping out her reserves of perseverance and self-control that much faster.

Kids don’t need lectures on fortitude or critiques of their character.

Instead, students often badly need understanding, encouragement, comfort and support. Simple gestures of kindness and help can make all the difference for a kid who does want to do his homework but who is running on empty in the willpower department.

Organizers of an annual Easter egg hunt in Colorado attended by hundreds of children have canceled this year’s event, citing the behavior of aggressive parents who swarmed into the tiny park last year, determined that their kids get an egg.

That hunt was over in seconds, to the consternation of egg-less tots and their own parents. Too many parents had jumped a rope set up to allow only children into Bancroft Park in a historic area of Colorado Springs.

Organizers say the event has outgrown its original intent of being a neighborhood event.

Parenting observers cite the cancellation as a prime example of “helicopter parents” — those who hover over their children and are involved in every aspect of their children’s lives — sports, school, and increasingly work — to ensure that they don’t fail, even at an Easter egg hunt.

An orange-robed, shaven-headed man came in and sat, cross-legged, on a podium. I felt uneasy, until he made a self-deprecating joke about a monk telling a bunch of mothers how to cope with their kids. He spoke in a cockney accent and laughed frequently. Later, he teased some of the kids about their smelly feet.

We grownups closed our eyes so he could guide us through the meditation – initially instructing us to focus on our breathing and then asking us to dwell on a positive aspect of someone we experience, erm, ‘difficulty’ with in our lives.

It sounds terribly cheesy, but the children went strangely quiet at first – although they may well just have been over-awed by the unfamiliar setting. I really was able to try (and largely fail – come on, Tibetan masters spend a lifetime trying to do this!) to calm the swirling miasma of my mind.

В 1956 году вышла книга Альфреда Бестера «Тигр! Тигр!», в которой автор ввел понятие «джантирования» – телепортации, перемещения в пространстве усилием воли. Герои Бестера джантировали на различные расстояния, и на момент событий, происходящих в книге, делать это уже умели практически все. Но первый в мире Бестера случай джантирования произошел исключительно благодаря попаданию Чарльза Джанте (по имени которого и было впоследствии названо явление) в заведомо безвыходную ситуацию, грозившую ему неминуемой смертью. Оказавшись перед выбором – умереть или извлечь себя из закрытого пространства силой мысли, Джанте преодолел общеизвестный барьер невозможного и поднялся «уровнем выше», став первым в мире джантирующим человеком. Дальнейшее – изучение явления, описание его параметров и обучение желающих, которыми, разумеется, оказались абсолютно все – стало уже делом техники.

К сожалению, телепортация, или джант, все еще остается за рамками даже теоретических возможностей человека. Но описанием его возникновения Бестер с гениальной точностью воспроизвел схему, с которой на том или ином этапе приходится сталкиваться каждому из нас. Все мы временами оказываемся в кризисе – ситуации, воспринимаемой психикой как «смертельно опасную». И возникает вопрос, что же делать дальше.

Кризис создает невыносимость, требующую разрешения – или ведущую к «смерти», то есть погружению в депрессию, страдания и мрак. Внутри существующих рамок подобное погружение неотвратимо, но потом начинается рывок, основанный на все тех же трех вещах – энергии, знании «ландшафта» (то есть представлении о том, как в принципе выглядит возможный результат) и расстоянии – количестве перемен, необходимых для перехода на качественно новый уровень. Он не должен быть слишком далек от старого, но непременно включает в себя то, что раньше было невозможным.

Isidor I. Rabi, the Nobel laureate in physics who died Jan. 11 [1988], was once asked, ”Why did you become a scientist, rather than a doctor or lawyer or businessman, like the other immigrant kids in your neighborhood?”

Dr. Rabi’s answer, as reported by Dr. Sackler, was profound: ”My mother made me a scientist without ever intending it. Every other Jewish mother in Brooklyn would ask her child after school: ‘So? Did you learn anything today?’ But not my mother. She always asked me a different question. ‘Izzy,’ she would say, ‘did you ask a good question today?’ That difference - asking good questions -made me become a scientist!”

It’s fathers day and I thought I’d tell a story about my dad and something he taught me a long time ago. I was in middle school and I had a school project due the next day and it came up at dinner that I had not done the project. My dad made me stay up very late that night until I had completed it. And he stayed up with me. He made sure I understood two things that evening. The first one is obvious. When assigned something, you do it and you do it on time.

But the second thing he explained to me was more subtle and way more powerful. He explained that I should start working on a project as soon as it was assigned. An hour or so would do fine, he told me. He told me to come back to the project every day for at least a little bit and make progress on it slowly over time. I asked him why that was better than cramming at the very end (as I was doing during the conversation).

He explained that once your brain starts working on a problem, it doesn’t stop. If you get your mind wrapped around a problem with a fair bit of time left to solve it, the brain will solve the problem subconsciously over time and one day you’ll sit down to do some more work on it and the answer will be right in front of you.

(Fred Wilson about his father).

“[My father] advised me to sit every few months in my reading chair for an entire evening, close my eyes and try to think of new problems to solve. I took his advice very seriously and have been glad ever since that he did.” Walter Alvarez, professor Earth and Planetary Sciences, son of Nobel prize winning physicist Luiz Alvarez

(via Eide Neurolearning Blog)

For most top students, there is no time in high school. That’s a brutal shame. Instead, they’re busy punching their college application cards, because that’s what the system has trained them to do. They get good at 23 things, because allegedly that’s what Harvard wants.

However, that’s not what the world wants, and that’s not what most people want for themselves. If you do, fine. But most people who really excel in life do so because they find something they are passionate about and do it. And then do it some more. Maybe it’s 2-3 things they become outstanding at, but it certainly isn’t 97 things they are merely passably good at.

Bizarrely, our current educational system (and it’s the perception of our current college admissions system) doesn’t allow for unstructured exploration or for focused excellence. There’s no free time - there’s just enough time for the next activity. The result is a striving for unfocused mere goodness.

Since there have been children, there have been adults trying to get them to cooperate. The Bible repeatedly commands children to heed their parents and proposes that disobedient children be stoned to death or at least have their eyes picked out by ravens. Over the centuries, the stick (or paddle or switch) has lost favor, in most cases, to the carrot. Today the petty bribes — a sticker for using the toilet or a cookie for sitting still in church — start before kids can speak in full sentences.

In recent years, hundreds of schools have made these transactions more businesslike, experimenting with paying kids with cold, hard cash for showing up or getting good grades or, in at least one case, going another day without getting pregnant.

I have not met a child who does not admire this trend. But it makes adults profoundly uncomfortable. Teachers complain that we are rewarding kids for doing what they should be doing of their own volition. Psychologists warn that money can actually make kids perform worse by cheapening the act of learning. Parents predict widespread slacking after the incentives go away. And at least one think-tank scholar has denounced the strategy as racist. The debate has become a proxy battle for the larger war over why our kids are not learning at the rate they should be despite decades of reforms and budget increases.

In principle, Fryer agrees. “Kids should learn for the love of learning,” he says. “But they’re not. So what shall we do?” Most teenagers do not look at their math homework the way toddlers look at a blank piece of paper. It would be wonderful if they did. Maybe one day we will all approach our jobs that way. But until then, most adults work primarily for money, and in a curious way, we seem to be holding kids to a higher standard than we hold ourselves.

“In all animal species, postures that are expansive, open, and take up more space are associated with high power and dominance,” she says. “Postures that are contractive—limbs touching torso, protecting the vital organs, taking up minimal space—are associated with low power, being at the bottom of the hierarchy. Any animal you can think of, when it’s prey, makes itself as small as possible.”

In primates, these postures also correlate with testosterone and cortisol levels. Expansive, high-power postures mean (in both sexes) high testosterone, a hormone that animal and human studies connect with dominance and power, and low levels of cortisol (the “stress” hormone), while the inverse holds for contractive, low-power postures. “Those endocrine profiles are associated with disease resistance,” Cuddy says. “Low testosterone and high cortisol make you very vulnerable to diseases, so you’re more likely to be picked off by whatever comes through. At the top, you’re more disease-resistant.”

Until recently, primatologists believed that those who inherited high-power neuroendocrine profiles became the dominant creatures in their groups, the so-called alpha males or females. “But it turns out that those hormone levels change when you take on the dominant role,” Cuddy explains. “If an alpha is killed and another primate has to take over that position, his or her testosterone and cortisol levels will change in just a few days. Likewise, if you get pushed to the bottom, your hormone profile shifts. It’s both cause and effect. It’s possible that slight innate differences in neuroendocrine profiles are greatly exaggerated by role assignment.”

In a recent paper published in Psychological Science, Cuddy, Dana R. Carney, and Andy J. Yap (both of Columbia) report how they measured hormone levels of 42 male and female research subjects, placed the subjects in two high-power or low-power poses for a minute per pose, then re-measured their hormone levels 17 minutes later. They also offered subjects a chance to gamble, rolling a die to double a $2 stake. The results were astonishing: a mere two minutes in high- or low-power poses caused testosterone to rise and cortisol to decrease—or the reverse. Those in high-power stances were also more likely to gamble, enacting a trait (risk taking) associated with dominant individuals; they also reported feeling more powerful. “If you get this effect in two minutes, imagine what you get sitting in the CEO’s chair for a year,” Cuddy says.