Tools of the mind

Slowness helps, it seems. While intelligence is often associated with speed – calculating sums at lightning fast rates etc . – that speed can have a cost attached. Nuances are missed, interruptions are made (when you think you know where the other person is headed), listening skills go down, and from what I can gather, anxiety is speeds ugly twin.

Adele Diamond believes (as quoted here) that:

“the failure of children to control their fast cognitive and emotional responses is the seed crystal around which the cascade of school failure begins. Teachers get annoyed and frustrated with such children, and school becomes less fun for these kids. They have difficulty complying with rules … The teachers expect less and less form these kids, … and the vicious cycle of failure has begun.”

Interestingly, she has tested some children using the Tools of the Mind Curriculum and these kids do better on tests that require what psychologists call executive function. Executive function is focusing, ignoring distractions, remembering and using new information, planning action and revising the plan and inhibiting fast, impulsive thoughts and actions.

How to achieve that? There’s a good NYT article that outlines some of the Tools of the Mind system for very young children.

At the heart of the Tools of the Mind methodology is a simple but surprising idea: that the key to developing self-regulation is play, and lots of it. But not just any play. The necessary ingredient is what Leong and Bodrova call “mature dramatic play”: complex, extended make-believe scenarios, involving multiple children and lasting for hours, even days. If you want to succeed in school and in life, they say, you first need to do what Abigail and Jocelyn and Henry have done every school day for the past two years: spend hour after hour dressing up in firefighter hats and wedding gowns, cooking make-believe hamburgers and pouring nonexistent tea, doing the hard, serious work of playing pretend.

And for older children, I was thinking meditation may well hold some keys. I have had a quick look online to see what resources there might be for children. Ideally, I was thinking, it would be something that children could do every morning before lessons start. This site seems to have some courses and introductory lectures so I’ll try there first. But if anyone has any tips, do please say.

I should say here, with no great pride, that meditation pushes all the wrong incense stick and tie-dye prejudices for me. My interest is in getting the children to slow down, not to make them Yogis. If meditation is one tool to help with this, then I think the children should know about it. If it helps them, then they can use it, if it doesn’t they can decide not to.