Category Archives: Living

GCC in 2033

For this last week of GCC’s Write 6X6 challenge, the suggested prompt was to write about where we see GCC 5 or 10 years from now – a “vision,” if you will. This prompt brought up another vision I had almost 10 years ago – one that changed my life in profound ways.

Before anyone gets excited, I am a scientist. I don’t suffer tales of the paranormal gladly. I had a vision about 10 years ago that absolutely came true, but plenty of my other visions did not. For example, I am not now, nor have I ever been, a Radio City Rockette. But I digress . . .

The day of my vision started by walking my daughter Taylor to her first day in a new job at a Manhattan advertising agency. A few months earlier, Taylor took an uncharacteristic leap and packed up to move to the Big Apple. Tears filled my eyes as we hugged a block away from her office, lest any of her new colleagues see mommy walking her to work.

After we parted, I decided to take a stroll on the High Line, a public park built on a historic, elevated rail line. Full of public art and flora and fauna (okay, birds and squirrels) right next to the life-sounds of the city, walking the High Line makes for a brain buzzy with introspection. I thought about Taylor’s exciting new career — and the one I was currently enduring as an assistant research professor.

View on the High Line

Right there on the High Line somewhere between 26th Street and the 10th Avenue crossing, the thought flashed, “I want to teach at a community college!” I then spent the next hour or so going over in my mind how such a position would feed my soul. (Yep, I said soul – this scientist has one, too.) This wasn’t the first time I considered community college teaching, but it was this one particular vision that spurred me to action.

I had one eensy problem. The leadership in my then-department had a policy: If you apply for another position, you must resign in order to receive a recommendation. You know where this is going. I quit my full-time job. With benefits. And a retirement plan. To become an adjunct. If my mother were alive to see it, she would have muttered, “Mary, Mary, Mary . . .”

Shortly after my decision to leap out into the CC job market, the net in the form of an adjunct gig at GCC magically appeared. (Did I really just write about magic?) More adjunct opportunities came from SCC and NAU. I even returned to ASU to lecture for a couple years before I landed in the residential position I am in now. My point is it’s been a long road to get here, but I have never been happier and more fulfilled at work.

My vision of GCC in the next 10 years is that we continue to grow in our vibrancy and remain as wonderfully student-centered as I believe we are today. My vision includes a faculty who feel valued and energized. There’s a wonderful book entitled, If You Don’t Feed the Teachers, They Eat the Students. My hope for GCC is that all faculty feel fed so that they may be fully present for students.

Five years elapsed between my initial vision and inking my employment papers with GCC, but every minute of the struggle to get here was worth it. Whatever we do collectively to move GCC forward over the next 10 years is worth every bead of sweat if it helps our students to live out their own visions of the lives they want as well.

 

May GCC be as vibrant as this mural on the High Line!

The post GCC in 2033 appeared first on My Love of Learning.

GCC in 2033

For this last week of GCC’s Write 6X6 challenge, the suggested prompt was to write about where we see GCC 5 or 10 years from now – a “vision,” if you will. This prompt brought up another vision I had almost 10 years ago – one that changed my life in profound ways.

Before anyone gets excited, I am a scientist. I don’t suffer tales of the paranormal gladly. I had a vision about 10 years ago that absolutely came true, but plenty of my other visions did not. For example, I am not now, nor have I ever been, a Radio City Rockette. But I digress . . .

The day of my vision started by walking my daughter Taylor to her first day in a new job at a Manhattan advertising agency. A few months earlier, Taylor took an uncharacteristic leap and decided to move to the Big Apple. Tears filled my eyes as we hugged a block away from her office, lest any of her new colleagues see mommy walking her to work.

After we parted, I decided to take a stroll on the High Line, a public park built on a historic, elevated rail line. Full of public art and flora and fauna (okay, birds and squirrels) right next to the life-sounds of the city, walking the High Line makes for a brain buzzy with introspection. I thought about Taylor’s exciting new career — and the one I was currently enduring as an assistant research professor.

View on the High Line

Right there on the High Line somewhere between 26th Street and the 10th Avenue crossing, the thought flashed, “I want to teach at a community college!” I then spent the next hour or so going over in my mind how such a position would feed my soul. (Yep, I said soul – this scientist has one, too.) This wasn’t the first time I considered community college teaching, but it was this one particular vision that spurred me to action.

I had one eensy problem. The leadership in my then-department had a policy: If you apply for another position, you must resign in order to receive a recommendation. You know where this is going. I quit my full-time job. With benefits. And a retirement plan. To become an adjunct. If my mother were alive to see it, she would have muttered, “Mary, Mary, Mary . . .”

Shortly after my decision to leap out into the CC job market, the net in the form of an adjunct gig at GCC magically appeared. (Did I really just write about magic?) More adjunct opportunities came from SCC and NAU. I even returned to ASU to lecture for a couple years before I landed in the residential position I am in now. My point is it’s been a long road to get here, but I have never been happier and more fulfilled at work.

My vision of GCC in the next 10 years is that we continue to grow in our vibrancy and remain as wonderfully student-centered as I believe we are today. My vision includes a faculty who feel valued and energized. There’s a fun book entitled, If You Don’t Feed the Teachers, They Eat the Students. My hope for GCC is that all faculty feel fed so that they may be fully present for students.

Five years elapsed between my initial vision and inking my employment papers with GCC, but every minute of the struggle to get here was worth it. Whatever we do collectively to move GCC forward over the next 10 years is worth every bead of sweat if it helps our students to live out their own visions of the lives they want as well.

 

May GCC be as vibrant as this mural on the High Line!

The post GCC in 2033 appeared first on My Love of Learning.

GCC in 2033

For this last week of GCC’s Write 6X6 challenge, the suggested prompt was to write about where we see GCC 5 or 10 years from now – a “vision,” if you will. This prompt brought up another vision I had almost 10 years ago – one that changed my life in profound ways.

Before anyone gets excited, I am a scientist. I don’t suffer tales of the paranormal gladly. I had a vision about 10 years ago that absolutely came true, but plenty of my other visions did not. For example, I am not now, nor have I ever been, a Radio City Rockette. But I digress . . .

The day of my vision started by walking my daughter Taylor to her first day in a new job at a Manhattan advertising agency. A few months earlier, Taylor took an uncharacteristic leap and decided to move to the Big Apple. Tears filled my eyes as we hugged a block away from her office, lest any of her new colleagues see mommy walking her to work.

After we parted, I decided to take a stroll on the High Line, a public park built on a historic, elevated rail line. Full of public art and flora and fauna (okay, birds and squirrels) right next to the life-sounds of the city, walking the High Line makes for a brain buzzy with introspection. I thought about Taylor’s exciting new career — and the one I was currently enduring as an assistant research professor.

View on the High Line

Right there on the High Line somewhere between 26th Street and the 10th Avenue crossing, the thought flashed, “I want to teach at a community college!” I then spent the next hour or so going over in my mind how such a position would feed my soul. (Yep, I said soul – this scientist has one, too.) This wasn’t the first time I considered community college teaching, but it was this one particular vision that spurred me to action.

I had one eensy problem. The leadership in my then-department had a policy: If you apply for another position, you must resign in order to receive a recommendation. You know where this is going. I quit my full-time job. With benefits. And a retirement plan. To become an adjunct. If my mother were alive to see it, she would have muttered, “Mary, Mary, Mary . . .”

Shortly after my decision to leap out into the CC job market, the net in the form of an adjunct gig at GCC magically appeared. (Did I really just write about magic?) More adjunct opportunities came from SCC and NAU. I even returned to ASU to lecture for a couple years before I landed in the residential position I am in now. My point is it’s been a long road to get here, but I have never been happier and more fulfilled at work.

My vision of GCC in the next 10 years is that we continue to grow in our vibrancy and remain as wonderfully student-centered as I believe we are today. My vision includes a faculty who feel valued and energized. There’s a fun book entitled, If You Don’t Feed the Teachers, They Eat the Students. My hope for GCC is that all faculty feel fed so that they may be fully present for students.

Five years elapsed between my initial vision and inking my employment papers with GCC, but every minute of the struggle to get here was worth it. Whatever we do collectively to move GCC forward over the next 10 years is worth every bead of sweat if it helps our students to live out their own visions of the lives they want as well.

 

May GCC be as vibrant as this mural on the High Line!

The post GCC in 2033 appeared first on My Love of Learning.

Can We Live Without Risks?

A statement someone made recently jumped out at me. They said they rarely take risks. I was amazed. I consider myself a very careful person, but I often feel like my risks are the challenges I take on. Of course, I’m not talking about doing anything like this!

Perhaps it’s the definition of the word risk [enter student’s clichéd discovery of dictionary definition to make written assignment longer]. Wink

I see risk as a transition and an opportunity. Now, if the risk doesn’t have that element, I won’t do it. In some ways, we all take risks every day. There are certain risks I simply won’t consider, the consequences are just too costly.

Professionally, I was always taught to say ‘yes,’ if you want to work. People want to know that you will say ‘yes,’ when they ask. It saves time for those hiring. That’s a musician’s point of view. It’s the way you keep getting more opportunities – or, for those who prefer less formal constructs – How you get more gigs. Regrets, yes, certainly. I said ‘no’ to a really good opportunity, which was a risk, because I was just getting married (hence, already in the midst of a transition) and didn’t want to spend my honeymoon thinking about the project and risking the beginnings of our marriage… I’ll always think about where that job might have led. But see, once again, I keep going back to the positive-negative balance of risks.

And I’ll admit to some positive/negative possibilities. I’ve walked into a classroom and spoken completely ‘off the cuff,’ which is definitely a risk. It’s not that I hadn’t thought about it. I had. I know my subject deeply. Some of those have been my most inspired lectures, but occasionally, they have not. It’s a risk.

How about classroom management? I had a student who sat in the front row of class and never took a note. (This is a room that is set up as a lecture/recital hall, so down in front is noticeable.) In fact, he came in without anything – no books, no notebook, no pen/pencil or computer. Nothing. An instructor would assume he didn’t come prepared for class. And we’ve all had those students who obviously weren’t. Did I mention this was a long lecture format? The class was two hours and twenty minutes long. Should I say anything to him? He wasn’t disruptive, and he did well in the subject. One day he came in with a Rubik’s cube. I saw it, but chose not to say anything. As the lecture was finishing I just happened to look over at him. He subtly showed me his work by merely opening his hand. It was finished, and it was perfect. He hadn’t been disruptive to anyone, he didn’t show anyone else, I hadn’t been interrupted by what he was doing, but it allowed him to concentrate on what we were talking about. A risk, and a reward.

Deeper Risks

I could stop there, because it would be a great place to end – but I’m going to “risk” it and go heavy. As I mentioned earlier, we take risks every day. Driving, flying, walking down a set of stairs, saying something that you wish you hadn’t. I never discuss politics. I’ve gotten to where I rarely offer comments – especially to the entire world on any of those fronts.

But I’m going to include the world community and the risks people are facing today because we need to be talking about this in our classrooms. These are the ultimate risks because they are about basic human needs. This is not something that is happening somewhere else. It will ultimately affect us here. I was just reading an article about the fact that many Russians are also leaving their homeland, just as many Ukrainians are – except those who choose to fight. There is a general surge of people trying to survive with some semblance of their lives intact. In the article, the author referred to a family’s current residence, a shared room with three mattresses on the floor. The people had a roof, they had mattresses, a floor, running water, and they still had some money. They had been well-to-do so such living conditions would not have been acceptable in their previous life, but under the circumstances they knew they were lucky. They calculated the risk and felt they’d come out ahead considering the cost.

I first saw evidence of the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s in Sweden. I ended up working with two Russian musicians as part of a Swedish quartet. There were interesting cultural flare-ups that surprised me. But like other recent mass emigrations, everyone was, and had been, fleeing for their lives. It’s amazing what we are willing to risk when we feel that we have little left to lose or too much to lose – our lives or our children’s lives.

In Estonia, ten years after the last Russian troops slowly left, I moved there, and in my research I learned more of Stalin’s ’round up’ of people. Sometimes there were lists, sometimes just numbers. ‘Take this number of people. I don’t care who.’ They disappeared or went to gulags. Often, no one ever knew whether they were killed outright or just never seen again. How can you live with that threat? I was part of an interview team to determine whether a young Estonian man would study in the U.S. when he talked about the importance of the NATO alliance to his country. I knew about NATO. It also meant, in couched terms, the U.S., from where funding came for this prestigious scholarship. I occasionally thought about NATO – but not to the extent that this young man understood it because the Estonians had few defenses against the Russians on their shared border. We, as Americans, have the luxury of a different point of view.

Before I sign off, I want to mention that moving people, their craft, their professions, their influences, and their cultures affects everything. It affects the arts, music, the humanities, science, technology, engineering, people, and even education. Would you stay or would you go? Ultimately, when we talk about risks, these are the most critical risks to discuss. I truly believe as educators everything we do counts, but we are also lucky that we can talk about risks that are so relatively ordinary when others face risks that are so tremendously devastating.

 

Teaching Boundaries, Part I – Tech

I wake up to the first morning light, my brain recently bathed in glorious REM sleep. The restorative powers of sleep are legion: memory consolidation, increased problem-solving abilities, boosted immune functioning to name a few. There is evidence the brain performs a sort of housecleaning during shut-eye, making morning a ripe time for starting out the day with renewed clarity and potential.

So what do I do? Before my feet hit the floor, I grab my cell phone off the bedside table and let the fresh horrors of the overnight world infiltrate my blissfully open mind.

I tell myself that I am checking my phone because I have children. (But they are in their early 30’s, y’all.) Then, I see a red flag indicating I have e-mail, and without thinking I click to open it. And, while I’m here, I might as well check Facebook . . .

I know none of this is good. First, any student who e-mails me overnight is not writing to say what a wonderful teacher I am. Instead, it’s that there’s been a death in the family or they just plain forgot they had an assignment due at 11:59pm. And don’t get me started on how scrolling social media can affect mood.

I noticed a tendency to feel tethered to tech when I started teaching online full-time about five years ago. I had a gnawing sense that I needed to be able to respond to students at all hours of the day (and night). I thought that since I wasn’t actually teaching in-person, the tradeoff was making myself widely available to students.

So, I found myself reaching for my phone at stoplights, while I waited for my coffee, pretty much any time my brain was idle for a minute. Heaven forbid I should be left alone with my thoughts.

What I found, however, is that I was feeling exhausted all the time as an online teacher. I felt overwhelmed and a tad resentful. It seemed like I could never “catch up.” I know I’m not alone in this. Many teachers feel like their workdays never end, and that is because they don’t. Tech has a frightening way of blurring day into night, weekdays into weekends, our 40s into our 50s . . .

Over time I have discovered that most of the angst in my life can be traced to boundaries. According to Nedra Glover Tawwab, author of Set Boundaries, Find Peace, the definition of boundaries is, “expectations and needs that help you feel safe and comfortable in your relationships.” Thus, a tech boundary is one set for your relationship with yourself.

Okay, so just set a tech boundary. I’ll just tell myself I won’t pick up my phone at the slightest hint of ennui. Easy, right?

Not so fast. What makes this a struggle is we battle our brain’s reward system when we fight tech. The little red dot with a number on it is anything but innocuous; it is there to prompt us to lay eyes on the alert. Tech shapes our behavior by hijacking the reward system.

So what’s the reward associated with opening overnight e-mail?  It actually might be the positive rush of seeing that there is, to quote my cop-husband, “nothing to see here” – that good feeling of realizing there are no fires to extinguish.

In her book Good Habits, Bad Habits, author Wendy Wood writes about creating “friction” around behaviors we want to discourage. In this way, we interrupt habits that are deeply grooved in our neural pathways. Here are some ideas I’m working on for putting friction between me and tech:

  • Remove work e-mail from my phone and home devices. This works as long as I don’t circumvent by logging into e-mail using my phone’s browser.
  • Alternatively, remove e-mail notifications from all devices. Can’t quite remove e-mail from your phone altogether? Disable the notifications that keep us coming back.
  • Designate three periods a day for checking e-mail. I am more successful with this on some days than others. But, I find I am more focused when I am not trying to multi-task.
  • Put my phone where it can’t be accessed quickly. I’m not as likely to grab my phone at every stop light if it isn’t right there on the console. At the grocery store, I can put my phone at the bottom of my bag.

The other day, while waiting for coffee at my local shop, I instantly reached for my phone and thought better of it. Even if there is an e-mail I need to respond to, must I do it right now? Instead, I immersed myself in the artwork on the walls and felt a better kind of rush.

Up next week – musings on setting time boundaries as a teacher.

The post Teaching Boundaries, Part I – Tech appeared first on My Love of Learning.

Teaching Boundaries, Part I – Tech

I wake up to the first morning light, my brain recently bathed in glorious REM sleep. The restorative powers of sleep are legion: memory consolidation, increased problem-solving abilities, boosted immune functioning to name a few. There is evidence the brain performs a sort of housecleaning during shut-eye, making morning a ripe time for starting out the day with renewed clarity and potential.

So what do I do? Before my feet hit the floor, I grab my cell phone off the bedside table and let the fresh horrors of the overnight world infiltrate my blissfully open mind.

I tell myself that I am checking my phone because I have children. (But they are in their early 30’s, y’all.) Then, I see a red flag indicating I have e-mail, and without thinking I click to open it. And, while I’m here, I might as well check Facebook . . .

I know none of this is good. First, any student who e-mails me overnight is not writing to say what a wonderful teacher I am. Instead, it’s that there’s been a death in the family or they just plain forgot they had an assignment due at 11:59pm. And don’t get me started on how scrolling social media can affect mood.

I noticed a tendency to feel tethered to tech when I started teaching online full-time about five years ago. I had a gnawing sense that I needed to be able to respond to students at all hours of the day (and night). I thought that since I wasn’t actually teaching in-person, the tradeoff was making myself widely available to students.

So, I found myself reaching for my phone at stoplights, while I waited for my coffee, pretty much any time my brain was idle for a minute. Heaven forbid I should be left alone with my thoughts.

What I found, however, is that I was feeling exhausted all the time as an online teacher. I felt overwhelmed and a tad resentful. It seemed like I could never “catch up.” I know I’m not alone in this. Many teachers feel like their workdays never end, and that is because they don’t. Tech has a frightening way of blurring day into night, weekdays into weekends, our 40s into our 50s . . .

Over time I have discovered that most of the angst in my life can be traced to boundaries. According to Nedra Glover Tawwab, author of Set Boundaries, Find Peace, the definition of boundaries is, “expectations and needs that help you feel safe and comfortable in your relationships.” Thus, a tech boundary is one set for your relationship with yourself.

Okay, so just set a tech boundary. I’ll just tell myself I won’t pick up my phone at the slightest hint of ennui. Easy, right?

Not so fast. What makes this a struggle is we battle our brain’s reward system when we fight tech. The little red dot with a number on it is anything but innocuous; it is there to prompt us to lay eyes on the alert. Tech shapes our behavior by hijacking the reward system.

So what’s the reward associated with opening overnight e-mail?  It actually might be the positive rush of seeing that there is, to quote my cop-husband, “nothing to see here” – that good feeling of realizing there are no fires to extinguish.

In her book Good Habits, Bad Habits, author Wendy Wood writes about creating “friction” around behaviors we want to discourage. In this way, we interrupt habits that are deeply grooved in our neural pathways. Here are some ideas I’m working on for putting friction between me and tech:

  • Remove work e-mail from my phone and home devices. This works as long as I don’t circumvent by logging into e-mail using my phone’s browser.
  • Alternatively, remove e-mail notifications from all devices. Can’t quite remove e-mail from your phone altogether? Disable the notifications that keep us coming back.
  • Designate three periods a day for checking e-mail. I am more successful with this on some days than others. But, I find I am more focused when I am not trying to multi-task.
  • Put my phone where it can’t be accessed quickly. I’m not as likely to grab my phone at every stop light if it isn’t right there on the console. At the grocery store, I can put my phone at the bottom of my bag.

The other day, while waiting for coffee at my local shop, I instantly reached for my phone and thought better of it. Even if there is an e-mail I need to respond to, must I do it right now? Instead, I immersed myself in the artwork on the walls and felt a better kind of rush.

Up next week – musings on setting time boundaries as a teacher.

The post Teaching Boundaries, Part I – Tech appeared first on My Love of Learning.

Teaching Boundaries, Part I – Tech

I wake up to the first morning light, my brain recently bathed in glorious REM sleep. The restorative powers of sleep are legion: memory consolidation, increased problem-solving abilities, boosted immune functioning to name a few. There is evidence the brain performs a sort of housecleaning during shut-eye, making morning a ripe time for starting out the day with renewed clarity and potential.

So what do I do? Before my feet hit the floor, I grab my cell phone off the bedside table and let the fresh horrors of the overnight world infiltrate my blissfully open mind.

I tell myself that I am checking my phone because I have children. (But they are in their early 30’s, y’all.) Then, I see a red flag indicating I have e-mail, and without thinking I click to open it. And, while I’m here, I might as well check Facebook . . .

I know none of this is good. First, any student who e-mails me overnight is not writing to say what a wonderful teacher I am. Instead, it’s that there’s been a death in the family or they just plain forgot they had an assignment due at 11:59pm. And don’t get me started on how scrolling social media can affect mood.

I noticed a tendency to feel tethered to tech when I started teaching online full-time about five years ago. I had a gnawing sense that I needed to be able to respond to students at all hours of the day (and night). I thought that since I wasn’t actually teaching in-person, the tradeoff was making myself widely available to students.

So, I found myself reaching for my phone at stoplights, while I waited for my coffee, pretty much any time my brain was idle for a minute. Heaven forbid I should be left alone with my thoughts.

What I found, however, is that I was feeling exhausted all the time as an online teacher. I felt overwhelmed and a tad resentful. It seemed like I could never “catch up.” I know I’m not alone in this. Many teachers feel like their workdays never end, and that is because they don’t. Tech has a frightening way of blurring day into night, weekdays into weekends, our 40s into our 50s . . .

Over time I have discovered that most of the angst in my life can be traced to boundaries. According to Nedra Glover Tawwab, author of Set Boundaries, Find Peace, the definition of boundaries is, “expectations and needs that help you feel safe and comfortable in your relationships.” Thus, a tech boundary is one set for your relationship with yourself.

Okay, so just set a tech boundary. I’ll just tell myself I won’t pick up my phone at the slightest hint of ennui. Easy, right?

Not so fast. What makes this a struggle is we battle our brain’s reward system when we fight tech. The little red dot with a number on it is anything but innocuous; it is there to prompt us to lay eyes on the alert. Tech shapes our behavior by hijacking the reward system.

So what’s the reward associated with opening overnight e-mail?  It actually might be the positive rush of seeing that there is, to quote my cop-husband, “nothing to see here” – that good feeling of realizing there are no fires to extinguish.

In her book Good Habits, Bad Habits, author Wendy Wood writes about creating “friction” around behaviors we want to discourage. In this way, we interrupt habits that are deeply grooved in our neural pathways. Here are some ideas I’m working on for putting friction between me and tech:

  • Remove work e-mail from my phone and home devices. This works as long as I don’t circumvent by logging into e-mail using my phone’s browser.
  • Alternatively, remove e-mail notifications from all devices. Can’t quite remove e-mail from your phone altogether? Disable the notifications that keep us coming back.
  • Designate three periods a day for checking e-mail. I am more successful with this on some days than others. But, I find I am more focused when I am not trying to multi-task.
  • Put my phone where it can’t be accessed quickly. I’m not as likely to grab my phone at every stop light if it isn’t right there on the console. At the grocery store, I can put my phone at the bottom of my bag.

The other day, while waiting for coffee at my local shop, I instantly reached for my phone and thought better of it. Even if there is an e-mail I need to respond to, must I do it right now? Instead, I immersed myself in the artwork on the walls and felt a better kind of rush.

Up next week – musings on setting time boundaries as a teacher.

The post Teaching Boundaries, Part I – Tech appeared first on My Love of Learning.

Confessions of a people pleaser

Advice on how to deal with difficult conversations in the classroom or workplace? Here’s a tip: Don’t follow my lead. I could write a textbook about how to be a people-pleaser and a doormat. I could have been the poster child for how not to stand up for yourself. But, that’s changing…

In the past year, my rose-colored glasses started to crack and now they have pretty much shattered. Surprisingly, I am OK with this. It’s almost a relief. Maybe it was turning 55. Maybe it was a book I read. Whatever prompted the breakage, I’m not overthinking it. I’m just grateful for the epiphany.

Even without my pink lenses, my default reaction still looks for the warm and fuzzy side of any problem. But at least now I recognize my inclination and try to redirect. Difficult conversations?  I always had rosy ideas for those. My go-to attitude was always to make everyone else feel OK. Five decades of people-pleasing is a hard habit to shake. But I’m starting to adjust to my new non-rose-colored view. I guess most people just call it reality. I call it liberating. 

Now I realize that most of my life, I avoided difficult conversations with the intention of sparing others bad feelings or preventing an argument. I was a wimp. My rose-colored shades kept me weak and in pain. Today as I write this, I’m still in the beginning stages of recovery from my rose addiction, but I’m getting stronger. I like the view from where I am, without people-pleasing eyewear. It’s not perfect, but it’s a lot less painful. 

Difficult conversations? Now I just call it communication…

 

How Teaching Psych 101 Saved My Life (or at least made it a lot better!)

A popular book proclaimed that everything we need to know we learned in kindergarten. For me, everything I needed to grow into a healthy human I learned as a teacher of Introduction to Psychology. I don’t think I’m overselling it – teaching this course has changed the trajectory of my life.

The story is not a pretty one. Rather, mine was a story of do as I teach, not as I do. The prescription for physical and mental wellness is woven throughout any PSY 101 textbook, and I was doing my best to dole out the appropriate medicine to my students.

“Adequate sleep helps memory consolidation.”

“There is a link between exercise and a positive mood.”

“Stress can be regulated through mindfulness and meditation.”

Meanwhile, I myself was sleeping too little, sitting too much, and stress dominated most of my days. I regularly used food to regulate my mood. How I could warn my students about the “self-medication hypothesis” with a straight face remains a mystery to me.

But, with each new group of students, my awareness of my own hypocrisy grew. Just as I was beginning to muse about making some healthy changes, life hurried me along. Faced at the time with a more pressing need to find balance in my life, I turned to lessons ripped from the pages of PSY 101. I wanted to achieve greater peace in my life and get down to a healthy weight. I wanted more energy to face life’s challenges. I wanted strength when I was feeling broken.

As an educational psychologist, I know a little bit about how change happens. I know simplicity can be key when forming new habits, and I also know the power of mnemonic devices that help us to remember our goals. I therefore focused on just the following five directives from psychological research on how to live a healthy life (and they just so happen to rhyme!):

Soothe involves finding ways to regulate stress. Choose means opting, for the most part, to eat foods that make the body feel good and provide energy. Move involves finding some way to engage the body every day, even if it is just a walk around the block. Snooze means taking sleep hygiene seriously and getting in those zzz’s. Groove underpins all the previous elements and relates to setting up structures and habits that lead to healthy actions (like planning workouts for the week and stocking the fridge with veggies).

There is nothing sexy about this prescription. It also is no quick fix. There is nothing extreme involved, but rather balance is at the centerpoint. Each day I remember the words soothe, choose, move, snooze, and groove, and they help me to stay in balance.

So what did these five words do for me? Over a year later, I am perhaps healthier than I have ever been in my life. I have a much deeper sense of inner peace. I went from a BMI classified as “obese” to one smack-dab in the “normal” level. I feel energetic and strong. And, I no longer feel like a phony when sharing with my students how to be healthy and well.

This post is part of the Write 6X6 challenge at Glendale Community College.

The post How Teaching Psych 101 Saved My Life (or at least made it a lot better!) appeared first on My Love of Learning.

How Teaching Psych 101 Saved My Life (or at least made it a lot better!)

A popular book proclaimed that everything we need to know we learned in kindergarten. For me, everything I needed to grow into a healthy human I learned as a teacher of Introduction to Psychology. I don’t think I’m overselling it – teaching this course has changed the trajectory of my life.

The story is not a pretty one. Rather, mine was a story of do as I teach, not as I do. The prescription for physical and mental wellness is woven throughout any PSY 101 textbook, and I was doing my best to dole out the appropriate medicine to my students.

“Adequate sleep helps memory consolidation.”

“There is a link between exercise and a positive mood.”

“Stress can be regulated through mindfulness and meditation.”

Meanwhile, I myself was sleeping too little, sitting too much, and stress dominated most of my days. I regularly used food to regulate my mood. How I could warn my students about the “self-medication hypothesis” with a straight face remains a mystery to me.

But, with each new group of students, my awareness of my own hypocrisy grew. Just as I was beginning to muse about making some healthy changes, life hurried me along. Faced at the time with a more pressing need to find balance in my life, I turned to lessons ripped from the pages of PSY 101. I wanted to achieve greater peace in my life and get down to a healthy weight. I wanted more energy to face life’s challenges. I wanted strength when I was feeling broken.

As an educational psychologist, I know a little bit about how change happens. I know simplicity can be key when forming new habits, and I also know the power of mnemonic devices that help us to remember our goals. I therefore focused on just the following five directives from psychological research on how to live a healthy life (and they just so happen to rhyme!):

Soothe involves finding ways to regulate stress. Choose means opting, for the most part, to eat foods that make the body feel good and provide energy. Move involves finding some way to engage the body every day, even if it is just a walk around the block. Snooze means taking sleep hygiene seriously and getting in those zzz’s. Groove underpins all the previous elements and relates to setting up structures and habits that lead to healthy actions (like planning workouts for the week and stocking the fridge with veggies).

There is nothing sexy about this prescription. It also is no quick fix. There is nothing extreme involved, but rather balance is at the centerpoint. Each day I remember the words soothe, choose, move, snooze, and groove, and they help me to stay in balance.

So what did these five words do for me? Over a year later, I am perhaps healthier than I have ever been in my life. I have a much deeper sense of inner peace. I went from a BMI classified as “obese” to one smack-dab in the “normal” level. I feel energetic and strong. And, I no longer feel like a phony when sharing with my students how to be healthy and well.

This post is part of the Write 6X6 challenge at Glendale Community College.

The post How Teaching Psych 101 Saved My Life (or at least made it a lot better!) appeared first on My Love of Learning.