Magic in Education - Not!

NOTE to READERS: This is an editorial for Silhouettes, the official e-journal of the National At-Risk Education Network, so it stands a bit away from most of my posts that are more to the personal side of things. I strongly believe - I KNOW - we are heading in the wrong direction in our schools, despite my liking the new President. He is too traditional regarding education and will continue the policy of doing a great job to prepare children to live in the 1950's.
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The Magic of Education

Some of you know, that a large part of Doctor Zest is based in the business of education. It is a business, make no mistake about it. Literally it is the largest business in the United States---more money, time and other resources are expended towards education than any other single enterprise. It is so much a part of our lives that we forget it is optional. Yes. People have survived quite well never having gone through a school door. Fewer and fewer, however, as we have begun to get frantic about this business called education. Now they are pushing towards "national standards" so all states are equal in identifying what a "good education" is and, further, it will be the same in NYC as it is in Montgomery, Alabama. Logically, makes sense.

Do you know how a magician works? Not only do they have to have gadgetry, cards, hats, rabbits, or whatever, the real trick of a magician is to make you look one place while something is going on somewhere else. While you watch the hand hold up the hundred dollar bill above his head, you do not notice that he palmed a piece of paper he is later going to burn with his other hand. Magic.

In my work as a psychotherapist, I learned often that it was not what WAS done that has the largest impact. Let me give you an example. Surviving dysfunctional (abusive and neglectful) families was my specialty. Research shows that rarely do you find patients in mental institutions or convicts in jails who came from loving, nurturing, affirming homes. It is just a fact that most clinical mental illness and criminal behavior has at its seeds of origin in an abusive and/or neglectful family.*

I had clients sit and tell me horror stories about how they were raised. Some clients let the details just spill out on the first visit; some it took a building of trust and searching through personal history before it would come out. It was amazing to me how glib some people were about the terrible things done to them as children, and, often, without a lot of emotion. It was like they were telling a story they had told many times. I listened, and listened, and listened. I was paid to listen and I became a hell of a good listener. And I listened some more. Eventually all the details were expressed on what was done to them as children.

However.

Nothing expressed emotionally during the telling of these tales was as dramatic as when I asked this question: "You have told me about all the things that were done to you. Now, tell me what wasn't? What did you need but did NOT get from your parents?" THAT was when the tears started. THEN I heard halting, stumbling, not well thought out, unrehearsed, details on what was missing in their home as a child. Wow. "They never told me I was dear to them." "They never came to any event I was in at school." "They never took time to just ask me how I was doing or what I was feeling." "They never listened to me." and on and on. And I listened.

I sometimes wonder if Neglect is not the big damaging piece in many children's lives. Survivors of physical abuse usually heal. Even if it is headline material relating how someone got this burn on their skin or that broken bone. Rarely does anyone write about the severe damage done to kids when they are neglected. I have reason to believe that, in the long run, we are more impacted in our lives by what we did NOT get more so than what did happen to us.

This brings me to national standards, and why I am concerned. Just like in NCLB we were so concerned with kids being left behind that we spent all this time testing and measuring schools against one another, and the result is that we now have almost a 30% failure to complete record in our public high schools. We were so busy paying attention to measuring and evaluating that we failed to notice that the neglected kids dropped out in larger numbers!** Seven years of NCLB and larger failure to complete numbers. Wow.

So, as we now decide that NCLB was not "the answer" the governors and the President and his chief of education are going to get us very busy designing a new complexity: national standards of education. Answer me this: If kids were not responding to local efforts as well as was hoped, how is something as depersonalized as national standards going to help? It will not.

But a lot of kids will continue to get neglected while we are very very busy with the new $100 bill.

Magic.

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* Read SHADOW CHILDREN ~ Understanding Education's #1 Issue. You can buy an autographed copy only from http://www.doctorzest.com/

**I know this is oversimplified, which doesn't mean it is inaccurate. It is VERY complex measuring things such as human beings in large groups, and in a way that is my point. The complexity and discussions created by the complexity can easily fulfill the prophecy.

Compartments of life all in one room - YOU!

NOTE TO READER: This particular blog insert is the first in a series. You may wish to "start at the end" of all the blogs and read "up". In other words, if this is your first time here at DoctorZest begin reading with the first blog way down the list. The blogs have information that "builds" from simpler to more complex in many cases, so the top one is the latest one. Make sense? Thanks for reading!
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There are five compartments in the dynamic stress management "toolbox":
Mental Tools
Physical Tools
Emotional Tools
Social Tools, and the
Secret Compartment, to be revealed later.
Remember that whenever you artificially break things into specific categories, in reality, there is always a "crossing over" between categories. For example, how can you truly separate "social" experiences from "physical" or "emotional" ones? I construct the book in compartments only to facilitate some type of order and cohesiveness. After you follow my advice in the next paragraph they will all blend together naturally, as they should. After all, stress is often not predictable, so you need to carry all your life management tools with you at all times. Be ready, Grasshoppa!

The Art of Choosing

Ethel was married to an active alcoholic for 25 years. A quarter of a century living with a man whose life was centered around booze instead of around her. She said to me in a session one of the saddest things I have ever heard in my counseling career: "This is not what I had planned for my life.I never dreamed I would spend all my time with a drunk. Now I am almost 50 and look in the mirror and hardly recognize me anymore."

She looked 70. She was 48 years old.

It would have been cruel to ask her a very legitimate question: "Why did you let this happen to you?" It is not a question you ask on the first day of counseling. First, it IS cruel, despite being about as poignant as you can be. She will have to build up readiness for that question. Secondly, I knew her answer. I don't know. I heard that from my clients — almost every one of them. I don't know. I am clueless as to what has ruined my life. I don't know. Now come on! Of course you know the answer: You rolled over and played dead! You refused to take action. One cannot be faulted for that. We watched our passive parents reacting to pain. We did it all the way up to 22 when we married the "party boy" — "He was such fun!" and kept on reacting, narrowing our world down gradually until all that was left was suffering through each day. It was the only tool we had: Waiting.
Were I to write a perfect book on having a healthy life it would be titled with one word: Choices. It would be about the art of choosing. Choosing is actually an art as well as a science. The art is very real. The art of sculpting that thing called Your Life.

Willingness: The most important ingredient

Most often people are brought to their knees before they are able to change. If one truly is tired of one's situation enough, waiting until the state of desperation arrives is not really necessary. All it takes, first and foremost, is the WILLINGNESS to take time to reflect upon one's situation, learn of the Tools of Change, then persist in applying them. This is not BS.
Most of us change via a vehicle called waiting. We wait until discomfort moves us to change. It can be just stiffness in your back — so you readjust the way you are sitting. Your job has become so hateful that you begin to look through the want ads. Your spouse uses an expression just that ONE MORE TIME and you blow up. Your day is boring, you seek entertainment.
Yes, that is the way most people change. They wait until they are uncomfortable, and then take action.
Q: But what kind of action?
A: Action to avoid pain/discomfort.
That becomes a life pattern. And it gradually becomes habitual, so our whole life is spent reacting to discomfort rather than taking action to carve our our lives the way we want it.

Balance

Balance, is there a more important word for a good life?

Humans are supposed to be homeostatic, meaning: in a balanced state. This balanced state is maintained by responding to feedback in the form of sensory input from the environment. The occurrence of a stressor in your life sends you into an alarm state signifying that a decision may be needed to self-correct the imbalance. The pause while one contemplates (or avoids) the decision places you in a state of resistance. This state of resistance is physical (muscle tension), emotional (negative feelings), and mental (a cognitive "make-wrong" judgment).

The longer you stay in a state of negative-resistance, or avoid making a decision as to what to do about a particular stressor, the higher your chances for distress, or damage to one of your personal systems.

Overstaying your time in resistance/negativity/indecision will lead to exhaustion or "burn-out." To make a decision to unhealthily adapt (a few of the limitless examples are smoking, drinking, workaholism, temper tantrums, overeating, etc.) will also result in exhaustion. [Exhaustion, unfortunately, makes itself so very convenient with a front as well as a back door!]

The goal is to make wise adaptations so that you can have a happy and healthy life. If, however: a) Your life-teachers (parents/grandparents/preachers/educators/caregivers) failed, out of their own ignorance or absence, to teach you appropriate healthy adaptive tools and skills; and/or, b) at the opportune moment you were incapable of lesson absorption for some reason or another, then you are set up for "burn-out" sooner or later.

Usually it is sooner because life keeps making demands whether you have healthy stress management tools or not. This means that a person will more often than not utilize whatever is handy, including unhealthy, compulsive and ineffective habituated patterns of response to demands for change. Why? Because bad breath is better than no breath at all.

Choosing Conscious Control

Wherever I go, the topic of stress is an increasingly critical and hot topic these days! And you know what? It's not going to get much better as we move more and more into this "economic crunch" on top of the permanent insecurity created by 9.11. If you just lift your eyes from the page and think about it, you can feel the crunch, right?

NOTE: If my name sounds familiar, you're right. I used to run around the country doing a workshop at Holiday Inns (and other places ;‑) titled, "Birth, Death, and Other Minor Annoyances."

AND: I have also done a lot of organizational consulting, including some Fortune 100 and 500 companies, with an appropriately hysterical workshop for manic middle managers titled, "A Crash Course in Stress Management."

So, we must launch a counterattack with tools, techniques, and right understanding. Let's level that playing field! That's the purpose of this series of monographs: To take our lives back! Plus we want to always have fun.

[By the way, if you think having fun while discussing stress management is inappropriate, then you are definitely reading the right blog!]

Dedication

To: –

The most important symbol is the "–"

A tombstone has two dates separated by the "–" representing your life.

It should be a lot more than a dash.

This blog is dedicated to your having a fulfilling, fun and meaningful journey.

Sometimes we need a friend with a flashlight!

The killer of the spirit is passively accepting the things that happen to you as inevitable and not understanding that only you have control over your life. The tools and skills to live a precious life consciously are at hand. Most of them are just covered up or lost in the dark. They are still here. Sometimes you just need a friend with a flashlight.