Promoting Balance and Harmony Through Meditation in the Classroom!

 

Tests, projects… no time to socialize, too little time and too much homework!! These were listed as sources of stress by my 7^th period IB Economics SL class. Now, I wonder as a teacher of a course that is demanding, as most IB courses are, what am I doing to promote happiness for my students?

I have become more aware of this since my presentation and participation at the Ahimsa Center in November at the Ahimsa and Sustainable Happiness Conference.  My presentation topic was on teaching skills to promote happiness through education, yet, the  IB course  load that  we teach, clearly is not making students too “ happy”---even when we coordinate and try not to give all the projects at the same time, and make room for adjustments, the complains do not seem to stop, especially towards the end of the quarter!! At times, it seems we are creating more unhappiness in the name of teaching!!  So how do we help our students achieve the IB Learner Profile of being Balanced?

Well one of the presenters at the Ahimsa center was Dr. Jarman from FAU.   Dr. Jarman has worked closely with Professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the “father” of positive psychology and author of Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Dr. Jarman presented on how meditation can promote success in school through better attention span and focus.  Luckily Dr. Jarman is based right here in South Florida and so I got in touch with him and invited him to my class. When I mentioned this to my class, they were overjoyed!! So I took this opportunity to ask my students to write  reflective journals for 10 days on the sources of  their ‘stress’. The goal was to generate adequate amount of self knowledge on the topic, so that the session would be more effective.

Dr. Jarman came to my class yesterday. I had invited the Principal and another teacher who was interested in the topic. The main idea that Dr. Jarman shared with the students was that the mind needs to be seen as a separate entity and needs to be guided. He told the students that every time we try to pay attention and focus on something, the mind tends to distract us. So we need to observe that, be aware of it and then bring the focus back to where it needs to be. To illustrate this, we did a breathing exercise where we simply focused on our breathing for 7 minutes and in the meantime observed where the mind was taking us. Every time the mind took us away from the focus on breathing, we had to bring the focus back on the breathing. In this way, we were guiding the mind to focus, and were not allowing it to distract us. After the  7 minute-session, we discussed our experiences and realized just how difficult it can be.  Dr. Jarman emphasized that despite this we need to continue with the process : focus, observe the distraction,, label the thinking and bring it back to focus. In this way we can strengthen the  mind and develop more focus.

It is a simple process, yet quite revealing at a deeper level. It forces one to be aware of the thinking process. Dr. Jarman also mentioned how the mind is good at building stories and thus creating stress. When this happens, we should cut the stories short and focus on what we are doing and what needs to be done. So after some reflection, the students learnt that instead of worrying about all the tests and all the assignments they have to do (the stories!!), they can just focus on one assignment at a time, do it well, and then move on to the next. This means, if distractions come along the way, then we have to bring the focus back to the task.

The session ended with students reflecting on their list and sharing how this meditative process can help to bring their focus back to the moment. The students also learnt that they need to :

•  be aware of the stories that the mind can create and cut them short in order to avoid panic/stress and the fight or flight  mode! Aka Stress!!
• make time to meditate, exercise, organize, reflect in order to be more productive even when very busy;
• have a level organization in order to  keep the focus on what needs to be done;
• build mental strength by being aware of thoughts, consciously labling them and bringing the focus backto where it needs to be. 

In the end, we all felt we learnt how our mind works and how we need to train and control it and not let it control us! We will continue our discussion on this in my 7^th period class and assess how well we manage our time and assignments. We may not have reduced the work load but at least we have some tools now with which to address it. Most importantly, we learnt that the mind can make the load lighter by being focused!

I would like to thank Dr. Tara Sethia and the Ahimsa Center (http://www.csupomona.edu/~ahimsacenter) for creating  this excellent opportunity to share these important topics at the Ahimsa  and Sustainable Happiness Conference and thanks to  Dr. Jarman for sharing his insights with us!! Ahimsa Center also holds two-week residential summer institutes for selected K-12 teachers every two years on integrating nonviolence and sustainability in education. This year it is on Gandhi, Sustainability and Happiness.  Dr. Jarman also has a website (www.scholarisacademics.com), where he offers his service to students and teachers. Finally I want to end by saying that while we were in India, visiting schools,  through the three week summer program for k-12 teachers of the ISSJS (www.isjs.in), I found  the attitude of students there towards education was quite different and students seemed to be much more relaxed. Their relationship to education was quite different in the way they took full responsibility of it (rather than putting it on teachers) and as a result seemed more in control of their success. In a way it is also about the thinking process--what we tell ourselves makes us behave and react quite differently. So, thanks to Dr. Shughan Jain and Laura Hershfield for making this trip to India possible and for helping us gain an insight on how nonviolence is practiced in Indian schools. The ISSJS has another summer training this year for k-12 teachers.

 

 

 

The Gender Gap- A Reflection on Societies

As I reflect on the recent horror story in New Delhi, I find myself searching for answers to questions like --why did these men become so inhuman?  What were their own experiences that led them to become such monsters? What desensitized them to such an extent and so shamelessly…. What pumped them up to such level of brute arrogance…..?  A sense of justice is disturbed within and questions like this keep erupting.

Examining it quite clinically, I find that answers are hidden behind more questions… poking accusing fingers at the very society that is silently feeding the male gender to its grotesque inner form...

Aren’t culprits a product of the society they live in?  What happened is terrible, but what is even worse is realizing that they are a byproduct of the socio-cultural environment they live in. Isn’t it the same society that kills the girl infant, and devalues girls by marrying them off with a “dowry”…. and the one that denies daughters education and nutritious food while the sons are pampered to the point where they never learn to take responsibility of their lives? So isn’t this society teaching men that they are worth more just for being the “male” gender and that their lives are more valuable than that of their female counterparts? …Silently but surely, isn’t this society creating such insensitive  monsters?

How long can this type of silent and institutional violence continue, noticed and yet not? Why are those who were oppressed as a girl child becoming the oppressors of the same girl child as mothers—or to be less harsh, why are they allowing it to happen? Aren’t men and women enslaved in this system because they have chosen to be blind and deaf, conforming quietly to such irrational traditions -- paving the path for such atrocities?

So doesn’t change start with each one making fair choices. You cannot change a whole system, but do you have the courage to change yourself and shake free of this inhuman construction? Can you as parents make sure your girl child is made to feel like gold along with your boy? Can you as parents, fathers and mothers, stand strong against killing of the girl infant and can you as parents allow your daughters to get the same education as sons and not give her away as if her marriage is a favor bestowed upon you? Can you make sure you train your sons to be responsible and not smother so much of selfish love into them that they never learn to appreciate but take things for granted? Can you teach your sons through your own behavior that women are to be respected and that they too should fight against injustice? Can you as a woman make sure you take care of yourself and not give so much away that your children and husband think that your only job is to give to them and that you are not important otherwise? Can you make sure you learn that while the love of a man is important to you, you will never give yourself away to norms that subjugate you to them? Can you men and women please, please not keep quiet at the face of injustice but talk to educate, teach and pave the path to justice?

Societies everywhere, ---men,  women--- adults, have stopped thinking and questioning for most part…and they lack the courage to stand up for what is right, or to even differentiate between right and wrong in the first place. Like robots, this society (as most societies) is machinated and runs on the engine of unjust (including gender) value systems ….so why would it not do something inhuman? Anything robotic is clearly far from anything humane. So, machinated, dehumanized products of a society can surely commit inhuman acts, right?

More generally, whatever the ills are in a society, clearly the source of change lies in the choices we make in creating the kind of society we wish to have….We… each one of us, through our choices and behavior, make or break the monsters in our societies.   If we can have the courage to give space to justice in small ways, the bigger picture will be just too. But if we lack courage, act blind and deaf in the name of culture and traditions well then aren’t we too responsible for the atrocities in our societies? Remembering Gandhiji, we have to be the ‘change we want to see” and for that we need the “truth force” to push against systematic, institutional wrongs through  the choices we make. As teachers we need to build the steps to this ladder by helping  young minds learn the skills to stand up for truth  and justice even if it means going alone. 

Combat Paper Project

So for the culmination of this unit, students worked on something called a "Combat Paper Project."  I learned about the Combat Paper Project from a professional development workshop I attended last spring.  What the organization does is sets up a forum for soldiers to process their experiences from war, and literally transform them into art.  Soldiers shred their actual uniforms, turn them into pulp, and then create paper and artwork from that pulp.  It's about re-purposing that pain.  This had a clear connection to the text we were reading, The Things They Carried, in which Tim O'Brien highlights the importance of writing for him, about how it allowed him to literally separate himself from certain experiences.  What my students did to connect the book to the project was write about a painful experience (or draw, whatever), or just something they needed to get off their chest, and then they shredded it.  We worked with the art department to learn paper-making techniques, and went through a very similar process as members of the Combat Paper Project.  Seldom have I seen my students so engaged in an endeavor.  I made a blog detailing both what they did as well as sharing some images.  Please feel free to check it out:

http://ourcombatpaperproject2012.blogspot.com/

So happy about everything that's happening in this particular class.  Thank you guys for reading!  :)

   

Researching War

So, I just wanted to share an update of what my classes ending up doing with their study of The Things They Carried.  First off, I want to share that one of the reasons I am so passionate about this unit is that my best friend is a veteran of the Iraq war, and he is being deployed to Afghanistan this coming spring.  He has shared some of his experiences with me, and while before hearing about this, I knew war was "bad," I never before really thought about how bad.  There's a passage from The Things They Carried where Tim O'Brien writes about his feelings about war before he went which I can completely relate to:  "[My anti-war thoughts] were almost entirely an intellectual activity.  I brought some energy to it, of course, but it was the energy that accompanies almost any abstract endeavor; I felt no personal danger; I felt no sense of an impending crisis in my life.  Stupidly, with a kind of smug removal that I can't begin to fathom, I assumed that the problems of killing and dying did not fall within my special province."  While reading and preparing for class, this quotation really resonated with me.  Most of my students are "anti-war" -- I mean, who's pro-war?  But it's a distant kind of anti-war... there's nothing personal, nothing invested about it.  So I was wondering what I could do to change that.  The best thing I came up with was education.  So, that's where their writing assignment came from.

My students were tasked with basically proving that the problems Tim O'Brien and his fictional comrades faced in the Vietnam War are not too different from the issues faced by current soldiers.  Together, we brainstormed things O'Brien is concerned with in his book -- people's motivations for joining a war, psychological impact of committing murder, training people to be killers, desensitization to violence, the difficult transition back into home life, finding a job and purpose upon returning to civilian life, the prevalence of suicide in veterans, amongst other things.  I told students that the point of the paper was to learn about the reality of war -- if we are going to send young men and women to such a thing, we have an obligation to know what it is we are sending them to.  I feel so passionately about this... if people were more aware of the reality of war, I believe they would be less willing to support it.  I know there's some truth to that, since talking with my friend Mario and hearing what he saw (and seeing it, too) truly changed my life.  No one should have to go through what he did, and I'm trying to do my small part to encourage that change in the world.

As an extension, I think I'm going to ask the kids to write some sort of piece researching what they can DO about the issue they chose to write about.  They can research organizations who are helping ameliorate the issue, then just write a reflection about what they've learned.  Yep, I think that's going to be the goal.

Here is a link to the assignment in case anyone wants to check it out.  Thank you again for your continued support! :)

Link to Researching War Assignment

The Things They Carried

So last week I started my unit on The Things They Carried, by Tim O'Brien (link on Amazon).  It's an awesome book, and the kids are always really into it... so my challenge this year was to make this unit more purposeful.  To give it a real clear objective.... Right now, I've decided that it's about students understanding the real experience of soldiers, and knowing that if they are going to support a war, they need to understand what exactly it is they are supporting.

The stories deal primarily with, as the title says, the things soldiers carry, both physically, emotionally, and mentally.  It becomes quickly apparent that the intangible weights are far heavier than the tangible ones, and many soldiers come home with lasting effects of the soldier's lifestyle.  While the book is about Vietnam, I want students to see that this is not a unique experience, and we have soldiers today dealing with the very same issues as Tim O'Brien's characters.  I think for their final assessment, they are going to be asked to write a paper proving that very idea -- that the issues O'Brien are concerned with are not unique to Vietnam, but are still issues to combat veterans today.

After seeing the success of using a documentary in the forgiveness unit, I'd like to use another film for this unit.  Two I have watched are Soldiers of Conscience, which is about soldiers struggling with the question to kill or not to kill, and This is Where We Take Our Stand, a documentary by Iraq Veterans Against the War about their desire to share their experiences via the 2008 Winter Soldier hearings.  I need to really pin down the goal of showing a film, and decide where to go from there....

I also want there to be some application piece -- something the kids DO with what they learn.  That's currently my big question mark...

Anyway, that's where I am at the moment.  I hope you are all well :)

Hugs,
    Laura

Forgiveness & Restorative Justice lesson success

Hello, friends!  So I wanted to share an update on my recent unit.  I wrote a few weeks ago about my students' engagement with the topic of revenge and justice -- this got me wanted to stick with the topic and explore it further.  So, after reading a play and seeing one character consumed with revenge and another resigning to a fate he didn't deserve (and forgiving his offenders), I turned the topic to forgiveness.  We read two works by MLK -- "Loving Your Enemies," a sermon on forgiveness, and we read an excerpt from "Pilgrimage to Nonviolence."  I asked the kids to write a response to the pieces and to connect the readings to the text we were studying in class.  The kids had some really thoughtful, reflective things to say.  Some reflective thinking about conflict resolution started!

Next, we had a guest speaker come in to talk about restorative justice (http://www.c4rj.com/).  We watched a clip from the film "Burning Bridges," which is a documentary following a restorative justice process after a group of teenagers burn down a bridge in a small community in PA.  We debriefed afterwards, and students all concluded that "this can't be used with real crimes, crimes with real victims."  This was kind of where I wanted them to be.... and so we then watched the documentary "A Long Night's Journey Into Day," which documents South Africa's use of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in order to heal the wounds caused by apartheid.  After each segment of the film, students shared their reactions.  They were pretty inspired by people's ability to forgive others for some of the most heinous crimes imaginable.  They watched mothers and fathers of murder victims hug the person who murdered their child.  They also saw families of murder victims who did not forgive the offender, and reflected on that burden.  The film also humanized many of those who committed atrocities, which resonated with the kids as well.  They saw that these people were people, not monsters, and it was pretty powerful to watch.

So for their assessment, students had two options:  a personal narrative reflecting on an experience related to forgiveness, or write a persuasive essay arguing that restorative justice should be used in a given situation (could be current events, a school issue, American history -- anything related to a community they're a part of).  The students really got into these pieces, and wrote some beautiful work.  They cared about what they were writing about, and I really just feel good about the unit.... awesome, awesome.

I'm going to try to attach the documents from this unit in the comments box, so you can access them if you'd like.  Thanks for your continued support :)

Big hugs,
   Laura

Ahimsa Conference in CA -- See Tazeen present! :)

Hi friends!  Many of you are aware of this conference, but just in case some do not know yet, I wanted to share some details.

Dr. Tara Sethia, who runs the Ahimsa Institute which many of the participants in the India program attended last summer, is offering a conference the first week in November called "Ahimsa and Sustainable Happiness."  It is from November 2-4, and I can personally speak for how amazing Tara's work is.  She's so passionate and thoughtful about this topic, and so I am confident this will be useful in enhancing our practice and our understanding of ahimsa and its relationship with happiness.

Our friend Tazeen is presenting (yay!!) and Meghan Hausdorf and I are planning on going, and Dr. Sethia is offering scholarships to help pay for the experience.  If you want more information, feel free to ask!

Miss you all,

    Laura