Whatever the stimulus, it won’t help anyone’s success if I get noticeably upset as soon as my students get uncomfortable. We think we’re not good teachers or parents if they don’t “get it.” Or perhaps we’re bored or impatient and don’t feel like waiting any longer. We don’t want to be seen or known as the meanie or the bad guy.
It’s actually our own discomfort as teachers that we seek to quiet. We think their self-esteem will falter or they’ll somehow be undone. Sometimes we make things easier because we don’t want the learner to suffer through the struggle. Goldilocks would shake her head and say, “Too soft.” When teachers and parents take away our discomfort-by not asking enough, by solving our problems for us, or by giving us praise for innate abilities rather than for effort-they deprive us of our own success and the joy of discovering our own abilities. We inflate grades and backslide our expectations. Heck, we should never feel any pain of any sort. Rather than preparing us for a ready stance for learning, however, our society has inched us away from discomfort, ratcheting us into a sense of entitlement or laziness where we think we should never have to struggle or fail.
This isn’t the usual path we go down, now is it? You’ve used your body to prime your mind for learning.įrom “We Three, A Primer” by Alberta Walker and Ethel Summy, with illustrations by Grace P. Something’s different and your brain is having to work to make sense of what’s happening. You’re not in pain, but you’re in unfamiliar territory. Odds are, you now feel a bit uncomfortable. Once you’ve done that first fold, notice which of your arms crosses over on top and then switch them so that the other arm crosses on top. One of the ways I introduce this notion in classes or in presentations is to ask listeners to fold their arms in front of them. We need an off-balance moment before we can take a next step. What happens if I try this angle? If we only see what we’ve already found, that seeking mechanism withers away and life becomes aimless or apathetic. That internal pull leads us to play at the limits of our abilities. We want to investigate what’s around us so we can appreciate it, change it, or improve it. One of our primary human motivations-perhaps in the same family of needs as food, shelter, and love-is that of seeking. It’s also important that we don’t go too far and make our lessons saggingly easy. Step by step, the skill develops in progression. They start with the success and build from there. In a focused TAGteach session, when we work on a super-specific skill using an acoustical marker or “tag” to mean Yes, that’s it, we always begin with a baseline task where we know our learner has already established good command. In behavioral training, we talk about “ rate of reinforcement.” A learner needs to experience enough success-and reward-to keep their focus locked in. She was feeling too frustrated to continue and needed a break before trying again. At that point, no instruction or suggestion I could have offered would have been likely to help. Last year, one of my best hitters literally swung and missed at all fifteen pitches she saw in her first session. When the girls first get back in the hitting cage after five months of not picking up a bat, they can struggle. I see that same shutdown sometimes at spring tryouts for softball. The sounds become more like background noise. If someone gets going too quickly, however, I start to lose everything. Most words and sentences, I can follow fine. Often, when I’m in a Spanish-speaking country, I can have the same experience. Many students-and their parents who visit on Family Days-talk that way about math classes, as if the teacher were conducting class in a foreign language. That’s a time when we want to run and hide. We all know that feeling of overwhelm when we simply cannot understand what’s being asked of us. In between those two poles lies a “Just Right” moment, a learning location that both fits and stretches. Make it too easy and the learner walks away in boredom. If we make a lesson too difficult, our learner may shut down in frustration. When designing ideal conditions for learning, we do well to consider the case of Goldilocks. “The New Winston Primer Manual” by Sidney G. Goldilocks knocks at the door of learning.
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