PILOTed

Are You Angry?

There are certainly a lot of things to be angry about right now. Covid-19. The response to Covid-19. People not wearing masks, or people wearing masks. Racism and bigotry. Policy brutality. Lawlessness. China. Russia. Trump. Biden. Republicans. Democrats. Media and social media.

There’s a lot to be angry about. Are you angry?

Anger is one of our most central survival mechanisms. Anger and fear cause our minds to focus and our bodies to react. We are better able to ignore pain, filter everything else out except what we are angry at or afraid of, and focus on a binary action choice; we do this or we do that.

If a predator were to threaten us, we could flee or we could fight. That reaction has saved countless of our human, hominoid, hominid, mammalian, and vertebrate ancestors.

The anger/fear focus and action frame of mind, though, does severely limit other responses.

There is no creativity, no critical thinking, no innovation, and no room for other emotions when we are angry. We just have a binary choice.

How many of the problems we face can be solved with a quick fight or flight reaction?

Are we going to end racism or policy brutality by fighting? Are we going to build a just society where all kids have a chance to live meaningful lives through violence or anger? Are we going to reduce virus deaths through railing at those whose actions we disagree with?

Many of the situations that are feeding our anger are complex; they need creative options and then continuously improved reactions based on data and feedback. For some of these situations, we might do better to wait, think, and discuss. For others, we may need to provide safety first, and then once things are stabilized to enact longer term fixes.

If we are angry (or afraid) our minds are not capable of these solutions. In fact, we may end up “solving” the wrong problem because we lacked access to our creativity and critical thinking, and we only focused on that one aspect we were angry about rather than looking at the bigger picture.

Getting us angry is a tool used by demagogues. If we are angry, we only see two paths, strike out against the enemy they point out, or strike out against them.

We cannot counter a demagogue through anger, we can only win against a demagogue by learning to be resourceful through first calming our anger.

The first step to becoming resourceful is to recognize the anger and the second step is to choose to be resourceful as a more effective frame of mind than anger.

Sometimes, I say to myself, “Isn’t getting angry exactly what this other person wants? I control myself, it’s a good thing I know that I don’t have to be angry.”

Another technique I’ve used is to say, “What does this person I’m angry at not want me to see, what are they hiding by trying to trigger anger?”

I can do more posts about how to get into a resourceful mode, and techniques for being resourceful. Please let me know if you’d find that helpful, and here is a previous blog on Unsafe Thinking.

But the first step to being effective is to understand anger for what it is.

1. Anger is a survival mechanism that has existed all the way back into our reptilian ancestors, and possibly even earlier.
2. Anger allows us to focus; it presents a do this or do that binary choice.
3. Many of the situations we face are more complex, and require innovation, creativity, communicaton, deliberation, collaboration, and critical thinking. Those resources are not available to us when we are angry.
4. Demagogues, back from our earliest history, have tried to trigger anger as a means of control.
5. When our anger is triggered, we have the mechanisms in our own brains to replace anger with calm resourcefulness, which will be more effective in solving complex problems.

Flexible Pedagogy Post Covid-19, a White Paper

Going into the Covid-19 shutdown, US schools probably couldn’t have been more unprepared to deliver online, remote, or blended instruction. Look at what we did.

Teachers taught through “classroom management” and assessed through tests that are easy to grade but which do not test the things that we care about the most.

We rewarded students for, and punished them for not, complying and following instructions rather than inspiring them through intrinsic motivation.

And then we closed the schools and told the teachers to deal with it and cover the same material for the rest of the school year while 20-50% of their students do not have access to online classes or materials and none are used to having to learn on their own without a teacher hovering over them.

And then we let the teachers know that next year they may or may not be teaching in classrooms, may or may not have a similar class schedule as they have in the past, their students may or may not have access to technology, their students will probably not have learned as much in the previous year as they have in the past, but that they are still responsible for teaching all next year’s content.

And yet, somehow, it just may be possible that, at the end of next school year, students could even be ahead of where they would normally be. Sancha Gray, Superintendent of Asbury Park, NJ calls this a probletunity. That’s what we have now, a probletunity.

We’ve known for years that the way we educate was suboptimal, but there has been no impetus to make the gut wrenching changes needed. Now the “opportunity” has been thrust upon us. We all know we want personalization, student agency, better ways to assess learning, more authentic learning experiences, attention to the whole child and cultivate foundational skills and competencies such as the 4C’s (collaboration, communication, creative thinking, critical reasoning).

It’s time to invent the future.

Here's my vision.