The Yerkes-Dodson Law holds that the relationship between pressure (or stress) and performance is shaped like a bell curve. Place no pressure on a person at all, and their performance will likely be negligible; place the entire universe on their shoulders, and their performance will be similarly bad. Unfortunately, I know very few teachers who don’t operate on […]
simplify
Less News, Better Brain
A few weeks ago, I realized that consuming the news was messing up my brain. I’d get done teaching my classes all morning, and then I’d sit down for lunch, and I’d pull up The Week or some other news site, and 60 minutes later I’d still be reading the latest stories and commentaries. It’s […]
The Most Dangerous Word to Your Sanity (and How to Stop Saying It)
“The most dangerous word in one’s productivity vocabulary [is] ‘yes.’” –Cal Newport in Deep Work If our fixed-schedule commitments are going to yield their greatest fruit, then we have got to reduce the number of times that we say “yes” in response to requests for our time. I could delve into the things that I […]
Relationships: Not a Separate Goal, but a Fruit of and a Means to *the* Goal
If you’re trying to decide whether you should spend class time developing relationships with and amongst your students or working on the curriculum toward the longest-term objectives, I think you’re asking the wrong question. When people set off on a Mount Everest trek (says the guy who has, of course, done this many times), they […]
The Any-Benefit Approach
The any-benefit approach to decision-making says that if anything good can possibly come of a new strategy or lesson or unit or initiative, then it’s worth using (Newport, Deep Work, p. 186). Unfortunately, this is often the approach we take to deciding whether The New Thing We Learned is worth giving a go — in […]