Happy New Year!

I have been absent a while as I have been unwell but the turning of the year prompts me to put pen to paper. It is traditional to sign Auld Lang Syne at the midnight hour on the final day of the year, Scots for 'old time's sake'. It's a beautiful tune and sentiment and one which has power to touch my heart like few others. As we grow older those relatives and friends of our youth become fewer and, although, we have new family and even friends we inevitably miss those who have gone before.

In the Service of Nine Lessons and Carols from King's College on Christmas Eve the bidding prayer speaks of those we are joined with who live on a different shore and in a greater light. I like to think at this time of year when we sing Auld Lang Syne that we are indeed linked to those who have gone before and live on a different shore and a light immeasurably brighter than our own.

May God be good to you all this year and bring great blessing upon you.

What is it to be good ?

We are coming to half term and a long half term it has been. Soon Christmas will be upon us with all its joys, excitement and promise of hope for the future. I have been thinking this week about what makes a good person and how we can try to achieve that. I learnt some twenty years ago when I had a nervous breakdown that money, position and power over others were worth nothing in themselves if we did not value our health, our family and the good we can do for others. This is why, when I got better I returned to teaching.

 Aristotle  lived in ancient times and wrote some of the greatest books on how people ought to live. He says of the good person:

“It  belongs to goodness to do good to the deserving and love the good and hate the wicked, and not to be eager to inflict punishment or take vengeance, but to be gracious and kindly. Goodness is accompanied by honesty, reasonableness, kindness, hopefulness, and also by such characteristics as love of home and of friends and of one's fellow-men, and love of what is noble..”

To me, as a psychologist, there is much wisdom in these words of over two thousand years ago. However, they will not necessarily serve you well in the world of wealth, competition and promotion. Nobody gives prizes for honesty, or kindness or for seeking justice for the poor and under-privileged. The prizes go to those who are most competitive in the human jungle, the industrialist who can make his workers unemployed without a thought, a politician who can cut nursery places for poor children, or ourselves ignoring the homeless on our streets.  So, we must behave well and do our best not because it will bring us praise or reward but because it is the right thing to do.

"Coffee! Because you can sleep when you're dead"

It’s no surprise that Costa in Northwood has had to double in size or that the coffee machine in Gwyer is almost always broken. It’s a fact that St Helen’s girls cannot seem to function on a Monday morning without their daily hit of caffeine, whether that be a latte or an espresso. We were intrigued to find out whether this habit is actually enhancing our learning and waking us up, or if it is just becoming an addiction that should be discouraged. 

We did a survey of 20 girls in Year 12 and found that 70% have a least one coffee a day. When these girls were asked whether their daily cup of coffee truly benefited them, or if it was simply more of an addiction, the majority responded in favour of it being beneficial. We were curious to find out if this was in fact true.

We found substantial evidence to show that caffeine has no power to transform us into an alert, energetic machine. Nor does it have the ability to enable us to storm through that 1000 word English essay that we’ve been procrastinating over until 2am on the deadline day. Instead, think of caffeine as some sort of placebo. The effect can often be almost imaginary, especially in the long run. Like nearly all things in life, the more you consume caffeine, the more resilient your body becomes towards it. Sure, your first cup of coffee probably left you feeling full of energy, but from experience that one cup later turns into three a day in order to have the same effects. This is what often leads to caffeine dependency and later a possible addiction. Like any drug addiction, withdrawal is going to be extremely uncomfortable for your body. It can lead to headaches, insomnia, stress and exhaustion – ironically, all the things coffee is meant to prevent in the first place. What coffee does do to you over the course of time is to stop your body from resting. So when you do decide to brave that essay with a coffee (which may seem like your only saviour) you are only damaging your body further. 

So take the morning after you’ve pulled an all-nighter to finish the English homework for example. The only thing you feel like doing is sleeping for eternity, but instead, your alarm rings and it’s time for breakfast. You opt for a coffee because you feel sorry for anyone that has the misfortune to cross you when you’re tired. However you might be interested to know that when you take that reassuring gulp at 7am, you’re actually stimulating your central nervous system. Adenosine (a neurotransmitter) binds to its receptors in the brain when it is created. This fusion causes you to feel drowsy by slowing down the nerve cell activity. Caffeine is, in simple terms, disguised to look like adenosine. It fools the receptors to allow itself to join onto it just as the adenosine would do.

Adenosine usually causes the blood vessels in the brain to dilate, meaning more oxygen can get into it during sleep, however the caffeine creates the opposite effect. This is why many headache medicines contain coffee, as the constriction of blood vessels can help to stop a headache. Caffeine also causes increased neuron (fancy word for brain cells) firing in the brain and the pituitary gland, which controls hormones, senses this and assumes an emergency is occurring. It releases hormones which tell the adrenal glands to release some adrenaline. We’re sure you’ve all experienced the release of adrenaline when you’ve spotted a huge spider whilst in the shower or watched a scary movie but here are its main effects: 
• Your pupils dilate
• Heart beats faster
• Blood pressure rises 
• Liver releases sugar into bloodstream for extra energy
• Blood vessels on surface of skin constrict 
• Muscles tighten

These are all explanations as to why, after your numerous hits of caffeine, you feel excited, your heart beats faster and your muscles are tensed. Although these effects seem rather dramatic for just a hot drink, none of these have any real detrimental impact on our bodies if you moderate your intake of caffeine.

Overall, our aim for this blog was not to run costa out of business, but instead to give light to the other side of coffee. In no way are we suggesting you give up on that treat every morning, but instead, think more carefully about why you are drinking it… and maybe next time, try opting for a decaf with your toast.

Hi Exciting News ! The blog will be edited by Y12 from now on!

Hi Exciting News ! The blog will be edited by Y12 from now on!

Maisy Tracey, Ellen Weerasekera and Melissa Clark will now be running the Tea & Toast Psychology blog. Ideas are welcome, so please get in touch via school emails if you want to contribute towards this blog!

A few ideas we have for upcoming posts are:
- The long term effect of caffeine, energy drinks and performance enhancing drugs on our bodies and brains
- How the Paralympics have altered the nation's views on disability
- Is it cool to get good grades?
- Should there be a stricter dress code for Sixth Formers? And would this increase concentration levels?
And more...

We're really excited to get working on this blog and we hope we can maintain Dr. Brown's standard!
Please feel free to email or come and find us with feedback or any ideas.

 

Try, Try and Try again...

 Your Potentiial is as Good as you Think it is…

 

 

I have been a teacher for forty years I believe in the power of learning and knowledge for good. I don’t believe that human potential is limited and neither does Carol Dweck who is Professor of Psychology at Columbia University, New York. She is a leader in the field of student motivation and her research is widely recognised. Over many years she has developed a highly influential theory of student motivation building on the work of others, notably on ‘attribution theory' – what we attribute for our failures and successes.

She divides students into two types, based on the student's own belief about their ability.

Fixed IQ theorists: These students believe that their ability is fixed, probably at birth, and there is very little if anything they can do to improve it. They believe ability comes from talent rather than from the slow development of skills through learning. “It's all in the genes”. Either you can do it with little effort, or you will never be able to do it, so you might as well give up in the face of difficulty. E.g. “ I can't do maths”.

Untapped Potential theorists : These students believe that ability and success are due to learning, and learning requires time and effort. In the case of difficulty one must try harder, try another approach, or seek help etc.

About 15% of students are in the middle, the rest are equally divided between the two theories. Surprisingly there is no correlation between success at school and the theory the student holds.

Differences in performance only show when the student is challenged or is facing difficulty , for example when a student moves from school to college. Then research has shown that the ‘Untapped Potential Theorists' do very much better, as one might expect.

It is possible to move students from the Fixed IQ theory to the Untapped Potential theory.

 It's a matter of persuasion of course.

Many teachers, myself included, thought that “it's obvious” that learning is worth the effort and can produce improvement. But almost half of students at every level, do not share this view. The challenge to change their view will be well rewarded.

Why bother with ? A recent review of research by Hattie, Biggs and Purdie into the effectiveness of teaching programmes found that the programmes that had the greatest effect focussed on the ‘attribution' by students of what affected their learning – this is precisely Dweck's focus. Whether students attribute their success to something they can change or to something they can't is immensely influential, and this attribution can be changed. The effect sizes found by Hattie et al showed that work on attribution can improve a student's performance by between two and three grades!

 

Hattie, J., Biggs, H. & Purdie, N. (1996) Effects of learning skills interventions on student learning: A meta-analysis. Review of Educational Research, 66(2), 99-136.

 

Aubade....

Aubade, when we greet the dawn. The following is from a poem by Phillip Larkin, his thoughts on a sleepless night,

"This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear - no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anasthetic from which none come round. "

Sombre thoughts of a man with no faith and no way of reconciling himself to his final "goodbye".This is the time of the year when we say farewell and assess the meaning of the school year which has gone. For those of us in Year 13 it means, for some, the end of a life in St.Helen's which began when they were four or five. For some staff it either means moving on to new posts or maybe to retirement. This set me thinking about saying goodbye - a part of life which none of us find easy and can cause us great sadness whether it is to a friend for the summer hols or to a much loved pet. I was reading this morning about Ben Fogle's distress on having to have his beloved dog Inca put to sleep. Then, of course, when we have to say goodbye to people we love.

Ella Fitzgerald sings a marvellous version of the Cole Porter song " Everytime we say Goodbye". The next line runs "I die a little" does that not decribe the great loss we feel when we say goodbye to one we love even if it's for weeks rather than years ? As a psychologist this sense of loss and saying goodbye is to me a very important phenomena. This is because it is one of our most profound feelings. In books, films, music and art the act of saying "goodbye" is one of the most powerful swayers of emotion. It is something with which we can all identify because we have all felt it.

My personal favourite is the final movement of Mahler's ninth symphony where he described its ending as being like a tiny white cloud fading into the eternal blue of the sky. A metaphor for death as many "goodbyes" are.

Our distaste for goodbyes is a reminder of our unfathomable mutual dependence on each other. Our self cannot come into being, let alone endure without the recognition of others. We depend on others not only to nourish our material persons, but to sustain our character -who we are.
Recognition is as essential to the self as food is to the body. That humans are social animals, understates the case. We are all interdependent body and soul.Deprive us of human contact and we begin to disintegrate. That's why solitary confinement is torture.

The American poet Emily Dickinson wrote,

I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us--don't tell!
They'd banish us, you know.

Emily knew that what stands between us and exile is affiliation- friendship, family call it what you like.Self-reliance is a myth. Have you noticed that older  people  tell the same stories over and over   again ?   They are    desperately trying to shore up their  identities that, because of a   lack of recognition, are breaking down. By telling us their stories, they are staving off the disintegration of self, one day at a time. You can't really blame them--their struggle is at once heroic and tragic. That you've heard it all before is a measure of their need to repeat themselves. One day, you too may need an understanding  ear.

Close! stand close to me, Starbuck; let me look into a human eye; it is better than to gaze into sea or sky; better than to gaze upon God. ...this is the magic glass... .

So spoke Captain Ahab in Melville's Moby Dick. Without that "magic glass," we gradually cease to be. I see you seeing me and I exist. I see you seeing me see you and we exist. Mutual recognition is the glue that holds us together, not merely as friends, but as individual selves. In co-creating and exchanging a blizzard of signals, verbal and non-verbal, we are reinforcing the synapses that form the neural nets that encode our very self.

Good-byes are poignant preludes to the leave-takings and withdrawals that deprive our minds of the support they need to maintain our selfhood. As such, every good-bye is a premonition of disintegration, a foretaste of death, another step on the path to "adieu."
No wonder we're not fond of good-byes. Which brings us back to Larkin and his aubade...
Despite the sombre tone of this blog I hope you all have a wonderful and happy summer holiday.

Dr.Brown

Trashing Teens

Does society under estimate the abilities and coping capacities of teenagers ? Does society now place too many restrictions on them ? I'm sure St.helen's girls will have strong opinions on this subject.Psychologist Robert Epstein argues in a provocative book, "The Case Against Adolescence," that teens are far more competent than adults assume, and most of their problems stem from  the restrictions placed on them. This is a recent article from Psychology Today. People of my age (63) notice that young people remain juvenile into their twenties an age when most of us had jobs, mortgages and or/children.

Psychologist Robert Epstein spoke to Psychology Today's Hara Estroff Marano about the legal and emotional constraints youth.
HEM: Why do you believe that adolescence is an artificial extension of childhood?
RE: In every mammalian species, immediately upon reaching puberty, animals function as adults, often having offspring. We call our offspring "children" well past puberty. The trend started a hundred years ago and now extends childhood well into the 20s. The age at which Americans reach adulthood is increasing—30 is the new 20—and most Americans now believe a person isn't an adult until age 26.

The whole culture collaborates in artificially extending childhood, primarily through the school system and restrictions on labour. The two systems evolved together in the late 19th-century; the advocates of compulsory-education laws also pushed for child-labour laws, restricting the ways young people could work, in part to protect them from the abuses of the new factories. The juvenile justice system came into being at the same time. All of these systems isolate teens from adults, often in problematic ways.
Our current education system was created in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and was modelled after the new factories of the industrial revolution. State schools set up to supply the factories with a skilled labour force, crammed education into a relatively small number of years. We have tried to pack more and more in while extending schooling up to age 24 or 25, for some segments of the population. In general, such an approach still reflects factory thinking—get your education now and get it efficiently, in classrooms in lockstep fashion. Unfortunately, most people learn in those classrooms to hate education for the rest of their lives.
The factory system doesn't work in the modern world, because two years after graduation, whatever you learned is out of date. We need education spread over a lifetime, not jammed into the early years—except for such basics as reading, writing, and perhaps citizenship. Past puberty, education needs to be combined in interesting and creative ways with work. The factory school system no longer makes sense.
What are some likely consequences of extending one's childhood?
Imagine what it would feel like—or think back to what it felt like—when your body and mind are telling you you're an adult while the adults around you keep insisting you're a child. This infantilization makes many young people angry or depressed, with their distress carrying over into their families and contributing to our high divorce rate. It's hard to keep a marriage together when there is constant conflict with teens.
We have completely isolated young people from adults and created a peer culture. We stick them in school and keep them from working in any meaningful way, and if they do something wrong we put them in a pen with other "children." In most nonindustrialized societies, young people are integrated into adult society as soon as they are capable, and there is no sign of teen turmoil. Many cultures do not even have a term for adolescence. But we not only created this stage of life: We declared it inevitable. In 1904, American psychologist G. Stanley Hall said it was programmed by evolution. He was wrong.
How is adolescent behavior shaped by societal strictures?
One effect is the creation of a new segment of society just waiting to consume, especially if given money to spend. There are now massive industries—music, clothing, makeup—that revolve around this artificial segment of society and keep it going, with teens spending upward of $200 billion a year almost entirely on trivia.
Ironically, because minors have only limited property rights, they don't have complete control over what they have bought. Think how bizarre that is. If you, as an adult, spend money and bring home a toy, it's your toy and no one can take it away from you. But with a 14-year-old, it's not really his or her toy. Young people can't own things, can't sign contracts, and they can't do anything meaningful without parental permission—permission that can be withdrawn at any time. They can't marry, can't have sex, can't legally drink. The list goes on. They are restricted and infantilized to an extraordinary extent.
In recent surveys I've found that American teens are subjected to more than 10 times as many restrictions as mainstream adults, twice as many restrictions as active-duty U.S. Marines, and even twice as many as incarcerated felons. Psychologist Diane Dumas and I also found a correlation between infantilization and psychological dysfunction. The more young people are infantilized, the more psychopathology they show.
What's more, since 1960, restrictions on teens have been accelerating. Young people are restricted in ways no adult would be—for example, in some states they are prohibited from entering tanning salons or getting tattoos.
You believe in the inherent competence of teens. What's your evidence?
Dumas and I worked out what makes an adult an adult. We came up with 14 areas of competency—such as interpersonal skills, handling responsibility, leadership—and administered tests to adults and teens in several cities around the country. We found that teens were as competent or nearly as competent as adults in all 14 areas. But when adults estimate how teens will score, their estimates are dramatically below what the teens actually score.


Well, you've read some of the evidence and ideas - what do you think ? Are we over-protective of teen agers ?