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What Back to School Could Mean
September 8, 2012 by 2 Comments
This past week, over 70 million students from Pre-K to PhD went back to school in the United States. Of those, an estimated 1 million students are homeless, an all-time high. And this past week, many of us went back to school ourselves to teach these folks. Maybe you have a adjunct position, or maybe you are supervising an intern, or maybe you are a school counselor or work at a university health service.
It has never seemed more urgent to me then now that we help people get the educations they desire and work toward. Our country has been struggling immensely over the past several years with fiscal crashes, growing gaps between the upper, middle and working classes, and the sense of hopelessness and pessimism that accompany them. When 1 million children are homeless in one of the 10 richest countries in the world, there is a lot of change needed.
Education should be fueled by optimism even though it always begins in failure. By that I mean that we start off by not knowing stuff, and hoping to change that. If we all knew how to read, write and think critically innately, we’d never need to go to school. We begin not-knowing, but, and this is what is amazing, hard-wired to learn things. We are wired to attach to caregivers, acquire language, and make meaning of the world. And we all have the ability to have ideas.
Recently there has been a lot of useful commentary on how we need to get better at failing, in order to be able to innovate. That is true, and it is only half the story. To be able to innovate, we need to be willing to risk and tolerate failure, true. But just as importantly, we need to allow for the possibility that we could contribute something important and transformative to the world as well.
Recently I was talking with a group of my graduate students, and I asked them to be honest with me and raise their hand if they thought they could get an A in my class. I was heartened to see that 3/4 of class raised their hands. Then I said, “Now raise your hand if you believe that you could have an idea in this class that could change the world.”
One student raised their hand. It was a poignant moment for me, and I suspect many of them.
What has happened to our educational system and values that we teach people to expect they can get an A, but not come up with an idea that can change the world?
I do not fault the students at ALL for this, because I think they have been taught this pessimism by our system. SATs and standardized tests are the ways we grant access to more educational privilege in the U.S., but numbers don’t allow for the reality that everyone has the ability to ideate, to come up with a new thought that could change the world in small and large ways. And students are given or not given financial support based on numbers, which at best only indicate potential, the potential in many ways to know what has already been known, rather than the ability to discover the unknown. These numbers become a driving concern to parents and children, to teachers and students 0f all ages.
Many of the students you are working with are starting the year feeling defeated already. I remember a talk I gave a while back to students on academic probation at a community college, in the last chance class they had to pass in order to continue. Every one of them played and enjoyed some sort of video game, and I asked them why they were willing to try and fail repeatedly with video games when they were having such reluctance to try and fail at school?
One student raised his hand and answered, “because with a video game, I might win.”
What a damning indictment of the educational environment we are shaping people’s hearts and minds in. And yet, by the end of that class every one of the students had spoken, had put forth an idea of their own which brought us as a group further.
Recently, I have been playing a new MMO called Guild Wars 2 and I am finding it very timely for the back to school season. Although I have played WoW for years and have leveled characters up to 85 there, suddenly I find myself thrown into a new world. There is a completely unexplored map, a new economy to master, the game mechanics and character classes just different enough to make my keyboard skills rusty. I didn’t have a clue what was going on until I hit level 5 or 6, when suddenly I began to “get it.” The big question I have for you is, what kept me going to level 5?
I suspect the answer is that video games like GW2 create an optimistic world, where the possibility of success and creating something new is a distinct one. I kept trying in places where I got stuck because I knew both that failure was a possibility but so was success. I also had the opportunity to play the beta version, where we were always being asked by the game designers for our impressions and ideas. Many of these ideas have been incorporated into the later iterations of games like GW2, WoW, and Minecraft. These ideas have literally changed the worlds of these games.
What if we looked at our classrooms and studies more like a beta test? What if we allowed for the possibility that each of us, any of us, could have an idea that changes the world? What kind of learning and character building would that environment produce?
I highly doubt that if aliens were to visit our planet thousands of years from now that they would be impressed with anyone’s GPA. I doubt that they’d sift through the ashes of a civilization to see its test results. They might note the high levels of anxiety and rhetoric in the 21st century speeches on education reform though.
If you are a student reading this I hope you will take this to heart: I believe that you are capable of coming up with an idea that could change the world. If you are a teacher I hope you’ll fight to keep your classroom a laboratory of innovation or a beta test rather than crank out widgets of standardized educational achievement. If you are a therapist I hope you will help support your patients and their families to maintain a sense of their capability and optimism. If you are a parent I hope you will remember that your children’s willingness to take risks and find interests in the world may not always match your own or the status quo and that that is a good thing.
Someone, many someones, somewhere, many somewheres out there, a world-changing idea is about to happen. Let’s not miss it.
If you’re a therapist looking to join a group of innovative colleagues for supervision, you may want to take advantage of this. Like this post? There’s more where that came from, for only $2.99 you can buy my book. I can rant in person too, check out the Press Kit for Public Speaking info. Subscribe to the Epic Newsletter!
How to Get Taken Seriously as a Mental Health Professional
August 8, 2012 by 8 Comments
Many therapists looking to start or grow their private practice often wonder the same question when they are starting out: How do I get referrals? If you can tolerate a mild rant, I may have one answer for you.
Let’s look at this concern through a tried and true mental health paradigm. First, we take a symptom, and then we look at the underlying conflict that the symptom represents.
So what’s the symptom? That’s easy, head on over to LinkedIn and take a look at several profile pictures of colleagues. Go ahead, I’ll wait. What did you see? When I looked I saw some professional headshots, but more of the following:
- blank photos
- top of head/ chin cut off
- people in front of a car
- waterfalls
- tank tops
- the “I’m holding my phone camera at arm’s length” shot
- at a party
- graduation gown
- flower
- too dark to see
- wearing sunglasses
- skiing
If you want to generate referrals, this may be a problem. Some colleagues may have a different opinion or be too diplomatic to say this, but let me not mince words. If you don’t have a professional headshot it is doubtful I will refer to you. I don’t send people to waterfalls for psychotherapy. I suspect people wearing shades of paranoia or vampirism. I envy people who can ski much too much to ever want to help them grow their business. Cars in photos are either nicer than mine or too shabby, triggering too much judgment either way. And party-goers scare me. 😉
My experience as a consultant has been that these headshots are symptomatic of one of two scenarios:
1. You don’t take social media seriously. In this day and age, our potential patients want to see us before they see us. They often do their research by checking out our online presence. If you go on LinkedIn for example, you may find that several people viewed your profile this week. A picture is worth a thousand words. I have seen great head shots in black and white, or even avatars for online therapists, so it doesn’t have to be a standard color shot. But the way technology works now, whatever picture you choose will most likely attach to your emails, tweets, blog comments, posts, and feeds of all kinds. There are exceptions to this, like my colleague Social Jerk, who needs to maintain a tight hold on her anonymity to allow for her to create such creative and satiric posts about social work. But if you are not trying to be a satirist, but rather grow a therapy practice, this will not work for you. And if you’re on Twitter, please don’t be an egg. When I need to jettison followers to follow additional people, the eggs are often the first to go. Accept that social media is the point of professional first contact with your colleagues and customers. Take it seriously.
2. You don’t take yourself as a therapist and businessperson seriously. Anyone that has read this blog or chatted with me at a workshop can probably tell you that I am neither dour nor constantly serious. I certainly think there is a lot of room in our profession for humanity, play and creativity.
That said, we are in the business of providing treatment for serious concerns, working with people who have a range of predicaments. We assess for suicidality, psychosis and trauma. Your patients come to you with vulnerability and hope that you will help them create profound change, recovery and healing in their lives, maybe even help them stay alive. If you think that therapy is just two people in a room chatting, then by all means keep the beach picture.
To get a professional head shot requires investment of your time and money. It is a business expense. If you are unwilling to invest in a professional image to represent your business concern I suspect you are not ready to own and run a business. If you are unwilling to invest the time to look through your existing photographs and select one (if you have it) that presents a professional demeanor online then I suspect you are not ready to own and run a business.
Now I know that the term “professional” photo is vague and subjective. I am not saying that you need to be in a suit and tie. You can be a play therapist and have affect like my colleague Charlotte Reznik. But slapping up a blurry photo of you near a palm tree sends the message that you can’t be bothered to represent yourself or your brand. And in business we need to be concerned about our brands, even as therapists.
Look, I’m not saying these things to hurt your feelings. I really want you to succeed, and I know that there are a lot of people out there who need your help. That’s why I suggest that the photo is the symptom of an underlying issue, which is the difficulty to take either technology or your business seriously. If you have taken time and consulted with trusted colleagues and have come to the conclusion that “I want potential patients to see me as someone blurry whom they could go skiing with” is your brand, and that the head shot is a conscious and intentional image to brand yourself online than you have my blessing.
If not, get thee to a photographer.
If you are interested in participating in a small group supervision experience, you may want to check out the Supervision Package I’ll be offering this fall. You can find out more about it here.
Like this post? There’s more where that came from, for only $2.99 you can buy my book. I can rant in person too, check out the Press Kit for Public Speaking info.
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Post to a Young Therapist
August 1, 2012 by 3 Comments
I’m a big believer in twofers. When you run your own business, twofers are essential. So when I get several emails about a topic I try to craft a post in response. Recently I have been getting emails from many therapists or therapists in training who want advice on how to pursue a career as a gamer therapist. Many of them grew up playing video games and have a lot more comfort and familiarity with them than their therapists who have been around for a bit.
Take Claire for example, who has graciously allowed me to share an excerpt from her email to me:
For most of my life, both video games and service to others have been passions of mine. I’ve recently been working at a game company in XYZ, and have been immersed in the gaming culture more than ever. The more I see it (and experience it first-hand) the more I see a need for therapists who can address the issues so many gamers face as a result of their passion.
Before today, I had no idea if anyone had pioneered this field of study, of if there was even a place for it. And then I found you. A quick perusal of your website tells me that you and I are very much aligned in our beliefs about how games affect us, and why they matter. Seeing that you have crafted this job for yourself inspires me to look further into the possibility of knitting together these passions of mine.
Note the use of the word “passion” here. I hear from these younger folks how their interest and curiosity around video games and technology in general is met with skepticism and often hostility. Supervisors turn into lawyers before their very eyes and begin every conversation about technology with the words “HIPAA” and “liability.” The only question asked in the exploration of patient’s video game is “how many hours are they on the computer?”
Part of the problem with this disconnect is that many up and coming therapists become inadvertently ashamed of the fact that they are gamers themselves. The implicit or explicit pathologizing of video games and tech use shapes the behavior and expectations about whether discussing gaming, or even using it as an intervention, stops before it begins.
Those of us who have been in the field for a while can often become set in our ways. We can act as if education and the workplace haven’t changed much since we started our practice. Insulated in our office and routine, we stick with the phone, maybe email, and play therapy games that have changed little since the 70s. With this stance we are not prepared to work with patients in the 21st century, let alone supervise 21st century trainees.
If you are training to be a therapist, here’s what I recommend if you want to be a gamer therapist:
1. Start from Within
Repeat after me, “It is okay to experience excitement and enjoyment when I am working with patients.” Somewhere along the line our graduate programs have begun to give you the message that you are supposed to be an evidence-based automaton with little emotional investment in treatment. I have had students who have heard dozens of times in their training ideas like “emotional detachment,” and “inappropriate boundaries;” yet not once has anyone talked to them about feeling excited and enjoyment in their sessions. Even trainees doing play therapy express guilt or fear about getting “caught up” in the play. You’d think we were supposed to spend our entire careers with dull, depressing people! Allowing for a range of emotional experience with patients means the whole range, including excitement and fun. So if you are going to be a gamer therapist, start building your capacity to enjoy yourself in sessions.
2. Create A Gamer-Affirmative Environment
Did you know that research has suggested that 1 out of 4 comic book readers are age 65 or older? Yet how many offices have comic books for their adult patients alongside People and Time? The same is true for video games. Geeking up your office and waiting room sends the message that you don’t equate video games or technology with “toys.” In my waiting room I don’t have comic books currently, but I do have Wired magazine and titles devoted to video games. Many conversations have begun as a result. I also have a Deathwing statue and other game-related memorabilia. Recently someone saw a Post-It I had with the word Katamari on it. I had made a note of the game to remind myself to check it out. That Post-It was all it took to begin a very excited and meaningful conversation about the game (which has a free App, by the way.) The smallest changes to your office can convey that you are interested.
3. Try (and I mean play) lots of different video games
This is the fun part, usually. I have the major game platforms and am always trying one or two new games a week. If a patient mentions a game in a session, I make a note to try it ASAP if I haven’t already. Sometimes this requires discipline, because like most people I don’t like every sort of game. But each game I test out helps me understand the patient better.
4. Have video games in your office
I have always had handheld video game consoles in my office, but in addition I have an XBox 360 as well. I don’t think you can be doing contemporary play therapy well without it.
5. Disclose that you play video games
The fact that you have game consoles probably implies this a bit, but let’s be explicit. Regardless of age, 64% of Americans play video games, and the percentage is much higher under 40. So if you have played video games, disclose that you have. If you have a supervisor who sees that disclosure as more akin to “I smoked pot as a teen” than “Yes, I saw Star Wars” run away. Video games are an art form not a controlled substance, and there is a big difference between those two conversations.
6. That said, be on the lookout for countertransference.
Whether you like or hate, play or avoid, video games, you need to be mindful of the reasons why and when you talk about aspects of it. If your patient is telling you that they managed to fish up the giant sea turtle in WoW, it is an empathic failure to say, “Yeah I got that last week, isn’t it cool,” rather than to reflect to them what that says about their persistence and discipline. Note any feelings of competition you have (or don’t have) and wonder about it.
7. Get good supervision, even if you have to pay for it privately.
One of the downsides of licensure having a (in MA) 2 year post-graduate supervision requirement before you get your independent license is that it inadvertently sends the message to fledgling clinicians that after two years you don’t need it any more. That is not true. I encourage new therapists to consider ongoing supervision of some sort to be a business expense to build right into your practice. I had the opportunity to have weekly supervision for free at my workplace for 12 years. That sort of job benefit has gone the way of the milkman in many places today. This means you’ll need to buy some.
If you buy private supervision, remember that it is a different experience from your earlier or agency experiences with it. This is not your boss, you are hiring them. Hiring people means interviewing them, and screening them for fit. If they are technophobic they are not going to be a good fit for a gamer therapist, so it is important to let them know your pro-technology and gaming stance from the beginning.
If you are interested in participating in a small group supervision experience, you may want to check out the Supervision Package I’ll be offering this fall. You can find out more about it here.
Like this post? There’s more where that came from, for only $2.99 you can buy my book. I can rant in person too, check out the Press Kit for Public Speaking info.
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When Wallflowers Attack
July 13, 2012 by 10 Comments
Back in graduate school, my group therapy professor once said to me, “early risk-takers are often scapegoated by the group.” This comment came on the heels of yours truly taking a risk in the group, a group of psychotherapists in training. I learned two things in that group class on that day. The first was that early risk-takers are often scapegoated. The second was that we therapists can be just as cruel with our comments as anyone else.
This is something that many of my supervisees encounter when they start to put themselves out there, especially on the interwebs. They are stunned when the blog post they write elicits comments that are sometimes shocking in their nastiness. They are confused as to why this happens, and what to do about it. If you are beginning to use social media to build your psychotherapy practice, write newsletters, prepare a public speaking campaign or just write a blog, this post is for you.
The internet has made it easier to be both impulsive and anonymous, and emboldened some people to hurl invectives. I call these people the wallflowers. These are the people in any given group who are afraid to take risks or stand out, and resent those who are brave enough to do so. They are quietly resentful, and more often than not envious of people who are not quiet. I’m not talking about introverts here, but rather a particular group who stand on the sidelines seething.
These are the people who send you a nasty email at 2:00 AM criticizing your post for a spelling error, or the folks who text really ugly comments to you after you post something on a listserv they don’t like. They’re the people who make personal attacks on your workshop evaluation in the guise of constructive criticism, or bait you in discussion groups by deliberately misconstruing your words. Yes, I’m not making this stuff up, all of these things and worse have come at me by email, Twitter, Facebook, blog comment, and text message. The majority of the time it will be behind the scenes of whatever arena you’re in, so that you can see it and the larger group can’t. Consciously or unconsciously, wallflowers are counting on you not passing these barbs on to the larger group. Nobody likes a tattletale.
So what do you do about them?
First, take a second and calm down, and note that the intensity of your response is probably an indicator that this is out of the ordinary. Next, try to find a trusted friend or family member that you feel comfortable sharing it with, and ask them what they make of it. Supervisors are often really helpful here. Often they will react more strongly then you did, which gives you another clue its a wallflower attack. Your inclination may be to try to learn something from the comment. I’m going to say something that may go against the therapist grain here–Dismiss the comment and the wallflower. Don’t bother trying to make this into a growth opportunity, there are plenty of other growth opportunities out there for you. Don’t give this your energy.
In my experience this is very hard to do, because therapist wallflowers have a lot of skills to hook you. They bring their therapeutic arsenal and try to come at you as a therapist, by analyzing or interpreting you. Don’t fall for it. Just because you both speak the same language doesn’t mean you have to have a conversation with them. Therapy is a specialized and voluntary form of conversation, and anyone who tries to inflict this on you unasked is using their Jedi therapy powers for ill.
This is your reminder.
This is the price you will have to pay for being an innovator and a risk taker. Early risk takers are often scapegoated. You didn’t do anything wrong, you were just putting yourself out there. And every time you do that, you will run the risk of a wallflower attack. Don’t overprocess it, move on. And definitely don’t let it stop you. Remind yourself that the reason they had anything to attack you about is because you’re doing something they wish they could, creating. Anyone can ping off a blog post, or fire off a Tweet in reaction, but it will only be a reaction, not a standalone.
Remind yourself that your ideas are precious. I’m not trying to sound New Agey here. What I mean is that the fact that you had something to put out there is not to be taken for granted or underestimated. You could have not had the inspiration for that workshop or podcast, but you had it. All over the world there are people who have not given awareness to ideas, throughout history millions of good ideas have never been expressed or seen the light of day. Not you. You did it! And if you stop taking risks the wallflowers win, and the prize is one less idea in the world. Yippee.
I know this can be hard to do, trust me. And the technology we have today has made it even easier for wallflowers to attack. It’s sort of like that sense of invincibility drivers get when they are encased in the protection of their cars. Shake it off. Share it with someone you trust for perspective. Dismiss it. Stay focused. You can take time to smell the roses, but don’t get distracted by the wallflowers.
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21st Century (Psycho)education
July 8, 2012 by 2 Comments
Whether you’re a psychotherapist, an educator or a parent, sooner or later you will be involved in the facilitation of growth through learning. The bad news is that most of us were educated in the 20th century, when education was largely modeled on the 19th century. The view of literacy then was narrower, standardized and often monolithic. The good news is that technology today can help us invigorate learning as never before, often by using the mechanics or design of video games and social media.
Before we press on, it is time to choose your own adventure! I encourage you to ask yourself and answer this question: Is education inevitably like a daily spoonful of cod liver oil? That is, do I believe that it is something that is routine, unavoidably unpleasant the people need to just suck it up and deal with?
If you answered yes, click here to stop reading this post and go to Mordor, where you can play a free MUD with other denizens of gloom and doom.
If you answered no, read on to find some examples of how simple game mechanics can revolutionize a curriculum.
1. Game Patches
Game patches are supplementary, downloadable game content that patches into existing games to either fix bugs or introduce new content into existing games. One example was the famous Burning Crusade from World of Warcraft, which added another world of play, new races to create characters as, flying, and many new quests to challenge players. More recently, Minecraft added patches to include jungles (1.2,) fixed multiple crashes (1.2.4,) and made cats more impatient and eager to sit on things (1.2.5.) Much of the patch content comes from user experience comments, and players often know and eagerly await for patches for weeks in advance of their arrival.
Introducing content into classroom settings can benefit from this approach. First off, polling students during subject matter about what aspects of what they are learning would they like to know more about? What ways can learning or behavioral problems be debugged? For example, elementary school teachers can hype up the class before rolling out Grade 3.5, at the halfway mark of the year, and include in this patch a total restructure of seating plans, allowing new class configurations and addressing problems in a way that starts to be both expected and exciting.
In terms of curriculum, from kindergarten to college, most educators have some lesson plan, and previewing content of upcoming lessons can generate interest and engagement. This can range from creating a funny trailer on YouTube with teasers for the next lesson, to releasing hints about upcoming problems and subject matter. This can include contests to name upcoming characters, for example the characters involved in mathematical word problems, or residents of new areas about to be unlocked and explored in geography.
In school-based and outpatient therapy groups, where is often a psychoeducation component, group leaders can initiate a countdown before patching new content or welcoming new group members into the group. For process-oriented groups, members can be invited to debug and modify the design of the group to deal with challenges or conflicts in the group. I remember a really interesting version of this that a colleague of mine went through in her internship. We were at an outpatient mental health clinic, and although it was not languaged as a patch, her co-leader had her join the group for the first several weeks as a participant-observer. She attended the first 4 groups without speaking, and as week five approached there was much discussion and projection from other members about what she would say when she finally spoke. She was in essence the new content “patched” into the existing group, which introduced change, and new transference while maintaining some group stability and continuity.
2. Talent Trees
If we can just get beyond the tendency towards and linear thinking in curriculum, I am convinced that this intervention could be extremely effective. First, for those of you who are unfamiliar with the idea of a talent tree, here’s an example:
In many games, players have some choices about how to specialize in the area of talents. As they progress through levels, they acquire talent points to spend on unlocking different talents. So if an educator can be flexible in the order of learning certain topics, students can choose to specialize in learning something first or second. Let’s take Literature, would you like to be an Arcane Satirist, Epic Voyager, or specialize in Bloodmagic Murder. If you want to progress through the first talent tree, you will need to read and complete assignments involving Gulliver’s Travels, the second, The Odyssey, and the third MacBeth.
If you are doing psychotherapy we already have a version of this, it’s called DBT. In it people focus on unlocking talent points in the trees of mindfulness, interpersonal effectiveness, emotion regulation and distress tolerance. Which does the patient feel that they would benefit from working on first? Which do you recommend? For adolescents especially, this can make the difference between engaging in treatment and just another boring worksheet.
Other ways to use talent trees effectively can include: Helping gamer couples unlock skills to better communicate or improve their sex lives; helping parents focus on and prioritize specific behaviors to work on with their children; a template for an emergent adult’s first career search; and systematic desensitization of a phobia.
These are just two ways that we can use both the technology and concepts behind it effect change therapeutically and educationally. Can you think of others?
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“On the Computer.”
June 19, 2012 by 5 Comments
You can often tell a lot about how people value (or don’t) something by a preposition. It is very subtle, but I have come to find that “on” in particular is a problematic one. People are on drugs, on parole, etc.
Often I hear parents or clinicians talk about how much time Janey spends “on” the computer, or on Xbox, Playstation, etc. I also hear about how much time Eric is “on” Facebook, 4Chan, etc. There is always a negative connotation to this. I have never heard someone complain about how much time someone spends “on” the book, on the gym, on the dance, etc.
This may seem like a small detail, but why are the recent technologies, things that we are “on?” Is it because the web and video games were seen as analagous to the phone and television in their early days? I don’t think that is the whole story. Maybe we view technology as still cold and alien so we don’t curl up “with” a video game like we would a good book. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but there seems to be something perjorative about being on the computer or social media that just isn’t presented the same ways with the older more familiar literacies and arts in our culture.
But my biggest problem with this preposition is that it allows important clinical data to hide in plain site of the clinician: Our patient telling us that they are on the computer at night tells us next to nothing about what they are doing with it. The same goes for Facebook or Tumblr. When someone tells you in your office that they spent several hours on Facebook, do you ask them what they are doing on it?
These question matter, because as technology has become more advanced and mainstream the computer can be used to access many things: information, play, sexual excitement, art, all these and more are a mere mouse-click away. And when we are told someone is on the computer, I’d suggest we are only one question away from a panoramic window into their conscious and unconscious life.
So to with Facebook. In 2012 being on Facebook can mean any or all of these: reading, status updating, letter-writing, IMing, game-playing, listening to music, political activism, remembering a birthday, seeing photos of grandchildren, searching content, RSVPing to a party, planning a party, and yes, even having a party. Many relational things are happening on social media, real connections are beginning, middling and ending on it as you read this.
One good check for you is to pause and ask yourself what you think they are doing on Facebook. I am often amazed at how disinterested therapists appear to be about that. I have heard things at workshops like, “I don’t want to have anything to do with Facebook.” End of subject. Well, the statistics are accurate, more than half of the people in the US are “on” Facebook. And I personally think when half the population is involved in something, we can’t afford to be disinterested in it. At best this dismissal of a patient’s interest is an empathic failure, at worst it is dangerous.
I believe more and more that we have an ethical duty to educate ourselves about social media sufficiently so that we can help our patients and our society move towards universal digital literacy. We need to be able to help parents understand privacy settings, as well as challenge them not to think parenting has a privacy setting they can “park” their responsibility on. We need to help schools help kids learn how to communicate online even as we educate them that cyberbullying is different than traditional bullying, and in fact often more indicative of a moral panic about technology rather than an “epidemic.” We need to help extend our support of the individual’s reality testing to the online world, or as Howard Rheingold says, help them develop their “crap detector.”
Additionally, we need to become more nuanced in our understanding of what can be done or experienced “on” the computer, in order to understand how to keep psychology and social work relevant. We need to include video games in play therapy, use Pinterest for DBT skills building, YouTube to provide transitional objects or guided imagery. These do not have to dilute traditional psychotherapy, but our reluctance to use them does. As a psychodynamic practitioner I note how we are falling behind our more behaviorally-oriented colleagues in using technology. Technology has always had its place in psychoanalytic theory, as metaphor, analogy, and the technology of literacy to help us make sense of human experience. Technology aids and abets the ego defenses, creates another arena for object relations to play out, and provides selfobject functions.
We are not just “on” the computer or Facebook, our relationship with them and their’s with us is much more complicated than that. If by on we are talking about position, we’ve got the position all wrong. “On” implies perching on top of something, like a precipice. We are within experiences of the computer and social media, the plunge has been taken and we are swimming in it. Now we need to begin to figure out what that means.
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Technology and Time Management: Some Simple Tips
June 2, 2012 by Leave a Comment
Sometimes people get the impression from my presentations, book, or this blog that I think that there is no such thing as too much use of video games, social media & technology, so let me set the record straight. I do think that there is such a thing as problem usage. One of the first questions I get when I speak to therapists, educators or parents usually is, “how much time spent playing video games, texting, or using Facebook is too much?” The concern is real and understandable, but the problem is the way the question is framed.
Other than sleep, and maybe meditation, I can’t think of any activity that is good to do for 8 hours straight on a regular basis. Nothing, not gaming, sitting on an airplane, playing hopscotch, calisthenics, drinking alcohol or water, studying, or mowing the lawn, will be without adverse effects if you do it constantly for 8 hours straight. What makes most things problematic is not the quantity of time, but the quality of your life as a result of the usage. If you were to play hopscotch for any length of time such that it lost you your job, ruined your school performance, jeopardized your relationships with loved ones, or made you feel more negatively about yourself, those qualitative concerns are what would make it problematic. That said, another qualitative factor in determining whether using technology has become problematic for you can be its impact on your time management skills.
I strongly suspect that people have had time management challenges for as long as there have been sundials. And we do know from history that each introduction of a new technology is followed by an exponential increase in its use, which in turn creates feelings of overwhelm. And these feelings of being overwhelmed are what necessarily precede our developing the mental, physical and technological skills to manage the new use. The earliest known book indexes showed up about 150 years after the printing press, and were preceded by 50 years of increasing overwhelm as Europe’s book collection grew from approximately 30,000 to over 20 million. (And no doubt, even as knowledge and the arts grew so rapidly, there were members of the population who had little interest in learning to read, and would have criticized time wasted reading that could have been put to better use, like tilling the fields or baking bread.)
So here we are again, with a proliferation of technology and the demonization, confusion, and yes, real problems that come with it. Two years ago the average amount of time adults in the U.S. spent online was 13 hours excluding email, and with the advent of the iPad it has undoubtedly increased from there. Fortunately, people are starting to talk about ways to reflect on the way we use technology, such as Howard Rheingold in his new book, Net Smart. Which is important, because we’ve passed the point where using technology is optional, at least if you want to live and work in the U.S. So here are a few tips I thought I’d pass on that I and people I work with have found helpful in learning to how to manage your time and tech use:
- First, figure out what thing is the most time suck for you, because it varies. For some people it is going on Facebook, for others it’s gaming. Personally, I don’t think I spend more than 30 minutes a week on Facebook, because it isn’t my “thing.” On the other hand, I need to do something about the 2,500 unread emails in my box.
- Next, drill down into that technology and figure out what particular elements are taking up the most time. Saying “I spend hours on Facebook or Google+” is pretty meaningless, because these platforms have such varied functionality. Are you on FB chatting? Reading updates? Playing Farmville? Take a few minutes to reflect on what you do and how much time it tends to consume.
- Consider Chunking. Remember how I said my email was my biggest time suck? When I really feel overwhelmed, I begin setting aside a couple of 30 minute blocks to read carefully and respond thoughtfully to emails.
- If you’re a therapist, I suggest you take a lesson from your voicemail, and begin using an auto-responder. They are pretty universally available through either your webmail settings or your software. I do think we have a responsibility to our patients to let them know that their message has been received, and told that if this is an emergency they should not wait for a reply, but go to the ER or call 911.
- Peter Bregman, a blogger for the Harvard Business Review, makes the excellent suggestion of having two lists for your day. The first one lists the things you need to pay attention to that day. The second one is lists the things you need NOT to pay attention to. Many of us have a really hard time making priorities. We think that everything needs to be attended to, and sure, if you put something on the NOT list, you will miss out on something. It doesn’t feel good or easy to set priorities, because that is the nature of prioritizing.
- To the above lists, I suggest that you apply my own (non-patented) Postit Rule. Quite simply, the Postit Rule is that any list needs to fit legibly on a regular sized Postit, or be shortened. If I cannot print the items on my list legibly on one side of a postit, then more things need to go on the “NOT attending to” list. Experience has proven that if I don’t do this I won’t get everything done anyway, because even though “dither and complain about how busy I am” never shows up on either list, it somehow seems to consume a lot of time.
- For gamers who are having a hard time logging off, I suggest a PostIt that is taped up to the edge of your monitor saying something like “Just win? Maybe now’s a good time to log off.”
- For gamers who are interested in doing some self-reflection, I suggest you do this experiment: Keep a pad and pen near the place you’re playing. Tell yourself (and others if you’re grouped) that you are going to log off the next fail, not as a rage quit, but as an exercise. Then, when you lose, log off and spend 10-15 minutes writing down the thoughts, feelings, and impressions that come up immediately after a fail. Does it feel infuriating to lose? Urgent? Funny? A relief? What thoughts do you catch running through your mind? After you’ve reflected a minute, put it away, but take it out and reread it an hour later and a day later. What do you think of it now?
- You may have noticed that the above strategies don’t depend for the most part on advanced technology, but rather putting tangible reminders in your field of vision during the day.
- That said, there are several apps and sites that may help you get a handle on your time as well:
- If you surf a lot, consider using a news aggregator. One Howard Rheingold recommends is NetVibes, which is very customizeable. I find it a little too overwhelming, and I surf mostly on my iPad rather than a desktop, so I use the App Flipboard. It has a nice intuitive interface and allows me to read and share material very easily from within it. Or you can try Google’s Feedburner or FeedDemon.
- If you haven’t tried Evernote yet, especially on the latest iPhone, you are missing out on another good time-saver for non-confidential sorts of info. Evernote stores your notes, lists, pictures, and webpages so you can access them on any computer. It makes what you save searchable, and best of all IMHO in the latest iPhone you can dictate notes. If you’re a student or work with students, I recommend StudyBlue as well.
These are just some of the things out there that can help you achieve more mindfulness and organization. Because in my opinion the hours counting and addiction labeling is dodging the real issue, how to increase our own mental abilities to become self-reflective and intentional in our use of technology. Notice what you are attending to, increase the space between thinking and doing, and I’ll bet you find yourself a better gamer, blogger, worker, student, or other user of technology.
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Homework on Mars
May 12, 2012 by 7 Comments
In the 20 years that I have been working with children, adolescents and their families, I have seen no end of grief caused by homework. In fact, I sometimes wonder what families would do with all the time they saved if they weren’t doing homework, fighting about doing homework, looking for lost homework, trying to understand homework, or reading notes from teachers about incomplete homework.
And having worked in several school systems across communities of varying socioeconomic status, I can tell you that bad and boring homework knows no barrier of class or poverty. I’ve seen my fair share of photocopied worksheets and looked at “problems 1,2, 4-8 on pages 125-129″ enough to empathize with my patients over the years. Sometimes I manage to answer the question, how is this going to help me in life?” But more often I’m of the opinion that I’d glaze over looking at some of the homework assignments too if I were them.
If you are someone who believes in the idea that we’ve always had homework, and that kids and young adults have just got to shut up and do it, don’t waste anymore time reading this post. Because I think in general that homework is more over-prescribed than any psychiatric medication, and that it reinforces some pretty distorted views about education and work. Unfortunately, they are also pretty prevalent views of education and work, but they definitely aren’t the only ones.
I’m not alone in my critique of homework. Educator John T. Spencer wrote a great blog post about it a year ago, which points out that among other things, homework has been shown to not improve academic achievement and may even decrease it. This research came from Cooper’s metaanalysis of over 180 studies of homework conducted between 1987 and 2006, and you can find it here. Nor is this a recent critique: As Gill and Schlossman point out in their work many learned and progressive people spent the earlier part of the 20th century trying to abolish homework. Most of us parenting today however, were taught in such a way that we think of homework as a fundamental and inevitable “given” when it comes to school.
From the point of view of social emotional development and creativity at least, kids have a lot more important things to do when they aren’t in school. Homework takes time away from developing peer relationships, engaging in extracurricular activities, and, well, being a kid. And most assignments come in the form of worksheets and packets, which encourage dry research rather than lived experience or creativity.
I have a colleague whose son was given a list of “historic places” to research, which did not include one location in our Metro Boston area. No Old North Church, no African Meetinghouse, no Lexington Battle Green, nothing. No one place that encouraged parent/child time to take a trip or have a fun experience. This is one way that schools inadvertently teach kids to “phone it in.” And that’s not the only problematic habit homework instills: If a child comes home from a day of work and does more work, that is being a good student; if an adult comes home from a day of work and works more we call them a workaholic.
The other thing about homework is that it inherently demeans teachers. Although we are seeing some exciting developments with MITx, Udacity, the Khan Academy and other attempts to make education more scalable, we are being reminded that direct instruction by teachers is in many ways irreplaceable. Even if homework reinforces what is done during the day, which it may or may not, it doesn’t replace it.
Worksheets in particular become just another metric for grading, and a metric that doesn’t say much about how varied in support and context each of the homes it is occurring in can be. It can be argued that truly egalitarian public education happens in the school setting, as that is the one place that is a level playing field in terms of race and class.
But I don’t doubt that homework is not going away, if for nothing else than because it is “the way we do things.” But given the wonderful new technologies out there, I don’t see any reason why it has to be so rote and dismal as it often is. Originally I was going to write about using Netvibes as a virtual “Trapper Keeper” for homework, but then I began exploring and gardening on Mars.
Waking Mars is a game from Tiger Style, which I recently sampled for the iPad (it also is available for iPhone.) You play the game as Liang, an astronaut who finds himself exploring subterranean caverns on Mars. There he discovers various species of creatures called Zoa, who may be plants, animals, or something else entirely. In order to solve the mysteries of the cavern, Liang must experiment and learn how to interact with the different Zoa. This includes planting seeds, changing the pH of ground, helping mobile Zoa reproduce or herding them into predatory Zoa to create compost. As one progresses, the player must gather data on each Zoa in terms of their reproduction, vulnerabilities, ideal environment and interactions in order to help replenish the biomass of each cavern.
I could envision a range of educational uses for this game. It could be used to illustrate the concept of phyla and Linnaean taxonomy in general. It demonstrates both symbiotic and autonomous relationships in biology. It requires one to observe behavior and learn to predict it. It shows how and why understanding the environment and life cycles of a biosystem may have applied value. It requires problem-solving and critical thinking to advance, and the ability to compare and contrast types as well.
Waking Mars is an example of what could be begun in a connected classroom, and then continued at home. Achievements are recorded and available for later assessment. There is also social media capabilities to help kids collaborate on learning by tweeting things they’ve learned, and help teachers assess where the class as a whole is in terms of content. Best of all it is fun, and more intrinsically rewarding than a worksheet. I suspect parents would find it enjoyable too, and engage with their kids in a much more fun and playful way than the traditional role of parent as homework monitor.
These games are out there, and gamification is already being used in many educational settings. And if you think about it, it makes a lot of sense. What would you rather do, fill out a form or complete a quest? Both require literacy and other skills, but the added benefit of playing video games and using social media is that it begins to let kids integrate learning about digital literacy as well. One example of digital literacy that Howard Rheingold discusses is “crap detection,” where the individual doesn’t just Google something, but also questions whether the source is reputable, and fact checks it. So to return to Waking Mars, an instructor could pose the question, “should we consider the game and its’ website factual evidence to support the hypothesis that Mars has caves?” Why or why not? And if not, what or where might we search online to get more valid information?
Sometimes we need to allow for the possibility that youth might know better than us about something. If they are demonstrating that they want to spend time on iPads or computers, let’s ditch the pencils. If they enjoy video games and technology, let’s throw away the weekly worksheets. Do we want them to have the same disempowering and puritanical experience of education that many of us had? Or do we want them to enjoy learning and become lifelong learners? It would be great if we could get rid of homework entirely, but if we insist on having it let’s make it fun and engaging. Enough with the worksheets and problems 1,2, 4-8 on pages 125-129. Let’s jet-pack through caverns and garden on Mars.
Like this post? There’s more where that came from, for only $2.99 you can buy my book. I can rant in person too, check out the Press Kit for Public Speaking info.
