A Teaching Life

To slow this pace we choose to stop and pay full attention. We mute our phones. We sit, perhaps by ourselves or with a friend at a café. These pauses give us time to recollect, to think, to find solace.

Today, if you are a parent or work with children, you face challenges when they seek to be on their screens acting like Walter Michel’s children who “ate their marshmallow within seconds or minutes after the experimenter left the room.” You want them not to become addicted on digital devices that insist on instant attention, driven by personally designed algorithms, information coming in demanding an instant response, demanding more and more…and on and on it goes. An endless tracking. No time to think. No time to reflect.

You can choose to create spaces for children to linger, hesitate, wait. Invite them to see the value and satisfaction of uncertainty that can bring new awareness, knowledge, understanding. You want them not to grab the first ‘marshmallow.’ And certainly, not to google solutions to problems before thinking and exploring possible answers. And the same with AI. Relying solely on it for assignments, one only passes on information. Thinking and learning is absent. The brain is idle.

You can enact pauses in your life, your ‘second marshmallow-in-waiting,’ curtailing knee-jerk responses to allow for thinking and contemplation. While no external award awaits, like Michel’s second marshmallow, the waiting may well become reward enough.

Given that “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forward” (Kierkegaard), I write this Blog to bring ideas and methods from my life as a teacher in the latter half of the 20^th century to help teachers and the public to “live forward” in this century.