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It’s the time of year when resolutions and self-improvement are in the air.
Unfortunately, most of us will have abandoned our goals within weeks. Why is it so hard to follow through?
Here’s what I see as a teacher and a coach: We beat ourselves up for struggling with difficult things, and then the discomfort is so intolerable that we take the easy way out. It’s all pain, no gain.
Read MoreWhen I was running operations at my music school, I would often get a panicked calls from one of the many teachers.
“Did you change the key?” they would ask. “I can’t get my key to work. I’ve been trying for like ten minutes — I’ve tried every key I have.”
After I reassured them that I hadn’t changed the locks without telling them, they would usually make their key work within a minute. The seemingly impenetrable mechanism would now suddenly give way. The only thing that had changed was that now they knew that they had the right key. That gave them the fortitude necessary to succeed in unlocking the door.
Read MoreChildren who have struggled with reading often rush through it.
When reading aloud, they push themselves to get through the words as quickly as possible, giving each word equal weight.
Perhaps, after a history of being self-conscious about their slow decoding, they are trying to make up for lost time.
Ironically, they will find themselves stumbling more, not less. That’s because they are ignoring the natural pauses offered by commas and periods. If they slow down and focus on meaning, they will actually read more smoothly. When you see language in phrases instead of words, more emphasis is given to the important words, and the less important words will flow naturally. The overall effect will be “faster.”
Read MoreMy Brother, My Brother, & Me, a long-running podcast from brothers Justin, Travis, & Griffin McElroy, bills itself as “an advice show for the modern era” (Justin always pronounces it “modren”).
But this is not an advice show. It is a cleverly executed improv comedy show. The brothers field listener-submitted requests for advice along with selected Yahoo! Answers questions, offering deeply outlandish solutions to the problems presented. For instance, a question from a server in a restaurant about how to accommodate a guest who orders something that isn’t on the menu leads to speculation that perhaps the guest is a ghost who must return every week to the same restaurant until he is given his requested meal and is then gratefully “banished to the hell dimension” in a puff of vapor.
Read MoreThe 50th anniversary of the moon landing has come and gone. Nothing has changed as a result of marking that moment. In fact, the argument is that not much changed as a result of the moon landing itself.
That may be true for the moon itself, cold and still and untouched since the Apollo missions. But we are still reaping the benefits of the technological advancements that were required to achieve Kennedy’s ambitious goal to put a man on the moon before the end of the 1960s. Many decades of research and development were compressed into just over eight years. That is the benefit of a clearly defined, time-bound objective.
Read MoreI wrote yesterday about my reluctance to push a student through developmentally inappropriate material on a too-fast timeline. There is a flip side, however. Learning is not linear, and it’s important to recognize when a student is actually ready to take a leap.
Here’s the uncomfortable part: It may be before you’re ready, and they may leap right over you.
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