Welcome to Week Four of Once More, With Feeling.
Here in New England weâre in the grips of the heatwave that is worse in the Pacific Northwest and parts of Canada - stay safe out there, my friends.
BE THE SPARK - Thoughts on Teaching and Learning
Eyeing the door: A few months ago The Chronicle of Higher Education asked me to write a piece for a new report aimed at college administrators. The report is called The Future of Teaching and it is a collection of essays and reports focused on the fall transition to a ânew normalâ given the vaccine-gifted improvements in public health conditions in the States. My editor asked me to write about compassion for faculty and staff.
So I did! But I felt like so many great pieces had already been written about the need for care and healing after all of the stress and tumult (and for some, tremendous losses) of the last year and a half, and I wanted to contribute something new.
I wrote about a trend that Iâm seeing not only in surveys and other official reports, but across my own social networkâthat dedicated faculty and staff are leaving their positionsâand the existential threat this poses. It endangers the very sorts of experiences students come to college for in the first place.
You can read it here. I hear it pairs well with this article that concerns itself more fully with the perspective of staff.
Teaching Tip: This (sweltering) summer we are all looking first behind us and then ahead of us and consideringâwhat lessons am I going to take with me into the future, regardless of what teaching modality Iâll be teaching in? For so many faculty, the challenges of teaching on Zoom or Teams have been many, but there was one unexpected delightâwatching previously quiet students join the class conversation via the chat or other backchannel conversation apps. Presuming many of us will be returning face-to-face in the fall, how can you recreate the two things that was so great about those tools: 1) making space for students who want to participate but would rather do so via text than voice, and 2) creating a backchannel conversation (âdid anyone catch what that term was?â âthis reminds me of a short story I just read!â).
Enter the marvelous Sara Fulmer from the Office of Teaching and Learning (OTL) at the University of Guelph, who has created an entire cheat sheet with resources, links, and options for us.
Thank you Sara!
If you want to delve even further, here is a thread I wrote about using Slack in my neuroscience seminar last spring, and here is a wonderful webinar Derek Bruff held on the topic of using these sorts of tools in your classes.
HIVEMIND - On Social Neuroscience & Our Synchronous Selves
I know you arenât supposed to read your Goodreads reviews but I do, and it is so striking to me that so many of both the good and the bad reviews for HIVEMIND call out that the subtitle doesnât really describe what the book is about. Some people are delighted by what they actually find between the covers, and some are irritated to discover the book isnât what they thought it was. (I donât like the subtitle either and fought it pretty hardâbut lost!).
In any case, the book is really about our collective social selves and how much of our well-being is tied up in our synchronous, shared experience of the world. In the final chapter I share how having my own little collective of women who gather twice a year for goal setting, reflection, and play has shaped the course of my life for the better. We gathered recently in person after having a terrible Zoom retreat in January and weâre discussing a book proposal for what would be a recipe book of sorts for organizing your own collective.
In putting the proposal together, weâre searching for the stories of others. Over the years we have run into other groups of people who have an ongoing practice by which they gather with the same people repeatedly over time for similar sorts of retreats, though they tend to vary in focusâsome of them seem more focused on unwinding or physical activity or religious practice.
Is this you? If so, weâd love to talk to you! Let me know in the comments below or by emailing sarah DOT rose DOT cavanagh AT gmail.com.
MONSTERS - Thoughts on Uncertainty, Anxiety, and Mental Health
A podcast recommendation for those interested in adolescent mental health and also parents in generalâLisa DâAmour, author of Under Pressure: Confronting the Epidemic of Stress and Anxiety in Girls, runs a wonderful and lively podcast on a wide range of topics having to do with parenting and mental health.
EMOTION & MOTIVATION - Feeling and Striving
My two book projects keep talking to each other, and never more than this month as Iâm writing about goal setting and motivation for the Emotion & Motivation text and about purpose and vocation for my book on adolescent mental health and learning.
So Iâve been thinking quite a lot about vocation and what moves and drives us in our careers. It is in this context that I read the great Heather Urryâs presidential remarks at the annual conference of the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science (SIPS), in which she reflects on psychology, science, equity, and vocation. It really is a stirring call not just to psychologists but to knowledge-makers of all kinds. I am so blessed to call this woman friend, mentor, and collaborator. Donât wait, go read her beautiful, passionate reflections now.
INCIDENTALLY - POPPIES
Last fall as the terrible pandemic winter of isolation loomed its terrible head, I planted some poppy seeds. They werenât just any poppy seedsâthey were seeds from my grandmotherâs line of Lithuanian poppies that my mother had carefully dried for me from her garden. It felt like an act of faith putting them in the ground when the only thing that was certain was that the winter was going to be full of challenges and separations of various sorts.
The winter was hard, but we were privileged to be less affected than most, and we also made the best of what we had.
In the early spring my older brother began âwinter sowingâ various poppy seeds as a way to keep busy and focused on the promise of spring. They did so well that he was able to share a variety of plants with me and my mother. It has been riotous delight watching the variety of blooms explode this summer. Every morning when I do my tour of the gardens there are new versions that have burst forth. Oddly enough, he claims to not have planted this many different varieties, and I appear to have some that he doesnât. It feels a bit like something out of an Alice Hoffman novel.
Enjoy:
Finally, a tip from my mother: âSarah if you pick them when they are first showing color, pick the stem right down to the ground, and put into cool water for 24 hours. Then cut to desired length and burn the bottom of the stem. Lightly, to seal it up. Then put in water and they should bloom and last for a week or so. Otherwise they croak within hours. And donât pick( anything) in the heat of the day.â