Visualizing Teaching, Sleep Wonderful Sleep, and the Eternal Lure of Platonic Love Stories
Newsletter #13
Welcome to Week Thirteen of Once More, With Feeling.
BE THE SPARK - Thoughts on Teaching and Learning
What does engaged teaching look like?
Appropriately enough, a marvelous new project by Cassandra Volpe Horii and Martin Springborg answers this question using images rather than words.
It is an open access project so you can enjoy it digitally here, but if you want a glossy hard copy to live on your coffee table or in your Center for Teaching’s break room, you can also purchase that here.
The images are fantastic all on their own, but the book also includes close reading exercises and discussion questions for different types of groups in higher education.
Enjoy!
OUR MONSTERS, OURSELVES - Uncertainty, Challenges, Mental Health
Among the most challenging questions in psychology is whether and how to diagnose mental health problems. The complexities are legion. Is it at all appropriate to use a medical model for patterns of thinking, emoting, and behaving? Does doing so increase mental health stigma by using somewhat arbitrary cut-off points to put people experiencing natural variations in experience into boxes of “normal” and “abnormal,” with all of its attendant judgments? These critiques are probably what has led to a shift away from the term “mental illness”—I have noticed that increasingly people have begun using the term “mental health” to mean both well-being and the lack thereof, thereby avoiding the word illness. Does a medical model also cast a sheen of objectivity and science over what is deeply subjective and woefully unclear? The diagnostic systems themselves are a mess. For many diagnoses, two people can receive the same label and share not a single symptom—and at the same time can share many symptoms with people with an entirely other diagnosis.
Writer Christine Browne provides an update on progress (and lack thereof) in how major groups in psychology are tackling some of these issues in a recent issue of the American Psychological Society’s magazine The Observer. It is a fascinating read.
If you are intrigued by this topic, my favorite recent books addressing these issues in depth are Lucy Foulkes’ What Mental Illness Really Is—And What It Isn’t and Dean Burnett’s Psycho-logical: Why Mental Health Goes Wrong—And How to Make Sense of It. It is also a topic that I take up briefly in my new book Mind Over Monsters: Supporting Youth Mental Health with Compassionate Challenge, which is apparently available for pre-order now!
EMOTION & MOTIVATION - Feeling and Striving
When I was growing up, my mother’s stock response for any time I professed the slightest stress or emotion or rebellion was a shrugging, “Oh, you’re just overtired.” It drove me, in clinical terms, absolutely bonkers. It seemed to diminish and flatten any real objections I had to the demands of life, to how our household was run, to whatever newest indignity my two brothers had inflicted upon me into nothing more than the prickly discomfort of someone who hadn’t gotten enough rest.
But of course, she was right more often than not. A good night’s sleep solved most of my woes.
Since then, I have taken up the mantle of sleep evangelist. I received an honorable mention in my eighth-grade science fair for my presentation on Why You Should Go to Sleep Right Now. I have written about sleep in blog posts, tweeted about it, and bent the ear of journalists at The Chronicle of Higher Education about how faculty and staff need to sleep better.
So wasn’t I delighted to see an entire special issue of one of my most-read emotion specialty journals on the topic of sleep and affect. You can enjoy it here.
INCIDENTALLY - Platonic Love Stories
I have always had a soft spot for platonic love stories. There is something about combining deep attachment, idealized gaze, and emotional support with a lack of a hedonic sexual motive that moves me, even more than romantic love. It seems more pure, and also more lasting. The more common phenomenon of friendship has many of these components, of course, but the platonic love stories I have in mind have an extra kick—a heightened level of infatuation or idealization.
In literature, we have Frodo and Sam. Sherlock and Watson. If you prefer true life, Hope Jahren and Bill Hagopian from Lab Girl crush my heart in a scientific way, and Isaac Fitzgerald and Saeed Jones do so in a more very-literary-and-very-online way.
If television is more your thing, I present to you Christina Yang and and Meredith Grey from Grey’s Anatomy.
If you prefer film, in the new Netflix teen-and-texting version of Cyrano The Half of It, the scheming partners share a more tender love story than the object of both of their affections. (I thank my own teenager for introducing us to a film I would never have watched otherwise).
But back to novels.
My favorite read in just ages is Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. It contains one important platonic love story that the marketing pitches as the core of the book—“often in love, but never lovers” Sadie and Sam. But as that blurb indicates, their story is seemingly a cross between platonic love and unrequited love (the latter of which is a whole other sort of entrancing story).
To me the more moving platonic love in the book is the one between Sam and his college roommate Marx (no, really, actual roommates), and among the three friends as a collective. The care they take with each other, the gentle acceptance, the striving for goals together—it is warm and gorgeous and full of grace. They are occasionally cruel to each other too, in the way that human beings can be to those they love. But they always come back to each other. It is also a hymn to intellectual loves, to those people you crave to open your mind to, letting your thoughts dance together.
The book being solidly Gen X, thick with references to the video games I grew up playing, surely contributed to my enjoyment. But even if you are older or younger or never really got into video games, the story is a bright, moving, complex one, and touches on themes of identity, disability, and creativity in addition to love and friendship.
The Penguin website promotes the fact that it was a Jimmy Fallon book club selection, but please don’t hold that against it.
What are your favorite platonic love stories?