Learning From Peers Quotes

Females with ASDs often develop ‘coping mechanisms’ that can cover up the intrinsic difficulties they experience. They may mimic their peers, watch from the sidelines, use their intellect to figure out the best ways to remain undetected, and they will study, practice, and learn appropriate approaches to social situations. Sounds easy enough, but in fact these strategies take a lot of work and can more often than not lead to exhaustion, withdrawal, anxiety, selective mutism, and depression. -Dr. Shana Nichols

Be a Student of the Game. Like most cliches of sport, this is profound. You can be shaped, or you can be broken. There is not much in between. Try to learn. Be coachable. Try to learn from everybody, especially those who fail. This is hard. Peers who fizzle or blow up or fall down, run away, disappear from the monthly rankings, drop off the circuit.

It was a heady feeling, the idea that one could conjure a man from a stain on a calico patchwork quilt from 1978, that one could reverse the flow of power. If you commit murder and then vanish, what you leave behind isn’t just pain but absence, a supreme blankness that triumphs over everything else. The unidentified murderer is always twisting a doorknob behind a door that never opens. But his power evaporates the moment we know him. We learn his banal secrets. We watch as he’s led, shackled and sweaty, into a brightly lit courtroom as someone seated several feet higher peers down unsmiling, raps a gavel, and speaks, at long last, every syllable of his birth name.

If you are a boss, ask yourself: When you look back at how you’ve treated followers, peers, and superiors, in their eyes, will you have earned the right to be proud of yourself? Or will they believe that you ought to be ashamed of yourself and embarrassed by how you have trampled on others’ dignity day after day?

As your perspective of the world increases not only is the pain it inflicts on you less but also its meaning. Understanding the world requires you to take a certain distance from it. Things that are too small to see with the naked eye, such as molecules and atoms, we magnify. Things that are too large, such as cloud formations, river deltas, constellations, we reduce. At length we bring it within the scope of our senses and we stabilize it with fixer. When it has been fixed we call it knowledge. Throughout our childhood and teenage years, we strive to attain the correct distance to objects and phenomena. We read, we learn, we experience, we make adjustments. Then one day we reach the point where all the necessary distances have been set, all the necessary systems have been put in place. That is when time begins to pick up speed. It no longer meets any obstacles, everything is set, time races through our lives, the days pass by in a flash and before we know that is happening we are fort, fifty, sixty... Meaning requires content, content requires time, time requires resistance. Knowledge is distance, knowledge is stasis and the enemy of meaning. My picture of my father on that evening in 1976 is, in other words, twofold: on the one hand I see him as I saw him at that time, through the eyes of an eight-year-old: unpredictable and frightening; on the other hand, I see him as a peer through whose life time is blowing and unremittingly sweeping large chunks of meaning along with it.

God's guidance is almost always step-by-step; He does not show us our life's plan all at once. Sometimes our anxiousness to know the will of God comes from a desire to peer over God's shoulder to see what His plan is. What we need to do is learn to trust Him to guide us.

Eventually, you will hit upon a particular field, niche, or opportunity that suits you perfectly. You will recognize it when you find it because it will spark that childlike sense of wonder and excitement; it will feel right. Once found, everything will fall into place. You will learn more quickly and more deeply . your skills level will reach a point where you will be able to claim your independence from within the group you work for and move out on your own. you will determine your circumstances. As your own Master, you will no longer be subject to the whims of tyrannical bosses or scheming peers.

No waiting the beyond, no peering toward it, but longing to degrade not even death; we shall learn earthliness, and serve its ends, to feel its hands about us like a friend's.

The idea that girls are somehow responsible for 'provoking' harassment from boys is shamefully exacerbated by an epidemic of increasingly sexist school dress codes. Across the United States, stories have recently emerged about girls being hauled out of class, publicly humiliated, sent home, and even threatened with expulsion for such transgressions as wearing tops with 'spaghetti straps,' wearing leggings or (brace yourself) revealing their shoulders. The reasoning behind such dress codes, which almost always focus on the girls' clothing to a far greater extent than the boys', is often euphemistically described as the preservation of an effective 'learning environment.' Often schools go all out and explain that girls wearing certain clothing might 'distract' their male peers, or even their male teachers....in reality these messages privilege boys' apparent 'needs' over those of the girls, sending the insidious message that girls' bodies are dangerous and provoke harassment, and boys can't be expected to control their behavior, so girls are responsible for covering up....his education is being prioritized over hers.

Before the Law stands a doorkeeper on guard. To this doorkeeper there comes a man from the country who begs for admittance to the Law. But the doorkeeper says that he cannot admit the man at the moment. The man, on reflection, asks if he will be allowed, then, to enter later. 'It is possible,' answers the doorkeeper, 'but not at this moment.' Since the door leading into the Law stands open as usual and the doorkeeper steps to one side, the man bends down to peer through the entrance. When the doorkeeper sees that, he laughs and says: 'If you are so strongly tempted, try to get in without my permission. But note that I am powerful. And I am only the lowest doorkeeper. From hall to hall keepers stand at every door, one more powerful than the other. Even the third of these has an aspect that even I cannot bear to look at.' These are difficulties which the man from the country has not expected to meet, the Law, he thinks, should be accessible to every man and at all times, but when he looks more closely at the doorkeeper in his furred robe, with his huge pointed nose and long, thin, Tartar beard, he decides that he had better wait until he gets permission to enter. The doorkeeper gives him a stool and lets him sit down at the side of the door. There he sits waiting for days and years. He makes many attempts to be allowed in and wearies the doorkeeper with his importunity. The doorkeeper often engages him in brief conversation, asking him about his home and about other matters, but the questions are put quite impersonally, as great men put questions, and always conclude with the statement that the man cannot be allowed to enter yet. The man, who has equipped himself with many things for his journey, parts with all he has, however valuable, in the hope of bribing the doorkeeper. The doorkeeper accepts it all, saying, however, as he takes each gift: 'I take this only to keep you from feeling that you have left something undone.' During all these long years the man watches the doorkeeper almost incessantly. He forgets about the other doorkeepers, and this one seems to him the only barrier between himself and the Law. In the first years he curses his evil fate aloud; later, as he grows old, he only mutters to himself. He grows childish, and since in his prolonged watch he has learned to know even the fleas in the doorkeeper's fur collar, he begs the very fleas to help him and to persuade the doorkeeper to change his mind. Finally his eyes grow dim and he does not know whether the world is really darkening around him or whether his eyes are only deceiving him. But in the darkness he can now perceive a radiance that streams immortally from the door of the Law. Now his life is drawing to a close. Before he dies, all that he has experienced during the whole time of his sojourn condenses in his mind into one question, which he has never yet put to the doorkeeper. He beckons the doorkeeper, since he can no longer raise his stiffening body. The doorkeeper has to bend far down to hear him, for the difference in size between them has increased very much to the man's disadvantage. 'What do you want to know now?' asks the doorkeeper, 'you are insatiable.' 'Everyone strives to attain the Law,' answers the man, 'how does it come about, then, that in all these years no one has come seeking admittance but me?' The doorkeeper perceives that the man is at the end of his strength and that his hearing is failing, so he bellows in his ear: 'No one but you could gain admittance through this door, since this door was intended only for you. I am now going to shut it.

For the first time, Duroy thought of all that was hidden in her past and began to speculate. Obviously she'd already had lovers, but what sort were they and what kind of society did they come from? A vague jealousy, a sort of hostility against her, stirred in him, an hostility directed against everything that he did not know about her, all that part of her feelings and life which did not belong to him. He looked at her, irritated by the secrets hidden in that pretty, silent little head, which perhaps at that very moment was thinking with regret of another man, of other men. How he would have liked to peer into her memories, explore them and learn all there was to know about them!

When people say that school prepares children for the real world, what's implied is that it is the difficult parts of school (doing things you don't want to do, forced interaction with peers, following rules that you don't believe in) that are important. What's implied is that the real world is going to be an unhappy place and that being treated unfairly by people is a part of life. It may be a part of life in school, but it is not a part of our lives. School is as far away from the real world as possible. In school we learn that we cannot control our own destinies and that it is acceptable to let others govern our lives. In the real world we can take responsibility for choosing our own paths and governing our own lives. The real world is what we make it.

Standing alone today demands even more courage and strength than it did in former cultures. From infancy, children have been programmed to perform. Rather than living from their own needs and feelings, they learn to assess situations in order to please others. Without an inner core of certainty grounded in their own musculature, they lack the inner resources to stand alone. Pummelled by mass media and peer group pressures, their identity may be utterly absorbed by collective stereotypes. In the absence of adequate rites of passage, ad-men become the high priests of an initiation into the addictions of consumerism.

A thousand years from now" Leonidas declared, "two thousand, three thousand years hence, men a hundred generations yet unborn may, for their private purposes, make journey to our country. They will come, scholars perhaps, or travelers from beyond the sea, prompted by curiosity regarding the past, or appetite for knowledge of the ancients. They will peer out across our plain and probe among the stone and rubble of our nation. What will they learn about us? Their shovels will unearth neither brilliant palaces nor temples. Their picks will prize forth no everlasting architecture or art. What will remain of the Spartans? Not monuments of marble or bronze, but this......what we do here, today." Out beyond the narrows, the enemy trumpets sounded.

The child psychologist Jean Piaget saw conflict as a critical part of mental development. Through battles with peers and then parents, children learn to adapt to the world and develop strategies for dealing with problems. Those children who seek to avoid conflict at all cost, or those who have overprotective parents, end up handicapped socially and mentally. The same is true of adults: it is through your battles with others that you learn what works, what doesn’t, and how to protect yourself. Instead of shrinking from the idea of having enemies, then, embrace it. Conflict is therapeutic.

To Juan at the Winter Solstice There is one story and one story only That will prove worth your telling, Whether as learned bard or gifted child; To it all lines or lesser gauds belong That startle with their shining Such common stories as they stray into. Is it of trees you tell, their months and virtues, Or strange beasts that beset you, Of birds that croak at you the Triple will? Or of the Zodiac and how slow it turns Below the Boreal Crown, Prison to all true kings that ever reigned? Water to water, ark again to ark, From woman back to woman: So each new victim treads unfalteringly The never altered circuit of his fate, Bringing twelve peers as witness Both to his starry rise and starry fall. Or is it of the Virgin's silver beauty, All fish below the thighs? She in her left hand bears a leafy quince; When, with her right hand she crooks a finger, smiling, How many the King hold back? Royally then he barters life for love. Or of the undying snake from chaos hatched, Whose coils contain the ocean, Into whose chops with naked sword he springs, Then in black water, tangled by the reeds, Battles three days and nights, To be spewed up beside her scalloped shore? Much snow if falling, winds roar hollowly, The owl hoots from the elder, Fear in your heart cries to the loving-cup: Sorrow to sorrow as the sparks fly upward. The log groans and confesses: There is one story and one story only. Dwell on her graciousness, dwell on her smiling, Do not forget what flowers The great boar trampled down in ivy time. Her brow was creamy as the crested wave, Her sea-blue eyes were wild But nothing promised that is not performed.

All women learn from the follies of their youth, just as each young woman could learn a different lesson from the same problem it is up to all the LumberJanes to seek guidance in their counselors, their peers, and their elders.

I was just learning how to read and was reading every sign out loud, practising, and when I saw Cockburn Avenue I said Cock Burn Avenue and then asked what's that? And Elf, she must have been eleven or twelve, said that's from too much sex and my mother said shhhh from the front passenger seat and we didn't dare look over at my dad who clutched the wheel and peered out the windshield like a sniper tracking his target. There were two things he didn't ever want to talk about and they were sex and Russia.

There were many deficits in our swamp education, but Grandpa Sawtooth, to his credit, taught us the names of whole townships that had been forgotten underwater. Black pioneers, Creek Indians, moonshiners, women, 'disappeared' boy soldiers who deserted their army camps. From Grandpa we learned how to peer beneath the sea-glare of the 'official, historical' Florida records we found in books. "Prejudice," as defined by Sawtooth Bigtree, was a kind of prehistoric arithmetic--a "damn, fool math"--in which some people counted and others did not. It meant white names on white headstones in the big cemetery in Cypress Point, and black and brown bodies buried in swamp water. At ten, I couldn't articulate much but I got the message: to be a true historian, you had to mourn amply and well.

Why incentivize laziness? High-school students shouldn't be discouraged from grappling, sometimes unsuccessfully, with challenging books, pictures, and songs. A really, really good work of art doesn't bow down to you; you step up to it, and it rewards you. In the end, kids faced with what Chaucer actually wrote may still dislike him, and I'm fine with that; they will have earned that opinion rather than had it handed to them. For heaven's sake, it's easy for kids to see themselves and their peers in a rap song. When they can start to see themselves in a 14th-century poem, then they're actually learning something.

I already knew what I’d research. I wrote the words ‘Courtly love’ on my notepad in swirly script, then caught Hayden peering at it. ‘Courtly love? Sorry, Aurora, but I think I’ve already got that one in the bag.’ ‘I think you’d better think again, because I’ve already claimed it,’ I replied. ‘You just said you’re not the Mills & Boon type and, technically, courtly love could be considered historical romance.’ He grinned. ‘As you don’t want to pollute your mind with any clichéd topics, you should probably leave that one to me.’ ‘You, discussing romance? Ha!’ Hayden put on a hurt face. ‘I think I might be alright at it. After all, I’ve been doing a lot of observing lately.’ He gave me a significant look. ‘Observing?’ I repeated, curiosity getting the better of me. ‘Well, you keep accusing me of spying on your dates,’ he said, and shrugged. ‘So, technically, I guess I’m learning about romance firsthand. It seems kind of brutal, judging from the goodnight ritual I saw last night.’ My blood wasn’t boiling, but it was pretty warm. Despite that, I was not going to lose my temper. I was determined that this year Hayden Paris wasn’t going to destroy my composure.

When you notice you're thinking judgmental thoughts, pause. Try to catch yourself before you speak, text or do any harm. You can't get those words back.

Learn from peers in other countries.

Without any reinforcement—except that of seeing his peers hunt—he had learned every detail of flushing and retrieving and hadn’t been spooked in the least by the report of the gun.

We shouldn't let our envy of distinguished masters of the arts distract us from the wonder of how each of us gets new ideas. Perhaps we hold on to our superstitions about creativity in order to make our own deficiencies seem more excusable. For when we tell ourselves that masterful abilities are simply unexplainable, we're also comforting ourselves by saying that those superheroes come endowed with all the qualities we don't possess. Our failures are therefore no fault of our own, nor are those heroes' virtues to their credit, either. If it isn't learned, it isn't earned. When we actually meet the heroes whom our culture views as great, we don't find any singular propensities––only combinations of ingredients quite common in themselves. Most of these heroes are intensely motivated, but so are many other people. They're usually very proficient in some field--but in itself we simply call this craftmanship or expertise. They often have enough self-confidence to stand up to the scorn of peers--but in itself, we might just call that stubbornness. They surely think of things in some novel ways, but so does everyone from time to time. And as for what we call "intelligence", my view is that each person who can speak coherently already has the better part of what our heroes have. Then what makes genius appear to stand apart, if we each have most of what it takes? I suspect that genius needs one thing more: in order to accumulate outstanding qualities, one needs unusually effective ways to learn. It's not enough to learn a lot; one also has to manage what one learns. Those masters have, beneath the surface of their mastery, some special knacks of "higher-order" expertise, which help them organize and apply the things they learn. It is those hidden tricks of mental management that produce the systems that create those works of genius. Why do certain people learn so many more and better skills? These all-important differences could begin with early accidents. One child works out clever ways to arrange some blocks in rows and stacks; a second child plays at rearranging how it thinks. Everyone can praise the first child's castles and towers, but no one can see what the second child has done, and one may even get the false impression of a lack of industry. But if the second child persists in seeking better ways to learn, this can lead to silent growth in which some better ways to learn may lead to better ways to learn to learn. Then, later, we'll observe an awesome, qualitative change, with no apparent cause--and give to it some empty name like talent, aptitude, or gift.

Lastly, because you are a superhero, you are really good at putting together a good team. You can look around the room and notice the other superheroes because they are the ones noticing you. The friends you meet over forty are really juicy. They are highly emulsified and full of flavor. Now that you’re starting to have a sense of who you are, you know better what kind of friend you want and need. My peers are crushing it right now and it’s totally amazing and energizing to watch. I have made friends with older women whom I have admired for years who let me learn from their experience. I drink from their life well. They tell me about hormones and vacation spots and neck cream. I am interested in people who swim in the deep end. I want to have conversations about real things with people who have experienced real things. I’m tired of talking about movies and gossiping about friends. Life is crunchy and complicated and all the more delicious.

more than parents. For most of the history of the human race, children have learned culture from the adults. That’s why childhood and adolescence have to last so long in our species. But in the United States today, kids no longer learn culture from the grown-ups. American kids today have their own culture, a culture of disrespect, which they learn from their peers and which they teach to their peers.

To figure out what students were carrying with them from kindergarten into adulthood, Chetty’s team turned to another possible explanation. In fourth and eighth grade, the students were rated by their teachers on some other qualities. Here’s a sample: Proactive: How often did they take initiative to ask questions, volunteer answers, seek information from books, and engage the teacher to learn outside class? Prosocial: How well did they get along and collaborate with peers? Disciplined: How effectively did they pay attention—and resist the impulse to disrupt the class? Determined: How consistently did they take on challenging problems, do more than the assigned work, and persist in the face of obstacles? When students were taught by more experienced kindergarten teachers, their fourth-grade teachers rated them higher on all four of these attributes. So did their eighth-grade teachers. The capacities to be proactive, prosocial, disciplined, and determined stayed with students longer—and ultimately proved more powerful—than early math and reading skills.

We were from different circles; would pass in corridors without so much as a glance, as though this conversation had never taken place. I see it now, among the girls I teach: the oil-and-water separation of types, hard to define and yet instinctively known. It's a power one learns as a girl and never forgets: the ability to place one's peers in their hierarchy with little more than a glance. Impressive, I suppose, in its own, cruel way.

Remember, though, that self-explanations will be most helpful when the learners receive feedback on their work—so you still might follow up peer activities with a large-group session in which you solicit some explanations and can provide a response.

Many things in this period have been hard to bear, or hard to take seriously. My own profession went into a protracted swoon during the Reagan-Bush-Thatcher decade, and shows scant sign of recovering a critical faculty—or indeed any faculty whatever, unless it is one of induced enthusiasm for a plausible consensus President. (We shall see whether it counts as progress for the same parrots to learn a new word.) And my own cohort, the left, shared in the general dispiriting move towards apolitical, atonal postmodernism. Regarding something magnificent, like the long-overdue and still endangered South African revolution (a jagged fit in the supposedly smooth pattern of axiomatic progress), one could see that Ariadne’s thread had a robust reddish tinge, and that potential citizens had not all deconstructed themselves into Xhosa, Zulu, Cape Coloured or ‘Eurocentric’; had in other words resisted the sectarian lesson that the masters of apartheid tried to teach them. Elsewhere, though, it seemed all at once as if competitive solipsism was the signifier of the ‘radical’; a stress on the salience not even of the individual, but of the trait, and from that atomization into the lump of the category. Surely one thing to be learned from the lapsed totalitarian system was the unwholesome relationship between the cult of the masses and the adoration of the supreme personality. Yet introspective voyaging seemed to coexist with dull group-think wherever one peered about among the formerly ‘committed’. Traditionally then, or tediously as some will think, I saw no reason to discard the Orwellian standard in considering modern literature. While a sort of etiolation, tricked out as playfulness, had its way among the non-judgemental, much good work was still done by those who weighed words as if they meant what they said. Some authors, indeed, stood by their works as if they had composed them in solitude and out of conviction. Of these, an encouraging number spoke for the ironic against the literal mind; for the generously interpreted interest of all against the renewal of what Orwell termed the ‘smelly little orthodoxies’—tribe and Faith, monotheist and polytheist, being most conspicuous among these new/old disfigurements. In the course of making a film about the decaffeinated hedonism of modern Los Angeles, I visited the house where Thomas Mann, in another time of torment, wrote Dr Faustus. My German friends were filling the streets of Munich and Berlin to combat the recrudescence of the same old shit as I read: This old, folkish layer survives in us all, and to speak as I really think, I do. not consider religion the most adequate means of keeping it under lock and key. For that, literature alone avails, humanistic science, the ideal of the free and beautiful human being. [italics mine] The path to this concept of enlightenment is not to be found in the pursuit of self-pity, or of self-love. Of course to be merely a political animal is to miss Mann’s point; while, as ever, to be an apolitical animal is to leave fellow-citizens at the mercy of Ideolo’. For the sake of argument, then, one must never let a euphemism or a false consolation pass uncontested. The truth seldom lies, but when it does lie it lies somewhere in between.

Kohlberg’s most influential finding was that the most morally advanced kids (according to his scoring technique) were those who had frequent opportunities for role taking—for putting themselves into another person’s shoes and looking at a problem from that person’s perspective. Egalitarian relationships (such as with peers) invite role taking, but hierarchical relationships (such as with teachers and parents) do not. It’s really hard for a child to see things from the teacher’s point of view, because the child has never been a teacher. Piaget and Kohlberg both thought that parents and other authorities were obstacles to moral development. If you want your kids to learn about the physical world, let them play with cups and water; don’t lecture them about the conservation of volume. And if you want your kids to learn about the social world, let them play with other kids and resolve disputes; don’t lecture them about the Ten Commandments. And, for heaven’s sake, don’t force them to obey God or their teachers or you. That will only freeze them at the conventional level.

DAILY AWARENESS POEM Always we hope someone else has the answer. Some other place will be better, some other time it will all turn out. This is it. No one else has the answer. No other place will be better, and it has already turned out. At the center of your being you have the answer; you know who you are and you know what you want. There is no need to run outside for better seeing. Nor to peer from a window. Rather abide at the center of your being; for the more you leave it the less you learn. Search your heart and see the way to do is to be.

Learn from peers in other countries. Keep up your friendships abroad, or make new friends in other countries. The present difficulties in the United States are an element of a larger trend. And no country is going to find a solution by itself. Make sure you and your family have passports.

Bucket had started his criminal career in Braas, not far from when Allan and his new friends now found themselves. There he had gotten together with some like-minded peers and started the motorcycle club called The Violence. Bucket was the leader; he decided which newsstand was to be robbed of cigarettes next. He was the one who has chosen the name- The Violence, in English, not swedish. And he was the one who unfortunately asked his girlfriend Isabella to sew the name of the motorcycle club onto ten newly stolen leather jackets. Isabella had never really learned to spell properly at school, not in Swedish, and certainly not in English. The result was that Isabella sewed The Violins on the jackets instead. As the rest of the club members had had similar academic success, nobody in the group noticed the mistake. So everyone was very surprised when one day a letter arrived for The Violins in Braas from the people in charge of the concert hall in Vaxjo. The letter suggested that, since the club obviously concerned itself with classical music, they might like to put in am appearance at a concert with the city’s prestigious chamber orchestra, Musica Viate. Bucket felt provoked; somebody was clearly making fun of him. One night he skipped the newsstand, and instead went into Vaxjo to throw a brick through the glass door of the concert hall. This was intended to teach the people responsible lesson in respect. It all went well, except that Bucket’s leather glove happened to follow the stone into the lobby. Since the alarm went off immediately, Bucket felt it would be unwise to try to retrieve the personal item in question. Losing the glove was not good. Bucket had traveled to Vaxjo by motorbike and one hand was extremely cold all the way home to Braas that night. Even worse was the fact that Bucket’s luckless girlfriend had written Bucket’s name and adress inside the glove, in case he lost it." For more quotes from the novel visit my blog: frommybooks.wordpress.com

Why do women find it honorable to dismiss ourselves? Why do we decide that denying our longing is the responsible thing to do? Why do we believe that what will thrill and fulfill us will hurt our people? Why do we mistrust ourselves so completely? Here’s why: Because our culture was built upon and benefits from the control of women. The way power justifies controlling a group is by conditioning the masses to believe that the group cannot be trusted. So the campaign to convince us to mistrust women begins early and comes from everywhere. When we are little girls, our families, teachers, and peers insist that our loud voices, bold opinions, and strong feelings are “too much” and unladylike, so we learn to not trust our personalities. Childhood stories promise us that girls who dare to leave the path or explore get attacked by big bad wolves and pricked by deadly spindles, so we learn to not trust our curiosity. The beauty industry convinces us that our thighs, frizz, skin, fingernails, lips, eyelashes, leg hair, and wrinkles are repulsive and must be covered and manipulated, so we learn to not trust the bodies we live in. Diet culture promises us that controlling our appetite is the key to our worthiness, so we learn to not trust our own hunger. Politicians insist that our judgment about our bodies and futures cannot be trusted, so our own reproductive systems must be controlled by lawmakers we don’t know in places we’ve never been. The legal system proves to us again and again that even our own memories and experiences will not be trusted. If twenty women come forward and say, “He did it,” and he says, “No, I didn’t,” they will believe him while discounting and maligning us every damn time. And religion, sweet Jesus. The lesson of Adam and Eve—the first formative story I was told about God and a woman—was this: When a woman wants more, she defies God, betrays her partner, curses her family, and destroys the world. We weren’t born distrusting and fearing ourselves. That was part of our taming. We were taught to believe that who we are in our natural state is bad and dangerous. They convinced us to be afraid of ourselves. So we do not honor our own bodies, curiosity, hunger, judgment, experience, or ambition. Instead, we lock away our true selves. Women who are best at this disappearing act earn the highest praise: She is so selfless.

CONSENSUS PROPOSED CRITERIA FOR DEVELOPMENTAL TRAUMA DISORDER A. Exposure. The child or adolescent has experienced or witnessed multiple or prolonged adverse events over a period of at least one year beginning in childhood or early adolescence, including: A. 1. Direct experience or witnessing of repeated and severe episodes of interpersonal violence; and A. 2. Significant disruptions of protective caregiving as the result of repeated changes in primary caregiver; repeated separation from the primary caregiver; or exposure to severe and persistent emotional abuse B. Affective and Physiological Dysregulation. The child exhibits impaired normative developmental competencies related to arousal regulation, including at least two of the following: B. 1. Inability to modulate, tolerate, or recover from extreme affect states (e.g., fear, anger, shame), including prolonged and extreme tantrums, or immobilization B. 2. Disturbances in regulation in bodily functions (e.g. persistent disturbances in sleeping, eating, and elimination; over-reactivity or under-reactivity to touch and sounds; disorganization during routine transitions) B. 3. Diminished awareness/dissociation of sensations, emotions and bodily states B. 4. Impaired capacity to describe emotions or bodily states C. Attentional and Behavioral Dysregulation: The child exhibits impaired normative developmental competencies related to sustained attention, learning, or coping with stress, including at least three of the following: C. 1. Preoccupation with threat, or impaired capacity to perceive threat, including misreading of safety and danger cues C. 2. Impaired capacity for self-protection, including extreme risk-taking or thrill-seeking C. 3. Maladaptive attempts at self-soothing (e.g., rocking and other rhythmical movements, compulsive masturbation) C. 4. Habitual (intentional or automatic) or reactive self-harm C. 5. Inability to initiate or sustain goal-directed behavior D. Self and Relational Dysregulation. The child exhibits impaired normative developmental competencies in their sense of personal identity and involvement in relationships, including at least three of the following: D. 1. Intense preoccupation with safety of the caregiver or other loved ones (including precocious caregiving) or difficulty tolerating reunion with them after separation D. 2. Persistent negative sense of self, including self-loathing, helplessness, worthlessness, ineffectiveness, or defectiveness D. 3. Extreme and persistent distrust, defiance or lack of reciprocal behavior in close relationships with adults or peers D. 4. Reactive physical or verbal aggression toward peers, caregivers, or other adults D. 5. Inappropriate (excessive or promiscuous) attempts to get intimate contact (including but not limited to sexual or physical intimacy) or excessive reliance on peers or adults for safety and reassurance D. 6. Impaired capacity to regulate empathic arousal as evidenced by lack of empathy for, or intolerance of, expressions of distress of others, or excessive responsiveness to the distress of others E. Posttraumatic Spectrum Symptoms. The child exhibits at least one symptom in at least two of the three PTSD symptom clusters B, C, & D. F. Duration of disturbance (symptoms in DTD Criteria B, C, D, and E) at least 6 months. G. Functional Impairment. The disturbance causes clinically significant distress or impairment in at least two of the following areas of functioning: Scholastic Familial Peer Group Legal Health Vocational (for youth involved in, seeking or referred for employment, volunteer work or job training)

Although she’d been young—only four—Isabelle thought she’d learned what alone meant, but she’d been wrong. In the three years she’d lived at Le Jardin, she’d at least had a sister, even if Vianne was never around. Isabelle remembered peering down from the upstairs window, watching Vianne and her friends from a distance, praying to be remembered, to be invited, and then when

Most lecture-based courses contribute nothing to real learning. Consequential and retained learning comes from applying knowledge to new situations or problems, research on questions and issues that students consider important, peer interaction, activities, and projects. Experiences, rather than short-term memorization, help students develop the skills and motivation that transforms lives." [p. 7-8]

A good relationship with your inner world reveals what’s meaningful to you and directs your life’s purpose. If you don’t form that trusting relationship with your inner world, you will be dependent on whatever your peers, the culture, or authorities tell you to be. In part II of this book, you will learn more specific ways to get to know your inner world and how to engage in this process more deeply.

By midway through Kindergarten- that's age five or six- they've learned from their peers to knock that stuff off, at least in public: to disconnect from feelings, shun intimacy, and become hierarchical in their behavior. The lifelong physical and mental health consequences of that gender performance are ingrained as early as ten. By fourteen boys become convinced that other guys will "lose respect" for them if they talk about problems.

What was going on here was that like so many people in contemporary society, along the way to gaining their superb educations, and their shiny opportunities, they had absorbed the wrong lessons. They had mastered formulas in calculus and chemistry. They had read great books and learned world history and become fluent in foreign languages. But they had had never formally been taught how to maximize their brains' potential or how to find meaning and happiness. Armed with iPhones and personal digital assistants, they had multitasked their way through a storm of resume-building experiences, often at the expense of actual ones. In their pursuit of high achievement, they had isolated themselves from their peers and loved ones and thus compromised the very support systems they so ardently needed. Repeatedly, I noticed these patterns in my own students, who often broke down under the tyranny of expectations we place on ourselves and those around us.

A 2018 meta-analysis of sixty-four earlier studies involving more than five thousand subjects confirms that students learn more effectively if they are asked to explain a concept to themselves than if it is presented to them in other ways. The included studies compared learning outcomes from prompted self-explanation to those produced by a variety of other instructional approaches, including lectures by instructors, solving problems, studying worked problems, and studying text.17

Fortunately, new platforms and technology have made homeschooling manageable on many fronts. Parents can do everything from accessing first-rate courses online to finding support from other parents in the same situation. The best part is that they can completely tailor the experience to the learning style and interest of their children and give them the attention that they would never get in the classroom. The results are striking. Twenty-five percent of homeschooled children are at least one grade ahead of their traditionally schooled peers. The homeschooled population, as a whole, scores exceptionally higher on academic achievement tests.5 This shift is perhaps the best glimpse of the future of education—mass customization alongside personalized attention. Like banking, it will return to a human-scale model based on relationships and personal needs, and it will be where much of the disruption in the economy and labor market occurs in the next few decades.

You could have chosen any number of career paths, but this one is exciting. It’s creative. It requires deep thinking and rewards you with a sense of being able to do something that most of the people you meet each day can’t imagine being able to do. We may worry about progressing to the next level, making an impact, or gaining respect from our co-workers or our peers in the industry, but if you really stop to think about it, we’ve got it really good. Software development is both challenging and rewarding. It’s creative like an art-form, but (unlike art) it provides concrete,measurable value. Software development is fun! Ultimately, the most important thing I’ve learned over the journey that my career in software development has been is that it’s not what you do for a living or what you have that’s important. It’s how you choose to accept these things. It’s internal. Satisfaction, like our career choices, is something that should be sought after and decided upon with intention.

Ironically, the student who is dyslexic is often working two or three times harder just to keep up with her peers. The double whammy is that the child arrives home exhausted from the day at school and has zero reserves left to do homework or participate in family activities. As a result, the child can be seen as lazy because she comes home and doesn’t want to do anything. If you can provide your child with the accommodations and supports she needs in school, she’ll have the energy to participate like any other kid.

Actually, some of us learn to look for minor errors from an early age. For instance, you might conclude in kindergarten that while having the right answer is good, having it first is even better. And of course, having it first after others are wrong endows you with an even greater glory! Over time you find that finding even the tiniest of errors in others’ facts, thinking, or logic reinforces your supreme place in the spotlight of teacher and peer admiration. So you point out their errors. Being right at the expense of others becomes skillful sport.

Despite modifying his writing to suit the audiences, despite writing plays to draw large crowds, despite using other people's materials and copying plotlines from history, Shakespeare remains the preeminent artist of the English language and his reputation has reached such stratospheric heights as to border on idolatry (or Bardolatry as some people call it). Shakespeare was a product of his time and learned from his peers, but his plays transcend his time as all great works do—his genius is his own. As Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, "Where is the master who could have taught Shakespeare?

Humans never outgrow their need to connect with others, nor should they, but mature, truly individual people are not controlled by these needs. Becoming such a separate being takes the whole of a childhood, which in our times stretches to at least the end of the teenage years and perhaps beyond. We need to release a child from preoccupation with attachment so he can pursue the natural agenda of independent maturation. The secret to doing so is to make sure that the child does not need to work to get his needs met for contact and closeness, to find his bearings, to orient. Children need to have their attachment needs satiated; only then can a shift of energy occur toward individuation, the process of becoming a truly individual person. Only then is the child freed to venture forward, to grow emotionally. Attachment hunger is very much like physical hunger. The need for food never goes away, just as the child's need for attachment never ends. As parents we free the child from the pursuit of physical nurturance. We assume responsibility for feeding the child as well as providing a sense of security about the provision. No matter how much food a child has at the moment, if there is no sense of confidence in the supply, getting food will continue to be the top priority. A child is not free to proceed with his learning and his life until the food issues are taken care of, and we parents do that as a matter of course. Our duty ought to be equally transparent to us in satisfying the child's attachment hunger. In his book On Becoming a Person, the psychotherapist Carl Rogers describes a warm, caring attitude for which he adopted the phrase unconditional positive regard because, he said, “It has no conditions of worth attached to it.” This is a caring, wrote Rogers, “which is not possessive, which demands no personal gratification. It is an atmosphere which simply demonstrates I care; not I care for you if you behave thus and so.” Rogers was summing up the qualities of a good therapist in relation to her/his clients. Substitute parent for therapist and child for client, and we have an eloquent description of what is needed in a parent-child relationship. Unconditional parental love is the indispensable nutrient for the child's healthy emotional growth. The first task is to create space in the child's heart for the certainty that she is precisely the person the parents want and love. She does not have to do anything or be any different to earn that love — in fact, she cannot do anything, since that love cannot be won or lost. It is not conditional. It is just there, regardless of which side the child is acting from — “good” or “bad.” The child can be ornery, unpleasant, whiny, uncooperative, and plain rude, and the parent still lets her feel loved. Ways have to be found to convey the unacceptability of certain behaviors without making the child herself feel unaccepted. She has to be able to bring her unrest, her least likable characteristics to the parent and still receive the parent's absolutely satisfying, security-inducing unconditional love. A child needs to experience enough security, enough unconditional love, for the required shift of energy to occur. It's as if the brain says, “Thank you very much, that is what we needed, and now we can get on with the real task of development, with becoming a separate being. I don't have to keep hunting for fuel; my tank has been refilled, so now I can get on the road again.” Nothing could be more important in the developmental scheme of things.

Lacking older siblings, the oldest or only child identifies primarily with her parents, conforming to their ideals and demands, not the least reason being that she no one with whom to share those demands. Since firstborns try to live up to the expectations of adults- teachers' as well as parents'- rather than that of peers, they are likely to learn more and to bring home better report cards than younger siblings. Thus firstborns pave the way for younger siblings, setting the standards against which they are measured and measure themselves. Middle children tend to be more gregarious and more dependent on the approval of peers than that of adults. For one thing they have the example of the older sibling- who has the credibility of generational sameness- to guide them in their decisions and to teach them the rules of the family road. An older sister who was grounded for a month for coming home late from a date, for instance, is a lesson not lost on her younger sister or brother. At the same time younger children are buffered by birth order from their parents' sole concentration. Hence they are treated with more indulgence and are called upon less to take on responsibilities.

I worry where the mynah birds are hiding. I get a sinking dread about their well-being. I open my eyes and peer into Circe's face. She looks calm, almost beautiful. The darkness in her room is inky and tinged with cobalt blue. The air fizzles like television static. Circe mumbles and draws me towards her. She breathes on me, my mouth no more than three inches away from hers. She smells like Kodomo lion toothpaste and Gardenia bread. I know from this moment that these two things will always remind me of her, with a flinch, an ache. And maybe because of this, over time I will learn to avoid them.

Since I set my foot in France, and knew the traitor lived in Paris, I have watched carefully. I live retired in the house of my noble protector, but I do it from choice. I love retirement and silence, because I can live with my thoughts and recollections of past days. But the Count of Monte Cristo surrounds me with every paternal care, and I am ignorant of nothing which passes in the world. I learn all in the silence of my apartments,—for instance, I see all the newspapers, every periodical, as well as every new piece of music; and by thus watching the course of the life of others, I learned what had transpired this morning in the House of Peers, and what was to take place this evening; then I wrote.

Spiritual disciplines more easily introduced into daily activities ▪   School calendar formulated to dates that work best for our family’s needs ▪   Free time in our days for relaxation, family fun and bonding (instead of time spent driving from school to school) ▪   Strong parent-child bonds and sibling-to-sibling bonds more easily developed ▪   Removal from negative influences and peer pressure during the early impressionable years ▪   Difficult subjects discussed at the appropriate age for each individual child ▪   Difficult subject matter presented from a biblical worldview and within the context of our strong parent-child bond. ▪   Real world learning incorporated into lesson plans and practiced in daily routines ▪   Field trips and “outside the book” learning available as we see fit What We Hope to Give Our Kids: ▪   A close relationship with Christ and a complete picture of what it means to be a Christ-follower ▪   A strong moral character rooted in biblical integrity, perseverance and humility ▪   A direction and purpose for where God has called them in life ▪   A deep relationship and connection with us, their parents ▪   Rich, ever-growing relationships with their siblings ▪   Real-world knowledge in everything from how to cook and do laundry to how to resolve conflicts and work with those that are “different” from them ▪   A comprehensive, well-rounded education in the traditional school subjects

Sophia shielded her eyes with her hand and peered up at the Irishman’s face. His hard eyes wandered form her hand, to her face, to the sketch in her lap. He made a gruff noise in his throat-the sort of noise men make when they’re working up to saying something and don’t quite know how to get it out, but want to keep up the aura of brute masculinity in the midst of their indecision. He was making Sophia nervous. He meant to ask her something, and she was afraid to learn just what. “Yes?” she prompted. “The crew…We had it out between ourselves, Miss Turner. There were a bit o’ scuffling, but I came out on top.” He suddenly crouched before her, transforming his silhouette from tree-trunk to boulder in an instant. His craggy face split in a devilish grin. “I get to be first.

Parents of spirited children who are learning to manage their intensity well are talking about intensity and naming the emotions. They soothe the wailing baby by telling him that they understand it’s frustrating to wait for the bottle to warm. They tell the toddler that they understand she is angry. It’s hard for her to stop playing outside and come into the house. Soon, the children will be able to use these words themselves. It won’t happen overnight, but it will happen. And according to John Gottman, from the Gottman Institute, the research demonstrates that children who receive these types of messages are “emotion coached” and are more effective at soothing themselves and focusing attention. As a result, they do better in school and with peers, experience fewer behavior problems, and demonstrate more positive emotions.

One New Guinea friend surprised me by telling me that what she most likes about life in the U.S. is its “anonymity.” She explained that anonymity means to her the freedom to step away from the social bonds that make life in New Guinea emotionally full, but also confining. To my friend, anonymity includes the freedom to be alone, to walk alone, to have privacy, to express oneself, to debate openly, to hold unconventional views, to be more immune to peer pressures, and not to have one’s every action scrutinized and discussed. It means the freedom to sit in a café on a crowded street and read a newspaper in peace, without being besieged by acquaintances asking for help with their problems. It means the freedom of Americans to advance themselves as individuals, with much less obligation to share their earnings with all their relatives than in New Guinea.

The twentieth-century mystic Thomas Merton wrote, “There can be an intense egoism in following everybody else. People are in a hurry to magnify themselves by imitating what is popular—and too lazy to think of anything better. Hurry ruins saints as well as artists. They want quick success, and they are in such a haste to get it that they cannot take time to be true to themselves. And when the madness is upon them, they argue that their very haste is a species of integrity.”20 Merton elegantly articulates how the pressure of the create-on-demand world can cause us to look sideways at our peers and competitors instead of looking ahead. The process of discovering and refining your voice takes time. Unnecessary Creation grants you the space to discover your unique aptitudes and passions through a process of trial, error, and play that won’t often be afforded to you otherwise. Initiating a project with no parameters and no expectations from others also forces you to stay self-aware while learning to listen to and follow your intuition. Both of these are crucial skills for discovering your voice. It’s completely understandable if you’re thinking, “But wait—I hardly have time to breathe, and now you want me to cram something else into my schedule, just for my own enjoyment?” It’s true that every decision about where we spend our time has an opportunity cost, and dedicating time to Unnecessary Creation seems like a remarkably inefficient choice. In truth, it is inefficient. Consider, however, the opportunity cost of spending your life only on pragmatics. You dedicate your time to pleasing everyone else and delivering on their expectations, but you never get around to discovering your deeper aptitudes and creative capacities. Nothing is worth that.

This kind of parenting was typical in much of Asia—and among Asian immigrant parents living in the United States. Contrary to the stereotype, it did not necessarily make children miserable. In fact, children raised in this way in the United States tended not only to do better in school but to actually enjoy reading and school more than their Caucasian peers enrolled in the same schools. While American parents gave their kids placemats with numbers on them and called it a day, Asian parents taught their children to add before they could read. They did it systematically and directly, say, from six-thirty to seven each night, with a workbook—not organically, the way many American parents preferred their children to learn math. The coach parent did not necessarily have to earn a lot of money or be highly educated. Nor did a coach parent have to be Asian, needless to say. The research showed that European-American parents who acted more like coaches tended to raise smarter kids, too. Parents who read to their children weekly or daily when they were young raised children who scored twenty-five points higher on PISA by the time they were fifteen years old. That was almost a full year of learning. More affluent parents were more likely to read to their children almost everywhere, but even among families within the same socioeconomic group, parents who read to their children tended to raise kids who scored fourteen points higher on PISA. By contrast, parents who regularly played with alphabet toys with their young children saw no such benefit. And at least one high-impact form of parental involvement did not actually involve kids or schools at all: If parents simply read for pleasure at home on their own, their children were more likely to enjoy reading, too. That pattern held fast across very different countries and different levels of family income. Kids could see what parents valued, and it mattered more than what parents said. Only four in ten parents in the PISA survey regularly read at home for enjoyment. What if they knew that this one change—which they might even vaguely enjoy—would help their children become better readers themselves? What if schools, instead of pleading with parents to donate time, muffins, or money, loaned books and magazines to parents and urged them to read on their own and talk about what they’d read in order to help their kids? The evidence suggested that every parent could do things that helped create strong readers and thinkers, once they knew what those things were. Parents could go too far with the drills and practice in academics, just as they could in sports, and many, many Korean parents did go too far. The opposite was also true. A coddled, moon bounce of a childhood could lead to young adults who had never experienced failure or developed self-control or endurance—experiences that mattered as much or more than academic skills. The evidence suggested that many American parents treated their children as if they were delicate flowers. In one Columbia University study, 85 percent of American parents surveyed said that they thought they needed to praise their children’s intelligence in order to assure them they were smart. However, the actual research on praise suggested the opposite was true. Praise that was vague, insincere, or excessive tended to discourage kids from working hard and trying new things. It had a toxic effect, the opposite of what parents intended. To work, praise had to be specific, authentic, and rare. Yet the same culture of self-esteem boosting extended to many U.S. classrooms.

If I know the classical psychological theories well enough to pass my comps and can reformulate them in ways that can impress peer reviewers from the most prestigious journals, but have not the practical wisdom of love, I am only an intrusive muzak soothing the ego while missing the heart. And if I can read tea leaves, throw the bones and manipulate spirits so as to understand the mysteries of the universe and forecast the future with scientific precision, and if I have achieved a renaissance education in both the exoteric and esoteric sciences that would rival Faust and know the equation to convert the mass of mountains into psychic energy and back again, but have not love, I do not even exist. If I gain freedom from all my attachments and maintain constant alpha waves in my consciousness, showing perfect equanimity in all situations, ignoring every personal need and compulsively martyring myself for the glory of God, but this is not done freely from love, I have accomplished nothing. Love is great-hearted and unselfish; love is not emotionally reactive, it does not seek to draw attention to itself. Love does not accuse or compare. It does not seek to serve itself at the expense of others. Love does not take pleasure in other peeople's sufferings, but rejoices when the truth is revealed and meaningful life restored. Love always bears reality as it is, extending mercy to all people in every situation. Love is faithful in all things, is constantly hopeful and meets whatever comes with immovable forbearance and steadfastness. Love never quits. By contrast, prophecies give way before the infinite possibilities of eternity, and inspiration is as fleeting as a breath. To the writing and reading of many books and learning more and more, there is no end, and yet whatever is known is never sufficient to live the Truth who is revealed to the world only in loving relationship. When I was a beginning therapist, I thought a lot and anxiously tried to fix people in order to lower my own anxiety. As I matured, my mind quieted and I stopped being so concerned with labels and techniques and began to realize that, in the mystery of attentive presence to others, the guest becomes the host in the presence of God. In the hospitality of genuine encounter with the other, we come face to face with the mystery of God who is between us as both the One offered One who offers. When all the theorizing and methodological squabbles have been addressed, there will still only be three things that are essential to pastoral counseling: faith, hope, and love. When we abide in these, we each remain as well, without comprehending how, for the source and raison d'etre of all is Love.

In school, there is always a bully that gained the class's attention by using fear and abuse. At the time, his tactics won by getting the class's attention - and those who followed him either saw his way was working or were fearful of his retaliation, so went along with it. Eventually, his way faded because as his peers grew up, they found fear was only a state of mind that could be replaced by something more constructive, that the system would punish his behavior, or that others did not like his way and together as a group banded together to not be bothered. It is the short road of the bully that never wins in the end. For many, what we learn in school continues on into adulthood. The bully may still haunt us from time to time when we feel vulnerable, but the long road remembers the system is our collective rights, the banding together are our individual communities, and replacing fear with constructive thought is maturity.

He had discovered a new thing, of hurting people he liked. It gave him and extraordinary sensation to see Elsa cry after she had been smiling, and to make that he had caused her tears. He was aware of power, strange and exciting. In a way it was like the desire to make love. The two longings were very close together. To say something butter and cruel, to watch the smile fade from Elsa's lips and the shadows come into her eyes, to taunt her until she put her hands over her face, it made his heart beat and his blood race the same as when he held her and loved her. To change swiftly too was good. To follow the stinging blow with a caress, to kiss the tears he had summoned, until Elsa did not know where she was, and would peer into his eyes to learn the truth. [...] Not that her cared how she felt, whether she was humble or proud, but he liked to see her crawl. It was a definire pleasure; and the fact that he was fond of her added to his pleasure.

Predominantly inattentive type Perhaps the majority of girls with AD/HD fall into the primarily inattentive type, and are most likely to go undiagnosed. Generally, these girls are more compliant than disruptive and get by rather passively in the academic arena. They may be hypoactive or lethargic. In the extreme, they may even seem narcoleptic. Because they do not appear to stray from cultural norms, they will rarely come to the attention of their teacher. Early report cards of an inattentive type girl may read, "She is such a sweet little girl. She must try harder to speak up in class." She is often a shy daydreamer who avoids drawing attention to herself. Fearful of expressing herself in class, she is concerned that she will be ridiculed or wrong. She often feels awkward, and may nervously twirl the ends of her hair. Her preferred seating position is in the rear of the classroom. She may appear to be listening to the teacher, even when she has drifted off and her thoughts are far away. These girls avoid challenges, are easily discouraged, and tend to give up quickly. Their lack of confidence in themselves is reflected in their failure excuses, such as, "I can't," "It's too hard," or "I used to know it, but I can't remember it now." The inattentive girl is likely to be disorganized, forgetful, and often anxious about her school work. Teachers may be frustrated because she does not finish class work on time. She may mistakenly be judged as less bright than she really is. These girls are reluctant to volunteer for a project orjoin a group of peers at recess. They worry that other children will humiliate them if they make a mistake, which they are sure they will. Indeed, one of their greatest fears is being called on in class; they may stare down at their book to avoid eye contact with the teacher, hoping that the teacher will forget they exist for the moment. Because interactions with the teacher are often anxiety-ridden, these girls may have trouble expressing themselves, even when they know the answer. Sometimes, it is concluded that they have problems with central auditory processing or expressive language skills. More likely, their anxiety interferes with their concentration, temporarily reducing their capacity to both speak and listen. Generally, these girls don't experience this problem around family or close friends, where they are more relaxed. Inattentive type girls with a high IQ and no learning disabilities will be diagnosed with AD/HD very late, if ever. These bright girls have the ability and the resources to compensate for their cognitive challenges, but it's a mixed blessing. Their psychological distress is internalized, making it less obvious, but no less damaging. Some of these girls will go unnoticed until college or beyond, and many are never diagnosed they are left to live with chronic stress that may develop into anxiety and depression as their exhausting, hidden efforts to succeed take their toll. Issues

Imagine the daughter of a narcissistic father as an example. She grows up chronically violated and abused at home, perhaps bullied by her peers as well. Her burgeoning low self-esteem, disruptions in identity and problems with emotional regulation causes her to live a life filled with terror. This is a terror that is stored in the body and literally shapes her brain. It is also what makes her brain extra vulnerable and susceptible to the effects of trauma in adulthood.                              Being verbally, emotionally and sometimes even physically beaten down, the child of a narcissistic parent learns that there is no safe place for her in the world. The symptoms of trauma emerge: disassociation to survive and escape her day-to-day existence, addictions that cause her to self-sabotage, maybe even self-harm to cope with the pain of being unloved, neglected and mistreated. Her pervasive sense of worthlessness and toxic shame, as well as subconscious programming, then cause her to become more easily attached to emotional predators in adulthood. In her repeated search for a rescuer, she instead finds those who chronically diminish her just like her earliest abusers. Of course, her resilience, adept skill set in adapting to chaotic environments and ability to “bounce back” was also birthed in early childhood. This is also seen as an “asset” to toxic partners because it means she will be more likely to stay within the abuse cycle in order to attempt to make things “work.” She then suffers not just from early childhood trauma, but from multiple re-victimizations in adulthood until, with the right support, she addresses her core wounds and begins to break the cycle step by step. Before she can break the cycle, she must first give herself the space and time to recover. A break from establishing new relationships is often essential during this time; No Contact (or Low Contact from her abusers in more complicated situations such as co-parenting) is also vital to the healing journey, to prevent compounding any existing traumas.

4. Your Ability to Self-Protect The ability to sense danger in your surroundings or untrustworthiness in other people depends on how well you listen to your gut feelings. To detect threat, you have to be aware of how situations and interactions make you feel. The primal instincts of the inner world are crucial to your safety. 5. Your Awareness of Your Life’s Purpose A good relationship with your inner world reveals what’s meaningful to you and directs your life’s purpose. If you don’t form that trusting relationship with your inner world, you will be dependent on whatever your peers, the culture, or authorities tell you to be. In part II of this book, you will learn more specific ways to get to know your inner world and how to engage in this process more deeply. EIPs’ Attitudes Toward Your Inner World Now let’s look at how EIPs view your inner world. Understanding EI parents’ attitudes toward your inner experiences will help you trust yourself instead of deferring to them. They See You as Still Needing Their Direction EI parents see their adult children as

At the heart of every child is the need for play. Play is important for creativity, learning, and interacting with peers. But it’s also the way children communicate. If we want to show our children we love them, we need to play with them. Play is the magical portal to connection. Playing with our children isn’t about enjoying the activity as much as it is about connecting with them. Much as with love languages or personality types, understanding how our children play is critical. Author and psychologist Lawrence J. Cohen, the author of Playful Parenting, wrote, “Play is important, not just because children do so much of it, but because there are layers and layers of meaning to even the most casual play.” He pointed out the various layers of a father and son playing catch—from developing hand-eye coordination and the joy of learning a new skill to the bonding time the two are sharing. “The rhythm of the ball flying back and forth is a bridge,” Cohen wrote, “reestablishing a deep connection between adult and child; and comments like ‘good try’ and ‘nice catch’ build confidence and trust.

I encounter forms of this attitude every day. The producers who work at the Ostankino channels might all be liberals in their private lives, holiday in Tuscany, and be completely European in their tastes. When I ask how they marry their professional and personal lives, they look at me as if I were a fool and answer: “Over the last twenty years we’ve lived through a communism we never believed in, democracy and defaults and mafia state and oligarchy, and we’ve realized they are illusions, that everything is PR.” “Everything is PR” has become the favorite phrase of the new Russia; my Moscow peers are filled with a sense that they are both cynical and enlightened. When I ask them about Soviet-era dissidents, like my parents, who fought against communism, they dismiss them as naïve dreamers and my own Western attachment to such vague notions as “human rights” and “freedom” as a blunder. “Can’t you see your own governments are just as bad as ours?” they ask me. I try to protest—but they just smile and pity me. To believe in something and stand by it in this world is derided, the ability to be a shape-shifter celebrated. Vladimir Nabokov once described a species of butterfly that at an early stage in its development had to learn how to change colors to hide from predators. The butterfly’s predators had long died off, but still it changed its colors from the sheer pleasure of transformation. Something similar has happened to the Russian elites: during the Soviet period they learned to dissimulate in order to survive; now there is no need to constantly change their colors, but they continue to do so out of a sort of dark joy, conformism raised to the level of aesthetic act. Surkov himself is the ultimate expression of this psychology. As I watch him give his speech to the students and journalists, he seems to change and transform like mercury, from cherubic smile to demonic stare, from a woolly liberal preaching “modernization” to a finger-wagging nationalist, spitting out willfully contradictory ideas: “managed democracy,” “conservative modernization.” Then he steps back, smiling, and says: “We need a new political party, and we should help it happen, no need to wait and make it form by itself.” And when you look closely at the party men in the political reality show Surkov directs, the spitting nationalists and beetroot-faced communists, you notice how they all seem to perform their roles with a little ironic twinkle.

connection. “So, the short skirts…they’d be to help them run more easily?” he suggested. Halt nodded in his turn. “It would certainly be a more sensible form of dress than long skirts, if you wanted to do a lot of running.” He shot a quick look at Horace to see if his gentle teasing was not being turned back on himself—to see if, in fact, the boy realized Halt was talking nonsense and was simply leading him on. Horace’s face, however, was open and believing. “I suppose so,” Horace replied finally, then added, in a softer voice, “They certainly look a lot better that way too.” Again, Halt shot him a look. But Horace seemed to be content with the answer. For a moment, Halt regretted his deception, feeling a slight pang of guilt. Horace was, after all, totally trusting and it was so easy to tease him like this. Then the Ranger looked at those clear blue eyes and the contented, honest face of the warrior apprentice and any sense of regret was stifled. Horace had plenty of time to learn about the seamier side of life, he thought. He could retain his innocence for a little while longer. They left La Rivage by its northern gate and headed into the farm country surrounding it. Horace’s curiosity remained as strong as ever, and he peered from side to side as the road took them past fields and crops

When we arrived in this large room, Rockwell put a fluorescent marker down where we entered so we could find the way back out again. When Hurd failed to do that, her teacher corrected her. “In a cave,” she told Hurd, “always, always look back. Every few minutes, turn around. Nothing looks the same coming out as it did going in, so you have to memorize the backsides of every boulder, the shape of the hole you’ve just come through, see the reverse of every angle of slope.”2 Since my lamp is off, I think about how many hours I have spent in therapy instead, doing more or less the same thing: walking around the boulders of my childhood to see how they look from every angle, peering down into the holes where I spent months in the dark, wondering why the handholds I can see from the top were invisible from the bottom. The difference between the therapy and the cave is that the therapy wants me to look back so I can find another way out, not so I can return by the same way I came. Maybe that makes the cave more like a labyrinth. As long as you stay on the path, you cannot get lost—in time, maybe, but not in space. The path is circular. The way out is the way in. The path, like the cave, never changes. It is literally set in stone. Only the walker changes, not by looking back but by moving ahead, trusting the path to teach her what she needs to know.

I remember a story by a flight instructor I knew well. He told me about the best student he ever had, and a powerful lesson he learned about what it meant to teach her. The student excelled in ground school. She aced the simulations, aced her courses. In the skies, she showed natural skill, improvising even in rapidly changing weather conditions. One day in the air, the instructor saw her doing something naïve. He was having a bad day and he yelled at her. He pushed her hands away from the airplane’s equivalent of a steering wheel. He pointed angrily at an instrument. Dumbfounded, the student tried to correct herself, but in the stress of the moment, she made more errors, said she couldn’t think, and then buried her head in her hands and started to cry. The teacher took control of the aircraft and landed it. For a long time, the student would not get back into the same cockpit. The incident hurt not only the teacher’s professional relationship with the student but the student’s ability to learn. It also crushed the instructor. If he had been able to predict how the student would react to his threatening behavior, he never would have acted that way. Relationships matter when attempting to teach human beings—whether you’re a parent, teacher, boss, or peer. Here we are talking about the highly intellectual venture of flying an aircraft. But its success is fully dependent upon feelings.

Many college courses in the humanities focus on discussion over lecture. Students read course material ahead of time and have a discussion in class. Harvard Business School took this to the extreme by pioneering case-based learning more than a hundred years ago, and many business schools have since followed suit. There are no lectures there, not even in subjects like accounting or finance. Students read a ten-to twenty-page description of a particular company’s or person’s circumstance—called a “case”—on their own time and then participate in a discussion/debate in class (where attendance is mandatory). Professors are there to facilitate the discussion, not to dominate it. I can tell you from personal experience that despite there being eighty students in the room, you cannot zone out. Your brain is actively processing what your peers are saying while you try to come to your own conclusions so that you can contribute during the entire eighty-minute session. The time goes by faster than you want it to; students are more engaged than in any traditional classroom I’ve ever been a part of. Most importantly, the ideas that you and your peers collectively generate stick. To this day, comments and ways of thinking about a problem that my peers shared with me (or that I shared during class) nearly ten years ago come back to me as I try to help manage the growth and opportunities surrounding the Khan Academy.

The aim is to get the students actively involved in seeking this evidence: their role is not simply to do tasks as decided by teachers, but to actively manage and understand their learning gains. This includes evaluating their own progress, being more responsible for their learning, and being involved with peers in learning together about gains in learning. If students are to become active evaluators of their own progress, teachers must provide the students with appropriate feedback so that they can engage in this task. Van den Bergh, Ros, and Beijaard (2010: 3) describe the task thus: Fostering active learning seems a very challenging and demanding task for teachers, requiring knowledge of students’ learning processes, skills in providing guidance and feedback and classroom management. The need is to engage students in this same challenging and demanding task. The suggestion in this chapter is to start lessons with helping students to understand the intention of the lesson and showing them what success might look like at the end. Many times, teachers look for the interesting beginning to a lesson – for the hook, and the motivating question. Dan Willingham (2009) has provided an excellent argument for not thinking in this way. He advocates starting with what the student is likely to think about. Interesting hooks, demonstrations, fascinating facts, and likewise may seem to be captivating (and often are), but he suggests that there are likely to be other parts of the lesson that are more suitable for the attention-grabber. The place for the attention-grabber is more likely to be at the end of the lesson, because this will help to consolidate what has been learnt. Most importantly,Willingham asks teachers to think long and hard about how to make the connection between the attention-grabber and the point that it is designed to make; preferably, that point will be the main idea from the lesson. Having too many open-ended activities (discovery learning, searching the Internet, preparing PowerPoint presentations) can make it difficult to direct students’ attention to that which matters – because they often love to explore the details, the irrelevancies, and the unimportant while doing these activities. One of Willingham's principles is that any teaching method is most useful when there is plenty of prompt feedback about whether the student is thinking about a problem in the right way. Similarly, he promotes the notion that assignments should be primarily about what the teacher wants the students to think about (not about demonstrating ‘what they know’). Students are very good at ignoring what you say (‘I value connections, deep ideas, your thoughts’) and seeing what you value (corrections to the grammar, comments on referencing, correctness or absence of facts). Thus teachers must develop a scoring rubric for any assignment before they complete the question or prompts, and show the rubric to the students so that they know what the teacher values. Such formative feedback can reinforce the ‘big ideas’ and the important understandings, and help to make the investment of

Cribbage!” I declared, pulling out the board, a deck of cards, and pen and paper, “Ben and I are going to teach you. Then we can all play.” “What makes you think I don’t know how to play cribbage?” Sage asked. “You do?” Ben sounded surprised. “I happen to be an excellent cribbage player,” Sage said. “Really…because I’m what one might call a cribbage master,” Ben said. “I bet I’ve been playing longer than you,” Sage said, and I cast my eyes his way. Was he trying to tell u something? “I highly doubt that,” Ben said, “but I believe we’ll see the proof when I double-skunk you.” “Clearly you’re both forgetting it’s a three-person game, and I’m ready to destroy you both,” I said. “Deal ‘em,” Ben said. Being a horse person, my mother was absolutely convinced she could achieve world peace if she just got the right parties together on a long enough ride. I didn’t know about that, but apparently cribbage might do the trick. I didn’t know about that, but apparently cribbage might do the trick. The three of us were pretty evenly matched, and Ben was impressed enough to ask sage how he learned to play. Turned out Sage’s parents were historians, he said, so they first taught him the precursor to cribbage, a game called noddy. “Really?” Ben asked, his professional curiosity piqued. “Your parents were historians? Did they teach?” “European history. In Europe,” Sage said. “Small college. They taught me a lot.” Yep, there was the metaphorical gauntlet. I saw the gleam in Ben’s eye as he picked it up. “Interesting,” he said. “So you’d say you know a lot about European history?” “I would say that. In fact, I believe I just did.” Ben grinned, and immediately set out to expose Sage as an intellectual fraud. He’d ask questions to trip Sage up and test his story, things I had no idea were tests until I heard Sage’s reactions. “So which of Shakespeare’s plays do you think was better served by the Globe Theatre: Henry VIII or Troilus and Cressida?” Ben asked, cracking his knuckles. “Troilus and Cressida was never performed at the Globe,” Sage replied. “As for Henry VIII, the original Globe caught fire during the show and burned to the ground, so I’d say that’s the show that really brought down the house…wouldn’t you?” “Nice…very nice.” Ben nodded. “Well done.” It was the cerebral version of bamboo under the fingernails, and while they both tried to seem casual about their conversation, they were soon leaning forward with sweat beading on their brows. It was fascinating…and weird. After several hours of this, Ben had to admit that he’d found a historical peer, and he gleefully involved Sage in all kinds of debates about the minutiae of eras I knew nothing about…except that I had the nagging sense I might have been there for some of them. For his part, Sage seemed to relish talking about the past with someone who could truly appreciate the detailed anecdotes and stories he’d discovered in his “research.” By the time we started our descent to Miami, the two were leaning over my seat to chat and laugh together. On the very full flight from Miami to New York, Ben and Sage took the two seats next to each other and gabbed and giggled like middle-school girls. I sat across from them stuck next to an older woman wearing far too much perfume.

How I Got That Name Marilyn Chin an essay on assimilation I am Marilyn Mei Ling Chin Oh, how I love the resoluteness of that first person singular followed by that stalwart indicative of “be," without the uncertain i-n-g of “becoming.” Of course, the name had been changed somewhere between Angel Island and the sea, when my father the paperson in the late 1950s obsessed with a bombshell blond transliterated “Mei Ling” to “Marilyn.” And nobody dared question his initial impulse—for we all know lust drove men to greatness, not goodness, not decency. And there I was, a wayward pink baby, named after some tragic white woman swollen with gin and Nembutal. My mother couldn’t pronounce the “r.” She dubbed me “Numba one female offshoot” for brevity: henceforth, she will live and die in sublime ignorance, flanked by loving children and the “kitchen deity.” While my father dithers, a tomcat in Hong Kong trash— a gambler, a petty thug, who bought a chain of chopsuey joints in Piss River, Oregon, with bootlegged Gucci cash. Nobody dared question his integrity given his nice, devout daughters and his bright, industrious sons as if filial piety were the standard by which all earthly men are measured. * Oh, how trustworthy our daughters, how thrifty our sons! How we’ve managed to fool the experts in education, statistic and demography— We’re not very creative but not adverse to rote-learning. Indeed, they can use us. But the “Model Minority” is a tease. We know you are watching now, so we refuse to give you any! Oh, bamboo shoots, bamboo shoots! The further west we go, we’ll hit east; the deeper down we dig, we’ll find China. History has turned its stomach on a black polluted beach— where life doesn’t hinge on that red, red wheelbarrow, but whether or not our new lover in the final episode of “Santa Barbara” will lean over a scented candle and call us a “bitch.” Oh God, where have we gone wrong? We have no inner resources! * Then, one redolent spring morning the Great Patriarch Chin peered down from his kiosk in heaven and saw that his descendants were ugly. One had a squarish head and a nose without a bridge Another’s profile—long and knobbed as a gourd. A third, the sad, brutish one may never, never marry. And I, his least favorite— “not quite boiled, not quite cooked," a plump pomfret simmering in my juices— too listless to fight for my people’s destiny. “To kill without resistance is not slaughter” says the proverb. So, I wait for imminent death. The fact that this death is also metaphorical is testament to my lethargy. * So here lies Marilyn Mei Ling Chin, married once, twice to so-and-so, a Lee and a Wong, granddaughter of Jack “the patriarch” and the brooding Suilin Fong, daughter of the virtuous Yuet Kuen Wong and G.G. Chin the infamous, sister of a dozen, cousin of a million, survived by everbody and forgotten by all. She was neither black nor white, neither cherished nor vanquished, just another squatter in her own bamboo grove minding her poetry— when one day heaven was unmerciful, and a chasm opened where she stood. Like the jowls of a mighty white whale, or the jaws of a metaphysical Godzilla, it swallowed her whole. She did not flinch nor writhe, nor fret about the afterlife, but stayed! Solid as wood, happily a little gnawed, tattered, mesmerized by all that was lavished upon her and all that was taken away!

Creating “Correct” Children in the Classroom One of the most popular discipline programs in American schools is called Assertive Discipline. It teaches teachers to inflict the old “obey or suffer” method of control on students. Here you disguise the threat of punishment by calling it a choice the child is making. As in, “You have a choice, you can either finish your homework or miss the outing this weekend.” Then when the child chooses to try to protect his dignity against this form of terrorism, by refusing to do his homework, you tell him he has chosen his logical, natural consequence of being excluded from the outing. Putting it this way helps the parent or teacher mitigate against the bad feelings and guilt that would otherwise arise to tell the adult that they are operating outside the principles of compassionate relating. This insidious method is even worse than outand-out punishing, where you can at least rebel against your punisher. The use of this mind game teaches the child the false, crazy-making belief that they wanted something bad or painful to happen to them. These programs also have the stated intention of getting the child to be angry with himself for making a poor choice. In this smoke and mirrors game, the children are “causing” everything to happen and the teachers are the puppets of the children’s choices. The only ones who are not taking responsibility for their actions are the adults. Another popular coercive strategy is to use “peer pressure” to create compliance. For instance, a teacher tells her class that if anyone misbehaves then they all won’t get their pizza party. What a great way to turn children against each other. All this is done to help (translation: compel) children to behave themselves. But of course they are not behaving themselves: they are being “behaved” by the adults. Well-meaning teachers and parents try to teach children to be motivated (translation: do boring or aversive stuff without questioning why), responsible (translation: thoughtless conformity to the house rules) people. When surveys are conducted in which fourth-graders are asked what being good means, over 90% answer “being quiet.” And when teachers are asked what happens in a successful classroom, the answer is, “the teacher is able to keep the students on task” (translation: in line, doing what they are told). Consulting firms measuring teacher competence consider this a major criterion of teacher effectiveness. In other words if the students are quietly doing what they were told the teacher is evaluated as good. However my understanding of ‘real learning’ with twenty to forty children is that it is quite naturally a bit noisy and messy. Otherwise children are just playing a nice game of school, based on indoctrination and little integrated retained education. Both punishments and rewards foster a preoccupation with a narrow egocentric self-interest that undermines good values. All little Johnny is thinking about is “How much will you give me if I do X? How can I avoid getting punished if I do Y? What do they want me to do and what happens to me if I don’t do it?” Instead we could teach him to ask, “What kind of person do I want to be and what kind of community do I want to help make?” And Mom is thinking “You didn’t do what I wanted, so now I’m going to make something unpleasant happen to you, for your own good to help you fit into our (dominance/submission based) society.” This contributes to a culture of coercion and prevents a community of compassion. And as we are learning on the global level with our war on terrorism, as you use your energy and resources to punish people you run out of energy and resources to protect people. And even if children look well-behaved, they are not behaving themselves They are being behaved by controlling parents and teachers.

also been a white-collar worker in my career. In my experience, there are two types of people who do this type of work: Achievers and Hiders. Achievers are the people who want to perform at a high level. They are ambitious, motivated and energetic. They are full of ideas and want to move up the corporate ladder, which are great attributes to have. But there is a downside for the Achiever. The moment a person decides to be an Achiever, they become a target. Their boss sees them as threatening to their job, so they start to hold them down or take shots at their reputation. Their peers see them as a person who will either embarrass them or keep them from getting a promotion, so they start to do what they can to undermine their accomplishments. So, to remain an Achiever and survive in this hostile environment, a person must become good at one thing that has nothing to do with their productivity—and that’s politics. They must learn how to navigate the political world by diminishing their enemies and strengthening their relationship with powerful people. In fact, some of the most successful people in the corporate world aren’t Achievers at all. They are pure politicians. So if you decide to work in the corporate environment and to be an Achiever, you must accept the fact that you must become a good politician also. Now, let’s talk about the Hiders. These are the people who HATE politics, but still need a job. They learn not to be the ambitious Achiever. They don’t stand out. They don’t speak up in meetings. They don’t bring new ideas. They HIDE. They keep their heads down and do as they’re told. They do just enough so that they aren’t talked about negatively. They survive. And this has worked for decades. But in the New Economy, it’s becoming much more difficult to hide. And people are running out of time. So, back to our Perfect Career List: Can a white-collar job deliver on the list? Again, the clear answer is no—certainly not in very many areas. Sales

Because I like you,” she blurted out, and realized that for once it was true. It was a rather unsettling revelation. “You’re . . . , well, you.” Not just a body on a balcony, not just a pair of lips to blot out boredom, but Alex, Alex who argued with her and watched out for her and woke absurdly early in the mornings to ride with her every day, whether he had the time to do so or not. Perhaps this wasn’t such a good idea after all. Alex didn’t seem to think so, either. His dark eyes were intent on her face, watching her in that way of his, as though he were learning her from the inside out, peering into every little dark nook and cranny of her soul. There were plenty of those to choose from. Dark nooks were one of Penelope’s specialties. He might have wanted her last night, in the still of the bungalow, with the lingering scent of moonflowers on the breeze, but not in daylight, when he saw her again for what she was, brash, impetuous, with her face gone unfashionably tan and curry stains on her habit. He was undoubtedly mustering the words with which to turn her down politely. Penelope suddenly, very desperately, didn’t want to hear them. She jumped to her feet, leaning over to gather up the empty tins. “Or we can just ride on,” she said brusquely, not looking at him. A lean brown hand closed around her wrist. Penelope regarded it blankly, as though not quite sure what it was doing there, alien against the white lace frill of her sleeve. Slowly, her breath catching somewhere in the vicinity of her corset, she lifted her eyes to Alex’s face. What she saw banished any doubts she might have had. In his eyes blazed a reflection of the desire she felt in her own. Nothing more needed to be said. Without a word, he drew her down beside him on the blanket, the blanket that had seemed so prosaic only moments before, but now presented the prospect of a host of exotic and illicit possibilities. Penelope plunked down hard on her knees, catching at his shoulders for balance as she tilted her head down to kiss him, enjoying the unusual advantage of height. “Are you sure?” he murmured, his teeth tugging at her earlobe, even as his hands moved intimately up and down her torso. In answer, Penelope pushed hard at his shoulders, sending him toppling back onto the blanket, narrowly missing sheer disaster with a fork. She followed him down, bracing herself on her elbows and scattering kisses across his upturned face as he busied himself with the buttons on her riding jacket. The fabric parted, and his hands slid beneath, burning through the linen of her blouse, drawing her down on top of him with drugging kisses that made the noon sky dim to dusk and the rustling of the tree leaves blur in her ears. Penelope wriggled her hands beneath his shirt, feeling the hard edges of muscle beneath, delighting in the way they contracted with each labored breath, with a flick of her tongue against the hollow of his throat and an exploratory expedition taken by her lips along his collarbone.

Cultivate Spiritual Allies One of the most significant things you learn from the life of Paul is that the self-made man is incomplete. Paul believed that mature manhood was forged in the body of Christ In his letters, Paul talks often about the people he was serving and being served by in the body of Christ. As you live in the body of Christ, you should be intentional about cultivating at least three key relationships based on Paul’s example: 1. Paul: You need a mentor, a coach, or shepherd who is further along in their walk with Christ. You need the accountability and counsel of more mature men. Unfortunately, this is often easier said than done. Typically there’s more demand than supply for mentors. Some churches try to meet this need with complicated mentoring matchmaker type programs. Typically, you can find a mentor more naturally than that. Think of who is already in your life. Is there an elder, a pastor, a professor, a businessman, or other person that you already respect? Seek that man out; let him know that you respect the way he lives his life and ask if you can take him out for coffee or lunch to ask him some questions — and then see where it goes from there. Don’t be surprised if that one person isn’t able to mentor you in everything. While he may be a great spiritual mentor, you may need other mentors in the areas of marriage, fathering, money, and so on. 2. Timothy: You need to be a Paul to another man (or men). God calls us to make disciples (Matthew 28:19). The books of 1st and 2nd Timothy demonstrate some of the investment that Paul made in Timothy as a younger brother (and rising leader) in the faith. It’s your job to reproduce in others the things you learn from the Paul(s) in your life. This kind of relationship should also be organic. You don’t need to approach strangers to offer your mentoring services. As you lead and serve in your spheres of influence, you’ll attract other men who want your input. Don’t be surprised if they don’t quite know what to ask of you. One practical way to engage with someone who asks for your input is to suggest that they come up with three questions that you can answer over coffee or lunch and then see where it goes from there. 3. Barnabas: You need a go-to friend who is a peer. One of Paul’s most faithful ministry companions was named Barnabas. Acts 4:36 tells us that Barnabas’s name means “son of encouragement.” Have you found an encouraging companion in your walk with Christ? Don’t take that friendship for granted. Enjoy the blessing of friendship, of someone to walk through life with. Make it a priority to build each other up in the faith. Be a source of sharpening iron (Proverbs 27:17) and friendly wounds (Proverbs 27:6) for each other. But also look for ways to work together to be disruptive — in the good sense of that word. Challenge each other in breaking the patterns of the world around you in order to interrupt it with the Gospel. Consider all the risky situations Paul and Barnabas got themselves into and ask each other, “what are we doing that’s risky for the Gospel?

The Old Issue October 9, 1899 “HERE is nothing new nor aught unproven,” say the Trumpets, “Many feet have worn it and the road is old indeed. “It is the King—the King we schooled aforetime !” (Trumpets in the marshes—in the eyot at Runnymede!) “Here is neither haste, nor hate, nor anger,” peal the Trumpets, “Pardon for his penitence or pity for his fall. “It is the King!”—inexorable Trumpets— (Trumpets round the scaffold at the dawning by Whitehall!) “He hath veiled the Crown and hid the Sceptre,” warn the Trumpets, “He hath changed the fashion of the lies that cloak his will. “Hard die the Kings—ah hard—dooms hard!” declare the Trumpets, Trumpets at the gang-plank where the brawling troop-decks fill! Ancient and Unteachable, abide—abide the Trumpets! Once again the Trumpets, for the shuddering ground-swell brings Clamour over ocean of the harsh, pursuing Trumpets— Trumpets of the Vanguard that have sworn no truce with Kings! All we have of freedom, all we use or know— This our fathers bought for us long and long ago. Ancient Right unnoticed as the breath we draw— Leave to live by no man’s leave, underneath the Law. Lance and torch and tumult, steel and grey-goose wing Wrenched it, inch and ell and all, slowly from the King. Till our fathers ’stablished, after bloody years, How our King is one with us, first among his peers. So they bought us freedom—not at little cost Wherefore must we watch the King, lest our gain be lost, Over all things certain, this is sure indeed, Suffer not the old King: for we know the breed. Give no ear to bondsmen bidding us endure. Whining “He is weak and far”; crying “Time shall cure.”, (Time himself is witness, till the battle joins, Deeper strikes the rottenness in the people’s loins.) Give no heed to bondsmen masking war with peace. Suffer not the old King here or overseas. They that beg us barter—wait his yielding mood— Pledge the years we hold in trust—pawn our brother’s blood— Howso’ great their clamour, whatsoe’er their claim, Suffer not the old King under any name! Here is naught unproven—here is naught to learn. It is written what shall fall if the King return. He shall mark our goings, question whence we came, Set his guards about us, as in Freedom’s name. He shall take a tribute, toll of all our ware; He shall change our gold for arms—arms we may not bear. He shall break his judges if they cross his word; He shall rule above the Law calling on the Lord. He shall peep and mutter; and the night shall bring Watchers ’neath our window, lest we mock the King— Hate and all division; hosts of hurrying spies; Money poured in secret, carrion breeding flies. Strangers of his counsel, hirelings of his pay, These shall deal our Justice: sell—deny—delay. We shall drink dishonour, we shall eat abuse For the Land we look to—for the Tongue we use. We shall take our station, dirt beneath his feet, While his hired captains jeer us in the street. Cruel in the shadow, crafty in the sun, Far beyond his borders shall his teachings run. Sloven, sullen, savage, secret, uncontrolled, Laying on a new land evil of the old— Long-forgotten bondage, dwarfing heart and brain— All our fathers died to loose he shall bind again. Here is naught at venture, random nor untrue— Swings the wheel full-circle, brims the cup anew. Here is naught unproven, here is nothing hid: Step for step and word for word—so the old Kings did! Step by step, and word by word: who is ruled may read. Suffer not the old Kings: for we know the breed— All the right they promise—all the wrong they bring. Stewards of the Judgment, suffer not this King!

PATTERNS OF THE “SHY” What else is common among people who identify themselves as “shy?” Below are the results of a survey that was administered to 150 of my program’s participants. The results of this informal survey reveal certain facts and attitudes common among the socially anxious. Let me point out that these are the subjective answers of the clients themselves—not the professional opinions of the therapists. The average length of time in the program for all who responded was eight months. The average age was twenty-eight. (Some of the answers are based on a scale of 1 to 5, 1 being the lowest.) -Most clients considered shyness to be a serious problem at some point in their lives. Almost everyone rated the seriousness of their problem at level 5, which makes sense, considering that all who responded were seeking help for their problem. -60 percent of the respondents said that “shyness” first became enough of a problem that it held them back from things they wanted during adolescence; 35 percent reported the problem began in childhood; and 5 percent said not until adulthood. This answer reveals when clients were first aware of social anxiety as an inhibiting force. -The respondents perceived the average degree of “sociability” of their parents was a 2.7, which translates to “fair”; 60 percent of the respondents reported that no other member of the family had a problem with “shyness”; and 40 percent said there was at least one other family member who had a problem with “shyness.” -50 percent were aware of rejection by their peers during childhood. -66 percent had physical symptoms of discomfort during social interaction that they believed were related to social anxiety. -55 percent reported that they had experienced panic attacks. -85 percent do not use any medication for anxiety; 15 percent do. -90 percent said they avoid opportunities to meet new people; 75 percent acknowledged that they often stay home because of social fears, rather than going out. -80 percent identified feelings of depression that they connected to social fears. -70 percent said they had difficulty with social skills. -75 percent felt that before they started the program it was impossible to control their social fears; 80 percent said they now believed it was possible to control their fears. -50 percent said they believed they might have a learning disability. -70 percent felt that they were “too dependent on their parents”; 75 percent felt their parents were overprotective; 50 percent reported that they would not have sought professional help if not for their parents’ urging. -10 percent of respondents were the only child in their families; 40 percent had one sibling; 30 percent had two siblings; 10 percent had three; and 10 percent had four or more. Experts can play many games with statistics. Of importance here are the general attitudes and patterns of a population of socially anxious individuals who were in a therapy program designed to combat their problem. Of primary significance is the high percentage of people who first thought that “shyness” was uncontrollable, but then later changed their minds, once they realized that anxiety is a habit that can be broken—without medication. Also significant is that 50 percent of the participants recognized that their parents were the catalyst for their seeking help. Consider these statistics and think about where you fit into them. Do you identify with this profile? Look back on it in the coming months and examine the ways in which your sociability changes. Give yourself credit for successful breakthroughs, and keep in mind that you are not alone!

MT: Mimetic desire can only produce evil? RG: No, it can become bad if it stirs up rivalries but it isn't bad in itself, in fact it's very good, and, fortunately, people can no more give it up than they can give up food or sleep. It is to imitation that we owe not only our traditions, without which we would be helpless, but also, paradoxically, all the innovations about which so much is made today. Modern technology and science show this admirably. Study the history of the world economy and you'll see that since the nineteenth century all the countries that, at a given moment, seemed destined never to play anything but a subordinate role, for lack of “creativity,” because of their imitative or, as Montaigne would have said, their “apish” nature, always turned out later on to be more creative than their models. It began with Germany, which, in the nineteenth century, was thought to be at most capable of imitating the English, and this at the precise moment it surpassed them. It continued with the Americans in whom, for a long time, the Europeans saw mediocre gadget-makers who weren't theoretical or cerebral enough to take on a world leadership role. And it happened once more with the Japanese who, after World War II, were still seen as pathetic imitators of Western superiority. It's starting up again, it seems, with Korea, and soon, perhaps, it'll be the Chinese. All of these consecutive mistakes about the creative potential of imitation cannot be due to chance. To make an effective imitator, you have to openly admire the model you're imitating, you have to acknowledge your imitation. You have to explicitly recognize the superiority of those who succeed better than you and set about learning from them. If a businessman sees his competitor making money while he's losing money, he doesn't have time to reinvent his whole production process. He imitates his more fortunate rivals. In business, imitation remains possible today because mimetic vanity is less involved than in the arts, in literature, and in philosophy. In the most spiritual domains, the modern world rejects imitation in favor of originality at all costs. You should never say what others are saying, never paint what others are painting, never think what others are thinking, and so on. Since this is absolutely impossible, there soon emerges a negative imitation that sterilizes everything. Mimetic rivalry cannot flare up without becoming destructive in a great many ways. We can see it today in the so-called soft sciences (which fully deserve the name). More and more often they're obliged to turn their coats inside out and, with great fanfare, announce some new “epistemological rupture” that is supposed to revolutionize the field from top to bottom. This rage for originality has produced a few rare masterpieces and quite a few rather bizarre things in the style of Jacques Lacan's Écrits. Just a few years ago the mimetic escalation had become so insane that it drove everyone to make himself more incomprehensible than his peers. In American universities the imitation of those models has since produced some pretty comical results. But today that lemon has been squeezed completely dry. The principle of originality at all costs leads to paralysis. The more we celebrate “creative and enriching” innovations, the fewer of them there are. So-called postmodernism is even more sterile than modernism, and, as its name suggests, also totally dependent on it. For two thousand years the arts have been imitative, and it's only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that people started refusing to be mimetic. Why? Because we're more mimetic than ever. Rivalry plays a role such that we strive vainly to exorcise imitation. MT

Reader's Digest (Reader's Digest USA) - Clip This Article on Location 56 | Added on Friday, May 16, 2014 12:06:55 AM Words of Lasting Interest Looking Out for The Lonely One teacher’s strategy to stop violence at its root BY GLENNON DOYLE MELTON  FROM MOMASTERY.COM PHOTOGRAPH BY DAN WINTERS A few weeks ago, I went into my son Chase’s class for tutoring. I’d e-mailed Chase’s teacher one evening and said, “Chase keeps telling me that this stuff you’re sending home is math—but I’m not sure I believe him. Help, please.” She e-mailed right back and said, “No problem! I can tutor Chase after school anytime.” And I said, “No, not him. Me. He gets it. Help me.” And that’s how I ended up standing at a chalkboard in an empty fifth-grade classroom while Chase’s teacher sat behind me, using a soothing voice to try to help me understand the “new way we teach long division.” Luckily for me, I didn’t have to unlearn much because I’d never really understood the “old way we taught long division.” It took me a solid hour to complete one problem, but I could tell that Chase’s teacher liked me anyway. She used to work with NASA, so obviously we have a whole lot in common. Afterward, we sat for a few minutes and talked about teaching children and what a sacred trust and responsibility it is. We agreed that subjects like math and reading are not the most important things that are learned in a classroom. We talked about shaping little hearts to become contributors to a larger community—and we discussed our mutual dream that those communities might be made up of individuals who are kind and brave above all. And then she told me this. Every Friday afternoon, she asks her students to take out a piece of paper and write down the names of four children with whom they’d like to sit the following week. The children know that these requests may or may not be honored. She also asks the students to nominate one student who they believe has been an exceptional classroom citizen that week. All ballots are privately submitted to her. And every single Friday afternoon, after the students go home, she takes out those slips of paper, places them in front of her, and studies them. She looks for patterns. Who is not getting requested by anyone else? Who can’t think of anyone to request? Who never gets noticed enough to be nominated? Who had a million friends last week and none this week? You see, Chase’s teacher is not looking for a new seating chart or “exceptional citizens.” Chase’s teacher is looking for lonely children. She’s looking for children who are struggling to connect with other children. She’s identifying the little ones who are falling through the cracks of the class’s social life. She is discovering whose gifts are going unnoticed by their peers. And she’s pinning down—right away—who’s being bullied and who is doing the bullying. As a teacher, parent, and lover of all children, I think this is the most brilliant Love Ninja strategy I have ever encountered. It’s like taking an X-ray of a classroom to see beneath the surface of things and into the hearts of students. It is like mining for gold—the gold being those children who need a little help, who need adults to step in and teach them how to make friends, how to ask others to play, how to join a group, or how to share their gifts. And it’s a bully deterrent because every teacher knows that bullying usually happens outside her eyeshot and that often kids being bullied are too intimidated to share. But, as she said, the truth comes out on those safe, private, little sheets of paper. As Chase’s teacher explained this simple, ingenious idea, I stared at her with my mouth hanging open. “How long have you been using this system?” I said. Ever since Columbine, she said. Every single Friday afternoon since Columbine. Good Lord. This brilliant woman watched Columbine knowing that all violence begins with disconnection. All

Be a Student of the Game. Like most clichés of sport, this is profound. You can be shaped, or you can be broken. There is not much in between. Try to learn. Be coachable. Try to learn from everybody, especially those who fail. This is hard. Peers who fizzle or blow up or fall down, run away, disappear from the monthly rankings, drop off the circuit. E.T.A. peers waiting for deLint to knock quietly at their door and ask to chat. Opponents. It’s all educational. How promising you are as a Student of the Game is a function of what you can pay attention to without running away. Nets and fences can be mirrors. And between the nets and fences, opponents are also mirrors. This is why the whole thing is scary. This is why all opponents are scary and weaker opponents are especially scary. See yourself in your opponents. They will bring you to understand the Game. To accept the fact that the Game is about managed fear. That its object is to send from yourself what you hope will not return. This is your body. They want you to know. You will have it with you always. On this issue there is no counsel; you must make your best guess. For myself, I do not expect ever really to know. But in the interval, if it is an interval: here is Motrin for your joints, Noxzema for your burn, Lemon Pledge if you prefer nausea to burn, Contracol for your back, benzoin for your hands, Epsom salts and anti-inflammatories for your ankle, and extracurriculars for your folks, who just wanted to make sure you didn’t miss anything they got.

Try to tighten the feedback loop by actively seeking evaluations from teachers or peers, and test yourself often. Studies have found that in professions with less direct feedback loops -stock analysis, psychiatry, etc. -even the best get worse over time. Surgeons, by contrast, are the only class of physicians that improve the longer they are out of medical school. Why? Because if they mess things up, patients die. That is the power of timely feedback.

and beyond. Some of this evolution toward more secular, bureaucratic schooling followed necessarily from the Supreme Court decisions prohibiting school prayer and religious instruction in the 1960s. Regardless of whether you believe children should have prayer or study religion in school, the removal of those activities had the unintended consequence of removing existential questions about how the individual fits into the bigger, cosmic picture; about our life’s purpose. The moral hollowing of schooling is also attributable to the erosion of secondary education’s previously secure place and purpose in preparing kids for steady jobs right after graduation. Education historian Paula Fass traces the drift toward the “warehousing” of our young to schools’ loss of their tangible, culminating purpose—to prepare the emerging generation for conclusive entry into adult productivity. Instead, “going to high school became a stop-over during the teen years, with very little to offer beyond academic selection for those who would go on to college . . .” When a diploma was no longer a predictable ticket to a full-time, middle-class job and a set of expectations about adulthood, high schools began to fray. Peer culture metastasized to fill the vacuum of purpose. Instead of learning how to behave from their teachers, who no longer really saw their jobs as moral instruction and instilling wisdom acquired through age and experience, kids were learning how to behave from other kids, with predictable results. Fifth, the protest era of the 1960s saw an atypical amount of conflict about what America means, about whether our experiment in self-governance was really all that special. Some of the struggles—chiefly civil rights—were essential to America’s finally living up to the Declaration of Independence’s vision of universal,

SOCIAL AND EMOTIONAL FUNCTIONING Another coexisting regulatory problem may be how the child feels about himself and relates to other people. • Poor adaptability: The child may resist meeting new people, trying new games or toys or tasting different foods. He may have difficulty making transitions from one situation to another. The child may seem stubborn and uncooperative when it is time to leave the house, come for dinner, get into or out of the bathtub, or change from a reading to a math activity. Minor changes in routine will readily upset this child who does not “go with the flow.” • Attachment problem: The child may have separation anxiety and be clingy and fearful when apart from one or two “significant olders.” Or, she may physically avoid her parents, teachers, and others in her circle. • Frustration: Struggling to accomplish tasks that peers do easily, the child may give up quickly. He may be a perfectionist and become upset when art projects, dramatic play, or homework assignments are not going as well as he expects. • Difficulty with friendships: The child may be hard to get along with and have problems making and keeping friends. Insisting on dictating all the rules and being the winner, the best, or the first, he may be a poor game-player. He may need to control his surrounding territory, be in the “driver’s seat,” and have trouble sharing toys. • Poor communication: The child may have difficulty verbally in the way she articulates her speech, “gets the words out,” and writes. She may have difficulty expressing her thoughts, feelings, and needs, not only through words but also nonverbally through gestures, body language, and facial expressions. • Other emotional problems: He may be inflexible, irrational, and overly sensitive to change, stress, and hurt feelings. Demanding and needy, he may seek attention in negative ways. He may be angry or panicky for no obvious reason. He may be unhappy, believing and saying that he is dumb, crazy, no good, a loser, and a failure. Low self-esteem is one of the most telling symptoms of Sensory Processing Disorder. • Academic problems: The child may have difficulty learning new skills and concepts. Although bright, the child may be perceived as an underachiever.

All of this suggests that it makes sense to spend significant amounts of time reading and drawing, learning and experimenting, without guidance from instructors, peers, and experts.

serial killers report themselves as very lonely children who felt alienated and isolated from their peers. During their latency phases they did not learn to socialise, they did not learn to empathise with others and they did not incorporate moral and ethical values.

The promises in baptism indicate a very different theology of the family, which recognizes that ‘families work well when we do not expect them to give us all we need.’”14 But whether we baptize our infants or not, the principle is the same: our active participation in the church—and our willingness to see it as home—relieves some of the onerous burdens of childrearing, often made heaviest by our sense of limitation. We can’t parent alone. And we aren’t meant to. We have friends—better, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles—to help carry some of the worry and weight of the family housekeeping. And as I’ve learned from recent research, the most important predictor of whether children from Christian families keep their faith into adulthood is the number of multigenerational connections they enjoy at church. Teenagers may not need a youth group populated by hundreds of peers, but they do need other Christian adults in their church to take an interest in them and communicate that they belong.

my spot in the back seat. It was the same look and phrase that everyone gave me. It happened at the funeral and it had happened every day since. I’d learned to hate that pitying look as well as the reassuring words that people spoke. Neither eased my mind in the slightest. I just wished that Mrs. Williams pitied me enough to leave me where I wanted to be instead of with strangers. When the car slowed, I peered at the house that I’d now be living in for who knew how long. I took in the untidy façade in disgust. It was hard to see much through the overgrown trees and garden that spilled out over the pavement. The long grass seemed to be springing up from the ground like weeds. They probably were weeds. How could Mrs. Williams think that this mess of a house was a good place for me? She parked the car and jumped out. Her heels clicked over the pavement as she opened the gate at the bottom of the driveway. The fence was a dirty shade of white and chipped in many places. She got back into the car and I noticed she was panting slightly. “Okay, here we go,” she said.

Even if we came to a nationally shared recognition that government policy has created an unconstitutional, de jure, system of residential segregation, it does not follow that litigation can remedy this situation. Although most African Americans have suffered under this de jure system, they cannot identify, with the specificity a court case requires, the particular point at which they were victimized. For example, many African American World War II veterans did not apply for government-guaranteed mortgages for suburban purchases because they knew that the Veterans Administration would reject them on account of their race, so applications were pointless. Those veterans then did not gain wealth from home equity appreciation as did white veterans, and their descendants could then not inherit that wealth as did white veterans' descendants. With less inherited wealth, African Americans today are generally less able than their white peers to afford to attend good colleges. If one of those African American descendants now learned that the reason his or her grandparents were forced to rent apartments in overcrowded urban areas was that the federal government unconstitutionally and unlawfully prohibited banks from lending to African Americans, the grandchild would not have the standing to file a lawsuit; nor would he or she be able to name a particular party from whom damages could be recovered. There is generally no judicial remedy for a policy that the Supreme Court wrongheadedly approved. But this does not mean that there is no constitutionally required remedy for such violations. It is up to the people, through our elected representatives, to enforce our Constitution by implementing the remedy.

I typed the winery address into the GPS and then proceeded to pull out of the rental company driveway. I screeched and slammed on the brakes every four feet until I got out onto the street. There was going to be a learning curve. The GPS lady successfully got me over the Golden Gate, but I didn’t get to enjoy one minute of it. Paranoid that I was going to hit a pedestrian or a cyclist or launch myself off the massive bridge, I couldn’t take my eyes off of the car in front of me. Once I was out of the city, I spotted a Wendy’s and pulled off the highway. GPS lady started getting frantic. “Recalculating. Head North on DuPont for 1.3 miles.” I did a quick U-turn to get to the other side of the freeway and into the loving arms of a chocolate frosty. “Recalculating.” Shit. Shut up, lady. I was frantically hitting buttons until I was able to finally silence her. I made a right turn and then another turn immediately into the Wendy’s parking lot and into the drive-thru line. I glanced at the clock. It was three forty. I still had time. I pulled up to the speaker and shouted, “I’ll take a regular French fry and a large chocolate frosty.” Just then, I heard a very loud, abbreviated siren sound. Whoop. I looked into my rearview mirror and spotted the source. It was a police officer on a motorcycle. What’s he doing? I sat there waiting for the Wendy’s speaker to confirm my order, and then again, Whoop. “Ma’am, please pull out of the drive-thru and off to the side.” What’s going on? I quickly rolled the window all the way down, stuck my head out, and peered around until the policeman was in my view. “Are you talking to me?” To my absolute horror, he used the speaker again. “Yes, ma’am, I am talking to you. Please pull out of the drive-thru.” Holy shit, I’m being pulled over in a Wendy’s drive-thru. “Excuse me, Wendy’s people? You need to scratch that last order.” A few seconds went by and then a young man’s voice came over the speaker. “Yeah, we figured that,” he said before bursting into laughter and cutting the speaker off. The policeman was very friendly and seemed to find a little humor in the situation as well. Apparently I had made an illegal right turn at a red light just before I pulled into the parking lot. After completely and utterly humiliating me, he let me off with a warning, which was nice, but I still didn’t have a frosty. Pulling my old Chicago Cubs cap from my bag, I decided that nothing was going to get in the way of my beloved frosty. Going incognito, I made my way through the door. Apparently the cap was not enough because the Justin Timberlake–looking fellow behind the counter could not contain himself. “Hi,” I said. “Hi, what can I get you?” he said, and then he clapped his hand over his mouth, struggling to hold back a huge amount of laughter and making gagging noises in the back of his throat in the process. “Can I get an extra-large chocolate frosty please, and make it snappy.” “Do you still want the fries with that?” There was more laughter and then I heard laughter from the back as well. “No, thank you.” I paid, grabbed my cup, and hightailed it out of there.

There’s a strong impulse in our culture to run away from these little corners. We’re told that society’s winners will be the thinkers who network, collaborate, create, and strategize in concert with others. Our kids are taught to study in groups, to execute projects as teams. Our workplaces have been stripped of walls so that the organization functions as a unit. The big tech companies also propel us to join the crowd—they provide us with the trending topics and their algorithms suggest that we read the same articles, tweets, and posts as the rest of the world. There’s no doubting the creative power of conversation, the intellectual potential of humbly learning from our peers, the necessity of groups working together to solve problems. Yet none of this should replace contemplation, moments of isolation, where the mind can follow its own course to its own conclusions. We read in our little corners, our beds and tubs and dens, because we have a sense that these are the places where we can think best. I have spent my life searching for an alternative. I will read in the café and on the subway, making a diligent, wholehearted effort to focus the mind. But it never entirely works. My mind can’t shake its awareness of the humans in the room.

Michelle Phan grew up in California with her Vietnamese parents. The classic American immigrant story of the impoverished but hardworking parents who toil to create a better life for the next generation was marred, in Phan’s case, by her father’s gambling addiction. The Phan clan moved from city to city, state to state, downsizing and recapitalizing and dodging creditors and downsizing some more. Eventually, Phan found herself sleeping on a hard floor, age 16, living with her mother, who earned rent money as a nail salon worker and bought groceries with food stamps. Throughout primary and secondary school, Phan escaped from her problems through art. She loved to watch PBS, where painter Bob Ross calmly drew happy little trees. “He made everything so positive,” Phan recalls. “If you wanted to learn how to paint, and you wanted to also calm down and have a therapeutic session at home, you watched Bob Ross.” She started drawing and painting herself, often using the notes pages in the back of the telephone book as her canvas. And, imitating Ross, she started making tutorials for her friends and posting them on her blog. Drawing, making Halloween costumes, applying cosmetics—the topic didn’t matter. For three years, she blogged her problems away, fancying herself an amateur teacher of her peers and gaining a modest teenage following. This and odd jobs were her life, until a kind uncle gave her mother a few thousand dollars to buy furniture, which was used instead to send Phan to Ringling College of Art and Design. Prepared to study hard and survive on a shoestring, Phan, on her first day at Ringling, encountered a street team which was handing out free MacBook laptops, complete with front-facing webcams, from an anonymous donor. Phan later told me, with moist eyes, “If I had not gotten that laptop, I wouldn’t be here today.

In the aforementioned Intellectual Birdhouse, which focuses on artistic practice as research, Michael Schwab examines the role of the artists' artist and, in doing so, extends Foster's reflections when discussing 'love value' over exchange value. Drawing on the work of Bourdieu among others, Schwab describes what values the new archival context suggests for institutions that are looking to recoup their losses: "the 'artists' artist' is too epistemologically demanding on the market, which fails to capitalize (often during the lifetime of the artist) on the symbolic value that is produced while he or she delivers epistemological gain to his or her peers, who appear to be the only ones who are able to perceive such value in advance of the market." Schwab is arguing that the role of the artist in the production of knowledge through artistic research extends and can be differentiated from symbolic value. It is not the market that distinguishes the value of an artist to the artist, it is their epistemic value. In other words, it is what we can learn from that artist, not just their artworks. This produces a dilemma for the established institution that struggles to identifY the cultural significance and value of the 'artists' artist' until late, sometimes too late, in the lifetime of the subject. It is not necessarily just a lack of vision on the part of museum staff, archivists and curators, but the values these institutions are increasingly forced to place on spectacular exhibitions in order to survive through corporate and media driven sponsored relations. Archivists themselves acknowledge this limitation of working within institutions that have little room to speculate on cultural value except through established forms, such as the emerging contemporary markets. Many seek out and must work in new emerging archives, such as Flat Time House. However, I would also argue that it is the artist's understanding of the potential value of' 'becomingness' through cultural capital that applies to the present moment too. As has been stated by Derrida, the 'vision' to see what needs to be archived is now the work of the artist/s: to anticipate the archive itself. (excerpt from Experiments and Archives in the Expanded Field written by Neal White)

LOW SELF-ESTEEM Characteristic of most people with social anxiety is low self-esteem. I showed you the sequence in Chapter 1. What is the connection between low self-esteem and social anxiety? A person who has experienced years of failure and frustration will suffer from a lack of self-confidence unless he or she learns appropriate strategies that can break the cycle of negative thinking and allow real behavioral change to take place. In some cases, early peer rejection has caused the socially anxious person to develop a poor self-image. In other cases, negative reinforcement (harsh criticism at home, poor performance in school or on the playing field) has turned self-doubt into self-reproach. Eventually, that element of “self”—the inner voice-becomes far more judgmental than any outside person or group could be. The inner voice then chastises the person into silence, and, finally, retreat.

PUBLISH YOUR BOOK TODAY The following is a direct quote from Amazon, and, if you are a real writer, it is one of the most fun things you will ever see in your life: This royalty payment notification is for Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) sales recorded in the Kindle Store. Payment will be made to your bank account and should appear in your available balance within 2 to 5 business days after the Payment Date. Details of the payment will be available on the Payment Report after it has been processed by your bank. The email that the above is quoted from comes for you every month, along with notes about payments from the various Kindle Stores in which you are selling, and they make you feel terrific. What a knockout: there is my money, flowing in as receivables each and every month, like clockwork, from all around the globe and waiting for me in my personal bank account, sitting there to use as I see fit. The statements show up in your every month, along with those from all your stores. They are a bit longer than the above quote, but sit back, close your eyes and visualize how wonderful it will be to have money rolling into your bank electronically, eliminating the bother of dithering around with checks. Right now, as your read this, the opportunity to earn a solid living, even to make a fortune with your books is real world and readily available for you. The revenue stream is just sitting there; it’s waiting for you to get busy, to write books and to learn to use Amazon as an amazing marketing tool poised and ready for your decision to pursue your dream. The trick for getting hot at book marketing—so you can actually be in a place for fully enjoying your life as an author/publisher—is to believe in yourself: to move right on past all your previous confusion: discouraging feedback from peers, friends and family; all self-doubt and blaming games; rejection slips from agents, publishers and magazines; and yes, even the ego trip of your treasured writer’s block . . . .

The transmission of culture assures the survival of the particular forms given to our existence and expression as human beings. It goes much beyond our customs and traditions and symbols to include how we express ourselves in gestures and language, the way we adorn ourselves in dress and decoration, what and how and when we celebrate. Culture also defines our rituals around contact and connection, greetings and good-byes, belonging and loyalty, love and intimacy. Central to any culture is its food — how food is prepared and eaten, the attitudes toward food, and the functions food serves. The music people make and the music they listen to is an integral part of any culture. The transmission of culture is, normally, an automatic part of child-rearing. In addition to facilitating dependence, shielding against external stress, and giving birth to independence, attachment also is the conduit of culture. As long as the child is properly attaching to the adults responsible, the culture flows into the child. To put it another way, the attaching child becomes spontaneously informed, in the sense of absorbing the cultural forms of the adult. According to Howard Gardner, a leading American developmentalist, more is spontaneously absorbed from the parents in the first four years of life than during all the rest of a person's formal education put together. When attachment is working, the transmission of culture does not require deliberate instruction or teaching on the part of the adult or even conscious learning on the part of the child. The child's hunger for connection and inclination to seek cues from adults take care of it. If the child is helped to attain genuine individuality and a mature independence of mind, the passing down of culture from one generation to another is not a process of mindless imitation or blind obedience.

Recognizing that parental responsibility is insufficient for successful child-rearing, but still not conscious of the role of attachment, many experts assume the problem must be in the parenting know-how. If parenting is not going well, it is because parents are not doing things right. According to this way of thinking, it is not enough to don the role; a parent needs some skill to be effective. The parental role has to be supplemented with all kinds of parenting techniques — or so many experts seem to believe. Many parents, too, reason something like this: if others can get their children to do what they want them to do but I can't, it must be because I lack the requisite skills. Their questions all presume a simple lack of knowledge, to be corrected by “how to” types of advice for every conceivable problem situation: How do I get my child to listen? How can I get my child to do his homework? What do I need to do to get my child to clean his room? What is the secret to getting a child to do her chores? How do I get my child to sit at the table? Our predecessors would probably have been embarrassed to ask such questions or, for that matter, to show their face in a parenting course. It seems much easier for parents today to confess incompetence rather than impotence, especially when our lack of skill can be conveniently blamed on a lack of training or a lack of appropriate models in our own childhood. The result has been a multibillion-dollar industry of parental advice-giving, from experts advocating timeouts or reward points on the fridge to all the how-to books on effective parenting. Child-rearing experts and the publishing industry give parents what they ask for instead of the insight they so desperately need. The sheer volume of the advice offered tends to reinforce the feelings of inadequacy and the sense of being unprepared for the job. The fact that these methodologies fail to work has not slowed the torrent of skill teaching. Once we perceive parenting as a set of skills to be learned, it is difficult for us to see the process any other way. Whenever trouble is encountered the assumption is that there must be another book to be read, another course to be taken, another skill to be mastered. Meanwhile, our supporting cast continues to assume that we have the power to do the job. Teachers act as if we can still get our children to do homework. Neighbors expect us to keep our children in line. Our own parents chide us to take a firmer stand. The experts assume that compliance is just another skill away. The courts hold us responsible for our child's behavior. Nobody seems to get the fact that our hold on our children is slipping. The reasoning behind parenting as a set of skills seemed logical enough, but in hindsight has been a dreadful mistake. It has led to an artificial reliance on experts, robbed parents of their natural confidence, and often leaves them feeling dumb and inadequate. We are quick to assume that our children don't listen because we don't know how to make them listen, that our children are not compliant because we have not yet learned the right tricks, that children are not respectful enough of authority because we, the parents, have not taught them to be respectful. We miss the essential point that what matters is not the skill of the parents but the relationship of the child to the adult who is assuming responsibility.

Peer-oriented young people thus face two grave psychological risks that more than suffice to make vulnerability unbearable and provoke their brains into defensive action: having lost the parental attachment shield, and having the powerful attachment sword wielded by careless and irresponsible children. A third blow against feeling deeply and openly — and the third reason for the emotional shutdown of the peer-oriented child — is that any sign of vulnerability in a child tends to be attacked by those who are already shut down against vulnerability. To give an example from the extreme end of the spectrum, in my work with violent young offenders, one of my primary objectives was to melt their defenses against vulnerability so they could begin to feel their wounds. If a session was successful and I was able to help them get past the defenses to some of the underlying pain, their faces and voices would soften and their eyes would water. For most of these kids, these tears were the first in many years. Especially when someone isn't used to crying, it can markedly affect the face and eyes. When I first began, I was naive enough to send kids back into the prison population after their sessions. It is not difficult to guess what happened. Because the vulnerability was still written on their faces, it attracted the attention of the other inmates. Those who were defended against their own vulnerability felt compelled to attack. They assaulted vulnerability as if it was the enemy. I soon learned to take defensive measures and help my clients make sure their vulnerability wasn't showing. Fortunately, I had a washroom next to my office in the prison. Sometimes kids spent up to an hour pouring cold water over their faces, attempting to wipe out any vestiges of emotion that would give them away. Even if their defenses had softened a bit, they still had to wear a mask of invulnerability to keep from being wounded even further. Part of my job was to help them differentiate between the mask of invulnerability that they had to wear in such a place to keep from being victimized and, on the other hand, the internalized defenses against vulnerability that would keep them from feeling deeply and profoundly. The same dynamic, obviously not to this extreme, operates in the world dominated by peer-oriented children.

Walking through the halls of my son's high school during lunch hour recently, I was struck by how similar it felt to being in the halls and lunchrooms of the juvenile prisons in which I used to work. The posturing, the gestures, the tone, the words, and the interaction among peers I witnessed in this teenage throng all bespoke an eerie invulnerability. These kids seemed incapable of being hurt. Their demeanor bespoke a confidence, even bravado that seemed unassailable but shallow at the same time. The ultimate ethic in the peer culture is “cool” — the complete absence of emotional openness. The most esteemed among the peer group affect a disconcertingly unruffled appearance, exhibit little or no fear, seem to be immune to shame, and are given to muttering things like “doesn't matter,” “don't care,” and “whatever.” The reality is quite different. Humans are the most vulnerable — from the Latin vulnerare, to wound — of all creatures. We are not only vulnerable physically, but psychologically as well. What, then, accounts for the discrepancy? How can young humans who are in fact so vulnerable appear so opposite? Is their toughness, their “cool” demeanor, an act or is it for real? Is it a mask that can be doffed when they get to safety or is it the true face of peer orientation? When I first encountered this subculture of adolescent invulnerability, I assumed it was an act. The human psyche can develop powerful defenses against a conscious sense of vulnerability, defenses that become ingrained in the emotional circuitry of the brain. I preferred to think that these children, if given the chance, would remove their armor and reveal their softer, more genuinely human side. Occasionally this expectation proved correct, but more often than not I discovered the invulnerability of adolescents was no act, no pretense. Many of these children did not have hurt feelings, they felt no pain. That is not to say that they were incapable of being wounded, but as far as their consciously experienced feelings were concerned, there was no mask to take off. Children able to experience emotions of sadness, fear, loss, and rejection will often hide such feelings from their peers to avoid exposing themselves to ridicule and attack. Invulnerability is a camouflage they adopt to blend in with the crowd but will quickly remove in the company of those with whom they have the safety to be their true selves. These are not the kids I am most concerned about, although I certainly do have a concern about the impact an atmosphere of invulnerability will have on their learning and development. In such an environment genuine curiosity cannot thrive, questions cannot be freely asked, naive enthusiasm for learning cannot be expressed. Risks are not taken in such an environment, nor can passion for life and creativity find their outlets. The kids most deeply affected and at greatest risk for psychological harm are the ones who aspire to be tough and invulnerable, not just in school but in general. These children cannot don and doff the armor as needed. Defense is not something they do, it is who they are. This emotional hardening is most obvious in delinquents and gang members and street kids, but is also a significant dynamic in the common everyday variety of peer orientation that exists in the typical American home.