What Fills My Head

Enchanting Podcasts: Or, How I Motivate Myself To Walk Schroeder In The Rain 

I used to judge people who wore earbuds while walking their dogs. However, now that I've found some awesome podcasts that I actively want to listen to, I get why people do it. Not listening to anything can mean that I spend too much time in my own head, which isn't always good, or that I start talking to Schroeder in "Schroed voice," which can make for some embarrassing moments when other humans materialize.

So, here are some of my favorite podcasts, both new and old: 

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Being Boss with Emily Thompson & Kathleen Shannon 

These are two creative lady entrepreneurs who talk all about their work and give great advice while being hilarious and authentic. I don't have a favorite episode; they're all SO good. I even listen to the ones about issues that are not at all related to me (like motherhood) because they are just so empowering. Emily does not mince words! Kathleen is so endearing. They make anything feel possible. 

Dear Sugar with Cheryl Strayed & Steve Almond 

These two dish out life advice relating to love, identity, etc. They receive and read letters from listeners who ask deep questions and then give thoughtful responses. I always feel like I'm listening in on someone else's therapy session--for free! 

Good Life Project with Jonathan Fields  

I've only listened to one and a half episodes so far, but the gist is that Fields interviews fascinating people, people who have endured huge trials or happened upon fascinating discoveries, and asks them hard questions. The podcasts are long enough to delve into tough issues. It's like Fresh Air, but for those interested in psychology and health. 

Starr Struck Radio with Mary Catherine & Ben 

What a funny couple! They talk about all sorts of things, but my favorite episodes so far have been about morning routines and motivation. I tried the whole morning routine thing and see its value, but I still cannot force myself out of bed. You can read more about that experiment here. And as for motivation, well, they made me realize a lot of mine is negative. Eeks! 

Disabling the Snooze

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After shutting off both alarms yesterday and waking up a whole hour later than I intended to (hence no morning routine or blog post), I decided I had to take more preventative steps last night, the most punishing of which was to disable the snooze button. That's right. I don't even have the option, in my zombie-like state, to even have the opportunity to press the wrong button.

I took other preventative measures as well: I added a backup alarm at 5:45, increased the volume of the now three alarms, and selected more grating sounds for each intrusion into my slumber.

If this doesn't work, I might need to arrange for a whole marching band to enter my bedroom before sunrise. I can keep making all of these extreme efforts, or I could, as some have proposed, just go to bed earlier. If only it were that simple ...

Actually, it probably should be that simple, but I (stubborn as I may or may not be), just won't accept that solution. Or maybe I will. If I were to go to bed earlier, I would miss out on precious reading or Jacob time (though not in that order!). We usually eat dinner around 7:30 or 8 when he comes home, and then watch Jeopardy!, and then he either goes to the gym or watches college basketball (or professional baseball, or tennis, depending on the season), at which point I get back to work on planning, grading, or imagining cool things to teach that I'll never have time for, or I just wilf around.

Does this mean that we have to change our ENTIRE routine? I like this new morning routine, albeit I like it better without the morning part, and I like my introverted time at night to read, and I want to also, ideally, see my husband.

As a sidenote, I've been hearing about this concept called "decision fatigue" lately, the idea being that the more decisions you make, the harder it gets to make decisions. (I'm sure that's an oversimplification, but it will have to do for now.) And when I think about all the decisions I have to make in a day as a teacher, all the decisions that I have to make so very quickly and that are so very significant, well, it's no wonder that 1) I like to make slow, methodical decisions when I can, and 2) I am worn out of making sound decisions by the end of the day (or, as we now know, in the morning).

Disabling the snooze means that I'm denying myself the autonomy I crave. I guess for now I have to concede that doing so gives me more of what I want even more--time to write in the morning and time to read or work in the evening, and then time to read again just before bed--so much so that it's worth it to disable the alarm, rendering me powerless to its early siren call and eliminating my choice to make a poor decision when I'm barely awake.

I think I might have just talked myself into this whole morning thing. Yawn.

What does "giving up" really mean?

I'm not referring to mornings, at least not yet, though this was undeniably more difficult than the past two have been. I snoozed on both the first and second alarms, producing a chorus of only mildly pleasant electronic noises. When I snoozed on the second alarm, I started to feel defeated. Autonomous (as I mentioned yesterday), but nonetheless defeated.

When I realized I still had the headache that I had yesterday, I was even more tempted to give up on this morning. And then I remembered my laptop's battery had mysteriously drained yesterday; when I turned it on this morning it quickly fell from 5 to 3 percent power, and then it ever so kindly presented that cryptic message, the one in which it notifies its user that it will shut itself off soon--how soon? Three minutes? Thirty seconds? Enough time to look up a password?

I took Jacob's Bluetooth keyboard, connected it to my iPad, and somehow managed to log in to WordPress. The parentheses keys don't work properly. In fact, only a few of the punctuation keys even produce the mark they claim to produce. It would be easy to give up. It would also be easy to do it later (which defeats the whole purpose of the morning routine) or to reframe it as strategically moving on to something different. I actually like writing, so I'm not giving up this easily, even though the spell checker isn't working and I have a headache.

But what if I really didn't care for what I'm doing? Or if I didn't see the purpose? One of the big education buzzwords right now is "grit." More like: GRIT! GRIT! GRIIIIIIIT! The idea is that kids need to have this inherent desire to work through a problem or persist on a difficult assignment and that if they do, they will eventually succeed, and if they don't succeed in school but have grit, they will still be fine in life. There is some merit to this for sure. But what's elided is the act that districts and schools and teachers are the ones setting the bar and that sometimes the students need to be able to hop over it. If they continually fail, or if everything (reading, spelling, attention, memory, handwriting) is so difficult, it actually makes logical sense to stop trying.

Why keep trying if nothing works? In other areas of life, we do. I stop reading books if I don't find them interesting, useful, or entertaining. If I don't want to read the section of the paper I find uninteresting or personally meaningful, I don't have to. No sports section for me! People leave relationships when they no longer work. I actually think the "field" of relationships can provide some insight on giving up. For example, the research on the topic of cohabitation generally concludes that if a couple intentionally move in together, they don't increase their likelihood of separating later. On the other hand, if they just "slide" into living in the same place and don't actually make a conscious decision, they are more likely to part ways later. I may have read a book or two on living together back in the day...

What distinguishes these two groups is their intention or the lack thereof. That can help to reframe the giving up versus grit dichotomy. In other words, if kids can know the difference between intentionally changing course and can reframe a decision to quit as instead one to move on to something else, that makes sense to me.  If they are considered or consider themselves quitters every time they stop something, well, that is not exactly motivation to keep trying.

But what about when the topic at hand is reading? Or learning vocabulary? Or analyzing literature? What if it's really, really difficult and they really don't like it? It's hard to parse the continual disappointment from the subject matter. I mean, can I get them to like it, or even enjoy it, if I show them that they are not going to feel defeated every time, if they might even feel successful or eventually autonomous?

Abetted by the Snooze

Another morning, another battle of willpower. The idea, I think, is that this waking up early in the morning thing becomes a routine so that it isn't a battle of willpower every day. The idea is that it simply becomes what I do, and I don't have to agonize over calculating the amount of times I can press the snooze button. But sometimes I don't like routines because they feel stifling. Alas, it would be difficult to argue that waking up doesn't constitute a stifling routine.

Today, I snoozed the 5:15 alarm and the 5:30 alarm, effectively doubling the number of times I had to leap out of bed to squelch the alarm. It works much better when I turn off the first alarm, snooze the second, and continue to snooze the second. However, if I do the opposite--snooze the first and turn off the second--then I might wake Jacob up from excessive snooze button pressing. Or, worse, if I turn off both the first and the second alarms, then I might never wake up, at least not until Jacob's alarm bursts onto the scene a little before 7.

So why not just get up the first time and skip the snooze altogether? Of course. That would be too easy. See, if I know that I can snooze, I feel in control, even empowered. The sheer fact of knowing that I can choose to arise or to succumb to the toasty sheets feels means that I have some modicum of control over a part of my day. The rest of my day--or at least each weekday--is predetermined: Walk the dog, drink the coffee, teach the kids, write the reports, eat the lame lunch, teach the kids, clean the room, walk the dog, make the dinner, and so on. I actually do like my days, even though that list doesn't make it sound like it, yet I still find myself grasping for more autonomy, independence, and choice. And that, that is what the snooze provides.

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This is where I should stop writing and walk the dog. But there's more! And I still I have tea to drink, this relaxing, calming of the nervous system tea that looks so much like urine that I can't drink it out of a glass tumbler, which is exactly what I did the first time I drank it, which also happened to be at work. Thankfully no children asked me why I was consuming human waste. I'm not sure yet whether I think it's actually relaxing, though, regardless it is a useful routine (ahh!) and because it's not carbonated, it helps with hydration.

I have never before read a book about a feeling. A whole book on empathy? It can't be that complicated. But it is, really. I loved the first essay, the titular one. After that, I have been less impressed. The one I read last night belonged in a philsophical journal, so devoid was it of spunk and personal reflection. The first one felt so authentic and personal while also serving as a societal critique on doctors and healthcare, but not in a trite way:

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Leslie Jamison tells stories of her experience as a fake patient (impersonating a sick person to help doctors improve their diagnostic and interpersonal skills) that parallel her experience undergoing first an abortion and shortly thereafter, heart surgery.

Here, Jamison describes some of the social abilities that serve as prerequisites to empathy. Social self-confidence is the fourth.

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I wish I had the language to describe this overwhelming sensory experience as a kid, when people would seemingly bombard me with the question, "Why are you so shy?" All I could think to say, but was too shy to actually say, was, "Why are you so loud?" But that doesn't address the core issue in their question, which I think is that people process the world around them in ways too numerous to count or to understand.

Mornings! Early Ones!

I really would prefer not to speak to anyone at all before 8 AM. OK, maybe Jacob, if he brings me coffee in bed. Just kidding. Maybe. Ever since I can remember mornings, I have hated them. I need multiple alarms that fire off obnoxious sounds from across the room so that I actually have to get out of the bed  to turn them off. And even then, if it weren't for Jacob trying to get back to sleep, I would probably snooze for several hours. My current strategy is to set an alarm for before I actually need to get up with a relatively mild noise and then another at the actual time I need to get up with a noise that's so horrifying that it makes me lurch out of bed to silence it. But the problem is that I then hop right back in bed and fall back into a deep slumber immediately.

So that sets the stage. Then last Tuesday, on our lovely snow day, I listened to the first podcast from a yoga teacher and blogger I adore, Mary Catherine Starr, and her husband, Ben. It was all about doing something useful or helpful or calming with your mornings, and how you should use that precious stretch of uninterrupted time to do something that you wouldn't be able to do the rest of the day. Things like reading the paper, exercising, walking the dog, spending time with a partner, etc. as opposed to checking email, which you can do all day. And then Ben said this thing that gave me a massive guilt trip: your morning routine is a microcosm of your life. Well, shoot. That explains some things.

So I thought, well, I could start that next week ... And then I thought, no, start right now. And then I kept thinking about my mornings, but was not about to arise earlier to exercise in the dark, frigid weather. And then I kept feeling guilty, as though I was wasting so much time and making myself a frazzled mess, but I didn't bother to get up early. Then last night came, and it occured to me that I could get up ten minutes earlier and not be as rushed in the morning. So, with some trepidation, I reset my alarms and chose different tunes for the early alarm and the *new* on-time alarm. The early one scared me 5:15 this morning.

We shall see how this goes. Mary Catherine and Ben said to make sure that your morning routine involves something you enjoy, otherwise you won't do it. Right now, if I shuffled almost any activity (other than wilfing or writing) to the morning, I would immediately come to despise said activity. So I'm writing now, this morning, trying out this whole morning routine thing. I almost preemptively gave up on myself last night as my mind filled with negativity regarding the early hours of the day. Then I remembered the growth mindset and thought of what I would say to one of my students if he or she were to say, "No, I have never been able to do that, and I know I never will, and I am not even willing to try because I know I will fail."

On that note, I'm off to go talk to people.

But first, a huge thanks to Mary Catherine and Ben for their hilarious and useful podcast, Starr Struck Radio!

Coming up soon:

• a recommendation for The Empathy Exams 
• a few words on teachers buying school supplies