Return-Path: <nifl-health@literacy.nifl.gov> Received: from literacy (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by literacy.nifl.gov (8.10.2/8.10.2) with SMTP id j0T0k9n29622; Fri, 28 Jan 2005 19:46:09 -0500 (EST) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2005 19:46:09 -0500 (EST) Message-Id: <000a01c5059b$a869c160$e896eb04@compaqcomputer> Errors-To: listowner@literacy.nifl.gov Reply-To: nifl-health@literacy.nifl.gov Originator: nifl-health@literacy.nifl.gov Sender: nifl-health@literacy.nifl.gov Precedence: bulk From: "rick lynn" <mayfieldga@netzero.net> To: Multiple recipients of list <nifl-health@literacy.nifl.gov> Subject: [NIFL-HEALTH:4626] These cognitive tools will help children and adults X-Listprocessor-Version: 6.0c -- ListProcessor by Anastasios Kotsikonas X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2800.1409 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Type: text/plain; Status: O Content-Length: 13356 Lines: 210 rick oliver Teacher 5012 Seaboard Ave. Jacksonville, FL 32210, mayfieldga@netzero.net 904-771-0687 http://learningtheory.homestead.com/Theory.html I have developed a working idea that could create two large variables/tools for students and adults to continually improve learning ability, motivation, and mental/emotional health. My article and its tools provide a way to help maintain better mental/emotional health. - This includes the big topic - Sucide Prevention by helping to reduce layers of mental frictions that can lead to suicide among both children and adults. I hope you like it. Feel free to make copies. I feel it is too important to sell. My Residual Layers Fig. as an attachment for all who request it, goes with the article. - Oh, as a special education teacher, I feel these tools could be integrated easily into the curriculum for both special ed and regular ed students, although more good could be achieved for students not as organically disabled. rick Removing the deadly myth of fixed intelligences The teachings of single or multiple fixed intelligences have made many students and adults feel more or less permanently inferior than their peers. This teaching in our schools and in society has created much peer pressure and class distinctions among persons. It has also created much psychological suffering, which is leading to many escapes such as drug/alcohol abuse, violence, depression, and suicide. I hope you can see the connection between the harmful teachings of permanence or fixed intelligence in ability and its deadly effect on the mental/emotional health of our students (and adults). My theory will provide two large tools we can all use to continually improve our lives and remove this deadly teaching from our schools and society. Many years ago, Charles Darwin came out with his theory of evolution. According to that belief, people evolved over time from the apes. Later, his cousin, Francis Galton came out with his belief on "Social Darwinism" or that persons succeeded by being naturally more intelligent and/or working harder than others. According to that false belief, if a person did not succeed, that person was either less intelligent or simply did not work hard enough. According to his belief, environment played little or no role in success; it was simply intelligence and hard work. Today in school and society, students are being taught the same myth, that those succeed are simply more able and/or just work harder. In truth, our individual environments do greatly affect our ability to think and learn. While genetics plays a role in hair, eye color, physical features, and size, our minds are pretty much like any other organ in the body, pretty much all the same. Although our minds can be damaged in various ways, causing mental problems of intelligence, for the vast majority of us, such is not the case, we are all pretty much equal in its function. However, since our minds are very complex, we "are greatly affected" by many things, which enter our minds and have a tendency to either help or hurt our ability to think and learn. Our abilities are greatly determined by the amount of, quality of and continuousness of the mental, emotional, physical, and social support, knowledge, and skills we have received from family, friends, and peers from infancy onward. You can see how changes in the amount, quality, consistency of any of those supports over time could greatly affect one's ability when compared with someone else who received more or less of those various supports. The good news is there two, very large tools we can use today to continually improve our mental/emotional health and abilities despite our individual environments. While I know we cannot provide everyone with a nice, knowledge-rich, and secure environment, I do believe we can all learn to approach our individual environments more delicately and differently no matter what our environment to continually improve our ability to think, learn, change, and develop into newer and better persons each day. I now give you my learning theory, which offers us two, very large tools we can all use to continually improve our lives. The first tool shows us how to more permanently lower layers of mental frictions that hurt our ability to think, learn, and change. The second tool provides a more correct way to use pace and intensity (more slowly at first) when approaching various mental work, situations, problems, academics, Etc. These tools are very important for long-term motivation and achievement. The first tool is designed to properly understand and lower layers of average stress. By changing and correcting the current "faulty" definition of stress, we can all learn to greatly improve our ability to think, learn, change, and develop into newer and better persons. Currently, stress is improperly thought of as simply energy used when performing any physical, mental, or emotional activity. It is also thought of as occurring only during some immediate, situation or problem. To make matters more confusing, many believe there is good stress and bad stress. These views of stress are "not useful" for helping us change and improve our lives. However, by changing from these faulty definitions of stress to one is that more accurate and useful, we can then use it as a powerful tool to help students and adults change and improve their lives. We need to see stress more accurately as "mental frictions" that occur in our everyday life and hurt our ability to think and learn, not as energy used. For example, laughing, crying, running, and swimming are not good stress but very low, if any stress. Here, we are using energy, but we are "not creating mental frictions" from it. So you see in this definition, "stress does not occur" when energy is expended without mental frictions. Also by seeing stress more accurately as mental frictions that occur not just as immediate problems but also as other many layers of subconscious (just below the surface) problems, plans, and other unresolved mental frictions, we can then see how our individual environments greatly affect our ability to think and learn. In my theory I show how we can use this better definition of stress to help students and adults continually improve their ability to think and learn by learning how to more permanently reduce such layers of mental frictions in their life. My First Tool is designed to more permanently reduce layers of residual stress that hurt our ability to think and learn. When you are performing mental work such as academics, your mind is also working on other layers of other things or problems in your life. Each layer or problem your mind is working on even below the surface (subconsciously) hurts your ability to think, learn, change, and grow mentally. Try to picture an upright rectangle representing your full ability to think and learn (Fig. page 7). Then begin drawing in from the bottom, narrowly spaced horizontal lines to represent layers of many things your mind may be working on both consciously and just below the surface or subconsciously. The space you have left represents your leftover ability to think, learn, and create new knowledge. The length of this space also represents our length of reflection time or time a person uses to consider the rewards or consequences for some course of action. This shows us just how our individual environments do greatly affect our ability to think and learn. Persons with higher layers of residual stress will have to work harder to receive the same mental reward for mental work expended. This is why children appear to be smarter: they have fewer layers of residual stress. We cannot just relax or perform physical work to reduce those layers of residual stress. When we attempt new mental work after relaxing that energy is then re-applied back as mental energy to those other layers of residual stress, so nothing is accomplished. When our bodies recover from performing physical work as a form of relaxation, the energy used for those purposes is then re-applied back to those other layers of mental work or residual stress. My theory provides a tool to understand and more permanently reduce layers of residual stress. A person can begin to understand how things in his or her life and the weights they are placing on those things work to create layers of mental frictions. A person can then begin to understand a little more each day how the elements of his or her individual circumstances, responsibilities, problems, along with the weights or values that person is attaching to those elements in his or her life are creating various mental frictions. >From this, persons can then learn to understand why a certain mental friction or layer of residual stress is occurring. They can then learn how to approach those areas that are creating mental frictions in their life, more delicately. Then with a small change in a value in a certain area of his life, he can then resolve and more permanently remove that layer of residual stress. This also helps persons make changes in values and set up better principles of approaching life which will help to resolve other layers of mental conflicts and "prevent other mental conflicts from occurring in the future". This enables us to more permanently reduce layers of residual stress that hurt our ability to think and learn. With each more permanently removed layer of residual stress, students and adults will be able to improve their ability to think, learn, extend reflection time (or help persons think longer and better before making a decision). This will also improve motivation in mental areas. The easier it is to learn, the greater the motivation to learn. Also this upright rectangle also shows how layers of residual stress combined with situational stress on top creates even shorter reflection time that leads to psychological suffering. This shorter reflection time and psychological suffering can lead to many escapes such as drug/alcohol abuse, depression, suicide, even a great catharsis of violence. My theory offers a way to more permanently reduce those layers of residual stress that lead to such problems. My Second Tool looks at the dynamics of how our pace and intensity can be used more correctly when approaching mental work, situations, problems, academics, etc. As our pace and intensity in approaching mental work exceeds our immediate knowledge and experience or try too hard, we create exponentially greater (much more) mental friction, thus forcing us to work much harder to learn. This also raises our layers of residual stress and hurts much more, our ability to think, learn, and also shortens more so our length of reflection time (again, ability to think better or more intelligently). We can learn how to more correctly approach new mental work, situations, problems, and academics to continually improve thinking, learning, and improve motivation to think and learn academics (make it easier to learn). By lowering our residual stress, we will also increase our reflection time or time we take to think, plan, and make decisions. As a person accumulates high layers of residual stress, he begins to experience two bad things at once by experiencing psychological suffering and his reflection time shortens - His desires, goals, enjoyments, and methods of problem solving become more simplistic or short-term, less thought-out. The psychological suffering and shorter reflection time may then create a powerful need for a catharsis or escape from that high, accumulated mental tension. This condition makes drug/alcohol abuse, teen sex, the catharsis of violence, and suicide more appealing in view of the immediate reward or release from psychological suffering and temporary lowering of residual stress such escapes provide. The equation for "motivation in mental areas and intrinsic reward" is equaled to "mental reward received for mental work expended". Both of these tools will enable us to remove the myth of permanence in ability for students and adults and provide them with tools they can use to continually improve their ability to think, learn, and extend their reflection time. My complete theory with many applications for many social and academic problems is on my home site. By showing students how our individual environments "do greatly affect" their ability to think and learn, students and adults will have far more respect and esteem for themselves and for others. By providing students with tools to approach their individual environments more delicately and differently to continually improve their ability to think and learn, students will have more long-term hope of changing and developing in time, many of the qualities they admire in others. This will release students from the harmful myth of permanence in ability currently being taught and improve life for all of us by reducing many escapes and other problems such as dropouts, drug/alcohol abuse, and suicide. This is my short version. My complete theory with many applications is on my home site. Feel free to read, copy and use. My complete theory on site also has applications for the African American Male Crisis, really a general Male Crisis, just affecting African American Males more so. If you have any questions regarding my theory just e-mail me.
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