Mental Toughness, Resiliency, and Endurance
This from Eide Neurolearning Blog: Mental Toughness, Resiliency, and Endurance . We touched on this briefly in class and it’s fascinating to look at why some people overcome obstacles while others are crushed by them. Of particular concern for me is the notion that some kids hit a “wall” in school around the middle school years, when some kids that have always had an easy time in school are confronted with more challenging work. These kids might lack the skills to deal with the challenge.
I’ve noticed that my daughter may have a propensity for this behavior because even now (at six years old) she will get frustrated when confronted with a mental challenge. For example, I was trying to get her to see that it doesn’t matter the order of numbers when adding: 5+3 is the same as 3+5. She grasped this quickly so we moved on to work with expressions of inequality, 5 >3, 3<5, which she also got easily. Then, I threw out some fill-in-the-blank problems in which she had to use <, >, or =. The last question I gave her made her really upset because she thought it was really hard: 572,681 + 439,887 ____ 439,887 + 572,681. All she seemed to see were the “big” numbers and she wouldn’t even let me ask her any questions so that she could arrive at the answer; instead, she just clammed up and got very discouraged. I felt annoyed and discouraged myself because I knew she could get it, but she gave up.
How do you talk to a 6-year old so she understands the importance of perseverance without making it a big deal or a battle? You know, something beyond “winners never quit and quitters never win.” Maybe it’s not something you can talk about.
Resiliency can be modeled for young people, and it’s never too young to begin praising effort and perseverance more than accomplishment, to encourage risk-taking and boldness, and to allow kids to fail, but being ever ready with unconditional emotional support, context (failure is one of the best ways to learn), and redirection toward the future.
In any event, according to the pdf linked at the bottom of the post, resilience is partly related to the ability to “let go” of negative experiences. Apparently we can now take pictures of the brain and observe this “letting go” while it is happening. Wild stuff.
October 2nd, 2005 - 2:30 pm
Per both your posts — I do regret not pulling the Elkin, but since lgs interested you, you may want to go further and look around self-esteem that’s where the concept is more fully developed and research has looked at the role it plays for us…
Per your example with your daughter, DO get into your Piaget and Vygotsky (at least to a reasonable degree) and see if you can make any connections related to 1) the concepts, according to P, that she should be able to grasp at this age and 2) the ways that you attempted to use scaffolding — might the step have been too great for her and perhaps another kind of breakdown of the task was needed??? Also, when a child “hits a wall” (great image) it may help to quickly back up to a piece thast she completed successfully, have her explain what/how she did… then see if she can guess (you can guess together) what ight come next, so you create an advanced organizer (see Ausubel) of some type.
Good start — please do get a bit more into the reading, with some explanation of your understanding of what was presented, then continue to use the excellent application connec tions I see here…