Meeting This Academic Year, Smartwatches and Stress, Our Idiosyncratic Minds
And thus the new academic year begins. For those mourning the end of summer, just remember that autumn dawning means our social media feeds will be filled with delights like these.
BE THE SPARK - Thoughts on Teaching and Learning
At long last, Karen Costa's new book An Educator's Guide to ADHD is available for pre-order.
In other educational development news, the psychologist Regan Gurung has been busy as heck, first chatting with Beckie Supiano about how he shores up student belongingness in large classes in this great piece for the Chronicle of Higher Education: How a Professor Helps Students Feel Seen. In between this and launching his academic year he also premiered a video overview of his book Study Like a Champ, giving high school and college students tips from cognitive science to maximize their study habits. I sent it to my kiddo and sibkid, currently both undergraduates (yes, both the book and the video).
Wondering how to meet the demands of the upcoming academic year with positivity and energy (rather than dismay and fatigue)? There is a Chronicle panel next week on Fighting Campus Fatigue highlighting (among others) the great Isis Artze-Vega. I hope to tune in from my commute, because September also means an uptick in time in the car.
In case you missed it, I also published some thoughts on the topic in an essay titled How to Get Through the Year–And Maybe Even Thrive.
STRIVING - Emotion, Motivation, Our Synchronous Selves
The dawn of the smartwatch era gave us much more information about the inner workings of our bodies than we ever had before – some might say too much information. Our wrist friends report on how much time we spent in REM sleep, how many times we stood up in a day, and how many breaths we're taking. Depending on your model, you might also get detailed reports about whether those numbers are ticking up or down, and little nudges when they go in the wrong direction. Your running speed arrow is moving in the wrong direction, Sarah!
These smartwatches, and also lower-tech fitness bands, also claim to track your emotions and stress levels. (Never mind that even people who have spent their entire careers studying affect can't agree what counts as an emotion or how to measure when people are having them).
Enter Eiko Fried, one of my favorite research psychologists. He and some colleagues decided to evaluate whether these smartwatch reports of stressful times have any validity. They tracked the data of over 800 smartwatch wearers over three months. Critically, they also pinged these folks throughout the day and asked them to report on what they were currently doing, thinking, and feeling. At the end of each day, these participants also completed a short reflection on their best and worst experiences.
They discovered that there was little correlation between the smartwatches reporting people were stressed and people actually feeling stressed. The authors attribute this largely to the fact that smartwatches rely primarily on heart rate and how it varies as a measure of stress. Your heart rate might indeed spike because you are feeling stressed. But it also might spike when someone you are attracted to holds your gaze for an extra beat, or when you remember you have leftover curry for lunch in the fridge, or when you get a bolt of inspiration on a project.
We're a long way from our devices being able to read us emotionally. Which is probably a good thing, honestly.
You can read a pre-print of the article here and a chattier news report here.
OUR MONSTERS, OURSELVES - Uncertainty, Challenges, Mental Health
In Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, Peter Felten and Isis Artze-Vega highlight three books to help us think through motivating young people and supporting their mental health – and I was honored to see that one of the books was my own Mind Over Monsters.
In the article, they note that all three books highlight the need for balance between challenge and support. Balance between compassion and challenge (as I argue), between standards and support (Yeager), and between backbone and heart (Wisdom). Approaching changing times with such balance can open up new avenues of possibility. "What stories about this moment might create space for possibility, purpose, and even joy," Felten and Artze-Vega write, "both for ourselves and our students?" Read the rest of their great analysis and applications to change in higher education here.
INCIDENTALLY - The Many Delights of Our Idiosyncratic Minds
I was fascinated by this longform piece in The New Yorker about the runaway success of the indie film studio A24. Films produced by the studio are so different from each other – Midsommar's bright sunshine horror, Babygirl's risky provocations, the inspiring chaos of Everything Everywhere All at Once. But they are also so different from everything else Hollywood has to offer. They are unique visions that only individual human minds having lived one set of particular experiences, combined with one set of biological tendencies of mood and thought, can inspire. (This is not about AI. But it also is). The piece also digs into how A24 also has a deep trust in the instincts and decisions of the individual filmmakers and their vision – so different from the market-tested, remade-four-times, run-through-AI slop that seems to fill theaters and television screens these days.
Trust human creativity.