Opening the doors to communication.

I have 2 projects in the works (well, none of them are started yet but it should only be a matter of weeks at the most) and they consist of giving tools to people to communicate. So far so good. But as we all know, some people (*cough* teenagers *cough*) sometime tend to abuse of their communication channels. I`m all for free speech and I`m not fond of censorship but sometimes, some comments or things said are just not having any positive or constructive consequences.
The first project is simply a pen pal one. I want some of my Japanese students to write a letter in English to a student in Canada. I`m convinced that my Japanese students` letters will pretty much all go like ; ``Hi! My name is JD and I like candies. Do you like candies?``. The only worry I had was about the letters coming back from Canada... As you probably know, Canadian teenagers tend to be a bit more... hmm...``knowledgeable`` about birds and bees, funny cigarettes and these kind of things.But I`m probably just paranoid; the students taking part in this exchange will probably know how to behave and won`t try to corrupt the nice and  innocent Japanese students. So no big deal.

The second project tho is a bit more ambitious. While discussing with a parent which also happens to be involved in the school`s publishing committee and the PTA (I think), we agreed that there would be a need for an online tool that would allow students, teachers, parents, alumni and everybody involved with the school to communicate about various subject. At the same time, that tool would promote the use of English in school related discussions.
Part of the solution is an online forum where all these people can exchange knowledge. When we say forum, we also say ``threads`` and ``posts``. All this usually involves moderators...
I have no problem being a moderator and making sure that the forum is not used in any bad ways (attacking someone`s reputation, cheating...) but I can only do it for posts that are written in English (or French, but that won`t happen). I`m pretty sure that most of the posts will be in Japanese because it will naturally be more efficient for most of the users even if we try to promote English communication.
I`m pretty sure that everyone will behave and use the forum for positive sharing of ideas and building a better community but all we need is one person with bad intentions and everything could turn into a  PR nightmare. We would be hoping for the official school`s webpage to link to our forum. Even if it would not be managed by the school itself, any drama happening on the forum would have consequences for the school. So we need to be very careful.
We need to think and discuss more to figure out what level of security we really need and if the whole thing is a good idea or not. I think the possibilities of a tool like that could be amazing and it would be a shame to take it away from this community even before it comes to life because we are scared of what one individual could do.
To be continued...

Procrastination

(La version francaise est ICI)

(from pro- ‘forward’ + crastinus ‘belonging to tomorrow’)

It seems that procrastination is really a world wide phenomenon. I’m pretty sure a good part of any country’s population “suffers” from it. I’m trying to rationalize that weird human behaviour and I’m having a really hard time doing so. Where in the evolution of our specie was procrasting an advantage? How did it end up being such a strong tendency for so many?

I can kind of understand why we tend to do it; avoiding painful or difficult tasks, being overwhelmed by the amount of work to do and being scared to take the first step, wanting to relax now… But that surely didn’t help us catch more mammoths.

Which leads me to wonder if our society of instant gratification made the problem worst. I guess we kind of loss that threat that we’ll starve during winter if we don’t stock enough food during autumn. It seems that pretty much whatever people do, there is a way for them to get bailed out.

Consequences would usually be one thing that gets us going… but few things really bring consequences that are truly worth not forgetting about. After a student gets detention a couple of times, he just doesn’t seem to be more motivated to do his homework the next time; “well, I prefer relaxing now… worst thing that could happen is I get another detention. I survived two already. No big deal.” And he goes back to playing video games…

So some people try to give themselves punishments or rewards in order to motivate themselves. Even if it is a pretty low level motivational tool (punishments and rewards), it works very well on kids and, it seems, on many adults too. The tricky thing is that to follow through with a “self punishment”, you need to be very disciplined… or masochist (how different these two things are from each other is open to discussion).

Ok… Discipline! Parents (some of them at least) try to teach their kids discipline, teachers try to teach their students discipline and most adults are trying to kick themselves in the butt to be more disciplined. It’s not easy. But it seems that good discipline is the key to achieving great things (or maybe obsessive-compulsive disorder is…). Being disciplined is being able to listen to the good little voice inside of you that reminds you about the consequences and being able to ignore the other voice that tells you to slack off and have fun now. No wonder why it’s so difficult to have a good discipline. I think there are two things that can help us be a bit more disciplined: our education and being intrinsically motivated.

How do we become intrinsically motivated? By caring, first; Which is not a given for most teenager thinking about school. Secondly, by having a passion for something. I think passion is one of the strongest weapon against procrastination, but we rarely have a passion for everything important that we should be doing. And finally, by keeping  the (good or bad) consequences in mind and being really concerned about them (so we kind of go back in a loop there).

I really wish there was a secret recipe to beat procrastination. When our students would be immune to Tony Robbins, we know there is no easy solutions. In the end, I guess the best we can do is the same as for everything else: find a decent balance between all the extremes. In this case,  between working too hard and mental health. It does seem that culturally, Japan has a tendency for the first one (which opens another huge discussion…), but teenagers are teenagers and some seem to be very fond of their mental health.

That being said, I do have some of the most motivated students I ever had right now… I think I’ll go ask them some tips…

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Hello, my name is JD and I’m a procrastinator.

Will you join my support group?

Some humor from professional procrastinators: Grad Students!