personal reflections and thoughts from others

tags: mental health, interactions, education

[thoughts-that-made-me-think]

Leadership isn’t always being in an official titled role. You can still contribute and be impactful and help people just by doing it. You can even be a better leader - because by not taking on the official role, you can let yourself step back and take breaks when you need them.

helpful thing my manager told me today

[thoughts-that-made-me-think]

me: I have such high standards for myself and put so much effort into everything. I just feel so tired, and I need to treat myself better. I really am trying hard to fix this.

them: You're always trying hard, though. For things to get better, maybe give yourself some more slack.

[thoughts-that-made-me-think]

me: But I have limited time, and there's this balance between spending my time on things that are most important to me, and on more technical things that employers and stuff are looking for. There's always overlap, but it's hard to prioritize.

woman running the workshop: It is a balance, but... maybe you need to challenge your assumptions of others' expectations.

[thoughts-that-made-me-think]

I think that before therapists, parents often would have naturally have taken on that role. They know a lot about the context of the things you've done when you were younger and the things that have led to how you feel today.

my host’s manager, when I was telling her how my therapist didn’t seem to have enough context to help me 

[thoughts-that-made-me-think]

Nurturing this sense of wonder should be education’s highest goal; failing to nurture it is the central tragedy of our current system.

The One World School House, Salman Khan (page 58)

[thoughts-that-made-me-think]

“Taking responsibility for education *is* education; taking responsibility for learning *is* learning. From the student’s perspective, only by taking responsibility does true learning become possible.”

The One World School House, Salman Khan (pages 42-43)

[thoughts-that-made-me-think]

In a traditional academic model, the time allotted to learn something is fixed while the comprehension of the concept is variable. [...] What should be fixed is a high level of comprehension and what should be variable is the amount of time students have to understand a concept.

The One World School House, Salman Khan (page 39)

[thoughts-that-made-me-think]

...sometimes the presence of a teacher can be a source of student thought-paralysis. From the teacher’s perspective, what's going on is a helping relationship; but from the student’s point of view, it’s difficult if not impossible to avoid an element of confrontation.

The One World School House, Salman Khan (page 22)

[thoughts-that-made-me-think]

I wanted to be a tutor who genuinely shared his thinking and expressed it in a conversational style, as if I was speaking to an equal to was fundamentally smart but just didn’t fully understand the material at hand.

The One World School House, Salman Khan (page 18)

[thoughts-that-made-me-think]

The elements of instruction … should be presented to the mind in childhood, but not with any compulsion. Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion has no hold on the mind. Therefore do not use compulsion, but let early education be rather a sort of amusement; this will better enable you to find out the natural bent of the child.

Plato, The Republic

[thoughts-that-made-me-think]

if you push yourself for no reason other than "it’s expected", you’ll be miserable and regret it later

[thoughts-that-made-me-think]

https://medium.com/@aliciatweet/overcoming-impostor-syndrome-bdae04e46ec5

[brittanyjoyal]

Stop saying sorry. Say thank you instead. When you say, ‘Sorry for being a jerk,’ the other person is forced to either call you a jerk or say it wasn’t a big deal. Instead, say, “Thank you for being so patient with me,” so the other person has a reason to say they love you.

I saw this gem on Reddit tonight.  It was posted under a topic of “What ‘little’ things you can do to improve your relationship with your significant other.”  (via lamegrownup)

[thoughts-that-made-me-think]

me: most of it is fun - or at least it would be - but when I take on too much it becomes stressful

them: I think there's a balance between commitments and stuff that you do for enjoyment that you can drop at any time

[thoughts-that-made-me-think]

I read/heard somewhere once that stereotypes exist to help us categorize things - we place things in boxes to allow for fast judgements to save us time and energy in situations where that's important. 

I think that one of the reasons I've been so tired lately is because I've been using that time and energy to counter fast judgements and ingrained behaviour. I am so glad I'm educating myself and fixing bad things, and I know minority groups have no choice but to deal with these things, but there is so much work to be done and I have so so many thoughts and I am so tired. So tired.

[thoughts-that-made-me-think]

I spend so much time seeking wisdom from others, and meaningful reflections from within myself - why not put them somewhere that's easy to reference later?