The definition of lawnmower parent is “one who goes to whatever lengths necessary to prevent their child from having to face adversity, struggle, or failure.” And it’s pretty much the same for a lawnmower teacher. The kids I teach are my children, and I did A LOT to help them along.
How to make a shift, in the interest of the students
Notice the difficulties students have without judgement.
Develop a strategy to help them resolve the difficulty.
Explicitly teach the strategy.
Create a system for monitoring use of the strategy.
Congratulate the student when he or she uses the strategy effectively.
author Fritz Breithaupt. “Sometimes we commit atrocities not out of a failure of empathy but rather as a direct consequence of successful, even overly successful, empathy,” he writes in his forthcoming book The Dark Sides of Empathy.
Breithaupt, who directs the Experimental Humanities Lab at Indiana University, argues that empathy is a morally ambiguous capacity, one that can lead us astray if we don’t understand its many sides.
People assume that empathy is good because it is good for the recipient of empathy — I’m actually skeptical about this.
How is empathy good for the empathizer?
“vampiristic empathy.”
Vampiristic empathy is a form of empathy where people want to manipulate the people they empathize with so that they can, through them, experience the world in such a way that they really enjoy it.
An extreme case of this is helicopter parenting. Helicopter parents are constantly trying to steer their kids in the directions they think are the right directions. Of course they want the best for their children.
In a sense, extreme helicopter parents are robbing their kids of a selfhood so that they can basically project their own self into these kids.
empathy can actually make us more polarized instead of bringing us together.
Humans are very quick to take sides. And when you take one side, you take the perspective of that side. You can see the painful parts of that perspective and empathize with them, and that empathy can fuel seeing the other side as darker and darker or more dubious.
Are there other downsides to empathy?
[Empathizers] may overextend themselves. If you are a medical doctor who sees a lot of suffering and pain every day, it can very quickly become too much. Something like a third of medical doctors suffer from “empathy burnout” that is so severe that it affects their functioning as doctors and their personal life. They become the victim of feeling empathy. My note: and some therapists can suffer of “hollow” empathy – an empathy not as a human feeling but as a tool to extend their ability/control in the room.
Also, “MInnesota Nice” can acquire a rather different meaning seen through the lens of this research
My core argument here is that in many cases of altruistic help or humanitarian aid, people actually don’t really empathize as much with the person in need. They identify more with the helper, the hero, the person who intervenes even if it’s an imaginary helper.
If you want recognition and if that doesn’t come, it can turn into resentment.
we can learn to use empathy in a somewhat controlled way. We can learn when to block it, when to not allow empathy to be manipulated and when to fully turn it on.
Yes, we are born with empathy, but it needs constant practice [to know] when to use it and when not to use it. So the dark sides are so important to know because they teach us that in some cases you shouldn’t empathize.
Anxiety is increasingly becoming a serious issue for American teens. Sixty-two percent of incoming freshman surveyed by the American College Health Association said they’d experienced overwhelming anxiety the year before, up from 50-percent in 2011.
Join us for an online training program that will provide faculty with critical information about FERPA, the federal statute that governs nearly all student records. Beginning with an overview of the FERPA framework, we will address issues that faculty commonly face—often without realizing the implications and risks—including:
Posting grades
Emailing with, and about, students
Writing recommendation letters
Using online tools and collaborative pedagogies
Speaking with (helicopter) parents
Administrators requesting student information
If you are searching for relevant scenarios and practical tips for better understanding how FERPA applies to everyday work of faculty, this online training is right for you.
Bonus Training Material and Quiz
Included in registration is a bonus lesson covering specific nuances of FERPA as it relates to faculty and an accompanying quiz which will provide a chance for you and your team to test your knowledge immediately before or after the webcast. This 20-minute training will cover:
Taking attendance, posting grades, and other course communication
The Do’s and Don’ts of identifying students online, in person, and on paper
After surveying more than 4,650 educators, we learned that teachers are essentially trying to do three things with data—each of which technology can dramatically improve:
The U.S. Department of Education has increasingly encouraged and funded states to collect and analyze information about students: grades, state test scores, attendance, behavior, lateness, graduation rates and school climate measures like surveys of student engagement.
The argument in favor of all this is that the more we know about how students are doing, the better we can target instruction and other interventions. And sharing that information with parents and the community at large is crucial. It can motivate big changes.
what might be lost when schools focus too much on data. Here are five arguments against the excesses of data-driven instruction.
The National Education Policy Center releases annual reports on commercialization and marketing in public schools. In its most recent report in May, researchers there raised concerns about targeted marketing to students using computers for schoolwork and homework. Companies like Google pledge not to track the content of schoolwork for the purposes of advertising. But in reality these boundaries can be a lot more porous. For example, a high school student profiled in the NEPC report often consulted commercial programs like dictionary.com and Sparknotes: “Once when she had been looking at shoes, she mentioned, an ad for shoes appeared in the middle of a Sparknotes chapter summary.”
4) Missing What Data Can’t Capture
Computer systems are most comfortable recording and analyzing quantifiable, structured data. The number of absences in a semester, say; or a three-digit score on a multiple-choice test that can be graded by machine, where every question has just one right answer.
5) Exposing Students’ “Permanent Records”
In the past few years several states have passed laws banning employers from looking at the credit reports of job applicants. Employers want people who are reliable and responsible. But privacy advocates argue that a past medical issue or even a bankruptcy shouldn’t unfairly dun a person who needs a fresh start.