The Psychology Of Optimal Experience

The Latin teacher, who taught in a room in a different corridor from where I taught

, disappeared sometime in late November or early December. When I asked what had become of her, I learned that she had been fired. As a new teacher, I was personally concerned. This could happen to me. I eventually learned, from a supervising teacher, that the Latin teacher had been fired for bending back students' fingers to control them. Apparently, she had bent fingers back until students had cried and become submissive in class, but reported the practice to their Merrell Shoes parents. Clearly, the two of us had been socialized into quite different methods of teaching. My school administration did not approve of the result of her socialization.

I think that there is no question that teachers whose classroom practice is dominated by one of the paradigms to teaching that Peter Sma-gorinsky adumbrates have been socialized into using them. But the fact of socialization does not render them equivalent. The teachers in the traditional program Peter describes did receive positive yearly evaluations, tenure, and opportunities for sabbaticals, but all of that positive feedback does not mean they were effective, only that their administrators did not know any better which is not unusualand so rewarded them.

It happens that this same school was the object of study by the psychologist Mihaly Csikszent-mihalyi as one of the several studies leading to his well-known discussion of Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Here is Csikszentmihalyi's description of optimal experience based on thousands of interviews and questionnaires with people in many widely diverse cultures and activities ranging from motorcycling among Japanese youth groups to mainstream scientific research and to meditation among elderly Koreans.

When people reflect on how it feels when their experience is most positive, they mention at least one, and often all, of the following. First, the experience usually occurs when we confront tasks we have a chance of completing. Second, we must be able to concentrate on what we are doing. Third and fourth, the concentration is usually possible because the task undertaken has clear goals and provides immediate feedback. Fifth, one acts with a deep but effortless involvement that removes from awareness the worries and frustrations of everyday life. Sixth, enjoyable experiences allow people to exercise a sense of control over their actions. Seventh, concern for the self disappears, yet paradoxically the sense of self emerges stronger after the flow Merrell Shoes On Sale experience is over. Finally, the sense of the duration of time is altered; hours pass by in minutes, and minutes can stretch out to seem like hours. The combination of all these elements causes a sense of deep enjoyment that is so rewarding people feels that expending a great deal of energy is worthwhile simply to be able to feel it.

Most of us have experienced such feelings on at least certain occasions. In the midst of such experience, one loses track of time and other responsibilities, even certain needs. It is as though everything else disappears from the radar of our conscious state.

by: Scofield

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