#gameful

It’s really hit the fan, hasn’t it?

Novel coronavirus (COVID19) has impacted all of us in a variety of ways, from the advent of “social distancing” to the mass closure of businesses, educational institutions and public amenities the world over. For me, I have had to start reimagining the last quarter of my year through the lens of ‘pandemic pedagogy;’ envisioning what it means for me to be teaching students during an era characterized by frustration, confusion and institutional madness.

I want to continue in the path I’ve been on, but I’ve decided that I (and my students) need to feel license to care about our health a little more than usual. The way I want to do this is by returning to the root of my Year of Teaching Adventurously: the resilience principles of SuperBetter.

On this “Resilience Guide” there are several lines drawn to give students (and teachers) space to plan their ways of engaging in the 5 areas of health that I encourage all of us to engage in: physical, mental, social, emotional and holistic health.

https://www.instagram.com/p/B97RxZeAaD5/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

The vocabulary that is key to understand are Power Ups, Quests, Bad Guys and Allies. I’ve covered each of these terms at length in my previous blog project, The Gameful Guru, but some of them bear clarification.

I want to focus on Power Ups and Quests, because they comprise the greater portion of this document. Power Ups are categories of adaptive and supportive activities, tasks or items of consumption that can help you get stronger, more focused, happier and/or more connected with your social circle. They fall into four main categories, each relating to the four forms of resilience.

I want to provide examples that you can share with your students (or your fellow teachers):

Physical: Drink a Glass of Water (self explanatory) Sit Up, Stand Up (Get out of your seat at least once every hour and do 10 sit ups) Sing At The Top of Your Lungs (improve respiratory control and mood by singing a favorite song at full voice) Mental: Read a Book, Undistracted (Set a timer for X minutes and read a book without stopping; turn off your phone and read until the time is up) Snap to It (Snap your fingers exactly 50 times) Countdown (Count backwards from 100 by a number other than 5) Emotional: Cute Animal Overload (For five minutes, look at pictures of baby animals) Good Vibes Only (Listen to an upbeat song that you like; shoot for a positive mood) Do Something Fun (Set a timer for X minutes and do any leisure activity you enjoy! Give yourself permission to enjoy yourself) Social: Giving Gratitude (Send a text to three different friends thanking them for some aspect of their friendship with you) Future Boost (Make plans to communicate or see two people sometime in the near future; use this to give yourself something to look forward to) Mutual Aid (Make an Ally by sharing your Quest with another person; Offer to be an Ally for them in their goals)

Power Ups are important for all aspects of life, but they’re especially important when you have a specific Quest you are pursuing, or an Epic Win you are working toward. Sometimes Quests are things other people write for you, and other times, they are tasks you take on for yourself. Quests can be just another way of framing your daily to-dos, but if you add a fun factor, an unnecessary obstacle to overcome, or a social element, suddenly Quests become something gameful to behold!

A Physical Quest would be Hydrate or Die-Drate! (Drink 5 glasses of water in 3 hours; maintain healthy habits of hydration and exercise!) A Mental Quest would be Be Your Own Taskmaster! (Choose three items on your To Do List and set 25 minute Pomodoro estimates for how long it would take to complete them in their entirety; test your estimates by taking on one item and racing against the clock to complete them faster than your estimated time!)

An Emotional Quest would be 1:1, One On One (Improve your Positive to Negative emotion ratio by spending one on one time with a trusted friend; choose two emotional power ups each to activate with each other’s help!)

A Social Quest would be Allies, Assemble! (Practice social connectivity by choosing two friends of yours to share in your resilience-based Questing; exchange Power Up ideas and help each other take on at least 1 Bad Guy)

I came up with all of these quests in less than 10 minutes, and you can too!

Here is your first Quest from me: Come up with two ways for you to engage with each of the four forms of resilience (Power Ups) that does not require you to endanger yourself medically. Message me with what you come up with! Until next time, Life Will Pass Through, Keep Being You!

I knew when I started this blog that there was a relatively high chance that things would go this way. Notice I didn’t say “end up”—I’m not finished, not by a long shot.

October—and, wow, most of November—has gone by with nary an update to this blog, and although I know no one is depending on this blog for their livelihood or anything like that, I do feel some apology is in order. It isn’t that I haven’t had time to write. (It’s rarely a matter of time with writers.) For me, it’s been a situation, or a string of situations, where I’ve felt that I haven’t lived up to my goals, my idealized identity as the Mindful Mentor. I’ve continued to teach and mentor my students, but in a lot of ways I’ve let my personal goals fall by the wayside, and I feel like this has impacted my teaching practice in a couple ways.

For one, although I feel like I’m handling my largest (Gateway) teaching load to date with relative cool headedness, the small things seem to be falling off. I’ve moved from trying to find opportunities to work harder to figuring out shortcuts, ways to get away with putting in as little advance effort as possible. I’ve become less adventurous, and in small ways, less effective.

That said, there are things that I have felt good about. I have a strong rapport with my students. I get to laugh with them on a regular basis. I’ve been giving them regular tests and quizzes and they’re doing pretty well on them (and not because they’re easy). I’m gradually figuring out how to guide students through the essay writing process without too much nitpicking, and without outright telling them what to write. We’re almost to the end of our second quarter and we haven’t stopped updating character sheets (though occasionally there have been weeks where I have forgotten and have had to retrace steps later). And despite being initially wary of the workload associated with five regular Gateway students, it has been much more manageable than when I had four Gateway students last year because I only have three grade levels to work and plan within.

Thanksgiving break was much needed, but I don’t feel like I’m dragging myself to the finish line. Or I suppose I can say, I don’t plan on having to drag myself to the finish line. I’m making shifts in my health and my habits to bring me closer to the track I was on at the beginning of the semester. Just like how I started out the semester, and this journey as a whole, I want to set concrete, measurable goals for myself that will help me make progress.

Physically, I want to get back in shape and stop neglecting my physical health. My starter goal will be to go to the gym on my own for an hour-long workout at least once a week. Workouts with other people are also on the agenda, but I need to start by being my own motivator.

Mentally, I need to restart my meditation routine. I’ve been getting better about waking up early enough to get to work in time to meditate, but for whatever reason, I’ve kept myself from doing it recently. 10 minutes daily (Monday-Friday) is my minimum goal, and once I have that down, I’ll bump it back up to 20 minutes.

Interpersonally, I want to reach out to my family more, especially my extended family that doesn’t live near me. I am blessed to have three living grandparents, and a gallery of wonderful aunts and uncles, but I don’t feel like I share enough of myself with them, or check in with them often enough. Although I don’t think setting a goal of calling each one of my extended relatives once a week is realistic, I can set a goal of contacting three family members a week, with the goal of getting to everyone on my list by the end of the month.

Personally, I want to pick up my reading and writing habits again, including but not limited to what I do for this blog. Adventure 1 was productive—more productive than anticipated in some respects—but Adventure 2 has had its issues. 30 minutes of nightly reading with planned communication with writing friends about my novel seems like a fair goal at the moment. My current reading goal is to finish reading The Hobbit before the end of the semester, so I’ll need to pick up the pace.

Professionally, the main thing I need under control is my regularity with Notes Home and submitting grades. I write Notes Home every week, but whereas I used to write them on Fridays and Sundays fairly consistently, I’ve recently struggled to meet this standard, finishing them over the course of the work week. Before this evening (Sunday 6pm), I have a goal to be completely caught up with my Notes Home backlog so I feel good going into next week. I also plan on being as up to date with grades as I can be by Sunday evening (with only recent quizzes/tests that are on my desk being left for Monday morning.)

And lastly, at the very least, I will publish a blog post next weekend checking in on these goals, but if I can muster up the energy, I will also write a blog post during the work week as well. I want to be excited to share my progress with you all, not ashamed that I’ve come up short. It’s okay to not be all the way there yet, but I can’t gripe about it if I don’t try.

Life will pass through, keep being you.

“I want to be better than I was, better than I am.”

I say these words to myself from time to time, generally after I am reminded of something I’m ashamed of, or when I feel myself slipping into bad habits. It’s a mantra, almost a compulsion, that I hold with me. It started out as something shorter, though:

“I want to get better.”

These words, which some might recognize as lyrics from a certain Bleachers song, sum up a lot of how I used to think of myself and my struggles, especially when I was struggling. It bears a connotation of recovery, as if my dysfunction were an illness I was trying to correct, and this isn’t exactly the case. I don’t want to get better, I want to be better. I want to do better. And I can.

Another oft-used phrase: “I don’t know what I’m doing—I’m trying, but I’m failing.” This one crops up whenever I make even the smallest mistake. Maybe I didn’t lock my house door when I left for work. Maybe I stayed in bed too long. It doesn’t always stand up to scrutiny—am I trying? Is missing the mark the same as failing?—but it doesn’t have to. It’s a reaction to a feeling more than anything, and when the feeling takes hold, the voice that emerges takes on a life of its own.

This negative voice doesn’t always come to the surface, and lately, it hasn’t been dominant. But the positive voice that started me out on this project hasn’t always been in play, either.

“Life will pass through, keep being you.” That was the motto I gave the Mindful Mentor for my first Adventure, and really, though it is addressed to you, the audience, it is something I want to remind myself of, each time I make a misstep, each time I come up short. Life has been passing through, and when it comes to being me, maintaining my habits and continuing to work toward my goals, I haven’t exactly stopped, but I don’t think I’ve been my best.

I think something that mindfulness is teaching me is being accepting of who I am, in each individual moment. I’m allowed to want more for myself, to want more out of myself, but I can also accept what I’m able to give on a given day. Some days, it’s hard to get out of bed. I still do it, but maybe I don’t give myself enough time after getting up to get to work early, meditate and prepare for the day’s challenges. Maybe I have only enough to get to work and get settled before the first (proverbial) bell. And on those days, maybe that is my best.

It doesn’t stop me from being discontented, from being unsatisfied with myself and my actions. Being mindful doesn’t mean giving mediocrity a pass. To me, being mindful means taking stock of my thoughts and feelings, and deciding for myself which of those thoughts and feelings, if any, has the power to shape how my day goes. I’m not rejecting negativity, I’m giving all things their due consideration. And if I’ve truly done my job, then I should come out ahead more often than not.

Adventure 2 began last week, and my students set new goals for the quarter. I had each of them create documents meant to track their regular engagement with these goals, and we’ll generally be checking them at the beginning and the end of each week. I want to write about what I settled on when it comes to Discipline and Openness, because there are still some things I want to finish hashing out, but for now I just want to set an intention for my week.

This week, I want to be better than I was last week, with regards to my habits. I didn’t do any nightly reading and I completely dropped the ball on meditation. Not only that, but I didn’t write any blog posts. I did do a decent job with teaching and planning last week, but it was a shorter span of days to work with, and in any case, I can’t rest on my laurels.

It might be slow at first, but I don’t want to be all or nothing with my habits. I want to do things every day, but I know sometimes I will miss the mark. I need to be okay with missing and trying harder the next day. Today counts, and tomorrow will count too.

Well, this sure has been a week.

After a rocky start, I think I managed to make it through a solid week of teaching, planning and grading, only missing out on some meditating toward the end and some nightly reading (I’m still choosing what book to revisit--Vote now on your phones!). My adventurers are about to finish Adventure 1 and I have a few things to prepare for to make sure we tie things up nicely--and set ourselves up for even better adventuring going forward!

Some main happenings this week--I went through Unit 0 with The Nutritious Napper and The Bodacious Bookworm. Given I wasn’t actually there to teach the Guided Notes on SuperBetter, the unit felt a little anemic by comparison to how it seemed the first time around. I don’t necessarily want it to be longer, but I might choose a different chapter to read from Mindset, or maybe pair the Passage Response Reflection with a different text entirely the next time I teach it.

The Relentless Wordsmith and I worked through a few selections from The Canterbury Tales, and I think having a way of taking notes while we read is going to be important in general. We’ve taken notes on nearly everything we’ve read and it’s helped him to do better on his homework, so I shouldn’t let that stuff slide. The Studious Scholar and I are reading Death of a Salesman, which I actually haven’t read until now (I remember reading All My Sons in college, which is not the same thing.) Meanwhile, the Henotic Health Advisor started writing an original short story involving anthropomorphic rodents and interspecies warfare! All in all, our last few lessons seem to be writing themselves.

Less clear is where things are going in Quarter 2. For our next Adventure, I have a few goals for what I want to accomplish. The first goal is mechanical, and also tied to pacing. I want to make sure that, at least one day a week, my students get some time to revise earlier work. This means I have to give more feedback overall, but the main purpose behind this, gamefully speaking, is to give them more opportunities to earn points to Openness and Discipline. These two traits, along with Bravery, have been lacking much purpose in the current design of my teaching and learning game. They are, like the main attributes, accumulative in nature, but rather than representing a skill that can be improved upon, they are more like badges of honor, marks of going above and beyond with assignments and responding to feedback. Therefore, as I’ve discussed with my students already, in the next Adventure, Openness, Discipline and Bravery will become currency to be spent on bonuses relating to homework, quizzes and other things I’m still working out.

In order to make this work, I need to be more specific and consistent with what I award these points for. Bravery has been under utilized thus far, and I haven’t worked out exactly what I should qualify as a Brave act. The main candidate I have in mind has to do with the less-assisted parts of the writing process. If students spend time out of class doing a substantial amount of writing, venturing into the unknown, I can reward them not just with positive sub-deadline grades, but Bravery. In hindsight, I could have given the Relentless Wordsmith quite a bit of Bravery for his ability to maintain a consistent pace during his Beowulf essay writing process. On the other hand, the Studious Scholar may have missed out on Bravery but might have been incentivized to get more of his work done in a timely manner if the reward for accumulating Bravery was good enough. Lots of things to figure out, but I’ve got time.

Another goal I have for Adventure 2 is to do something interesting with the Writing Prompt routine I have in place. At first Weekly Goals and Narrative Reflections were the name of the game and generally went fine, but I feel like as time has gone on the prompts have become repetitive and as a result, uninspiring. To increase opportunities for creative expression (and thus Magic gains) I want to make my writing prompts more varied and demanding. Granted, we will still probably keep them to about 7 minutes in length, so I don’t want them to be too elaborate. It will be a delicate balance to strike.

There’s still one more week remaining in Adventure 1, and I’m determined to finish things strong--and maintain some momentum as we move into Adventure 2! I’ll lay out my plan of attack on Sunday.

Life will pass through, keep being you.

I used to like sick days.

Mostly, I think, because a lot of the sick days I’ve taken as an adult have been mental health days. The reality of the work I do is that it pays okay, and I enjoy doing it, but when I miss a day, or am otherwise a day short, I really feel it. This week started out pretty well, and my first day with my new adventurers went well, but last night I tossed and turned dealing with a sore throat. It didn’t end up amounting to much—a strep test at the Minute Clinic yielded a negative result and I left the pharmacy with ibuprofen and some numbing cough drops—but to be safe, I stayed home from work. Now I’m looking ahead to Thursday, usually a brief, laid-back affair, and I feel, well, anxious. I have quizzes to write. It’s only my second day with two of my students and we’re about to kick off Unit 0, and there’s a part of me that’s worried that it’s not going to go well.

The thing is, there’s a lot of signs that things will be fine. I’ve gone through this process smoothly already this year, and I know I can pull it off again. I just need to let myself enjoy the process, get back in there, and finish the week strong.

I’ve been reading again, and on the days I’ve been teaching, I’ve managed to get my meditation time in, which has felt good. Taking time during the day to just breathe, to pause and let my mind focus on one thing at a time, has been helpful, and I plan to use it to get me to the finish line. Today may have been hard, and it may feel like I’ve been set back, but I know that momentary frustration can’t beat the Mindful Mentor so easily.

For tomorrow, I have two adventurers to induct into my system, and three quizzes to administer to my remaining adventurers. The Relentless Wordsmith has been reading the Canterbury Tales and has learned about the Middle Ages. The Studious Scholar spent some time reading Puritan poetry, and The Henotic Health Advisor—many adjectives beginning with H have cycled in and out of his title—has been reading some short stories from the likes of Edgar Allan Poe and Truman Capote. The quizzes I need to write for them are not necessarily going to be punishing in difficulty, but they should cover a decent breadth of information.

The main objective of tomorrow’s introductory lesson is to introduce them to their character sheets and to have them add one more paragraph to their Intro to Me letters, which they should have completed while I was gone. We’ll discuss their letters and brainstorm their Personal Pursuits and Growth Goals for the last part of this Adventure, and I’ll be able to document our discussions here later this week.

I know I’m capable, and I’m not going to let a day off and Thursday jitters keep me from taking on my challenges with gusto.

I’ll update you on how it all goes. Until then, life will pass through, keep being you.