The Self-Driven Child

Grades, Rakes, and Reflection: Helping Kids Do Less To Do Better - With Teacher & Writer Tim Donahue

• Ned Johnson • Season 1 • Episode 37

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In this episode, I sit down with Tim Donahue, a seasoned high school English teacher and a writer, to dive into the pressures of grade inflation, the impact on student resilience, and why kids today feel overwhelmed by academic and extracurricular demands. Tim’s unique perspective, drawn from years in the classroom and as a published writer, sheds light on how grade inflation and the drive for high grades may actually be compromising students' learning and mental health.

Together, we explore how students and parents can navigate the academic landscape to foster genuine learning, creativity, and stress tolerance. Tim also shares his insights on the importance of doing less to achieve more, advocating for a balanced approach that prioritizes reflection and meaningful engagement over relentless achievement. 

 

Episode Highlights:
[04:12] - Discussing grade inflation and its effects on teaching, learning, and the integrity of feedback.
[08:13] - The role of resilience in education and how students benefit from realistic feedback, even if it means lower grades.
[12:00] - How inflated grades can deprive students of vital information about their strengths and weaknesses.
[17:18] - Examining the disconnect between high school and college expectations, and the effect on students’ mental health.
[23:37] - Tim’s passion for “less is more” and the importance of brevity and reflection in learning.
[36:39] - The impact of recreational screen time on student well-being and the hidden benefits of spending time in nature.
[43:27] - Finding peace and mindfulness through activities like raking leaves and the restorative power of nature.

 

Links & Resources:

 

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Tim Donahue:

From my perspective as a teacher, my main tool is feedback. It's harder to give direct feedback when I feel kind of the pressures to go along with the tide of giving higher grades. And if you are an outlier and you give an essay that you think should get a B minus A B minus you may have to stand in there and weather the blows a little bit. I had a very smart student who had graduated. She was a freshman at Brown at the time, and she wrote to me and she said, I wrote my first essay for English, and I got a B on it, and it's the first time I haven't gotten an A on an English assignment in years, and I was so thankful that the teacher did that, because we sat down and, you know, he talked to, you know, so ideally, that's what grading is, right? It's a checkpoint, and it's a check in, and it's a chance to improve. You know, when things just get A's, when you hand them in, I really think it belies the whole process of learning. So you know, and I know that I'm not alone in this voice.

Ned Johnson:

Welcome to the self driven child podcast. I'm your host, Ned Johnson and co author with Dr William stick of the books the self chiven child the science and sense of giving your kids more control over their lives. And what do you say? How to talk with kids, to build motivation, stress, tolerance and a happy home. Do you ever feel like there's incessant pressure on your kid to do more and on you to get your kid to do more? Ever increasing grades, ever increasing competitiveness, both in and out of school, and never enough time to well, do anything else. Me too. I'm really excited for this podcast, talking with Tim Donohue, an excellent educator who spent a lot of time thinking and writing about great inflation and the ever ratcheting pressure involved in that, and about how we need to help kids do less to do better. I'm Ned Johnson, and this is the self driven child podcast. Well, Hi, Tim. Thanks for making time for this conversation.

Tim Donahue:

Well, you're welcome. Thank

Ned Johnson:

you for having me for folks who haven't yet read some of your stuff. Can you talk a little bit about the work that you do and the writing that you

Tim Donahue:

do? Well, so my obviously, my real job is I'm a teacher. Yay high school English for 30 years. I did take one year off a few years ago, but it's been a pretty straight run in my practice. I mostly teach writing and environmental issues, but for a very long time, I've been a very competitive athlete, and as that has sort of abated, I've now taken on the sport of writing. So

Ned Johnson:

yeah, I'm not the athlete that you are, but, but I have friends who are really competitive at many things. And the question that my friend Leah, the question that pops to mind is, how do you win at that? So anyway,

Tim Donahue:

well, it is a quite a straining I find it a full body exhausting experience to try to write well. But around the time of the pandemic, I tinkered around and I wrote something well, just about my neighborhood, Primal Scream therapy that we engaged in, just to kind of get some community and stress relief during covid. And I wrote an essay, and honestly, it was the first thing I had written in probably a decade, and somehow, just I got the timing right, and the New York Times published it as a guest essay. So that gave me this really false sense that, wow, this is no problem. But then, you know, so I've since then, really been making a deliberate practice of trying to write essays. Mostly I will write about environmental issues and education, and some about endurance sports. That's been my practice in the last five years or so.

Ned Johnson:

I love that. So talking about a false sense, I will use that to pivot into a piece that you wrote about great inflation. And I love to hear a little bit about, you know, it's probably not unique, but, but yours was certainly one of the early pieces I saw about this. What were some of the things that you were seeing that led you to this and why those things are a problem?

Tim Donahue:

Well, you know, it's actually, uh, you may be referring to my New York Times piece about great inflation, but thank you. I actually wrote something a couple years prior for USA Today on the same subject. Since then, I think I first wrote about it in 2021 it's, I think, just been on the rise. It's just, it's in the water of teaching. It's something that nobody really likes, but, but everybody is contending with. I think it really impedes instruction in a whole host of ways. From my perspective as a teacher, my main tool is feedback, and it's harder to give direct feedback that gains traction when I feel kind of the pressures to, you know, go along with the tide of giving higher grades and. You know, in both of these pieces I've written about this subject, I will confess that my own estimation of grades has probably increased over the years, which I found from the comments that have, you know, accompanied these pieces I have written, you know, so what are we going to do about it? I don't know. It's a collective action that can't be tackled just by one teacher. It's, frankly, very unfair if I'm out of step, you know, right, my colleagues about it. So, yeah, right, you'll

Ned Johnson:

get at least a little bit of blowback, I would guess. Yeah.

Tim Donahue:

I mean, you know, this is obviously a big reason why, why it happens? Because if you are an outlier and you give an essay that you think should get a B minus A B minus you may have to stand in there and weather the blows a little bit. Obviously, this can be a very learning experience. You know, it's funny. I when I did the Times piece, I had a very smart student who had graduated in 2023 so that, you know, spring and the piece came out in the fall. She was a freshman at Brown at the time, and she wrote to me, and she said, I wrote my first essay for English, and I got a B on it, and it's the first time I haven't gotten an A on an English assignment, you know, in years. And I was so thankful that the teacher did that, because we sat down and, you know, he talked to, you know, so ideally, that's what grading is, right? It's a checkpoint, and it's a check in, and it's a chance to improve. You know, when things just get A's, when you hand them in, I really think it belies the whole process of learning. So, you know, and I know that I'm not alone in this voice, but the collective action is challenging. Yeah,

Ned Johnson:

yeah. One thing that comes to mind, jumps to mind for me is, in addition to this thread of ever increasing grades and like woe Ben and blah, blah, blah We all know about and are concerned about, ever increasing levels of anxiety and other stress related disorders in young people, my observation is that, for so many kids, is as long as they get an A they feel safe. They feel safe. They feel safe. But a little bit like the work of Ali libo, which some of folks who read what Bill and I write, know about that, in the moment you feel safe, but you don't develop stress tolerance without having at least a modicum of stress. That's how you know the ability to have something hard and then feels a sense of control and be able to do something about it. So to the point of your your student, who's kind enough to write back from Brown, she got a Grade B that was probably short of what she was looking for and writing for. But then presumably, spend some real time digging with her professor. Spend some real time digging that paper, and not only worked her grade up to probably where she wanted to be, but got better as a writer, and sort of increased, one would think her internal locus of control that I now have greater tools and skills to do what I want to do, and I can bounce back from, you know, Air quotes, terrible I know where Henry terrible grade, and it seems to me that that kids I see so many kids, are super perfectionistic, who go all the way through who never get anything less than an A, and they're terrified at the prospect, in part because they've never had one.

Tim Donahue:

You touch on a concept that I think I try to convey in that Times piece is when we give all these really high grades without the process behind them. I mean, first of all, we lose the integrity of the writing process. I mean, yeah, for instance, my brother is a professional journalist, and, oh, my god, the drafts he goes through. And I always tell the story of not perhaps the greatest role model, but Hemingway. You know, when he wrote the last page of, I think, for whom the bell tolls. It said that he went through 57 drafts, and wow. Robert Caro talking about his process, he says, you know, by the end of the day, you see a lot of crumple pieces of paper on the floor. That's one thing you lose, but you also lose what you were living to is resilience, right? This idea that, okay, I'm gonna look at my work. I'm going to be self critical, and by doing so, I can improve and again, honor that that process you're touching on, the mental health piece, I think we see really good grades as a palliative against that, right? I don't want to encourage my students misery. I will go against my own principles for the sake of my students, and that's a difficult thing for teachers who care. Like most teachers, right? They see we teach individuals, we don't teach commodities, and it's hard to see our kids crying or adding to their stress. But I do think there's a tipping point where to sort of quote the headline of that piece. If everybody gets an A, nobody gets an A, right so thus that brings in that narcissism of small differences that you know Freud was talking about.

Ned Johnson:

I love that that was new to me, how we just have, like this tiny,

Tim Donahue:

tiny distinction. If. Don't live up to that. Oh, my God. What is wrong with us? Thus we implode that sense of mental health risk, you know, whereas, let's say, you know, like easier analogy is, if you're giving awards, we always, as well as schools, we give awards. If you know, in a senior class, one person gets the award out of, I don't know, 200 well, that person is really exceptional. And if I'm in the 199 I don't feel like a chump. But you know, suddenly, if, like, 77 kids get the the highest honor, well, what's wrong with me? You know? Yeah, so this is the issue, yeah.

Ned Johnson:

Well, you know, when I read that quote about the narcissism of small differences, it made me, it made me think of the movie American Psycho, if you since you remember the scene where they're, they're comparing their business cards, and he's sort of losing their mind about, you know, this or that shade of white, and there's, there's no discernible difference, right? But they're kind of, kind of losing their minds there. Yeah, you know your point, about 77 out of 100 get it then that the folks who aren't feel like I must be the biggest dope in the world. The other thought that it jumps to mind for me is that with grades, when there's wild grade inflation, one of the things that it does is deprive people, not only of feedback, of Hey Ned, this paper could be better if, but it also deprives me of accurate information about what I'm good at and what I'm not as good at, right? You make this wonderful point and forget which article we'll pivot into helping kids do better by doing less in a moment, but that we tend to think about high school and college as separate entities, rather than kind of an eight year arc, right, of developing writing skills, you know, resiliency and future selves. And it strikes me that when people get kind of A's on everything, it doesn't really give me feedback. Of, like, actually, Ned, you're pretty terrible in romance languages. Maybe that's not the thing for you, you know.

Tim Donahue:

Yeah. I mean, so many issues there, you know, okay, in terms of your last point about direct feedback about Ed or any particular student, you know, I don't think that's necessarily a lost in translation from high school to college thing. I still think there is room for the role of the individual teacher, yeah, to get to know a student's learning style and to work with them on particular skills. I mean, for instance, I know with my students, you know, I get to know who they are over the semester, and I know that this student has great ideas, but can't codify them into coaching paragraphs, so I'll work on that skill. I know that this student has a really hard time getting going on their writing, and they have tremendous writer's block. So there is room, you know, in the current system, to to individualize education. My bigger quip with lack of communication between high school and college. Well, it's so many things, right? It's, it's such a different experience. For one thing, we just maximize the schedule in high school to pivot, or I'll go toward a good admission. And then when they get into college, chances are they're taking maybe four classes a week, that maybe even twice a week, which is probably a better model for this motivated learner. But it is such a difference in expectation, I think, in their senior or their least, their senior fall, they're expected to be experts on, I don't know eight different things, right and right, then they major in something, and then they really, actually become an expert. But I think the more difficult lack of communication is in this really duplicitous language students receive. You know, if you were to go to a college campus, right? Like this guy, Leedy Klotz, who I cite in the article, he runs a forum at University of Virginia, and he tells parents, on opening weekend, your kid is going to do better if they do less, right, if they specialize in a couple things that they love, whereas to get into University of Virginia, you better take eight AP classes and have this score on your SAT and, you know this, GPA and, oh, by the way, take care of yourself, right? Take care of your mental health, right? So

Ned Johnson:

do everything, but don't look like you're actually sitting and

Tim Donahue:

they can pile all this stuff on because there's no one to sort of regulate, right? Of course, right? You know, again, I'm not talking about all high school students, but I'm talking about those who aspire toward, you know, select college admission. We know that's a minority of overall high school students, but it is quite a maelstrom of students who are getting really mixed messages, yeah, because no one is there to kind of regulate the fluidity, as you point out. Yeah, it's one mind going through the eight years, but it's really a different you know, so many cooks in the kitchen for them. Yeah, it can. And then obviously, only add. To their stress and mental health issues.

Ned Johnson:

I mean, 100% right about what a really attentive and committed teacher can do, or coach, or whatever happens, who's helping a young person develop, writing, math, athletics, music, whatever happens to be. What strikes me is that the current Zeitgeist for parents, for administrators, for certainly for colleges, and most of all, for students, when they think about everything as a performative aspect to gain them that admissions rather than something where they're developing an ability or developing themselves by definition, they're probably looking to you, to me, to anyone saying, is that good enough? Is that good enough? Is that good enough? Rather than thinking about I'm trying to develop myself. And again, if you think I you know, because I'm sure you get this all the time. I have this with students. Can't you just tell me what the answer is? And I'm like, Who, no offense, who gives a rat's patootie about the answer to this? I want you to know how to do it. So I think increasingly, I see so many kids, particularly super academic and anxious, where so long as they get the A they feel that they're safe, and we just keep kicking the can down the road. And what gets lost, as you noted, is that deeper engagement. And I'm not quite sure, well, it's interesting. I interviewed, you know, Jeff selingo, the education writer. He wrote a book called who gets in and why. I used to be the editor of The Chronicle of Higher Education. Real interesting guy, and we're having a conversation for a bunch of educators. And I asked him about the levels of mental health that, you know, the highly selective higher allergic to universities that everyone's pining for. And I said, Do colleges take any ownership of a process, just the way you described it, Tim, that really leads kids to try to do everything all at once in ways that are, you know, great on paper, but terrible internally. And he said, they absolve themselves of any responsibility. They don't think they're part of the problem. And it's so it's curious that we all love the performance of perfectionist to kids and then sort of gnash our teeth about the mental health and, gosh, what can we what can we do about that, not recognizing that the the process, the same thing that leads kids to be so high achieving too often, leads them to undo their mental health so

Tim Donahue:

well, yeah. I mean, you bring up a lot of responses. Here's here's one that kind of comes from the end of your comment. I love how you probe that question, because not hardly anyone is really asking that question. Is there anything to hold somebody accountable for this? What I think is failed communication between colleges and high school I

Ned Johnson:

love that language, because then it's not just you're doing something wrong, I'm doing something wrong, but if we talked about this more, because presumably we're all interested in developing young people, yeah,

Tim Donahue:

I mean, I see one really striking reality, you know, if you want to boil this all down, great inflation, taking on too many classes, you know, creating a really overstressed travel soccer player slash French club leader, Trump, bonus, AP, physicist, who's the president? You know, it's a process of saying yes, right? It's like, yes, you can get the good grade. Yes, you can lead this. Yes, do this. And it's all arguing toward this college process that because people game the system and apply now to like 20 colleges, is increasingly a no, you're not going to get admitted, right? So, you know, I have a student now who's applying to Dartmouth, I don't know what their admissions rate is. I bet it would be like 7% that was, that was my guess. So that's like 93% of people get a no there, whereas all they've been getting is yeses, right? So that's another really difficult adjustment. And to your earlier points about students just really worried about the results. I mean, obviously I'm an English teacher, so I have the liberty to say things like, hey, like you're it's gonna be better if you love doing it, which I sincerely believe, and I try to honestly have my students see that. But for whatever reason, I will have students coming in and asking questions, like, is it okay to write on the back of the paper? Is it okay to double space, you know? Is it okay if I research this book, it's like, Oh, of course, you know? Like, yeah, but there's something. Because I would think, like, by and large, these students have been given yes as an answer, yeah, anything so that yeah, if they get a no, or if they get like, a, okay, this part is good, but this part needs work. It's hard for them to hear that. And of course, again, the irony being that, like they all know that Harvard. Has a 3.8% acceptance rate. So really, the answer is probably no. It's a weird conundrum that we're living in.

Ned Johnson:

I was reflecting on my somebody was in high school, the school they attended had sort of regular, and then, you know, not a school doesn't do AP, but kind of advanced and so particularly in the sciences, what students report is that if you do that higher level, it, on average, adds an hour every night of homework. Okay, and my son, I have a dear friend who was in our area, now in rural Texas, and sort of helped my family and her son kind of think through the whole college thing. And this is probably, I guess it was the start of sophomore year, and was asking about what classes he was taking, was going to take, and he basically said, I'm not. I don't want to take the advanced math. I don't want to take advanced whatever, whatever. Because he said, Dad, I'm doing theater at school. I don't get home until nine o'clock at night, except for three weeks the year, I'm there until nine o'clock every single night. And there's and there's no way. So what I'm smiling about is he over time, he was a music guy, theater guy. He's a music major now, and basically is set in, set up for career in composing film scores for TV and movies and this kind of thing, and just phenomenally talented as a musician. And I thought, how could he have developed the skills that he had, if all of that time and time for reflection was crowded out, my wife and I and the sister just got a text this morning that he'd finished this thing and handed in the symphony that is his sort of senior capstone work, and he said, I can now, at least for a while, stop hallucinating about musical notes, because that's all that he's been so deeply immersed in. And one of the things that you talk about in your piece, that high school needs, high schoolers need to do less to do better, is about the importance of reflection. I see this in him as a musician, where my wife's a musician as well, and he said, It's killing me because I have a week to finish this thing, and I'm looking at what I did in February of last year when he started writing this, and what I'm doing now is so much better than what I did then, but I can't redo, redo the whole thing, but he recognizes how much he developed his craft. Yeah, and I'm sure you see that as a teacher, I mean that what do you seem when we crowd out time for reflection for young people? Yeah?

Tim Donahue:

I mean, we're doing that a lot, and the piece I'm writing coming up is getting at the value of reading the full text, as opposed to the annotated version, which, you know, a lot of forces are pushing for this, yeah, teachers of English. Well, let me give you maybe an easier example. I'm a big less is more fan, and I think there's a sort of, Oh, bless you community of this. You know, you talk about the Honors track. Let's add this extra thing, yeah, on top of all of these other things, when I try to teach writing, what I what I sometimes do is I'll give an assignment, and I'll say, Okay, write 1200 words, and they'll do that, and then I'll say, Okay, now keep the essential argument and make it 600 words, right? And so you have to have the essential you learn efficiency, but you're doing the same topic, but you're seeing it a lot better, and 90% of the time it's a better essay in half the length, right? Oh,

Ned Johnson:

I love that. What's the would have been short of it? You didn't have enough time. I've heard that attributed to Jefferson and probably 16 other people. But do you know the Do you know brevity

Tim Donahue:

is the soul of wit? Yeah. Yeah. So that's a sense of reflection, you know, to look actually at your own work, right? Yeah. The anti thing of that is like, hand in schlock and get an A and never think about it, right? And students, they find it a pain in the butt, because I don't really tell them I'm going to do that. I said, okay, because students definitely have the mentality of like, Oh God, I'm so glad that essay is over with. I could move on like, but I do think in the end, they do appreciate that. But yeah, what's lost if we if we lose the reflection is obviously the deep dive into ideas that we won't expect to happen, right? So I love the forum in English class, you know, you have an hour and you're talking about massive concepts like, you know, free will or suppressed voices, or inequity, or whatever it is, and the connections that can come out and the voices that can come out if you allow for the patients. Are really startling. And this is, this is, you know, frankly, why I'm in this game as a teacher, because we talk about the forces that, I guess, suppress them into interperformative players, but really they haven't been told how to think at. This point, they still have quite open minds, especially, and they can certainly be led toward the joys of opening their minds, in my experience, more than adults, right? I think adults have kind of fixed ideas about learning,

Ned Johnson:

and if I can jump in there, and my definition, adolescent brains are more malleable, so they're vulnerable, you know, to substance use disorder, but they're also vulnerable to new lessons and new ways of thinking, just as you described. Because adolescent brains are still have greater neuroplasticity than does my middle aged brain. It doesn't mean that it can't change, but it means they are much more able to do that, and that the point that my friend writing part is a clinical neuropsychologist is that the most important outcome of adolescence can't cannot be where you go to college, but the brain that you're sculpting and carry into adulthood, knowing that brains develop in the ways that they're used. So to your point about you write an essay, it's 1200 words, you feel pretty good about that. And like, Guess what, Ned, we get to go back and do this again. Like, are you kidding me, but you're developing that ability to do that over and over and over, to pay close attention and to figure out what matters, and writing like friggin anything else in the world really is a developable skill, and not just, not just shaping that skill, but really shaping the brain. I mean, I would, I mean, it would be quite entertaining, and I'm sure, very humbling for me, if you and I both read a text or a poem or whatever, and then kind of wrote about what it means, and it simply has to be the case that for you have 30 years of teaching and thinking closely and deeply about words and not and other people's words as well, that you you've developed that ability the same way. I go back to my music major son, who can listen to a song and figure out what key it's in and what mode it's in. If you know what mode is, you have to look it up. Super nerdy, you know? And, I mean, just like, and I'm like, how do you hear that? He's like, Dad, all I've done is think about music for eight years.

Tim Donahue:

Yeah. I mean, it's a lot of my kids are athletes, and I always use the analogy of, we're just going to do the drills over and over, and you're going to get better at them. Yeah, I don't think that there is boringness in in repetition. I think it's just a richer, more nuanced way to approach it. They get better at it

Ned Johnson:

well, and especially if it's for, if it's for something that you actually care about, right? If you know, even if, what was your sport? By the way, you're

Tim Donahue:

enduring sports, okay, skiing being the prominent big sport here in Connecticut.

Ned Johnson:

Oh yeah, I am. The idea that if you are a I'll pick on something like tennis or baseball or basketball, that people will sit there and work for hours, right? Kobe Bryant was famous for working for two hours on just one little turnaround shot, or whatever, because it served the purpose that he cared about or and so when we have that, that motivation to have a reason to want to work hard to get better and better at something that matters, that's really I mean, you noted this in your in your articles About the flow experience, what happens when brains are deeply, deeply involved? What happens to brains when people are deeply involved and working hard at something that they really care about and engage with? And the great part, of course, is this can happen in school, and as you note, outside of school activities as well. But you had that quote. Can you the person from Harvard who talked about the culture around extracurricular activities. This was so deeply dispiriting to me.

Tim Donahue:

You know, there was this piece written about how, because the grades are so much the same, the pivot now is to extracurricular activities. And by the way, also because, you know, at least that was last year, a lot of schools didn't require standardized testing. That is changing. Also, there's a lot of schools don't even want people to come in for interviews, right? So this, this notion of what distinguishes a student, was really being scrubbed so that that's what the Dean of Admissions at Harvard was saying, like, you know, because of great inflation. Now the distinctions are with extracurriculars. Yeah. And you know, this article pointed out how, really, that creates a lot of inequity, because if I have a connection to get this internship right, really different than if, like, I need to work this part time job to, like, get food for the family. So

Ned Johnson:

Right? And she had a note at the end of that quote, something that extracurricular is which should be a source of stress relief, become, become stress producing. Yeah, I've been reflecting on this for years that it strikes me, strikes me that basically any activity that a child can be involved in, from sports to fencing, I don't know how that became a childhood thing, you know, to art or music or anything, has more or less been monetized and weaponized, right? So I can pay someone to teach, you know, if you um, golly, uh, Jenny walls, who wrote the the book Never enough, and talks about her 11 year old who loved building things and Legos, and she's so she's trying to find an age approach. Appropriate architecture class. Well, there was not an age appropriate architecture class. So she's trying to talk this professor at some local university into allowing her 11 year old to audit a class for college sophomores. And you're like, even she recognized the the insanity of this. And it's like, yeah, play, right?

Tim Donahue:

So that kind of launched this, this notion that kids have to do even more, and that sort of fomented The idea for this, this next piece I wrote about just overburden students. So, you know, since that piece came out, it's been interesting to get the feedback. Yeah, a lot of my friends have high school kids. Yeah, I'm nearing the same with with my kids, yeah, 12, and it's this really interesting reception. It was just pretty universally, yeah, no, I hear you. My kid is playing this travel soccer team and this other thing, and they're home at nine. You know, I had a quote in there, which really did come from a parent at my prior school. She said, You know, my kid, they're never at home, and you know when they are, they're they're working, and I bring dinner in them, and I feel like I'm running a prisoner. That's right, prison warden, and it's this, like no one likes it. It's kind of like with brain inflation, like nobody likes this, but they just kind of shrug and put up with this temporary phase. This is just what they're in. As if, you know, this many tentacled beast has, has no Vanquisher, you know, which, frankly, I think, includes the cost of college tuition, which is absurd, that why is, you know, an adjunct professor teaching my kid making$32,000 when their school costs 86,000 Yeah, it's easy to point out that there's a mess. Obviously it's far harder to solve it. So, yeah,

Ned Johnson:

it is. I mean, the one thought that jumps to mind for me is for any educator and any parent to spend time really thinking about their own thinking so that they can convey so they can feel that it's safe to get off the Crazy Train to not buy into that. And I had a family here who kid was attending arguably the most elite Independent School here in the area and approached me about, you know, test prep to make a switch, just switch schools. And I asked her, so why? Why tell me more about the change? Like, you know, I'm thinking maybe the kid is really struggling there. And she said, during the summer, I have all this time with him, and we spend so much time together. We hang out, we have conversations, you know, we play cards together. And this kid is in seventh grade, and she said, when it gets to the school day, he comes home from sports, and then he's in his room for three hours, and then he goes to bed. And I never see my kid, and I have a friend who wrote a book, who stumbled on the statistic that, on average, by the time children leave the household at the end of high school, they will, on average, have spent with this 90% of all the time they're able to spend with us. That's hard, right? And, you know, that's,

Tim Donahue:

do you just depress me? Yeah, you know. And, and

Ned Johnson:

from my perspective, I think whether you're a 10% or a 20% whether there's more, probably has a lot to do with whether your kid feels like, Yeah, you were the prison warden, or whether you want to engage with them and have them engage with things, yeah. And I think, you know, it's hard, because it's back to your point about Freud and the narcissism of small differences. We're constantly comparing, oh my gosh, your kids doing travel soccer, my kids not. I better. I better get on that. There's what's called the DSM, that is the handbook of psychological disorders. And there was a new disorder that came on the early aughts that was this. It was shared delusional disorder. And really this is, you know, if we all sat around with tin foil hats over dinner, I'd probably grow up with some unconventional ideas about the government is really up to but part of it also is the idea that we buy into this idea that you have to go to an elite college to build a successful life, and that just can't be true, because if 97% of people who apply to Dartmouth can't get in, really are they destined for dreary lives? I mean, I assume you went to university, and I don't know where you probably assume the same thing of me. I'm not, frankly, interested or cared, because clearly you have developed the abilities, and, you know, sensitive if you're a kid and excellence as a writer and to think deeply about things. And the idea that that has to be at Princeton rather than Penn State, or, you know, or the local community college, it's a fear based, scarcity based message. And I think we can do a lot better when we can tell ourselves that there are many paths for our children they can lead to, you know, successful lives and doing doing work that's meaningful, but you're right. It is easier if it's if it's collective effort, right? Well,

Tim Donahue:

yeah, I mean many, many things there, maybe I'll pick up on two things, yeah. Again, to your. Matter point. You know, we do the same thing that colleges do with transcripts. You know, I've been part of many hiring committees for English teachers. Granted, it's a bit of a pointy, nerdy field to be in. It's very academic. But, you know, if you have two resumes, and one is Penn State and one is Princeton, you know, your bias is probably going to say Princeton. Obviously, you're going to look at, what else has this person done besides, right? We're really when we, when we base it solely on that. Yeah, we're honestly basing it on, like, how much, how good are they? Were they at the S, A, T, when they were 17? Do you know? I mean, it's a pretty limited field, and yet, if we have 300 resumes for a position, we have to save time as well. And writing of like, University of Michigan has, how many applicants do they have for their you know, they have, they just have to save a lot of time. Yeah, but you know, we talk about kids, you know, going to their rooms and cloistering themselves away what we're not talking about here. And I think this is the elephant in the room, which I'm sure you write about and think about a lot, is I can't get this stat out of my head that the average high school student gives over seven hours per day on recreational screen time, right? So you know, one of the actions I got from my recent piece was like, I don't think kids are too busy. And that really wasn't the essence of what I was saying, Yeah, because I do think that kind of to palliate all the stress. I do think, you know, they resort to social media, etc, which, of course, gives them more stress.

Ned Johnson:

Boy, is that a good point.

Tim Donahue:

But, you know, my point was, like, spend your time better. And I think if you take off some of the load, then the the sort of elixir of brainlessness, mindless scrolling is perhaps less appealing. Yeah, you know, you feel less guilty doing it. And I don't know I you know who I'm trying to, like, fix the human psyche here, but I do think that in addition more stuff, and, Frank and honestly, more time in school, more requirements, yeah, you also wedge in this really bad cycle. It's not that kids don't have time, it's that I wish they could use their time better. Yeah,

Ned Johnson:

yeah, no, it's an excellent point. I mean, it's probably a feels like a vicious or virtual virtuous cycle dependent how it's going. And, you know, keep mixing metaphors, a bit of a Gordian knot of where to start with that. It is certainly worth noting that anxiety and stress related disorders lead people to spend more time on phones and social media, because the major manifestation of anxiety is avoidance. So I will avoid schoolwork. I will avoid downtime. And there's a study done years ago where they put people in a room to be to be alone with their thoughts for 15 or 20 minutes, or they, if they got were bored, they could administer mild electric shocks to themselves. And 30% of women and 66% of men chose the electric shocks over being alone with their own thoughts. Wow. So it's very much the case that children, not knowing any better, use phones as stress relief in that, you know, I don't have to think about Mr. Donahue giving me that grade, or my SAT, or my parents or so, you know, the end of the world. And we distract ourselves, and there's 100% a place for that, you know, you distract we can all do this or distract ourselves from an intrusive thought, but under no circumstances, or in any way, is it stress relief? Maybe watching things that are truly funny are consumer because laughing does, but it doesn't relieve stress. It just stops, it kind of stops the inflows of stress, but does not increase the outflows of stress. So one that I'd love you to talk about this, because I know you're a big you know, mentioned before environmental work, one of the things that we know that gets crowded out by all the activity that kids do, from school and extracurricular activities, but also from time on their phones, is what, what is known as the default mode network, which engages when we're not actively engaged in anything, right? You just close your eyes for two seconds, and the end of the fault mode network pops online, and so it's a process of when the default mode network engages by design. We reflect on our past, we think about relationships, we try to put things into context. We do autobiographical planning, where you kind of pitch yourself in the future and think, Who am I and who's the person that I'm trying to become, developing this sense of coherence and a sense of empathy and golly, if those are not important things to develop as a young person, it's hard to know what is you know, kids would say, my kids say to me, going on my phone is the only break that I get from all these things that I have to do. And parents and educators might say, well, doing all these things are the only thing that keeps you. So it's probably a collective effort there. But one of the great things we know is that one of the single best ways for the default mode network to engage is for people to spend time in nature without a digital device. So you and I were talking before, and you perhaps a bit of an homage to raking. Can you talk just because it's autumn, like, let's talk about this. I love yard work, so I was so tickled that you talked about this.

Tim Donahue:

Well, yeah, so maybe this, this can stem back into something I teach about too. So we talked about the joys of of raking. One of my life long quests as a writer has been to break into this. There's a really amazing New York Times column. Nobody really knows about. It's called letter of recommendation. I don't know if you've heard of it, not yet, yeah. So it runs every week in the magazine. It's basically a sort of Ode to lesser celebrated experiences. And for my creative writing, I teach creative nonfiction. I always assign this, and it itself is a break in what you're talking about. It's so kids, you know, will write about recommending the experience of being not really that good at water skiing. I love that essay. We always talk about mastering something, but this thing, this person was like, I was not so good, and it was okay with that. I love that. Or, you know, they one kid wrote about like, riding your bike without having your hands on the handlebars, you know, just even something as simple as, like the letter of recommendation for a sunset, or a pair of favorite running shoes. And so I wrote about raking, raking leaves. I'm a big anti leaf blower guy. You're gonna hear them soon. Well, maybe you are now. Oh my and just the deliberate paying attention to the moment. I these kinds of hands to work, hearts to God kind of thing, not that it was a religious school, but can be quite, quite liberating. You know, I don't know if I bore my students, but I tell them about some of the great romantic poets, like Wordsworth, wandered so much. I mean, this guy was a walker, right? Emerson, Thoreau, yeah. And I often do something called a walk and talk in my class, which is, we just walk, right? We go outside and we go around the campus. And they love it, right? Because it's like a difference in their day. It's not looking at a screen. You know, the mitigating thing, right? Is like, let's say you play soccer, you are outside, but you're, like, focused on the crease and the three, two zone and the, you know, like the play execution. So that's like, it's how I do think it's healthy to play a sport especially, yeah, but I think you're talking about just stopping the stimulus, right, correct? You know, I just listened to Zadie Smith. She was talking to Ezra Klein, great interview. You know, she famously doesn't have a smartphone, but even like she says, I just pull out a book, even if the train is 30 seconds away, I'm still reading a book. She doesn't look up, right? She goes, she says, The capture is total. When she goes on the train, everybody's looking down at the device. And yeah, I do think looking up, putting your hands behind your back, roaming around, you know, I talk about the idea of sauntering in that Times piece.

Ned Johnson:

I loved that. Yeah, my wife's a Latin teacher says, Sonterra, yeah,

Tim Donahue:

it's free, and it's available. And, you know, it's like, Oh, I forgot, we can do that. It's, you know, it's weird.

Ned Johnson:

And the brain science on this. You may know this term already, but it's Shinran Yoku. It's a Japanese term that translates to forest bathing. And the science on this is robust, literally, looking at pictures alone of trees will lower people's stress and bring down their heart rate. I'm so loving the Reiki. It strikes me as, you know, the, I don't know, the New England equivalent of a Japanese Zen Garden. I've smiled. I mean, I have a feeling, a sense, of what Greenwich is, which may not be that dissimilar to some of the places that I live in and spend time. And I think about all the people this is being so ungenerous. But who pay for landscapers all over the place for these perfectly done houses, but they don't do any of it themselves because they need time and spend that money on therapy because their mental health is suboptimal?

Tim Donahue:

Yeah, they it's like driving to the gym to exercise when they could, like, ride their bike? Yeah? Yeah, yeah, it's true. Yes. Just full disclosure, I don't live in Greenwich, so you

Ned Johnson:

teach the end up there I have, there are nice people here. Oh yeah,

Unknown:

yes, there are some loan services at play too. So yeah, for

Ned Johnson:

a learning and living and, most importantly, development, being. Young brains, environment, we could do a little better. To your point, you know, help kids do better by by letting them do a little bit less, and really just supporting that. And a huge part of that, it just seems to me, we can talk about the brain science on it, and then we as adults, you know, parents who, who can or should, should, or at least can do better, to feel that it's safe to box out some space in their kids lives so they can do things that are, you know, the wandering, the sauntering, with no purpose whatsoever, apart from wandering and sauntering and giving kids times to be in their own heads for all the ways it's

Tim Donahue:

important. Sometimes I will teach antiquated texts. And, you know, let's say, Okay, I don't, I don't teach Thomas Hardy, but I might teach a Bronte, right? So, yeah, oh, they are wandering on the Moors and the meats and, you know, maybe they're brooding over some interpersonal thing, but they're way out in the open sky. And I often read these things and essays written about them. And, yeah, I'm like, wow, why it's right there? You know, I'm five miles away from Long Island Sound, where I know the beach is empty, right now. Yeah, we don't often go there, but I do think that there is no frigate like a book, right? That rust can actually take us to these places. To your point about the elixir in a longer English class and about, yeah, our beginnings never know our ends. This can happen, and this kind of wandering though we are in a chair, is welcomed as well. I think kids like that.

Ned Johnson:

Yeah. I love that I did engaging deeply in a book. So it's not the literary equivalent of Snapchat or Instagram, of a piece and a piece and a piece and a piece of what does it feel like to read, particularly a work of fiction that's hundreds of pages of long, hundreds of pages long, where you really get to engage with it. This is not high literature, but I just I read lessons in chemistry last year, and I was so sad when it ended, because I just so thoroughly enjoyed, yeah, the characters, you know, yeah. And I think that's true for a lot of folks, yeah. Well, Tim, for folks who are interested in your writing and your thinking, Is there a place we can direct people? Well,

Unknown:

no, I'm. I wish I had such a developed practice. I write really slowly. I don't write a lot. I don't know. I'm not really a marketer.

Ned Johnson:

I'll say quality over quantity, right? We're back. Yeah,

Unknown:

I aspire to collecting my work but, but I kind of a quite, a quite new at this, and I don't

Ned Johnson:

Well, what you've what you've written and shared so far. I'm I'm quite taken by and I imagine folks who listen to this will be as well. So I will include his links to as many things as I can find. And Tim Donohue, folks is a name. He's doing some really good thinking and helping kids do some really good thinking. So worth keeping an eye on them. Tim, thank you so much for the work that you and for for taking time to talk through this stuff with me.

Tim Donahue:

All right. Thank you.

Ned Johnson:

Hey folks, Ned here, over the past 25 years, I've talked to countless parents of high school age students who care deeply about their kids' education and how they deal with stress and the pressure to succeed. It can help parents to work with a team they trust won't just pile on more pressure to achieve better scores and grades. That's why I founded prep matters in 1997 to create a different kind of experience for test preparation and academic tutoring. This podcast and my books with my friend Bill sticks reflect our company philosophy and approach to helping students. If you have a high school age student and would like to talk about putting a plan together, please get in touch with us. Visit our website@prepmatters.com or while your kids may only text, you might want to actually talk with a person, if so, you can reach us at 301-951-0350, you.