Flow: A dichotomy in two Apps

I have a weekly ritual on Wednesdays: I browse the App stores to see what’s changed. Usually I find something intriguing or worth playing around with, but these are seldom really significant ‘Wow, my life has changed’ Apps. In fact, what often grabs me more about the Apps is the concept they’re exploring rather than the programme itself. Take ‘The Mesh’ for example, which is the current Free App of the Week on iTunes. The beauty and power of the App lie in its simplicity. It’s not complicated, and yet it’s immensely engrossing. I found myself spending hours trying to up my score, and then suddenly I realised I was doing mathematics. To add context to that statement, you need to understand that mathematics and I are like estranged family members: we know we can’t really ever escape one another, but if we never have to engage in conversation, that’s just fine. Nevertheless, at 23:00 last night, there I was, propped up in bed trying to work out how 7, 5, 3 and 2 were going to get me to 4. As it happens, I couldn’t work it out, and my streak ended on a measly final score of 32. I will persevere again tonight!

'The Mesh'

Now, what intrigues me so much about ‘The Mesh’ is the fact that I became completely engrossed in a very short space of time. The nature of the game means there is no ‘undo’ button, and an incorrect pairing can be one’s complete undoing for the levels to come. As a consequence, one must spend time assessing the whole scenario, planning moves and anticipating outcomes. The mental arithmetic is not complicated (well, it hasn’t been for the levels I’ve managed to reach), but having to work out multiple scenarios in one’s head becomes a challenging prospect. For the example above, there are a number of different things I could try:

7 - 3 = 4; 5+2 = 7… doesn’t work

7-5 = 2; 2+2 = 4, 3… doesn’t work

3-2 = 1; 5-1=4; 7… doesn’t work

You get the idea.

Before even starting to play the level, one has to run all these simulations in one’s head. The feeling of triumph when one gets it correct is intoxicating and I’m left utterly engrossed. And it’s maths.

The second App which has caught my attention this week is ‘Flowstate’ on the Mac App store. While I’ve not yet taken the plunge and purchased the App, it’s premise is certainly food for thought. Basically, Flowstate creates the perfect environment in which to create written pieces by preventing the clutter that so often prevents us from actually completing what we’re writing. The creators posit that forcing separation between the creation and editing processes encourages the completion of tasks. The App works by asking users to select a time period to be ‘locked’ into the App. Once the time has been selected, the user must write continuously. A pause of more than 5 seconds will delete everything that has been written during the session. Furthermore, trying to exit the session before time is up will also delete everything. Quite an unnerving prospect for those of us who are used to agonising over just about every sentence we type. I’m certainly guilty of spending ages and ages staring at the screen trying to figure out the way forward. With Flowstate, there’s no time for that—at least not while you’re writing. You have to keep going, even if it’s not going to make it into the final edit. 

And that’s the whole point: it doesn’t have to be perfect. So often we get utterly caught up on ensuring that the end product is a work of perfection that we end up not finishing it, or, even worse, not starting in the first place. Flowstate prevents that from happening by forcing action, but making us let go of the obsession with perfection and simply getting us to write write write and think later. Working on a finished piece and making small tweaks here and there is far less daunting than staring at a blank page for ages, and the prospect of everything vanishing before one’s eyes means we keep pushing onwards until we have something with which to work.

Both of these Apps look at the idea of focus and flow in a different way: the first requires measured, thought-through selection, because there is no going back while the second is almost the polar opposite: go for it without reservation and deal with the aftermath later. I think both of them have a place in education. Our students should know when to apply themselves to one task with utter focus and careful consideration, especially when it comes to dealing with other people, because often we cannot take things we’ve said back after they have been said (or tweeted). Conversely, we should also be encouraging our students to dive into tasks with a sense of abandonment. Increased digitisation means that we can undo just about everything we create within Apps or programmes and our work can be altered if and when it needs to be. We need to give students the freedom to fail and not be too perturbed by this, because refining is often a better learning experience than the initial creation is. I’ll look at the culture of refinement and criticism in another blog, but for now, I think it’s worth pondering how we can use these two kinds of flow in our teaching and indeed, in our own lives. 

Pause... focus and... SQUIRREL!

Those of you who are tuning in to my ramblings every day will notice that I didn’t post yesterday. Believe it or not, it was a literal interpretation of the proposed topic in the little book of prompts. The topic for the 8^th was ‘Unplug’ and it talked about how we know when to unplug from all the electronics and take a break. I decided to take this to heart, and I unplugged for the evening. I spent the time meditating before going to bed, which proved to be a most wonderful exercise.

Today, the topic is to talk about addiction and the things that distract us from achieving what we want to achieve. I’m particularly guilty of this, because more often than not, my aspirations for doing well are stymied by one of my own flaws. Consequently, this post is about what to do to help yourself avoid distractions and get back on track.

1.            Is it a distraction in the first place?

To answer this question you need to be honest with yourself. Are you browsing the internet looking for something that is pertinent to what you’re doing or are you just wasting time? Do you really need to take an hour’s break or is that excessive? Only you will know the answer to these questions, and you need to be truthful with yourself. Sometimes you really do need to take an evening off and that’s ok as long as you really are going to get stuck in with renewed energy the next day.

2.            Why is your mind wandering?

Have you ever completed a project where the time just seemed to disappear completely? Have you ever been so absorbed in what you were doing that you didn’t notice people around you? I feel confident in thinking that nearly every one of us has and this is a beautiful place to be. I’m also fairly sure we did it without needing to be on some kind of medication. The point I’m making here is that if you are really and truly engaged in what you are doing, your mind won’t wander. This means that if you want to avoid being distracted, you need to work on making what you’re doing meaningful and engaging for yourself. If that’s not possible, perhaps you need to re-evaluate the task’s importance.

3.            What’s bothering you?

Things that upset, worry or concern us are like termites gnawing away at our ability to focus and think clearly. Anxieties and problems tax our already-taxed brains and prevent us from performing optimally. This is where time out can be helpful if it is used as a way to work through whatever is weighing on your mind. However, if you do nothing but dwell on your issues without working on ways to resolve them, then the time out is going to do more harm than good.

Problems, whatever they are, need to be addressed in some way. Ignoring thoughts and emotions is a dangerous strategy, because they always surface again, and often at the most unhelpful times. Addressing a problem does not necessarily mean resolving it, though. It means you take the time to suit your action to the scenario. Worrying about anything is counter-productive, because your worrying about something will have no effect on it whatsoever. Worrying about not being able to pay the rent at the end of the month is not going to make money materialise or your landlord give you a break; worrying if people will like you is not going to do anything to their states of mind. The only person worrying will affect is you, and it will do so negatively. Worrying has got to go and this is a form of resolution.

If anything else is bothering you or upsetting you, you need to go through the steps outlined in the serenity prayer: “Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the determination to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

To simplify:

• If you cannot change something, let it go. They are draining and wasting your precious energy.
• If you can change something, then do it. What are you waiting for? Make a plan, and get stuck in. Sometimes just getting started is all you need.
• Don’t dwell on matters for too long. You need to take the time to think about whether the issue is worth all the effort in the first place. This is where meditation is extremely helpful.

4.            Keep your eye on the end

Remember that whatever you’re doing is for a purpose. If you believe strongly in that purpose, then you need to keep your mind focused on that. Yes, doing sit ups now might be a pain and they might not be all that fun, but in the end, you’re getting to get fitter and stronger and that’s the whole point isn’t it. Writing reports, doing research and going to talks might seem tedious at times, but if you remember what it is you want to achieve and you focus on how what you’re doing leads to that goal, it becomes a whole lot easier.

5.            Lighten up

Whenever I feel overwhelmed, I look at a map of the world, or I watch a video about the size of the universe. Sometimes our problems seem enormous and insurmountable, but we need always to bear context in mind. You are a single person in one place on an enormous planet that is but a tiny speck in the colossal universe. Somehow, every time I do this, my problems seem a little less massive.

This is advice I give to my students too, and it is advice I try to live by, but I mess up often. Lightening up means not beating yourself up when you get distracted. You’re only human after all. 

A sense of style

Wow, these just seem to get tougher every day. My brief is to talk about style and fashion, but I don’t really think that’s all that pertinent to what I want to write about here. Don’t get me wrong, I love clothes and dressing smartly and all the rest of it, but I don’t think this is the forum for that really.

What I have decided to do in a bid to twist this topic to suit my purposes is talk about the art of presentation. It’s kind of related to style, so the link is not quite as obscure as it might seem to be.

One of the difficulties I face on a fairly regular basis is getting students to take pride in their work. I have had so many semi-crumpled bits of scrawl handed to me that I could wallpaper a room with them. I’ve seen students deliver presentations accompanied by slide shows that could not have taken more than 10 minutes to design and I’ve had term projects that are woefully short and not thought through correctly submitted to me.

When I was a student, and in fact even today, I cannot bring myself to hand in something that does not look good. I wrote about worksheet and assignment design a few days ago, and that same mentality applies: it’s not just a case of putting a picture on the page and choosing a funky font to ‘zhoosh’ (wonderful South African word) it up a bit, it means making sure that the picture helps to draw students in and provide a bit of context. The font needs to be appealing, readable and suited to the purpose. If I use colours, they have to work together, there needs to be a sense of blending. If you look at my pages on the web, you’ll see there is at least some sense of aesthetic going on there. Now I’m not claiming to be an expert designer, but what I mean is that I’ve taken time to decide how things work together to create a final product. It was like this in school too.

However, it seems that the majority of students either couldn’t be bothered to do all this work, or they lack the necessary skills to do so. My suspicion is that it’s more the latter than the former. I was never taken through designing an effective PowerPoint presentation or taught how to make a poster appealing. There was a mark for it on the rubric, but no actual teaching ever happened. And that’s a big problem.

My rant here is not just because I’m dissatisfied with lacklustre work, it’s because of the ramifications this has beyond school. Sure, handing in a mucky essay or poster in Grade 9 is not going to mean the end of the world, but beyond the school walls it is. Writing emails in a professional context and being unable to structure sentences coherently or express oneself properly is going to be an enormous handicap, but students don’t know anything about that world and it’s pointless going on about it. The second any person over the age of 20 says, ‘When you’re out of school…’ they’ve switched off, so don’t waste your breath.

I think the solution to getting this to work is a layered one. Firstly, the idea of taking pride in what one is doing needs to be instilled. This can only happen if students buy in to what they’re doing, which brings me to my next point: perceived value. If students feel that what they’re doing is meaningful and has value, then they are more likely to want to put an effort into it. The next layer is incentive, and this one leaves a somewhat bitter taste in my mouth.

I am highly critical of the culture of ‘marks and grades’ that has developed. Any teacher will, at some point in his or her career hear, ‘Is this for marks?’ If you say it’s not, many students immediately lose interest and if they do anything at all, it will be with minimal effort. There’s no incentive to work, you see. Very few students will want to do something without there being some kind of reward, and the line ‘This is going to help you to understand the work,’ doesn’t quite cut the mustard it seems. This culture has been bred from years and years of being graded on just about everything to the point where the grade becomes a currency. Do well, and the teacher will reward you with stickers, or a free lesson, or special privileges and your parents will respond similarly. Don’t get the marks, and it’s extra work, tutors, extra lessons, being punished etc.

This is why when I say students need incentive, I say so with a sense of wariness and reservation. We need to work on moving away from this mentality. Students need to want to work because they can see the value in doing so. One of the suggestions I have here is upgrading aspects of the curriculum which we cling to because of some sense of inherent value these things have. When was the last time you had to write a formal letter to a newspaper complaining about an article? Even if you did write to a publication, I’m pretty sure you sent an email anyway. What I’m getting at here is you need to take the content and move it forward. Yes, it is important for students to know how to write formally and how to deal with an issue in a way that is respectful, but which communicates one’s opinion clearly, but there are so many ways this can be achieved. Getting them to sit quietly and write a letter complaining about the broken gate to the park is hardly going to inspire creative genius. What about sending each student an email from an upset customer and having them draft the response? You can include all the steps that would be involved in the process too. Suddenly the work seems a bit more relevant.

I don’t know if this is the solution, but it’s a solution. Getting students to see the value in what they are doing is sure to increase the likelihood that they’ll put effort into producing work of an excellent standard. And if we teach them how to go about doing this, I’m sure we’ll all see more engaged and thought-through work.

Once we’ve got the basics done, then we can move on to developing each student’s personal style, and that is something really exciting, because it will be helping them to reach their full potential, and isn’t that what this is all about after all?