Lifespan Development Blog 8

     Lifespan psychology has been truly beneficial to my overall learning experience and my future teaching career.  I am really praying for my ability to retain this learning so that I can apply it in my classroom in the very near future.  There was a quote in this week’s reading, Theories of Childhood that read, “Theories need to be real to the developing teacher.”  I will need to understand the theory and the development, not the theorist who said it, with that in mind, I thought it was important to make connections with some of these philosophies and how they could be applied in the classroom. 

     John Dewey was the founder of progressive education; he believed that education should be child-centered.  Students should be able to guide their own learning by choosing topics that are interesting to them.  The teacher has the task of making these topics meaningful to the educational process.  Although, Dewey thought education should be fun, he did not believe that it should be fun for fun’s sake.  Dewey believed that when students are engaged in learning, in activities that they are interested in, learning becomes enjoyable.  Many of Dewey’s principles can be seen in the early childhood setting, but I can see how his theories are important in any elementary setting.  I will find ways to make connections to the things that my students want to learn about.  I will be committed to integrating their interests in a meaningful way, in a way that will encourage them to be lifelong learners.

       One of Erik Erikson’s major challenges that he poses to teachers is considering the individual learner.  As an assistant, I have seen many teachers unknowingly ascribe certain characteristics to student behaviors.  Students are lazy when they don’t finish work, or are tired in class.  Students are smart when they are extremely quiet in class and passively follow directions.  Erikson teaches us that we need to know our students, and their distinct family situations and stages of development in order to teach effectively.  A student, who doesn’t finish work, may be having vision problems, difficulty reading text or any number of issues that might have nothing to do with being lazy.  A student that doesn’t participate in class may be hiding a problem that they are having with learning. 

     Piaget found value in the process of student understanding and not just finding correct answers.  When I was in seventh grade I felt extremely challenged by math.  I didn’t understand the equations and couldn’t figure out how to make algebra work for me.  No matter how often I heard teachers and tutors say, “just plug in the numbers, it’s simple,” it never felt that way.  As I think about Piaget and his theories I would suggest that he would have started much smaller with a me, a girl who couldn’t correspond x, y and z to real numbers.  He would say that I needed to understand the why, of what I was trying to accomplish.  Although I may have still got the answers wrong, I would have understood the process.

     Understanding how correlated child development is to education will help me understand my students in a way that will not only help them in my classroom, but will also help them with the social and emotional tools that they need in life.  I look forward to applying these theories in the classroom. 

Life Span Psychology Week 7

          “Even people who want to go to heaven, don’t want to die to get there.”  This quote from Steve Jobs 2005 commencement speech to Stanford’s graduates made me really think about what my thoughts were on death.  There are four types of death, a clinical death, brain death, biological death and social death.  A clinical death is considered the least useful to the medical profession because it can be unreliable and temporary.  Clinical death refers to the stopping of breathing and the heart.  Brain death occurs when oxygen has failed to reach the brain for eight to ten minutes; many times the person will fall into an irreversible coma.  A biological death follows a clinical death after brain cells start to die from lack of oxygen.  David Sudnow is a researcher who first suggested the concept of social death, it examines the phenomena when a person is still biologically alive but is treated as dead; patients start the process of death, closing of the eyes, before death actually ensues.  Death’s processes take a toll on the living as well as the dying, it is something that we will all have to face one day.

     I often think that it must be a sad existence to have nothing to believe in when you sit down to wonder about your impending death.  As a Christian, I know that our time here is temporary, but our spirit will live on in heaven.  Steve Jobs’ quote sums up the uncertainty that I feel about death, but at least I have reassurance in knowing that there is ‘something else.’  Although I grew up in church practicing my beliefs well before I understood what they truly were, Viktor Frankl and Carl Jung, two psychoanalysts developed theories about spirituality that develops with age. Frankl developed three interdependent stages that describe human connectivity to spirituality.  The first stage is the somatic or physical dimension.  This first stage deals with the human motivation to stay alive, an intention that begins at birth.  The second is the psychological dimension, which is an extension of the physical dimension but relies on the interactions that you make with the environment; it results from instincts and drive.  These first two stages deal with our ability to survive and how we survive, the paths that we take and the choices that we make.  Frankl believed that during the first two stages in life we are trying to find purpose in life.  We’re trying to find the things that we are meant to do, how can we interact with out environment in a way that makes us feel successful.  The last stage, which Frankl calls the noetic dimension, is when Frankl believes that we are searching for the meaning of life, when we are trying to find the answers to life’s biggest questions which makes people search for spirituality.  Whatever leads us to our spiritual journey, I think that spirituality greatly eases our thoughts on death and dying.  Figuring out that our life has some greater purpose and destination, can give you solace in those last moments. 

     There was a chapter entitled, ‘Dealing Successfully with One’s own Death,’ and I really had to think about whether that is truly possible.  I’ve read many pieces that dealt with Psychiatrist Elizabeth Kubler – Ross’s stages of death.  I have unfortunately even seen very special people in my life deal with these stages before being laid to rest.  I struggled with the words to say as they developed through these stages, but I realize that death is the most complicated and mysterious stage that we face.  In knowing that, all that we can do is live our lives in the best way that we can, be listening ears to those who face this stage before us, and pray that we are filling God’s purpose for us in our life.

Life Span Psychology Week 6

     I often tell kids younger than fifteen, “don’t grow up to quickly, childhood is over before you know it.” Fundamentally I believe that, but I realized something this weekend after reading this week’s chapters and also reflecting on last week’s movie, the Education of Shelby Knox.  I think kids should enjoy their childhood, they should feel a certain amount of carefreeness, that comes with not paying bills, taking care of a family or worrying about a career, but somewhere in that brief period of childhood we have to gather the tools to be responsible adults.  After watching the focused, driven, Shelby Knox last week, I wondered how do you foster such a ‘together’ teenager?  I definitely was not Shelby Knox at fifteen, my biggest responsibility was to maintain a good grade point average and keep my room clean.  I’ve realized that lack of direction, being more focused on satisfying the needs of my parent over figuring out what my own likes and dislikes were, left me flailing as a young person in college.  I don’t think I realized that I was transitioning into adulthood as a young undergrad; I was still completely focused on doing what my parents asked of me.  If I could revisit that time I would have been more reflective on my own strengths and weaknesses, I probably would have become a teacher at least ten years sooner if I had.

     William Perry’s theories have been highly criticized because of his research entirely being done on males, but I can see how his thoughts on intellectual and ethical development have been present at different times of my life.  As a young adult, Perry believes that we think of things absolutely, concepts are either right or wrong, but as we progress through adulthood we start to think about things more critically, taking into consideration perspective and situation.  Although, at this point in my children’s life I would hope that they take what I say as absolutely right, I hope that I can instill the tools in them to understand relativism, correlation and situational problem solving as adults.

     Erikson believed that as we move into adulthood we seek intimacy rather than isolation.  He believes that we seek to make concrete affiliations with others, as children he believed we prefer isolation because we are vulnerable to criticism.  I didn’t really agree with this initially, but I thought about how we cling to our parents and family as children, never really wanting to stray far away from home.  When we get older we start to find friends who think the way that we do and people we are comfortable with.  I remembered how as I got older I started to want to be around people who validated the way that I felt about myself, people who supported me or even made me better.  You begin to trust people who aren’t your parents or initial support systems.

     More than any other chapter so far, I understood how physical development plays a part on psychological well being.  Chapter ten dealt with the loss of sensory abilities, effects of poor health habits and the visible signs of aging.  There is an artist who photographed himself every day for twenty-four years, in order to show the physical effects of aging.  He started at age thirty-one and ended at age fifty-five.  What I thought was profound was how slowly the man seemed to age for the first fifteen years, and then progressively his aging seemed rapid.  I wondered how well he took care of himself, was he fit or a drinker, and how those things affected his overall appearance.  I didn’t wonder about this because I was extremely interested in the aging of this particular artist, but I was extremely interested in how to take care of myself to slow this aging process.  The connections between our physical development and cognitive development is not only eye opening, it explains a lot about how we feel and what we experience at different times in our life.