by Ann Duckworth

Created on: February 20, 2011

          The missing ingredient for education is teaching of cognitive tools to children and adults (parents) to help students and adults approach their lives and mental frameworks more delicately to continually improve learning, motivation to learn, and their mental/emotional health.  The false teaching of fixed intelligences has made students and adults feel inferior in different areas.  By teaching this belief, we are placing jagged pieces of metal and broken bottles in the hallways of our schools to cut and maim our students.  This false teaching in society has created anxiety and psychological suffering, which is leading to many escapes such as drug/alcohol abuse, violence, depression, and suicide.  The teaching of fixed intelligences was designed to maintain class distinctions.  I hope you can see the connection between the harmful teachings of permanence in ability and its deadly effect on the mental/emotional health of our students.

            We need to see mental stress more accurately as “layers of mental frictions” that accumulate in our lives and hurt our ability to think and learn.  By redefining average stress as average layers of mental frictions we have tools to more permanently reduce layers of mental frictions and improve thinking, learning, and mental/emotional health.  Laughing, crying, running, and swimming are not good stresses but low, if any stress.  We are using energy, but we are “not creating mental frictions” from it.  In this definition, “stress does not occur” when energy is expended without mental frictions.  By seeing stress more accurately as layers of mental frictions - layers of conscious and subconscious (below the surface) unresolved mental frictions, we can see how our individual environments greatly affect our ability to think, learn, and change.  We can use this better definition of stress to help students and adults continually improve their ability to think and learn by learning how to more permanently reduce layers of mental frictions.

          The first tool: stress is more accurately defined as layers of mental frictions.  When we are performing mental work, our minds are also subconsciously working on other layers of mental frictions from various problems, circumstances, etc. 

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