The Power of Mindful Learning (9 page)

The Collected Prose

ELIZABETH BISHOP

Our school years and later careers are permeated by such
injunctions and beliefs as "If you work hard now, rewards will
follow later" and "Once you do your homework, then you can
go out and play." The retirement years are the "golden years."
The consequences of this presumption for learning at any age
have not been fully explored.

When we think about work we often assume pressure, deadlines, the possibility of failure, fatigue, lack of choice, set
goals, and unavoidable drudgery. We see play as the other
side of the coin: energizing rather than enervating, freely
undertaken for fun rather than outcome, relaxing rather than
pressured.

Implicit in the concept of delayed gratification is the idea
that work activities are necessarily arduous. If they were not,
why would we have to be paid, or coaxed, or promised rewards
to do them? This is not to deny that some people enjoy their
work, but rather to understand what makes them different
from those who don't.

Two Tramps in Mud Time

ROBERT FROST

Work and study are often seen as so unpleasant that we try
to put them off as long as possible. Many of us would never
complete tasks if not for deadlines. It takes time to get our
minds working on these tasks even after we've sat down to do
them. When we play tennis, cards, or tag, on the other hand,
we launch directly into the fray. We don't first have to overcome mindsets about drudgery or fear of failure and work ourselves up to these activities, we simply play.

Delaying enjoyment makes sense if there are things that
must be done and there is no evident way to enjoy doing them:
Medical school is a killer, but that's what you have to do if you
want to practice medicine; doing the laundry is boring, but it's
necessary if you want the kids to have clean clothes; if you're
good now, you'll be rewarded in the hereafter. Is it true, though,
that medical school, laundry, or being good have to feel like
work? They do not feel this way for everybody.

Learning anatomy by memorizing all the parts of the body
is tedious; but what if it were a board game or a jigsaw puzzle
in which we got to assemble or disassemble people we knew?
Or consider the cliche that students of medicine think they have virtually every disease they study. Once you really think
you have a disease, learning its symptoms, etiology, and cure
may still not be fun, but it certainly isn't as hard.

My colleague Roger Brown points out that the work that we
do in order to gain future rewards often turns out to be absorbing and a pleasure, whereas the rewards, when they arrive, may
seem unimportant: "Writing, studying data, et cetera turn out in
retrospect to be our greatest, most reliable pleasures, rather than
the little trinkets of achievement (awards, et cetera) for the sake
of which the work was supposedly undertaken."

Rewards found in the present are certain. Delayed rewards
may feel empty ("To think of all I gave up for this. .. "). To justify waiting, the future must promise a bigger payoff. Yet the
promise of a big payoff diminishes our appreciation of the present situation. Doesn't waiting sometimes make the reward
sweeter? Perhaps so, but taken to extremes, this may be an
unhealthy trade-off, along the lines of knocking our heads
against the wall because it feels so good when we stop. To be
sure, the highs can be experienced only if there are lows. But
the alternative to steep peaks and valleys is not a perpetual, flat
emotional experience. Total involvement, when, as Frost put it,
work becomes "play for mortal stakes," provides a steadier,
fuller, ever-present gratification.

If we don't open the presents until Christmas, or if we
plan a trip for after the new year, aren't we delaying gratification? We are not, if the anticipation itself is positive. Compare leaving on a trip the same day you decide to go with
planning to leave in three weeks. You might spend the three weeks actively planning the trip, gathering information,
imagining all the fun you will have. The trip might even turn
out to benefit from such thoughts. This is hardly delaying
gratification; it is merely being gratified by anticipation as
well as by the actual trip.

There are two approaches that educators and parents typically use to encourage children to engage in a disliked activity,
whether it is homework or household chores. They promise
children that rewards (or punishments for noncompliance) will
follow, or they add fun elements to the unpleasant task. In
both cases they reinforce children's presumptions that the task
is odious.

Children are plied with stories that encourage this attitude: sweeping ashes from the fireplace all day leads to an
encounter with Prince Charming; taking care of frightening
old hags with huge teeth leads to pots of gold; and grasshoppers who chirp and sing in the meadow all summer will
starve, while the lowly ant toiling in the dusty granary will be
praised and rewarded.

For children to learn that they should forgo immediate
pleasures and invest time and energy in activities that will have
greater payoffs in the future, they have to assume that the
world is just and orderly and predictable, that is, that we all get
what we deserve.' The belief in a just world offers further support for the idea of delayed gratification. (It also supports a
tendency to blame the victim. If people are seen as getting what
they deserve, it is a small step to believing that victims must
have deserved what they got.)

A writer friend of mine was trying to concentrate on writing
when some school-age children started up a hilarious, noisy
game below his window. He asked them to leave. Since he was
breaking up what clearly seemed a delightful scene, he paid
them each a quarter for doing so. The next day they came back
and caused the same annoyance; again, he paid them to leave.
This routine continued for over a week, until one day my friend
found he was out of quarters, and he suffered through the racket
as best he could. He discovered that he could work despite the
disturbance, and thence he gave no more quarters. The children
stopped coming. Two weeks later he ran into one of them at the
market and asked why he and his friends no longer came
around. The child replied, "What do you think, we're going to
come for nothing?"

Rewarding behavior often has just this effect: overjustifying
the behavior so that its intrinsic value is overlooked.' The children came at first because it was fun for them. After being
paid, they kept coming for the reward. Even play can lose its
intrinsic value if it is done with another goal in mind.

Work

CHARLES LAMB

Who among us has not had the experience of some task,
initially enjoyed, coming to feel like work? Beginning a garden is enjoyable. Weeding it may not be. Trying a recipe for
the first time may be totally engrossing. Preparing it again
may not be. Shooting baskets is great fun. Competing may
turn it into work. Repetition may be part of the problem.
Adding other motives such as doing it because we have to,
fear of evaluation, or letting the outcome overshadow the
process can also turn play into work. For instance, cooking
may be more fun for men than for women because typically,
men are not expected to be good at it (or perhaps are not
expected to do it at all).

Most tasks are not inherently pleasant or unpleasant, but an
evaluation imposed on a task carries such a presumption. Virtually any activity can be made into work, and most, if not all,
activities can be enjoyable. Solving math problems is unpleasant for many students, yet some of these same students buy
magazines full of brainteasers. The fear of negative evaluation
colors much of the school experience for most people. Claude
Steele showed that black students often distance themselves
from academic matters in order to protect their self-esteem.' In
one study students were told that they would or would not be
tested on the material they were given to learn. Black students
performed perfectly well except when they believed they were
being tested. Although the anticipation of being tested can
affect us all, Steele contends that black students face additional
anxiety about the possibility of confirming a negative academic stereotype. Such an effect can be understood in full measure
when we remember how inextricably bound were our own
school experiences and our anxiety about being evaluated.

To test the way we evaluate the pleasure of activities depending on the context or the label we put on them, Sophia
Snow and I conducted a study.' We looked at whether people
would regard the same activity differently depending on
whether it was called work or play. Adults from the Boston area
engaged in one of three tasks involving a calendar of Gary Larson cartoons. Because the cartoons are amusing, the tasks were
expected to be fun. For the first task, participants were asked to
sort the cartoons into odd- and even-numbered days, then by
month, and then to add up the number of cartoons. The other
tasks were both more difficult and more engaging. For the second task, participants were asked to change one or two words
in a cartoon to alter its meaning completely. For the last task,
people were asked to sort the cartoons into categories of their
own choosing, for example, most versus least amusing, those
with dogs in them, and so on. For half the participants, these
activities were referred to as a game; for the other half, they
were described as work.