The Weekly COVID Update: The Most Wonderful Time of The Year
Has your New Year’s been ruined? Not the January 1st edition, but the real new year – Labour Day.
Of the 14 million households in Canada, roughly 5.8 million (41%) have school-aged children and are going through as large a disruption to their lives as COVID has induced. For many people, September has been a time of renewal, even more so than the calendar New Year. It is a time to start afresh with vigour and energy.
But this year has more stress than ever. The online social conversation around back to school has skyrocketed. It started much earlier and has been much more intense than last year.
It has not been your imagination. The July start to our conversation about back to school finally lines up with retailers pushing colouring pencils our children don’t need, binders they don’t use and new jeans they will grow out of by Thanksgiving.
Spring, summer, fall, winter... storage and organization? Most shoppers see the seasons change four times a year. Retailers see anywhere from 13 to 20 and all those seasons are designed to get shoppers into their stores. If you’re wondering, the storage and organization season is the first few weeks of January.
Did you know that those crazy Aussies promote Emoji Day (July 17th) as a retail holiday? What would you sell?
I guess emoji sumo Hallowe’en costumes are as good an idea as anything.
While “Curious Face” remains one of the most popular emojis, “Pleading Face” has surged in popularity since COVID and now sits in third place, behind only the consistent top two of “Face with Tears of Joy” and “Loudly Crying Face.”
Speaking of retail seasons, how’s Hallowe’en going to work? Will the costume of the year be lazy teenagers wearing bandanas over their faces pretending to be responsible, asymptomatic COVID victims while looming into your personal space grabbing some chocolate? I’m sure it’s been on sale at Costco for a few weeks. And those mini chocolate bars already have prime shelf space in Safeway. True, those aren’t really for the kids.
Getting back to back-to-school, most advice to children about preparing for school is to purge and declutter regularly. But should we really get all that judgy about their desks? Take a look at your own desk, is it decluttered?
“When people walk by your office desk, they will judge you and your ability to take care of yourself, your work tasks, your projects or their money and investments,” Sylvie di Giusto says. “Is that fair or not? It doesn’t matter, because it happens automatically.”
At least with Zoom we only have to clean the shelves behind us with carefully curated business books in clear view, such as The Outsiders, Blue Ocean Strategy, The Art of War, Start with Why and The Complete Calvin and Hobbes. (But keep the complete Shades of Grey on the bottom shelf. That invites a different kind of judgment. Stick to displaying Histoire d’O to appear cosmopolitan.)
Unsurprisingly, our lunch habits have also changed since we’ve been working at home. 85% of Americans report different eating habits since COVID-19. Children are hoping things change at school.
Studies have shown that the seven worst school lunches (nutritionally speaking) are:
Meatloaf(?) and potatoes
Nachos
Quesadillas
Pizza
Chocolate milk
Soft drinks
Sweets & desserts
So basically, a great Grey Cup meal (of the past, not this year) is the worst school lunch ever.
After trying to digest that carb- and fat-laden tray of goodness, kids need to study. Whether at home or in school, how we conceptualize intelligence is one of the most significant factors in how well people learn.
Throughout her 40-year career, Carol Dweck has studied intelligence. Dweck, a psychologist at Stanford University, identified two core mindsets, or beliefs, about one’s own traits that shape how people approach challenges: fixed mindset, the belief that one’s abilities were carved in stone and predetermined at birth, and growth mindset, the belief that one’s skills and qualities could be cultivated through effort and perseverance.
It affects both how we see ourselves and how we see others. If we have a fixed mindset about someone, we don’t interact with them in ways that allow them to grow and develop. This is as true of our colleagues as it is of our children.
This this excellent article in The Atlantic describes Dweck’s research and shows how important it is that we cultivate a growth mindset.
As Dewck says,
“When students had more of a growth mindset, they held the view that talents and abilities could be developed and that challenges were the way to do it. Learning something new, something hard, sticking to things—that’s how you get smarter. Setbacks and feedback weren’t about your abilities, they were information you could use to help yourself learn. With a growth mindset, kids don’t necessarily think that there’s no such thing as talent or that everyone is the same, but they believe everyone can develop their abilities through hard work, strategies, and lots of help and mentoring from others.”
As with many (if not all) psychological principles, it is not quite that simple. First, nobody has a growth mindset in everything all the time. Everyone is a mixture of fixed and growth mindsets. But how the mindset framework is being implemented is also a challenge. The mindset ideas were developed as a counter to the self-esteem movement of blanketing everyone with praise, whether deserved or not.
“Dweck recently noticed a trend: a widespread embrace of what she refers to as “false growth mindset”—a misunderstanding of the idea’s core message. Growth mindset’s popularity was leading some educators to believe that it was simpler than it was, that it was only about putting forth effort or that a teacher could foster growth mindset merely by telling kids to try hard. A teacher might applaud a child for making an effort on a science test even if he’d failed it, for instance, believing that doing so would promote growth mindset in that student regardless of the outcome. But such empty praise can exacerbate some of the very problems that growth mindset is intended to counter.”
If you are a parent or a manager, this article is one of the most useful links we have provided. It’s a very short read and provides very specific advice on how to cultivate a growth mindset that is applicable to everyone you provide feedback to.
While we’re on the subject of “back-to-“, let’s take a moment to honour the humpback whale. They are magnificent creatures that are easy to identify once to you get to know the signs. You can tape this handy cetacean guide to your office window for the next time a whale passes and you’re curious what it might be.
I know, you’re probably not going to tape this to your office window, but the next time you’re on Zoom and Charlie says, “oh look, there’s a humpback,” you’ll know how he identified it.
Best of luck with back to school.