When you are afraid, you start going into fight or flight mode. Your body starts prioritising what is needed for immediate survival - screw routine body functions, if you don't make it past the next few moments there won't be a routine to return to. You stop digesting food. Cell repair slows or stops. You stop producing saliva, which is why your mouth goes dry when you're nervous just before making a speech or going into a difficult conversation. Your heart rate and breathing increase to ensure better blood flow. A cocktail of hormones like epinephrine and oxytocin are cued up and produced, which amplifies your body's ability to act (and remarkably, in the case of oxytocin, reminds you to seek help).
Don't be mistaken about what happens when you feel fear. Your body is readying itself to help you face what you fear in the way it knows how.
What causes us to feel fear?
1) Fear occurs to us unconsciously. Do you pause to think, hey, very angry looking snake! Maybe I should be scared. Of course not, it would be too late! Fear becomes much clearer when we examine what happens inside your brain. When you are afraid, the fear/anger/aggression/anxiety centre of your brain - the amygdalas (get used to this name, it's gonna keep popping up) lights up. And we've covered all the changes that happen in your body: your blood pressure, your hormones, your heart-rate. But remember how amygdala is like a train interchange with direct routes to different parts of your brain? There is a direct neural link between our amygdala and your pre-frontal cortex, the rational thinking part of your brain. And if we look closely enough or we think things through, sometimes we realise, argh! it's not an angry snake, it's just a prank toy that your annoying friend had thrown at you. Or if you've handled angry snakes enough times, your amygdala does not light as much. Your blood pressure and your heart rate do not increase as much, you realise what you need to do is to stay calm and slowly back away.
Finally, notice how fear, anger, aggression, and anxiety are processed by the same part of the brain, the amygdala. This is no coincidence. These 4 emotions are closely tied to one another; aggression maybe triggered because one is nervous, angry, or fearful. Being fearful may cause one to react angrily, as a self-defense mechanism. Fear, like all our emotions, happens to us. Mostly, we can't control how it originates. But we can control how it develops by understanding what exactly is causing fear and by choosing the response that dispels it
2) We fear what we are unconfident or uncertain about. Think back on your ancestors doing something they weren't confident or certain off - hunting a massive animal without a weapon, or eating a berry they've never seen before. Doing so would mean a very high chance of seriously harming themselves. Today, after many cycles of evolution, we have been wired based on these experiences.
Think about it. Are you ever fearful of something you've done before, and are good? Brushing your teeth, putting on your clothes, indulging in your favourite hobby (whatever it is)? Of course not. You know you can perform these functions easily. You are confident.
But many of us would have felt fearful and anxious the first time we ventured into something new: using a pair of chopsticks, riding a bicycle, swimming, going on a first date. We were uncertain about these functions, and we were not confident about performing them. However, once we have demonstrated to ourselves that we are able to perform these tasks, we are no longer afraid. The same applies to more challenging tasks. Some of us struggle with: public speaking, starting a business, having a very difficult conversation with the CEO... You are uncertain and unconfident if you can succeed. But once you have proven to yourself you are able to do it, even for the more challenging tasks, you are no longer afraid. People might start off feeling scared about public speaking, but after speech 3797, you're pro The catch, of course, is that sometimes, we are too scared to start.
Even if we were certain of something OR confident about something, many of us will still feel some amount of fear. We might be theoretically certain how we should use a pair of chopsticks, but if we have never succeeded in using them properly, we remain unconfident and will still feel nervous if we had to use them, especially when others are observing. You might also be confident about
3) we fear what is painful. Boxer. climbing 100 flights of stairs or doing 100 burpees. But pain is not just physical but mental. Failure is painful. Being judged is painful.
This is why you procrastinate. You either fear what you have to do bevause you don't know how to do it (you don't fear brushing your teeth for example), or you fear doing something becaue you know it will be effortful
4) we fear what we cannot control
Learn more about your amygdala, the amygdala hijack, the thalamus, the pre-frontal cortex, and how your brain works here.
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Summary:
- Fear and anxiety (and anger + aggression) are always
Making standardised testing the standard practice
Who is Frederick J. Kelly? What "test" is too crude to be used? Why should I care?
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In 1914, the population of the United States was growing rapidly. The country had also just introduced at least 2 years of compulsory high school education. As a result, the number of students per cohort in the United States swelled from 200,000 in 1890 to 1.5 million in 1914.
Concurrently, there was a shortage of teachers. The training of new teachers was not as fast as the growth in students, and... World War 1 was ongoing - some teachers were gone, joining in the war in some form or another.
More students; insufficient teachers - there was hence an urgent need to examine how scarce teaching resources can be distributed to serve the students.
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Enter statistician Frederick J. Kelly who came up with his version of the standardised test — the “item-response” model. Doesn’t ring a bell? Today, it is known as the multiple-choice test.
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Kelly did not expect that his item-response test would soon be used as widely as it eventually did. He initially thought it would be an easy way to assess how much students knew about a topic. But, it soon adopted a different purpose - it solved the most pressing problem of the day. Kelly's standardised test was a quick and efficient way to grade and categorise students into different bands. It can then be decided how much of the limited teaching resource to allocate for each of students.
Kelly started to champion a different direction. First, he explained that his test was intended for “lower-order” processing, i.e. simpler questions. Later, as president of University of Idaho, he rejected standardised-testing, pushing for liberal, integrated, and problem-based learning, claiming that: “college is a place to learn how to educate oneself rather than a place in which to be educated.”
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Here’s the irony. The creator of a testing metric suggested changes to how his metric should be used. But the only thing that was changed was him. Because of his views, Kelly was asked to step down as President after just 2 years, while the test he created, which so well fitted the narrative of education, became increasingly widespread. Today, multiple-choice questions feature heavily at all levels of education; you and I have probably taken many a multiple-choice test. Indeed they are a critical component for entry into all universities in the world, including the very best.
The history of Frederick J. Kelly and the standardised test reinforce something that has been repeatedly emphasised across these pages:
- Stories are the way we explain and understand the world. For example, most of us understand the story of standardised tests as a "standard practice" in education.
- Before we formulate our stories, we are naturally influenced by many factors. But once we have made up our minds about what the story is, it becomes very difficult to change.
- Even if the original writer of the story comes out to explain: hey, you guys got the story wrong, that's not how I intended the story to be! Even then, it hardly matters. We believe the story more than the author who wrote it.
Related links:
Planck's principle: Change occurs one funeral at a time.
How far must one go to prove his case? Barry Marshall and stomach ulcers
How can we actually change the views of others?
Why does evidence not change our minds?
What effect dos evidence have in changing views on climate change?
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