Linguists have long argued about the extent to which the language we speak — determined in part by factors like geography and climate — limits the thoughts we are capable of having and actions we are capable of taking. “No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality,” theorist Edward Sapir wrote. “The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached.” At an extreme, one might argue that if you don’t know the word for a particular type of well-being, you’re not even capable of experiencing it.

It’s possible that when words give us a greater ability to differentiate feelings, we become more capable of understanding and regulating them.

Source: How Learning New Words Could Help You Be Happy in Life | Time

Beach and her research colleagues found that physicians-in-training who read the stigmatizing patient chart notes were significantly more likely to have a negative attitude toward the patient than those who read the chart containing more neutral language.”

And not only did their attitudes change—so did their treatment plans. Those physicians-in-training who had read the stigmatizing chart note decided to treat the patient’s pain less aggressively.

Source: Stigmatizing Language in Medical Records Affects Patient Care – Mad In America

By working in a quiet and scenic location, surrounded by books and nature, Winchester is leveraging a key principle of attention capital theory that I call location-boosted cognition.

Put simply, this principle claims that the details of the physical space in which you perform cognitive work can substantially increase the value of what you produce.

Source: Ready Player Productive: On Virtual Reality and Cognitively Demanding Work – Study Hacks – Cal Newport

I’ve been digging around in an idea that pervades Evangelicalism. The Evangelical belief that we merely live in our bodies. American Christianity (which consists in large part of evangelicalism) has minimized the theology and, if you will, sacredness of the body, saying that the physical body was irrelevant except to house the soul.

When framed in the evangelical American context, this twisted argument has a lot of value. It was probably the easiest theological justification for America’s beloved human rights abuses: enslavement and genocide.

By necessity of white America’s devotion to these practices, the black body didn’t matter to God.

The black experience didn’t matter to God.

Black suffering didn’t matter to God.

Evangelical theology has a functional disregard for both the body and mind, minimizing very real mental health disorders and often attributing them to personal sin or spiritual attack. It requires you to cut off parts of yourself in order to be a true believer.

In order to be a Christian, you have to engage in a form of self-colonization. You have to amputate your blackness, Latinness, Nativeness. You have to amputate your sexuality, your queerness, your masculinity if you’re female, your femininity if you’re male, your passions, your dreams, your intelligence, your critical thinking. No form of otherness is accepted within their narrow interpretation of Christianity.

Evangelicals will tell you that the resulting emotional and mental anguish and suffering are just holiness working in your life. Somehow they never have to answer for the fact that permanent pain is not positive growth.

When you are in pain, you are less able to think clearly and therefore easier to manipulate and control.

Do not mangle yourself for some White Jesus who expects your marginalization to continue as proof of your piety, while those with power, privilege, and supremacy do nothing to ease your burden. Jesus did not come to oppress the marginalized and put heavy loads on their backs. In fact, he condemned powerful people who were doing exactly that.

Source: We Get To Be Free — Tori Williams Douglass

A notebook is essential because if we really want our kids to engage in meaningful writing, we have to give them space to explore that process. And all the looseleaf, graphic organizers, and handouts in the world just can’t do that.

Notebooks allow for play, mess, and creativity. If a student writes a paragraph that ends up getting scrapped, it’s not such a big deal. They move on to the next page. They draw an arrow. They write in margins. But if that happens on a handout with fill-in-the blanks, the implication is that it’s somehow wrong. My own notebook is a holy mess of lists, arrows, scribbles, and eventually, through that process of sorting through the mess, my thinking is shaped into writing. By allowing our students to engage in this mess, we are encouraging students to make mistakes, to grow their thinking, and to take on the hard work of thinking and writing.

Source: The Most Essential School Supply (Plus 3 Instructional Practices to Make the Most of It!) | Moving Writers

Although people are often pathologized and shamed for feeling hopeless, hopelessness is sometimes a natural reaction to an oppressive political climate. George Carlin and other artists show how embracing hopelessness can serve as motivation to create social change.

“Carlin was a far better therapist for critical thinkers than are the vast majority of my mental health professional colleagues. Shaming hopelessness as some kind of character flaw or, worse, psychopathologizing it as a symptom of mental illness only adds insult to injury. Hope missionaries ignore the reality that pathologizing hopelessness does not make critical thinkers more hopeful, only more annoyed.

I know many mental health professionals who espouse hope but who are broken and compliant with any and all authorities. In contrast, I know anti-authoritarians who, like Carlin, express hopelessness but who are unbroken and resist illegitimate authorities. Carlin modeled a self-confident rebellion against authoritarianism and bullshit, and he provided the kind of humor that energizes resistance.”

Source: Hopeless But Not Broken: From George Carlin to Protest Music – Mad In America

I updated “Classroom UX: Bring Your Own Comfort, Bring Your Own Device, Design Your Own Context” with a selection from “Simon Winchester’s Writing Barn – Study Hacks – Cal Newport” to reinforce the point about deep work.

One of the more interesting ideas emerging from attention capital theory is the surprising role environment can play in supporting elite cognitive performance.

Professional writers seem to be at the cutting edge of this experimentation, but I wouldn’t be surprised if, in the near future, we start to see more serious attention paid to constructing seriously deep spaces as our economy shifts towards increasingly demanding knowledge work.

Source: Simon Winchester’s Writing Barn – Study Hacks – Cal Newport

Knowledge work is deep work. Make space in K-12 for deep work and the neurodivergent minds that prefer it.

“Writing is thinking” is my favorite expression for how to work in a company.

The biggest thing about writing down strategic choices is that they serve to build a corporate history (over a year or two, not really thinking about decades). Why decisions are made is rather important because companies, like people, can make the same mistakes over time without history.

Plus writing something for an audience is a way of making you consult representatives of that audience before publishing. What will marketing think? Will sales people be able to sell? Whether you consider those perspectives before or not does not change that they will react. This isn’t “buy-in” or “heads-up” but actually consulting the real stakeholders of a decision.

The act of writing forces a team of experts to share the details of goals-not just the what, but the why, what else was considered, the history, context.

But what is missing from that logic is that the process of writing and sharing thoughts is clarifying AND collaborating itself. Execution actually speeds up when you spend the up front time to write.

Writing is more inclusive. It is easier to contribute, doesn’t reward bullies and bullshitters, and allows for contemplation.

Are you creating a writing culture? Said in a way that I think makes more sense, is writing a core value of the company (team)? I hope so because I think it really matters and can help.

The first people to stop writing in a company are often those that were there the longest or the execs. Writing is important for everyone. Execs need to write, and do their own writing. Don’t farm out to others to fill in the details from an outline. Having others do your writing for you is for when you’re a head of state making speeches every day and for when every word matters, not for business writing even for the largest of companies.

Source: “Writing is Thinking”—an annotated twitter thread – Learning By Shipping

I updated “Neurodiversity in the SpEd Classroom” with selections from “This Video Demonstrates What It’s Like to Be an Autistic Adult Who Isn’t Being Heard | The Autism Site Blog” and a video embed of “Rethinking Autism: Autism Support Group – YouTube”.

More children than ever before are being diagnosed with autism. But what about the adults? Some of these individuals have never been diagnosed but have always known they were a bit “different.” Others were diagnosed but did not have the same degree of societal acceptance or the same number of resources available to help them cope with a neurotypical world.

Now this group of adults is the demographic that best understands what people with autism need, whether or not they know how to articulate it in a way the rest of society is able to grasp. But what these men and women have to say about autism is important. These people need to be heard!

The video below encourages adults with autism to get involved in the discussion and asks others to be cognizant of the needs of people with autism and invite them into the conversation. The neurotypical community needs adults with autism to lend their voices and experiences to help make the future brighter for the next generation!

Check out this powerful video!

Source: This Video Demonstrates What It’s Like to Be an Autistic Adult Who Isn’t Being Heard | The Autism Site Blog

I also embedded a couple tweets. See this thread for reactions to the video from #ActuallyAutistic folks:

This captures my sentiment: