Will You Relax?

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As a teacher, I’ve had my share of stress.  I work in an education system that seems to ignore the health of kids and staff in a misguided attempt to ‘raise standards’.

I’m absolutely convinced that ’standards’ would naturally improve IF we could learn to be more relaxed as a society.

The UK has the most over-tested kids in the world.

Who benefits from this?

I lose many many hours of teaching each year simply because the students are being tested and have to be withdrawn from lessons.

Crazy!

I’m so pleased, though, that I’m not alone in my thinking.  I’ve just read a great article called, ‘In Pursuit of Relaxation‘

Here’s a short extract:

“Relaxation techniques even offer academic benefits. According to Al Gini, author of The Importance of Being Lazy, “Fatigue and the frenzy of overstimulation can block objectivity, delimit perspective, and often deaden our ability to calculate and evaluate logically.” Research has also proven that stress has a negative, sometimes demoralizing, impact on the ability to learn and to take tests. Tension control, on the other hand, can help children learn better and more successfully manage stressful test taking. Indeed, there was a study of “brilliant American children,” which found that one of the common factors in their lives was the fact that they spent a lot of unstructured time “doing nothing.” That alone should be enough incentive to let children hang out and relax.”

How true!

In the article, Rae talks about how relaxation is a learned skill.  Isn’t it strange how something that you would imagine to be so easy, is actually very difficult to achieve.

So… period 3 each Wednesday morning to be devoted to one hour of ‘taught’ relaxation for kids AND staff?

What do you think?

Read Rae’s article here: In Pursuit of Relaxation

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