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Unhealthy Learning: Chronic Learning Performance Anxiety

The Guardian put out: How anxiety scrambles your brain and makes it hard to learn

The piece describes how episodes of anxiety negatively affect the learning-health of those with anxiety disorders. Unfortunately, it fails to address the chronic learning performance anxiety that is negatively affecting the learning-health of most of our children.

According to our national educational assessments, most U.S. children are chronically improficient at learning the skills most critical to their success in school.

How do you think these children feel? How would you feel if day after day, week after week, month after month, and year after year you felt ‘not good enough’ at learning?

What happens to the learning trajectories of children who grow up feeling (chronically) not good enough at learning?

Feeling ‘not good enough’ at learning (in socially important mental performance domains) elicits shame. It is the fear of shame (obviously the case in public speaking) that is the root of the anxiety.

What happens to the learning of children who experience chronic learning performance anxiety? What happens to the learning of children who learn to feel (chronically) ashamed of their minds?Mind-Shame

Where and when learning feels shameful, most can’t help but learn to avoid learning.

 

See:

When Learning Hurts – Toxic Learning
Re: Imaging study reveals differences in brain function for children with math anxiety
The Neural Correlates of Math Anxiety

and…

Do you see what I see? The Child, the Child…

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