I can’t report that I meditate daily or even weekly, but there were times in my life, difficult times, when meditation was a daily aid. I learned skills and habits that still help me today.  I am, in other words, well aware of both the power and the long-lasting nature of discoveries and habits gained through a meditative practice. It is my suspicion that the rewards of meditation in the classroom might show up later, and might last well into the future.

The experience is new to the students and they have to get used to it. (Some students may never take to it, but most do.) Its benefits are highly individualized. Some may find it of benefit in order to achieve the proper state of mind to write; others may find it a well to reach into for new ideas or new links between ideas; still others may expand its usefulness to other areas of life as well.

One thing is for sure — the typical methods of measuring effectiveness do not apply to meditation. The ultimate academic goal in a writing class is better essays, stories, or articles, and so many factors go into that accomplishment that it would be impossible to tease out the gains achieved only through meditation.

The nineteen students in my class provided reactions which help in the assessment.  On a general class survey, I asked them to evaluate each class activity this semester according to three criteria:  1) Did it stimulate you to think deeper, 2) Did you enjoy it, and 3) Was it useful in writing your essay. The highest number was 8, and lowest 1.

They rated meditation 4.5 for stimulation, 6.9 for enjoyment, and 4.5 for usefulness. Only individual conferences rated as high for enjoyment (6.9), followed by reading poetry (5.6)*.  There is a divergence between the students who benefited from it the most and those who benefited least, but even those who gave low numbers for stimulation and usefulness rated it higher for enjoyment.

What this leaves me wondering is, “What is the value of enjoyment in the classroom?”  Does  having a calm class which finds itself in a much better mood after meditation produce better essays? Discounting the disgruntled student whose numbers were 1, 2, 1,  the class enjoys this exercise more than it enjoys any other activity. In the comments section of the survey, they wrote, “not important, but fun,” “helps me relax,” “eases the stress,” “helps me think about the essay,” “helps me relax and open my mind,” “helps us clear our heads,” “helps connect everything together,” and quite a few remarked that it didn’t help so much in writing the essays, though they looked forward to it, it relaxed them, and it was fun.

In my experience, the meditation binds the class together and gives them a more positive attitude as they work together on writing essays and doing other exercises. Since many students have reported that they now set aside meditative moments as they tackle their homework in this and other classes, it must aid them in some way. This extra element of control over their stress and perhaps their confusion contributes something important to not only their academic, but also their personal lives. This must be evaluated on a scale which resides somewhere outside the Statistics books. My husband is an economist and statistician, and he is helping me make sense out of my first stab at evaluating meditation, but the proper questions to ask, and the proper factors to take into consideration are still under development.

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For your further information, below are the averages for each category.

*  For meditation:  stimulation, 4.48; enjoyment 6.9; usefulness, 5.2

Individual conferences:  6.3, 6.5, 6.9  Overall:  5.5

Reading stories/books:  4.8, 4.4, 6.0  Overall:  5.0

Reading poems/songs:  5.5, 5.6, 5.9 Overall: 5.6

Grammar explanations/exercises:  3.9, 3.0, 4.4  Overall: 3.7

Peer review (traditional):  4.4, 4.0, 4.6  Overall: 4.3

Modeling writing an essay in class: 6.2, 4.5, 5.8  Overall: 5.5

This meditation took place between the clarification in class of the goal for the next essay, and each student’s attempt to narrow his or her focus.

The lights went out, the door was closed, the students set themselves up by adjusting their posture and taking a few breaths.  I asked them to turn their attention to their next essay, then breathed on it for a minute or two.

“Ideas are running through your head, right?  That is the Monkey Brain, always teasing you, taunting you, distracting you with thoughts unrelated to your focus.”  Pause for a minute.  ”Don’t fight these ideas.  Let them enter your head and march out the other side. Instead of grasping them, let them move. Watch them.”

We breathed on that for a few minutes.

“Many of your are having negative thoughts about this essay — ‘I don’t know what to do,’ ‘I’ve always been terrible at writing,’ ‘I got a C in my high school writing class,’ ‘my teacher told me that writing was not my strong suit,’ ‘This is hard.’ Watch those thoughts march through your head and out the other side, too. They play no role in this task.”

We breathed on that for a few minutes.

“Now you are ready to think.”

We took at least five minutes to reflect silently, then turned on the lights, opened the door, and began to discuss the focus of the upcoming essay.

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My next post will be about evaluating the efficacy of meditation in the writing classroom.

My class has asked (by vote of 19-1) for regular meditation exercises. We do them once a week. I will document those in subsequent posts, but yesterday we did a variation — a concentration exercise. A case could be made that because of multi-tasking and the constant electronic intrusion into their lives, students rarely concentrate on a single activity. I wanted to test their frequent assertions that they can do two things at once; listen to music or television while studying, text while having a conversation, check the baseball score on their iPad while taking in the class discussion, and so on.

EXERCISE:  Our class is in a room with no windows, and I wanted the students to be in a place where visual or audio intrusions would be frequent, so we went into the hallway outside our classroom and they lined up at the windows, looking onto the Student Center Plaza, which was frequently criss-crossed by pedestrians. Another teacher and one of her students were discussing an assignment at the end of the hallway, clearly audible. After they had lined up, I advised my class that they should remind themselves that the noise and activity around them was other people going about other lives and had nothing to do with them.

They were instructed to pick an unmoving object and concentrate on it for two minutes. I would announce the beginning and the end of the period.

During the exercise two people looked away, but most remained unmoving and silent.

After it was over, the consensus was that 1) it was most difficult to ignore the audio intrusion of the teacher-student conversation, and 2) the two minutes did not seem a long time.

This exercise may have suggested (I don’t know, what do you think?) that students these days can indeed multitask, or at least can tune out visual and audio intrusions quite well. I consider this bad news, as it means that they can tune me out in class with ease if left with access to electronic devices, though the students agree unanimously that computers/iPads/iPhones should be put aside in class. I remember well the first time I tried to concentrate like this, on a hillside outside Jerusalem in 1966. It was impossible to concentrate on a single object for even a minute. Perhaps constant practice has wired modern students’ brains differently. It will be up to somebody else to figure this out, but I was surprised by the ease with which my students accomplished this exercise.