But what do we do with the pain of learning? We know from our mission that in learning there can also be so much joy, curiosity, collaboration, and fun – but what if school, homework, and studying feel so difficult that it hurts?

For all, we might be wondering how to best support the students in our lives with the quizzes, tests, and exams they’re facing. We’re past the back-to-school buzz, but not yet at the winter break. This in-between time contains a lot of work – preparing for and taking assessments of every kind.

One of my top hits has been some variation of 'I can’t,' or 'not yet,' or, in deep, vulnerable truth, 'other people might be able to do that, but that’s not something I can do’.

The logic is that with a short duration of only 25 minutes, a learner can start more easily and get through the work efficiently. The hope is that students begin to think in pomodoros: how many rounds of 25+5 will a particular task take? For example, a student can begin to internalize that a list of homework questions will take two rounds, whereas an essay will take ten.

There are always individual preferences and differences. There will be some learners who thrive solo, and I’m all about cheering on when a student finds their recipe or repertoire for feel-good learning. 

Between the 73 tabs we might have open to the hypervigilant “what am I forgetting?” feeling, it can feel so hard to stick to the task–any task–these days.

Students are sometimes surprised when I mention food and water as part of learning strategy coaching sessions, but I’ve had too many 1:1s with students who describe sleeplessness yet have a Red Bull in hand, who speak about relentless underlying worry and who live off of coffee and candy. I’m not claiming causation, but I do notice correlation. 

What touches me most in these student sessions is the articulated confusion over what to do. In that, I hear open-heartedness, I hear (as always) a place for learning strategies to help, and I hear the friction and tension and push-and-pull that learners live in all the time. The “what should I be doing?” or “how can I decide?” The sense that amidst all of the demands, it’s very hard to know what to do. 

Given that procrastination makes things worse in the long-run, why do learners (and all of us) procrastinate? Because we’re bored with the task and want to do something more interesting and fun; because we get distracted by and pulled into more immediately compelling activities; because the discomfort we feel in the face of the work we know we need to do is hard to sit with.

Whether you’re into wishing folks “happy new year!” with exuberance, or taking it quiet and slow; whether you vision board quarterly aims, or prefer to see how things organically unfold; this newsletter here, short and simple, is about how we can do some of this. How we can do this time of year—with practices that help us feel whole, with pushback against needing to do / buy anything.