Living Younger, Healthier, Longer:The Telomere Effect

My friend sent me an excerpt from the new book The Telomere Effect: A Revolutionary Approach to Living Younger, Healthier, Longer by Elizabeth Blackburn and Elissa Epel (2017). It was so thought-provoking and insightful that I decided to share it on my blog. More so when I am teaching Human Genetics this semester, where we talk of structure of genes, telomeres, their functions, etc. So here is the excerpt:

How can one person bask in the sunshine of good health, while another person looks old before her time? Humans have been asking this question for millennia, and recently, it’s becoming clearer and clearer to scientists that the differences between people’s rates of aging lie in the complex interactions among genes, social relationships, environments and lifestyles. Even though you are born with a particular set of genes, the way you live can influence how they express themselves. Some lifestyle factors may even turn genes on or shut them off.

Deep within the genetic heart of all our cells are telomeres, or repeating segments of noncoding DNA that live at the ends of the chromosomes. They form caps at the ends of the chromosomes and keep the genetic material from unraveling. Shortening with each cell division, they help determine how fast a cell ages. When they become too short, the cell stops dividing altogether. This isn’t the only reason a cell can become senescent — there are other stresses on cells we don’t yet understand very well — but short telomeres are one of the major reasons human cells grow old. We’ve devoted most of our careers to studying telomeres, and one extraordinary discovery from our labs (and seen at other labs) is that telomeres can actually lengthen.

HARMFUL THOUGHT PATTERNS

What this means: aging is a dynamic process that could possibly be accelerated or slowed — and, in some aspects, even reversed. To an extent, it has surprised us and the rest of the scientific community that telomeres do not simply carry out the commands issued by your genetic code. Your telomeres are listening to you. The foods you eat, your response to challenges, the amount of exercise you get, and many other factors appear to influence your telomeres and can prevent premature aging at the cellular level. One of the keys to enjoying good health is simply doing your part to foster healthy cell renewal.

Scientists have learned that several thought patterns appear to be unhealthy for telomeres, and one of them is cynical hostility. Cynical hostility is defined by high anger and frequent thoughts that other people cannot be trusted. Someone with hostility doesn’t just think, “I hate to stand in long lines at the grocery store”; they think, “That other shopper deliberately sped up and beat me to my rightful position in the line!” — and then seethe. People who score high on measures of cynical hostility tend to get more cardiovascular disease, metabolic disease and often die at younger ages. They also have shorter telomeres. In a study of British civil servants, men who scored high on measures of cynical hostility had shorter telomeres than men whose hostility scores were low. The most hostile men were 30 percent more likely to have a combination of short telomeres and high telomerase (an enzyme in cells that helps keep telomeres in good shape) — a profile that seems to reflect the unsuccessful attempts of telomerase to protect telomeres when they are too short.

These men had the opposite of a healthy response to stress. Ideally, your body responds to stress with a spike in cortisol and blood pressure, followed by a quick return to normal levels. Instead, when these men were exposed to stress, their diastolic blood pressure and cortisol levels were blunted, a sign their stress response was, basically, broken from overuse. Their systolic blood pressure increased, but instead of returning to normal levels, it stayed elevated for a long time afterward. The hostile men also had fewer social connections and less optimism. In terms of their physical and psycho-social health, they were highly vulnerable to an early disease-span, the years in a person’s life marked by the diseases of aging, which include cardiovascular disease, arthritis, a weakened immune system and more. Women tend to have lower hostility, and it’s less related to heart disease for them, but there are other psychological culprits affecting women’s health, such as depression.

Pessimism is the second thought pattern that has been shown to have negative effects on telomeres. When our research team conducted a study on pessimism and telomere length, we found that people who scored high on a pessimism inventory had shorter telomeres. This was a small study of about 35 women, but similar results have been found in other studies, including a study of over 1,000 men. It also fits with a large body of evidence that pessimism is a risk factor for poor health. When pessimists develop an aging-related illness, like cancer or heart disease, the illness tends to progress faster. Like cynically hostile people — and people with short telomeres, in general — they tend to die earlier.

Rumination — the act of rehashing problems over and over — is the third destructive thought pattern.How do you tell rumination from harmless reflection? Reflection is the natural, introspective analysis about why things happen a certain way. It may cause you some healthy discomfort, but rumination feels awful. And rumination never leads to a solution, only to more ruminating.

When you ruminate, stress sticks around in the body long after the reason for the stress is over, in the form of prolonged high blood pressure, elevated heart rate, and higher levels of cortisol. Your vagus nerve, which helps you feel calm and keeps your heart and digestive system steady, withdraws its activity — and remains withdrawn long after the stressor is over. In a study, we examined daily stress responses in healthy women who were family caregivers. The more the women ruminated after a stressful event, the lower the telomerase in their aging CD8 cells (the crucial immune cells that send out proinflammatory signals when they are damaged). People who ruminate experience more depression and anxiety, which are, in turn, associated with shorter telomeres.

The fourth thought pattern is thought suppression, the attempt to push away unwanted thoughts and feelings. The late Daniel Wegener, a Harvard social psychologist, once came across this line from the great nineteenth-century Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky: “Try to pose for yourself this task: not to think of a polar bear, and you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute.” Wegener put this idea to the test through a series of experiments and identified a phenomenon he called ironic error, meaning that the more forcefully you push your thoughts away, the louder they call out for your attention.

Ironic error may also be harmful to telomeres. If we try to manage stressful thoughts by sinking the bad thoughts into the deepest waters of our subconscious, it can backfire. The chronically stressed brain’s resources are already taxed — we call this cognitive load — making it even harder to successfully suppress thoughts. Instead of less stress, we get more. In a small study, greater avoidance of negative feelings and thoughts was associated with shorter telomeres. Avoidance alone is probably not enough to harm telomeres, but it can lead to chronic stress arousal and depression, both of which may shorten your telomeres.

The final thought pattern is mind wandering. Harvard psychologists Matthew Killingsworth (TED Talk:Want to be happier? Stay in the moment) and Daniel Gilbert (TED Talk: The surprising science of happiness) used a “track your happiness” iPhone app to ask thousands of people questions about what activity they are engaged in, what their minds are doing, and how happy they are. Killingsworth and Gilbert discovered we spend half of the day thinking about something other than what we’re doing. They also found that when people are not thinking about what they’re doing, they’re not as happy as when they’re engaged. In particular, negative mind wandering — thinking negative thoughts, or wishing you were somewhere else — was more likely to lead to unhappiness in their next moments.

Together with Eli Puterman, we studied close to 250 healthy, low-stress women who ranged from 55 to 65 years old and assessed their tendency to mind-wander. We asked them two questions: How often in the past week have you had moments when you felt totally focused or engaged in doing what you were doing at the moment? How often in the past week have you had any moments when you felt you didn’t want to be where you were, or doing what you were doing at the moment? Then we measured the women’s telomeres.

The women with the highest levels of self-reported mind-wandering had telomeres that were shorter by around 200 base pairs. (To put this in context, a typical 35-year-old has roughly 7,500 base pairs of telomeres; a 65-year-old, 4,800 base pairs.) This was regardless of how much stress they had in their lives. Some mind-wandering can be creative, of course. But when you are thinking negative thoughts about the past, you are more likely to be unhappy, and you may possibly even experience higher levels of resting stress hormones.

The negative thought patterns we’ve described are automatic, exaggerated and controlling. They take over your mind; it’s as if they tie a blindfold around your brain so you can’t see what is really going on around you. But when you become more aware of your thoughts, you take off the blindfold. You won’t necessarily stop the thoughts, but you have more clarity. Activities that promote better thought awareness include most types of meditation, along with most forms of mind-body exercises, including long-distance running.

Thought awareness can promote stress resilience. With time, you learn to encounter your own ruminations or problematic thoughts and say, “That’s just a thought. It’ll fade.” That is a secret about the human mind: We don’t need to believe everything our thoughts tell us. Or, as the bumper sticker says, “Don’t believe everything you think.”

Teachers are mentors, not vendors

On 20th Oct, 2016, Thursday, an article appeared in The Straits Times by Dr William Wan, who is the General Secretary of the Singapore Kindness Movement titled "Teachers are mentors, not vendors". As I was reading the article, I was feeling as if he has written what I see and feel around me, about today's students and parents, and the whole education system-- that TEACHERS are the MENTORS, not the service providers for the students. Below is the article for you to read and see for yourself:

Dr William Wan writes: On taking up my current role as general secretary of the Singapore Kindness Movement six years ago, I was surprised that students and parents were considered by the Ministry of Education (MOE) as "customers". I expressed my surprise and concern in discussion with my friends in the MOE management team.

What we call a thing has a big impact on how people perceive the thing itself. Would it really affect our treatment of teachers and the education system if we called our students and their parents "customers", I wondered. The word "customer" is based on a commercial concept. It is by definition, a transaction with which parties buy and sell among each other. And in sales and service, an often-used cliche is that the customer is always right. Hence, the customer is more likely the one in the stronger bargaining position.

Parents and teachers should work together as partners to educate students. Parents should also set a good example for their children by being more supportive of teachers. This thorny problem was anticipated by a 2012 publication, Case Studies In Public Governance: Building Institutions In Singapore, edited by June Gwee. It was already recognised that "education and learning were not for profit-making, and the commercial notion of 'delighting customers' threatened to be a misnomer and a source of tension".

What then would be the implications on our education system? Should we pull through with this customer-centric service?

For one, instead of the MOE and educational institutions having control over our education system, this terminology shifts the balance of power to the students and parents. This does not bode well for the education sector of modern Singapore, which already has a worrying number of able teachers leaving the profession. For example, discipline, already a difficult area by many anecdotal accounts, would become even more difficult to enforce. It is not common or easy for vendors to discipline their customers.

In addition, when there is a "problem" in the food chain, be it homework or other schoolwork, which party is to be held responsible? In the marketplace, the "service provider" will have to shoulder the blame and correct his mistakes. Hence, if the student has a problem completing her homework, it need not be the student's fault. National education cannot be treated as a mere commercial transaction. Teaching is a very noble calling, and our teachers are the best providers, not of a service, but of education itself, an indispensable block for nation-building. It should not be trivialised by commercialising it. Effective teachers do not just teach: They mentor, they listen and help with the student's problems (be it academic or personal) and they walk the journey with the students in their personal growth.

So how do we make the education landscape right for everyone?

AN END TO BEING STUDENT-PLEASERS

First, let us get rid of the old, misplaced idea that students and parents are customers that the MOE, educational institutions, principals and teachers absolutely have to please. Education itself is the institutionalised dissemination of information, knowledge and skills to a future generation. The overall objective is certainly not for a commercial benefit nor to service a customer base. The intent, according to the MOE's website, is to help our students discover their own talents, to make the best of these talents and realise their full potential, and to develop a passion for learning that lasts through life.

Teachers are not transactional vendors, but transformational mentors. They are educators, whose duties include guiding students and helping them develop skills and acquire a variety of knowledge. Their work is transformational, not transactional, and they must be empowered to do so. If they had to please their "customers", their work is immediately reduced to the transactional level.

Next, we should always give credit where it is due. I do not believe we can thank our educators enough for nurturing the future of our nation. Rather than critiquing how they should work their hours, we, as parents and grandparents, should support them and motivate them to continue nurturing the desire in our young to learn.

In any society, it takes a whole village to educate a child. All the more so in modern society. Today, the need for both parents to be at work makes the role of educators even more critically important in the lives of our children. We require more than just the parents to raise a child. We need able educators and a supportive workforce to understand one another, and to educate the child together as partners.

Finally, shouldn't we remember that we, as parents and extended family, have the prime responsibility of bringing up our children? Including, yes, educating them - perhaps less so in formal education, but certainly in general knowledge and most importantly, values.

On the latter, more important than any words uttered, our personal conduct and role-modelling do far more in educating our young. If we mistreat, or are otherwise excessively demanding of, and unreasonable with, our children's teachers, how do we think our children will regard them?

At the end of the day, in our relationship with our children's teachers, both we and they need to remember that kindness is, after all, up to each one of us. And then perhaps, in modelling this thought, despite all the other influences now readily available, we may yet succeed in making kindness and graciousness intrinsic values in the next generation and in our nation.

Right Away is the Opposite of Now

I was reading this book called "Time and the soul". It was really good book. A part of the book which explains how doing something 'right away' is the Opposite of 'Now" is given below:

Some years ago, I was walking downtown San Francisco with a great friend and a learned Tibetan scholar. I asked him about one of the most striking ways that the Tibetans express the uniqueness of the human condition. Imagine, they say, that deep in the vast ocean there swims a great and ancient turtle who surfaces for air once every hundred years. Imagine further that floating somewhere in the ocean is a single ox-yoke carried here and there by random waves and currents. What are the chances that when the turtle surfaces, his head will happen to emerge precisely through the center of the ox-yoke? That is how rare it is to be born as a human being!

In the middle of our conversation, I pointed to the crowds of men and women rushing by on the street and I gestured in a way to indicate not only them, but all the thousands and millions of people rushing around in the world. "Tell me, Lobsang," I said, "if it is so rare to be born a human being, how come there are so many people in the world?"

My friend slowed his pace and then stopped. He waited for a moment, taking in my question. I remember suddenly being able to hear, as though for the first time, the loud and frenetic traffic all around us. He looked at me and very quietly replied, "How many human beings do you see?"

In a flash, I understood the meaning of the story and the idea. Most of the people I was seeing, in the inner state they were in at that moment, were not really people at all. Most were what the Tibetans call "hungry ghosts." They did not really exist. They were not really *there*. They were *busy*, they were *in a hurry*. They -- like all of us -- were obsessed with doing things *right away*. But *right away* is the opposite of *now* -- the opposite of the lived present moment in which the passing of time no longer tyrannizes us. The hungry ghosts are starved for "more" time; but the more time we hungry ghosts get, the more time we "save", the hungrier we become, the less we actually *live*. And I understood that it is not exactly more time, more days and years, that we are starved for, it is the present moment.

Through our increasing absorption in the busyness, we have the present moment. "Right away" is not now. What a toxic illusion!


(Excerpted from Jacob Needleman's book "Time and the Soul")

Active aging vs dying

One of the biggest fear of mankind is dying or death. Almost everyone of us suffers from thanatophobia, the fear of death, some time or the other. "I'm not afraid of death," Woody Allen, famous Hollywood director, had once said. "I just don't want to be there when it happens." But death does come looking for us.

In Philip Larkin's great but chilling poem Aubade, a man woke at 4 in the morning and agonised fearfully about "unresting death". At the crux of his terror is that annihilation of consciousness and awareness: "That this is what we fear - no sight, no sound,/No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,/Nothing to love or link with,/The anaesthetic from which none come round."

Several philosophers through the ages have, however, exhorted that none should fear this absolute dissolution since being dead is akin to a state of dreamless sleep or being unborn - a perpetual nothingness. The focus, hence, ought to be on living and that includes dying since dying, too, is an act of living. "True philosophers," Plato wrote, "are always occupied in the practice of dying."

In a 2014 essay in the New York Times, Dr Paul Kalanithi, a 36-year-old doctor who was at the cusp of finishing his training in neurosurgery, wrote of that moment of confirmation (he had been suspecting it for some time, with his excruciating backache, weight loss and fatigue) that he had Stage 4 lung cancer. As he methodically scrutinised the CT films that revealed the cancer mottling his lungs and eating into his liver and spine, he registered his initial feeling. "I wasn't taken aback. In fact, there was a certain relief," he wrote. "The next steps were clear: Prepare to die. Cry. Tell my wife that she should remarry, and refinance the mortgage. Write overdue letters to dear friends. Yes, there were lots of things I had meant to do in life, but sometimes this happens…" He spent the remaining 22 months of his life learning how to die - or in the words of journalist Christopher Hitchens, "living dyingly".

Dr Kalanithi did not divorce his wife; they chose to have a child. Distilling his experiences and thoughts on his own dying into an autobiographical book entitled When Breath Becomes Air, which was published in early 2015. It was the first and only book that he had written. He wrote it for his only child and daughter and for other people "to understand death and face their mortality" and to get them into his shoes and "walk a bit, and say, 'So that's what it looks like from here… sooner or later I'll be back here in my shoes'… Not the sensationalism of dying, and not exhortations to gather rosebuds, but: Here's what lies up ahead on the road". After trying whatever treatments he could find tolerable and acceptable, and having made a decision together with his family and his attending doctors not to carry on any further, he died with his family at his bedside.

If there can ever be one, Dr Kalanithi's death could possibly be called "a good death" or at least a good enough death. When asked what a good death is, most people would say that it is a sudden and painless death - and probably would add that this is what they would want for themselves. But is it? Such a sudden and unexpected death would usually leave behind a detritus of unfinished and unresolved matters, and a clutch of traumatised survivors who had been denied of being able to express or hear what they have meant to that person, robbed of any opportunity to express gratitude or regrets, and deprived of any hope of reconciliation.

If it is any consolation, most of us would not go this way; we would have to endure that variable period of dying. The intervention of modern medicine can drag this process for months or even years with a progressive accretion of debilities and miseries. It might seem, then, that most of us would have the time to plan for our imminent death: to grieve, to come to terms with things, to provide for others, to try to live out the remaining time with some purpose and meaning, to voice our preference for life support or not, and plan for our funeral - but we often do not do many of these.

In mediaeval Christian Europe, it was widely subscribed that the preparation for one's earthly death and the celestial judgment that would follow were matters of immense importance. Such preparation was even celebrated in the arts and literature as Ars moriendi, the art of dying. The Ars moriendi provided practical guidance on reaffirming one's faith in God, remembering the right values and taking the right attitude in composing oneself to meet death fearlessly and stoically.

Today, we are a "death avoidance" society. Perhaps we are less religious now; maybe our blind faith in medical advances has given us that illusion that we can postpone death each time it comes threateningly close, and our various superstitions and cultural aversion towards death have certainly not made discussion of dying and death any easier. It is also very likely that the public still possess little information - let alone knowledge - of end-of-life options, including hospice and palliative care, and the legal rights to refuse or withdraw life-prolonging treatments.

We talk about active ageing but ageing, whether active or otherwise, would eventually lead to death - yet there is no talk of "dying well". Granted that it is difficult to attend to the thoughts and concerns of the dying; not to discuss it is to ignore - using that old phrase - that 800-pound gorilla in the room. Perhaps, together with active ageing, we should also start talking about our own version of the Ars moriendi.

Bipolar disorder vs genius-- the dilemma

Bipolar disorder is a mental condition marked by alternating periods of elation and depression. March 30 is called World Bipolar Day and its aim is "to bring world awareness to bipolar disorders and eliminate social stigma",according to the website of The International Society for Bipolar Disorders. This particular date was chosen because it is the birthday of Vincent Van Gogh, famous painter, who was posthumously diagnosed to have bipolar disorder and has since been turned into an icon of the tragic melding of genius and mental illness.

The strange association of creativity and extraordinary achievements with mental illness has long been a subject of popular fascination and scholarly studies. There is a fairly long list of individuals who have shaped history, science, culture and the arts who were thought to have been afflicted with bipolar disorder: Isaac Newton, Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, Theodore Roosevelt, Florence Nightingale, Johann Goethe, Edgar Allen Poe, George Frederic Handel, Ludwig von Beethoven, Virginia Woolf and Ernest Hemingway.

Since bipolar disorder is probably as old as humankind, having persisted generation upon generation, it suggests that it confers some evolutionary advantages. In a paper published in the British Journal Of Psychiatry in August, 2015, researchers linked high childhood IQ to an increased risk of experiencing bipolar traits in later life. "There is something about the genetics underlying the disorder that are advantageous," said Daniel Smith, the lead investigator of the study. "One possibility is that serious disorders of mood - such as bipolar disorder - are the price that human beings have had to pay for more adaptive traits such as intelligence, creativity and verbal proficiency."

The finding of this study is consistent with previous research, showing that people with an increased genetic predisposition to bipolar disorder are more likely to have a repertoire of intellectual and creative abilities which can certainly be advantageous in leadership roles and in the various artistic pursuits. One of the earliest accounts of bipolar disorder comes from Aretaeus, a Greek physician who was believed to have practised in Alexandria and Rome in the second century, and had left behind a clear description of how excited and depressed states might alternate in an individual. However, the disorder was not clearly recognised nor given a name for centuries.

It was only in 1896 that Emil Kraepelin, a German psychiatrist, called it manic-depressive psychosis, having observed that the peaks of frenzied excitement and periods of abysmal melancholy were usually separated by intervals during which the person seemed normal. In 1957, another German psychiatrist, Karl Leonhard, introduced the word "bipolar" for people who experienced mania and depression, and "unipolar" for those with depression only.

In all likelihood, bipolar disorder - like all mental disorders - remains shrouded in ignorance, fear and embarrassment. And people with this disorder - as with those with other mental health issues - are likely to be avoided, mocked, misunderstood and discriminated against. That needs to change, and the call for change needs to be made again and again as long as this situation remains unchanged. The term "bipolar disorder" has since replaced "manic-depressive psychosis" in the lexicon of psychiatry.

One end of the polarity of this disorder is mania which is an abnormally expansive and euphoric mood state that can unpredictably erupt into explosive anger. There is often a shedding of the person's normal inhibition; an urge towards potentially harmful activities such as spending sprees or sexual indiscretion or foolish business ventures; an unbounded energy with decreased need for sleep; a loquacity that permits no interruption; and a sense of inflated self-worth that can sometimes morph into grandiose delusions of fabulous wealth or special powers.

There is a rich literature of autobiographical accounts of what it is like to live with bipolar disorder, and one of the most eloquent is Kay Redfield Jamison's An Unquiet Mind. A highly regarded clinical psychologist, Jamison writes of her first attack when she was a senior in high school: "I lost my mind rather rapidly… I raced about like a crazed weasel, bubbling with plans and enthusiasms, immersed in sports, and staying up all night, night after night, out with friends, reading everything that wasn't nailed down, filling manuscript books with poems and fragments of plays, and making expansive, completely unrealistic, plans for my future."

Being in the grip of a storm of such seething energy can give the illusion of power, brilliance or genius. "I felt not just great, I felt really great," writes Jamison. "I felt I could do anything, that no task was too difficult. My mind seemed clear, fabulously focused, and able to make intuitive mathematical leaps that had up to that point entirely eluded me. At that time, however, not only did everything make perfect sense, but it all began to fit into a marvellous kind of cosmic relatedness."

In a way, it can be so intoxicating that there are some patients who want this manic phase. They miss the pleasurable excitement, the preternatural elation and the apparent creativity of mania, and they resent the levelling effect of medication. But this tumultuous brainstorm and frenetic overdrive of mania are not sustainable. The mania is ultimately exhausting and alienates others. Mania gets those who experience it into messes which they regret when they come out of it, and wrecks their life and work. Van Gogh had lamented that "if I could have worked without this accursed disease, what things I might have done".

And there is the other polarity; that same person who experiences such exultation of mood can plunge into a state of depression that brings in its wake abject misery, apathy, dejection and hopelessness that can make suicide seem the only way out.

Ten years ago, the British actor and comedian Stephen Fry, who has bipolar disorder, starred in a BBC television documentary called The Secret Life Of The Manic Depressive. In it, he spoke about his life with the disorder and went on to interview other celebrities, including British pop singer Robbie Williams and Hollywood actress Carrie Fisher, as well as other people with bipolar disorder.

A few years after the airing of this programme, psychiatrists Diana Chan and Lester Sireling reported in a 2010 publication of the British College of Psychiatrists, The Psychiatrist, on the phenomenon of a rising tide of people actively seeking out psychiatrists - either of their own accord or at the instigation of family members - and wanting to be diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

The two doctors speculated that the increased media coverage and the line-up of famous people of high social status talking about their own personal experiences have not only made bipolar disorder less stigmatising but possibly even desirable. They posited that beneath the quest for a diagnosis of bipolar disorder is the person's aspiration for a higher status which is vicariously attained through association.

Therein lies the potential treachery of such well-meaning efforts to enlighten and raise awareness of mental illness. In banishing those disparaging stereotypes and replacing them with positive ones, there lies the risk of romanticising and glamorising the condition. The onus lies with the psychiatrist to ensure that the right diagnosis is made. There are obvious dangers in misdiagnosing bipolar disorder: a person could end up being shunned by others, discriminated against by employers and insurance companies, and being prescribed medication with potential side effects. But it is just as harmful, if not more so, to miss a true bipolar diagnosis. All things considered, it is better for people who think they have this disorder to err on the side of safety and seek help.

In all likelihood, bipolar disorder - like all mental disorders - remains shrouded in ignorance, fear and embarrassment. And people with this disorder - as with those with other mental health issues - are likely to be avoided, mocked, misunderstood and discriminated against. That needs to change, and the call for change needs to be made again and again as long as this situation remains unchanged.

Concerns of parenting today's kids

In today's The Straits Times, an article appeared written by Dr Chong Siow Ann, vice-chairman of the medical board (research) at the Institute of Mental Health, Singapore. I liked it as I also experienced the type of childhood which the writer has described, and hence thought of sharing parts of it on my blog:

"Growing up in the 1960s and 70s, I (Dr Chong) had what could be accurately called a carefree childhood. Mostly I was left to my own devices to entertain myself. I wasn't taught to read or write until I went to primary school nor was I enrolled in a kindergarten; I think now it was because my parents couldn't afford the additional expense (there were already four other children at school) and they probably felt that it was unnecessary.

My mother, who had a few years of formal education and could read and write only in Chinese, proceeded to coach me on that single subject and kept an eye out that I would complete whatever homework I was given - even though she couldn't understand most of the other subjects. Schooling was relatively straightforward then: You went through primary school, took the Primary School Leaving Examination - which had no aggregate score - and, having cleared that, you proceeded to secondary school which, in my case, was the one that was nearest to my home.

And if you did reasonably well by Secondary 2, you were expected to go to the "science stream". I made that decision myself as with all other decisions about my subsequent education: which extra-curricular activities to join, which junior college to go to, and what university degree to pursue.

I felt no pressure from my parents, though, of course, they were proud (and probably surprised) that I was admitted into medical school. What mattered to them was that I should at least have a university degree and thereafter a steady job, and be an honest, decent and useful person - and they tried to ensure all that in a rather instinctual way.

HELICOPTER PARENTS
Within two generations, Singapore has catapulted itself into the First World. Meritocracy has been the organising principle of that transformation; and for better or worse, it has also been imprinted into our psyche.

With growing affluence and with most couples having fewer children, the latter have become the most precious of all possessions and, in tandem, parenting has become a very deliberate, self-conscious and angst-riven activity - particularly with the so-called helicopter parenting which is that odd amalgam of pampering and achievement pressure. Overprotective, over- controlling and intrusive, these helicopter parents would hover and keep their children on their radar screen: orchestrating and monitoring their activities, and swooping to blast away any obstacles in their path.

Sheep-like, disempowered and bereft of any sense of agency, these children are ferried, guided and nudged along the highways and byways of a demanding terrain of academic and extra-curricular activities. Having imbibed the ambitions of their parents and squinting through the parental prism, they see only one narrow path to success in life. The consequence - as we are told by concerned scholars and educators in a slew of scholarly studies, best-selling books and newspaper and magazine articles - is that these children who are consumed with the fear of not measuring up, don't learn to cope effectively with problems nor do they know how to soothe themselves when they are distressed.

There is "declining student resilience" and "emotional fragility", according to the Boston College psychologist Peter Gray. "Students are afraid to fail; they do not take risks; they need to be certain about things," he wrote of the students in the United States and the growing mental health crisis among them. "For many of them, failure is seen as catastrophic and unacceptable. External measures of success are more important than learning and autonomous development."

A five-year study from the National University of Singapore published in the Journal Of Personality this year showed that local children of intrusive parents who have high academic expectations of them are likely to be more self-critical and more inclined to feel that they fall short. "The child may become afraid of making the slightest mistake and will blame himself or herself for not being 'perfect'," said the study's lead investigator Ryan Hong, who warned bleakly that "it increases the risk of the child developing symptoms of depression, anxiety and even suicide in very serious cases".

Other research elsewhere has shown that students with "helicopter" parents are more likely to be medicated for anxiety and depression.

TIGER MUMS
To a certain extent, some parents may feel as hapless as their children, being compelled as they were in a meritocratic elitist society where - so goes the popular narrative - the best chance of material success in later life is attaining the requisite academic credentials earlier in life. And which parent would not be beset by that raft of guilt, uncertainty and anxiety of not doing enough in securing that head start for their child?

But still there is a general feeling that such values and expectations are wrong. The tendency is to blame the education system for being that crucible of feverish competition and high pressure. There have been many calls for changes. As The Straits Times editorial of July 16 said, the recent revamp of the PSLE nurtures the hope that primary education should be for children "to develop their passion for learning, grow in values and character, and explore their strengths and interests".

That sounds intuitively and sensibly right but there is a salutary lesson to be learnt from the experience of the world's most powerful nation. Americans have been drilled to respect the individuality of their children, to support them in their self-chosen passions, and to boost their self-esteem which is supposed to make them learn better.

But as the American journalist Elizabeth Kolbert pointed out in her piece in The New Yorker a few years ago: "After a generation or so of applying this theory, we have the results. Just about the only category in which American students outperform the competition is self-regard." She highlighted a study by the Brookings Institution that compared students' own assessments of their abilities in maths with their actual scores on a standardised test. Nearly 40 per cent of American students declared that they usually do well in mathematics, but only 7 per cent of them actually did well enough on the test to qualify as advanced.

In contrast, 18 per cent of Singaporean students said they usually did well in maths; 44 per cent qualified as advanced on the test, with even the least self-confident Singaporean students outscoring the most self-confident Americans. As Ms Kolbert commented wryly: "You can say it's sad that kids in Singapore are so beaten down that they can't appreciate their own accomplishments. But you've got to give them this: At least they get the math right."

And it's not just maths - American students are far from the top in international rankings for excellence in science. This Western orthodoxy of nurturing the self-esteem of the children and allowing them unfettered expression is anathema to Amy Chua, Yale law professor and author of that controversial book, Battle Hymn Of The Tiger Mother, where she expounded her exacting Chinese child-rearing of her two high-achieving daughters.

She argued that the sort of parenting which emphasises self-esteem without an accompanying insistence on actual accomplishment will set the children up to accept mediocrity. And it has another darker implication - a society that nurtures and blithely accepts unearned self-esteem could turn out entitled narcissists and weaken its global competitiveness.

The changes to Singapore's own education system are made in the hope that our children will have a less burdened childhood. But there is, I think, another intent, which is to help them be more creative, more original and more imaginative as adults - attributes that are essential for a "knowledge economy".

Let's hope that it will achieve all that, though Amy Chua's stern assertion might be something to be borne in mind. However, being what we are, it is unlikely that our tiger mums and cubs would be an endangered species any time soon."

How to make a good teacher

I came across an interesting article in June 11, 2016 issue of The Economist on 'How to make a good teacher'. It was quite relevant, and the points made there resonated with my thinking, hence I have appended the article below:

FORGET smart uniforms and small classes. The secret to stellar grades and thriving students is teachers. One American study found that in a single year’s teaching the top 10% of teachers impart three times as much learning to their pupils as the worst 10% do. Another suggests that, if black pupils were taught by the best quarter of teachers, the gap between their achievement and that of white pupils would disappear.

But efforts to ensure that every teacher can teach are hobbled by the tenacious myth that good teachers are born, not made. Classroom heroes like Robin Williams in “Dead Poets Society” or Michelle Pfeiffer in “Dangerous Minds” are endowed with exceptional, innate inspirational powers. Government policies, which often start from the same assumption, seek to raise teaching standards by attracting high-flying graduates to join the profession and prodding bad teachers to leave. Teachers’ unions, meanwhile, insist that if only their members were set free from central diktat, excellence would follow.

The premise that teaching ability is something you either have or don’t is mistaken. A new breed of teacher-trainers is founding a rigorous science of pedagogy. The aim is to make ordinary teachers great, just as sports coaches help athletes of all abilities to improve their personal best. Done right, this will revolutionise schools and change lives.

Education has a history of lurching from one miracle solution to the next. The best of them even do some good. Teach for America, and the dozens of organisations it has inspired in other countries, have brought ambitious, energetic new graduates into the profession. And dismissing teachers for bad performance has boosted results in Washington, DC, and elsewhere. But each approach has its limits. Teaching is a mass profession: it cannot grab all the top graduates, year after year. When poor teachers are fired, new ones are needed—and they will have been trained in the very same system that failed to make fine teachers out of their predecessors.

By contrast, the idea of improving the average teacher could revolutionise the entire profession. Around the world, few teachers are well enough prepared before being let loose on children. In poor countries many get little training of any kind. A recent report found 31 countries in which more than a quarter of primary-school teachers had not reached (minimal) national standards. In rich countries the problem is more subtle. Teachers qualify following a long, specialised course. This will often involve airy discussions of theory—on ecopedagogy, possibly, or conscientisation (don’t ask). Some of these courses, including masters degrees in education, have no effect on how well their graduates’ pupils end up being taught.

What teachers fail to learn in universities and teacher-training colleges they rarely pick up on the job. They become better teachers in their first few years as they get to grips with real pupils in real classrooms, but after that improvements tail off. This is largely because schools neglect their most important pupils: teachers themselves. Across the OECD club of mostly rich countries, two-fifths of teachers say they have never had a chance to learn by sitting in on another teacher’s lessons; nor have they been asked to give feedback on their peers.

Those who can, learn

If this is to change, teachers need to learn how to impart knowledge and prepare young minds to receive and retain it. Good teachers set clear goals, enforce high standards of behaviour and manage their lesson time wisely. They use tried-and-tested instructional techniques to ensure that all the brains are working all of the time, for example asking questions in the classroom with “cold calling” rather than relying on the same eager pupils to put up their hands.

Instilling these techniques is easier said than done. With teaching as with other complex skills, the route to mastery is not abstruse theory but intense, guided practice grounded in subject-matter knowledge and pedagogical methods. Trainees should spend more time in the classroom. The places where pupils do best, for example Finland, Singapore and Shanghai, put novice teachers through a demanding apprenticeship. In America high-performing charter schools teach trainees in the classroom and bring them on with coaching and feedback.




Teacher-training institutions need to be more rigorous—rather as a century ago medical schools raised the calibre of doctors by introducing systematic curriculums and providing clinical experience. It is essential that teacher-training colleges start to collect and publish data on how their graduates perform in the classroom. Courses that produce teachers who go on to do little or nothing to improve their pupils’ learning should not receive subsidies or see their graduates become teachers. They would then have to improve to survive.

Big changes are needed in schools, too, to ensure that teachers improve throughout their careers. Instructors in the best ones hone their craft through observation and coaching. They accept critical feedback—which their unions should not resist, but welcome as only proper for people doing such an important job. The best head teachers hold novices’ hands by, say, giving them high-quality lesson plans and arranging for more experienced teachers to cover for them when they need time for further study and practice.

Money is less important than you might think. Teachers in top-of-the-class Finland, for example, earn about the OECD average. But ensuring that the best stay in the classroom will probably, in most places, mean paying more. People who thrive in front of pupils should not have to become managers to earn a pay rise. And more flexibility on salaries would make it easier to attract the best teachers to the worst schools.

Improving the quality of the average teacher would raise the profession’s prestige, setting up a virtuous cycle in which more talented graduates clamoured to join it. But the biggest gains will come from preparing new teachers better, and upgrading the ones already in classrooms. The lesson is clear; it now just needs to be taught.