The lesson began with the striking of a Tibetan singing bowl to induce mindful awareness.
With the sound of their new school bell, the fifth graders at Piedmont Avenue Elementary School here closed their eyes and focused on their breathing, as they tried to imagine “loving kindness” on the playground.
“I was losing at baseball and I was about to throw a bat,” Alex Menton, 11, reported to his classmates the next day. “The mindfulness really helped.”
As summer looms, students at dozens of schools across the country are trying hard to be in the present moment. This is what is known as mindfulness training, in which stress-reducing techniques drawn from Buddhist meditation are wedged between reading and spelling tests.
Mindfulness, while common in hospitals, corporations, professional sports and even prisons, is relatively new in the education of squirming children. But a small but growing number of schools in places like Oakland and Lancaster, Pa., are slowly embracing the concept ”” as they did yoga five years ago ”” and institutions, like the psychology department at Stanford University and the Mindfulness Awareness Research Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, are trying to measure the effects.
During a five-week pilot program at Piedmont Avenue Elementary, Miss Megan, the “mindful” coach, visited every classroom twice a week, leading 15 minute sessions on how to have “gentle breaths and still bodies.” The sound of the Tibetan bowl reverberated at the start and finish of each lesson.
Why not something from Christian spirituality?
Exactly. Why not a meditative reading from the scripture while playing Taizé music in the background?
“Midge Kinder, a yoga teacher, and her husband, Rick, started the program six years ago”
I wonder if this school program is teaching more than mindfulness.
How about some teachings of the Man that died so many might live?
Put meaning to “being nice”.
Immagine what our sin cost God….
DonGander
Sigh. This is a new gambit to take the place of drugs on little boys,another attempt to make sure that little boys don’t act like little boys, but like little girls who sit nicely and quietly wit h their hands folded and do as they are told. Perhaps a little soma to go with the singing bowl. Will American educators NEVER get tired of looking for panaceas, new fads and novelties? Give the boys a lot of recess, let them run and bang around and then bring them back in. Is this concept hard to grasp? Tibetan signing bowl. Sigh. And tomorrow? Marijuana chewing gum? Bishop Schori droning on and on and on. And on and on. Boy, that’ll put ’em to sleep.
Larry, the answer is no.
Am I wrong to surmise this practice just might be a religious one?
My thoughts exactly #7. As NYC gets $B’s in federal support for their public schools each year, where’s that pesky ACLU to shut down Buddhism? They are certainly efficient at squelching Christianity?
Singing Bowls. Paganism at it’s finest.
KTF!….mrb
My wife has been teaching eight years now, and loves it — but she says that she has never seen anything so fad-driven as education.
With regards to separation of church and state — there is only one religion, and it is Christianity. Anything else is simply spirituality, and harmless. (or so they think….)
“As NYC gets $B’s in federal support for their public schools each year . . . .”
Make that Oakland, California
So, what would happen if a Christian parent went to the ACLU and asked them to sue the school district for violating the ‘Separation Clause”? Any bets on whether the ACLU would take the case?