How to Enjoy School

seventy three percent of high school student don't enjoy school - Hi guys, welcome back to the channel. of high school students don't enjoy school. That is a scary number it should be a scary number to you why should so much of our population be spending over a decade of their lives doing something that they don't enjoy at all it just doesn't make sense my name is John Fish and I'm a Harvard student and I wanna share with you the intuitive way that i turned school from being an experience that i was not enjoying into one that i really enjoyed and then back it up with some real psychology so the intuitive way that I learned to enjoy school came from my dad who is an amazing teacher, and what he taught me is to have fun in school by treating it like it's a game so I come from a fairly high level sports background I've played sports all my life, and so looking at classes as practice, time to own my skills for the game, the test was very intuitive to me and it, it made a lot of sense and it made school be enjoyable when i framed it that way Now, over the past year I've been reading a lot of positive psychology and I've been taking classes on psychology here and one name kept coming up for me He's a psychologist that pioneered the concept of flow Which is basically a highly focused mental state that leads to enjoyable experiences So, in this book "Flow" he breaks down the main principles that make an experience a Flow experience, and I mean i briefly summarize them because i wanna mostly get to the recommendations But, If you haven't read "Flow" I definitely recommend picking up a copy because it's a GREAT read no matter who you are So the key elements of Flow experience is are these There's a clear goal, something that you want to be doing with the task There is a clear & immediate feedback mechanism that gives you a sense of progress towards that goal your skills match the challenges presented by the activity you're concentrated on the activity at hand and you feel like you're in control of what you're doing in order to achieve that goal and there's a few other things that make a Flow experience a Flow experience but for that you're gonna have to read the book because these are the five things we're gonna be focusing on in this post So with this in mind it's pretty obvious to see why sports are enjoyable because they're pretty much by definition a Flow experience The goal, winning is obvious The sense of feedback, the feedback mechanism, the score. Again, fairly obvious Games are only really fun if your opponent is at similar skill level to you in other words, you know if you're a house league team you're not gonna be playing professional team Cause that would be not fun and you're not gonna play a team of toddlers cause that'll be too easy right? So, the skills match the challenges You're obviously concentrated at the task at hand When you're on the soccer field you're not on your phone texting your friends or whatever and finally, you're fully in control of what you do you are in control whether you chase after the ball whether you kick it in score it's all on you So, it's also pretty obvious why school does not fit the definition of Flow experience It's- Well there is a clear goal kind of ? in that you want to get good grades But when you think about the sense of progress towards that The feedback mechanism is almost always delayed You hand in a test and you have pretty much no idea about what you're grades gonna be It takes days or weeks, same thing with homework and further more the skills don't always match the challenges Sometimes things are way too hard sometimes they're way too easy So, it can be overwhelming at times, and it can be boring at other times You're not always concentrated either I mean.. pretty much everyone's on their phone when they're in school doing work, it's pretty much the norm and you also don't really feel like you're in control So, it's pretty obvious that school isn't a Flow experience for most people and i think that that really shows why 73% of students don't enjoy it But here's the promising thing As a student you can make school a Flow experience and here's how i recommend doing that So the first thing and the most important thing that you can do is You can set goals outside of grades that you can evaluate yourself on and that 's the key thing. Okay, so i'm gonna give you an example For my english class one of my goals, and i set a few, but one of them was to get better at writing arguable thesis Okay so when i write a thesis i want it to be something that is actually arguable That's not something that my teacher's gonna tell me that's something that i can figure out on my own When i'm looking at my writing i can say "Is this arguable?" and i can see whether i'm progressing or not and it's immediate because i'm the one evaluating it and just a side note i applied this to my daily life too I write down goals for every single day and i evaluate myself on whether or not i achieve them, I'm not nice to myself about it, i truly want to be honest Because that's the only way that i'll actually see progress Because i'll know if i'm faking it So, set goals for everything that you're doing in school They can be big macro goals that span in an entire year or a semester Or they can be micro goals, you know in this class i want to get better at X The most important thing is that those goals Your- Your progress towards them can be evaluated immediately Okay? So it can't rely on things like grades because That's usually not something that you can get immediately, while you're actually in the task So it needs to be something that, if you're in the task you can say "Yes, I'm doing this well" So focus, focus is a hard one at school okay? Because You obviously need friends and you need social activities right? I'm a huge advocate for balance. I don't think that anyone should be working all the time Because that's super unrealistic and- and it's not a healthy life to be livin' But, they way that I deal with this is that i put myself into "School Mode" Where the only thing that i'm thinking about is the task in front of me You know, what project i'm working on, the class, The note that i'm taking, and i tune out everything else So i turn off my phone I don't really talk to people while i'm doing that I'm just. In. School. and then when i'm not in school mode I just take that completely off I don't think about school at all and i let myself be present with my friends and enjoy that experience And i think when you apply that as a strategy You really find that you get more out of both experiences as opposed to kind of taking those average and having overall mediocre experiences When you're with friends you're stressed about school and when you're in school you're thinking about your friends Separating the two i found for me has been tremendously healthy and beneficial for my relationships and for school So practice putting yourself into "School Mode" Practice putting yourself in a state where you are fully focused on the activity at hand knowing that you know, at lunch you'll go back on your phone, you'll hangout with your friends you'll have a good time you won't need to worry about school because you've been killing it in your classes and while you're doing homework So finally, i think that the hardest thing about a Flow experience to implement in school is control Because it's very hard to feel control when you're doing the work that a teacher has assigned you to do But setting good goals will help with this okay? So for example if my goal is to write an arguable thesis or to get better at writing arguable thesis and my teacher assigned a post project Right? What i'm gonna be thinking about that post project is not "How do i get an A on this?" It's "How do I make a post that have an arguable thesis in this?" Okay? I'm changing the activity to fit my goals and fun fact when you have good goals like this You'll probably get better grades as well Because you're producing passionate and inspired work as opposed to stuff that you kinda just whipped out in half an hour whatever because you know it wasn't very fun If you're having fun with it your teacher will obviously see that and it will benefit you tremendously So I challenge you to reject grades as a feedback mechanism and to listen to your own internal heuristic about whether or not you're- you're improving Whether or not you're succeeding and achieving your goals Okay? Because you'll have a much more enjoyable experience if you do this, and to be honest it will help you with your grades as well So hopefully if you're a student you'll think about using these methods or maybe some other methods to make school into a flow experience because trust me you don't want to spend a decade of your life or more a lot more in some people's cases sometimes 2 decades Doing something that's just not enjoyable You- you wanna make this an enjoyable experience for yourself So teachers, here's a really important point for you if you can turn teaching into a Flow experience by applying the concepts of Flow to your work Then your students are actually much more likely to experience Flow as well To enjoy school It's due to a phenomenon known as emotional contagion and it's actually been documented in formal psychology studies So, I highly recommend that you figure this out for yourself and on that point To anyone you can really implement Flow in any part of your life I try and turn my life into a Flow experience by setting big goals and little goals for every single day and to be honest when i started doing that i started enjoying life a lot more So, if you're interested in reading more in the topic Some really, really interesting literature there's a link in the description to this post So, thank you so much for watching this post I really do appreciate your support If you got something out of this post or if you enjoyed it feel free to leave a like Maybe share it with your friends or your social network if you think that other people could benefit from this message and as always don't forget to subscribe I'm John Fish and i will see you next Friday