A social enterprise providing education and information to protect and enhance the mental health of young people
Last year, I took twenty Year 11 students on a mountain biking camp. We rode through the Stromlo Forest in Canberra by day, and camped in sub zero temperatures by night. It’s only in the last couple of months that I’ve really appreciated some of the analogies I could draw between by experiences mountain biking [...]
By now you’ve seen the pretty pictures: Color-drenched brain scans capturing Buddhist monks meditating, addicts craving cocaine, and college sophomores choosing Coke over Pepsi. The media—and even some neuroscientists, it seems—love to invoke the neural foundations of human behavior to explain everything from the Bernie Madoff financial fiasco to slavish devotion to our iPhones, the [...]
The number of happy faces on Lego toy mini-figures has been decreasing since the 1990s, and the number of angry faces has increased, giving rise to concerns that children could be affected by the negativity of the toys. In a study of 3,655 figures produced between 1975 and 2010, Dr Christoph Bartneck, a robot expert [...]
I have always loved the movie ‘The Matrix’. I watched it again recently with my daughter Meaghan, and I can’t help but be struck by the parallels of the situation that Neo, Morpheus and their allies find themselves in the movie, with the circumstances of a growing number of people who are fighting passionately for [...]
Of late, more and more schools are asking me to work with their students as well as their staff. My most popular workshop at the moment is Learning to Bounce where we explore resilience. Resilience is generally accepted to mean the ability to bounce back after adversity. However, inspired by the words of Dr Sue [...]
Again and again I’ve been surprised by what my children don’t see. I once invited a friend who has a disabled child over for lunch. The child was born with only one functioning eye, half an ear missing, and a malformed leg that had been amputated above the knee. Despite these difficulties, she was bright [...]
There are myriad reasons why sex has become so debased in society it has been almost rendered an ablution, going from something magical to mechanical, from a gift of love to subservient surrender. About now it's my duty to raise my arm and declare ''mea culpa'' because, as a magazine writer and editor who has [...]
(Genuine) Engagement & Wellbeing enhance achievement, yet how many schools pursue achievement at the expense of engagement and wellbeing? The following is an extract from my recently published manifesto, “Still Trying to Find X”. It is essential that we create a Virtuous Cycle for all students in our schools. The Virtuous Cycle relies on having positive relationships at its heart or [...]
The latest blockbuster film about King George VI, The King’s Speech, is a modern popular example of someone struggling with a stutter. As portrayed in the film it is a psychological derived problem that King George suffered from, not a physical condition. Interestingly for a film with no action, violence or nudity it has proven [...]
As Year 12 students across Australia prepare for their final school examinations, it will be interesting to note how the media reports the reaction of the students after each subject exam. In NSW, the Sydney Morning Herald reports daily on the exams of the previous day, citing teachers, students and parents as to whether [...]
