Chad asked in a previous post about a comment I’d made about teaching “quiet seated concentration games” in kids' judo classes. The main activity that I’m talking about is this…
Have the kids sit on their tape spots so they can’t touch each other. The seated position minimizes motion and noise. Tell them that when you call, “go,” we are all going to close our eyes and be completely quiet – no noise at all! And while we are being quiet we are going to count the sounds we can hear. I set a timer and at the end of a minute I ask each kid in turn to name one sound they heard. Sometimes I ask them to try to figure out exactly where the noises they hear are coming from.
Immediately, you will find that there are a couple of kids that want to deliberately make little noises to see if the others can hear them. I try to reiterate to these kids that they can’t hear as many noises when they do this, so they are just making themselves lose the game.
You will also find a subset of kids, usually older pre-teen boys, that want to sit cross-legged with thumbs and forefingers in circles on their thighs, a spacey look on their face, moaning, “ohmmmmmmm…” I usually try to emphasize to those kids that this is not what we are doing. We’re supposed to be listening – not acting goofy.
There is another reason for not allowing the goofy kids to adopt the meditation clichés – and that is you want to go out of your way to NOT present the image to the parents of these kids that you are teaching TM or anything like it. This is especially important in the Bible belt in the U.S.A. I emphasize to the students and to the parents that we are working on being able to be quiet, block out distractions, concentrate, and listen, because those are critical skills in learning, and because you have to be able to do that to be a winner.
A lot of times, we’ll repeat this quiet seated listening game several times, successively eliminating the more obtrusive sounds. I might run the game for a minute, then turn the air conditioner off and run it for another minute (we can often still hear water draining out of the AC), then run another minute with the lights off (they hum). We can often hear birds, parents taking outside, and cars on the road. Recently we heard crickets for the first time.
I’d personally like to play this game somewhere miles from roads and technology – some place you can hear the clouds.
Have the kids sit on their tape spots so they can’t touch each other. The seated position minimizes motion and noise. Tell them that when you call, “go,” we are all going to close our eyes and be completely quiet – no noise at all! And while we are being quiet we are going to count the sounds we can hear. I set a timer and at the end of a minute I ask each kid in turn to name one sound they heard. Sometimes I ask them to try to figure out exactly where the noises they hear are coming from.
Immediately, you will find that there are a couple of kids that want to deliberately make little noises to see if the others can hear them. I try to reiterate to these kids that they can’t hear as many noises when they do this, so they are just making themselves lose the game.
You will also find a subset of kids, usually older pre-teen boys, that want to sit cross-legged with thumbs and forefingers in circles on their thighs, a spacey look on their face, moaning, “ohmmmmmmm…” I usually try to emphasize to those kids that this is not what we are doing. We’re supposed to be listening – not acting goofy.
There is another reason for not allowing the goofy kids to adopt the meditation clichés – and that is you want to go out of your way to NOT present the image to the parents of these kids that you are teaching TM or anything like it. This is especially important in the Bible belt in the U.S.A. I emphasize to the students and to the parents that we are working on being able to be quiet, block out distractions, concentrate, and listen, because those are critical skills in learning, and because you have to be able to do that to be a winner.
A lot of times, we’ll repeat this quiet seated listening game several times, successively eliminating the more obtrusive sounds. I might run the game for a minute, then turn the air conditioner off and run it for another minute (we can often still hear water draining out of the AC), then run another minute with the lights off (they hum). We can often hear birds, parents taking outside, and cars on the road. Recently we heard crickets for the first time.
I’d personally like to play this game somewhere miles from roads and technology – some place you can hear the clouds.
