Adiós, mi pana

Querido Gordo, 

Somos tantos los que te extrañaremos. Y son tan pocos los que podrían soñar con ser tan importantes para tanta gente. Somos demasiados los que nos sentimos tristes al enterarnos de tu partida, y que nos sabemos afortunados de haberte conocido, chamo.

Cuando te conocimos teníamos en promedio diecisiete años, y estábamos empezando a abrir los ojos ante la extrañez laberíntica de la universidad, respirando por primera vez la cercanía de la vida adulta y sus exigencias impostergables. Llegábamos al aula temblando de miedo y salíamos desorientados por el pasillo de la Escuela de Psicología buscándote para comprar los programas de las materias y los libros que teníamos que resumir, esquivando el gentío indolente de estudiantes ya veteranos y profesores ocupadísimos que casi no tenían tiempo para nosotros, y llegábamos a tu puesto, donde nos recibías con amabilidad, sin excepción, y tu modo tranquilo y simpático nos calmaba, sirviéndonos de espejo para saber que podríamos con todo el desafío de la academia.

Semestre tras semestre, año tras año, generación tras generación de estudiantes pasamos frente a tí y nos nutrimos el alma con el ejemplo de tu buen humor y de tu humanidad pragmática y comprensiva. Ahora son nuestros alumnos, pacientes e instituciones quienes se benefician de tu labor prometeica, se sirven del fruto de tu diligente amistad.

Sé que al igual que yo, cientos, si no miles, de quienes tuvimos que atravesar períodos de intensa pobreza durante la carrera, logramos estudiar a tiempo los materiales aunque no tuviésemos cómo pagarte en el momento porque nos dabas crédito. Creías en nosotros, incluso cuando a nosotros mismos se nos dificultaba. Y muchos también se sentirían alegres al conversar contigo y descubrir que también leías los artículos y ensayos que debíamos aprender, y nos dabas tu opinión sobre cada autor que aparecía en las bibliografías obligatorias.

Y sé que al igual que yo, muchos que ahora han tenido que salir a deambular por los senderos profesionales del extranjero le deben a tu premura y la de tu equipo que recibiéramos a tiempo notas, programas, pénsum, y otro largo etcétera de documentos para poder legalizarse académicamente en otros países. Y sospecho que lo recibíamos con una rapidez que estaba inspirada por el cariño de quien nos vio y ayudó a terminar de crecer.

Quizás somos ahora nosotros quienes te copiaremos a tí, tratando de ser el colega sonriente que le brinda una presencia alegre y constante al extraño extraviado que recién empieza a tejer su vida y a construir su personalidad. Seremos fotocopias felices de tu ejemplo constante y de tu esfuerzo siempre exhaustivo.

Dudé antes de escribirte, porque ya no estás con nosotros para leer esto, pero luego me decidí a hacerlo, porque sé que en el cielo vas a pedir tu propio local de fotocopias y archivos, y lo primero que te van a encargar es que catalogues todos estos mensajes llenos de recuerdos lindos que estamos intercambiando los que te conocimos, y te vas a enterar entonces de lo mucho que te quisimos.

Adiós, mi pana. Gracias por todo.

Something Other than Fascism

There is a war on boys, and it is fought in infinitesimal spaces, tiny periods in between, before the clock ticks anew once it has struck the last millisecond. Its current shape resembles fascism in many aspects (politics, imagery and paraphernalia) but it differs in its causes, its goals, and its future evolution. However, the fact remains that there is a concerted effort by dark actors to destabilize as many boys as possible through the use of social media to shape global discourse and in turn, society, into their own profitable chaos.

Gambling companies, traditional brands underperforming in the market, alpha myth influencers, men’s rights activists, and many other self-pitying carrion scavengers stalk the battlefield from the outskirts looking to make a killing from the rupture of social structures brought forth by their victims: young boys who are too naive to realize they are being recruited into a campaign of self-destruction simply because their wounds bleed money.

It started a decade ago with the discovery of niche antifeminist crowds coordinating harassment crusades against women who made video games with unorthodox themes, which negatively changed the way game development companies related to players, as well as having a terrible impact on the real lives of many women in that industry who had to change residence and seek legal counsel to protect themselves from hordes of anonymous criminals who pledged to hurt them. But also, importantly, it changed the way big money was made: developers could either spend years committed to furthering their crafts and creating complex logical playthings with elevated quality that withstood the passage of time, or they could quickly churn out the umpteenth clone of the same games that had been recently successful with the misogynistic mob, and pander to the hateful players with an increasingly cartoonish masculine ethos that ensured they would get wallets thrown their way.

Soon other industries decided they wanted a piece of the retrograde pie, and thus the advent of the caveman marketing era arrived. Corporate teams devised creative ways to glorify the carelessness and destructive moral associated with the misanthropic persona of the caricature macho gamer, equal parts couch potato and frantic voice-chat agitateur, tailoring energy drinks, cheese puffs, chocolate, and sometimes deodorant, to fit the newly minted personality of the angry nerd that resents the world for failing to cater to their childish needs long after they stopped being children. This would later become the cultural fertilizer for the current push to turn boys into mindless minions.

At the same time, consumer-grade computer science took gigantic leaps and went from the still somewhat analogic experience of the early 2010s to the fully digital, augmented reality most of us live in now. There is no more need for uncertainty regarding how most things work, and thus there is no more room for the curiosity that would lead children to develop cumbersome theories of the world that would last until they were told otherwise in school; considerable amounts of magic were lost in that replacement of occasional curiosity for ubiquitous precision. But there is also a limit for how much complexity we can handle. The refresh rate of our screens is superior to what we can process, that is, we can see up to several hundred hertz, yet how much of that can we actually perceive and interpret? And how much of it simply gets discarded by our brains? Most of the bright, fast light we expose children to is excessive for their ability to make sense of, and it has a stimulating effect that raises the threshold to what they feel as the baseline for excitement or just contentment. That’s the second element of this zeitgeist trifecta of worsening perspectives for boyhood.

And the last leg of this problem is the neverending laboriousness we adults are immersed in. The amount of time we can be available for young people to build relationships with is slim. Kids are dealing with a world that is much more convoluted than it used to be, and they have to do it on their own. Sometimes it is because the technology is so new that it is hard for us adults to relate to it, but mostly it is due to the extreme levels of busy we have to be in order to stay afloat. And that is when the lack of structure, the vacuum left by our unavoidable absence, is filled by the allure of fascism: the anachronic search of order and tradition by becoming a subservient underling to a Duce or Caudillo that will tell you what to think, how to act, who to hate, and who gets to live or die. Many boys who find solace in the obscurity of alt-right forums are looking for some form of order, any order, that will keep the world at bay and let them feel peace. And most of them lack the constitutional scumbaggery that it takes to be a legitimate racist or woman hater. As soon as they get the structure they need in the real world, they start to heal and forget the hatred taught by the cyber fascist peddlers.

There are, however, a few solutions to this growing problem:

1. If you're a man, be a positive, active influence in that young boy's life. Talk to him, listen to what he has to say. Take him on every day errands and let him watch you following societal rules and expectations. Be nice to the women in your life, uplift them, celebrate them and whenever you get a chance, let them know how important they are in your life, just because. What you do and say around women will affect you personally, and it will also affect everything you do later on around the boys you're trying to protect from misogynistic echo chambers, and only if you're genuinely positive will you be able to cast sufficient gravitational pull to protect them from inceldom and similar propaganda.

2. If you're a parent or a teacher, watch the content they consume with them, ask them questions, and keep an eye out for positive, prosocial streamers and influencers you can recommend for them to see and follow.

3. As for the technological facet of the problem, I have my hope set on projectors, which would make it easy to let them enjoy games and streaming content without getting their eyes bombarded with images at an unmanageable speed, but maybe there could be another solution, in the form of a middleware pipeline that limits the refresh rate to slower, healthier figures to prevent the overwhelming effect of contemporary screens.

4. An old Spanish maxim, attributed at times to Pio Baroja and others to Miguel de Unamuno, states that the antidote to fascism is reading, and the antidote to racism is travelling (“El fascismo se cura leyendo, y el racismo se cura viajando”). Maybe they were right. The future is worth trying.

3 Educational Psychology Interventions for Prosocial Behaviour in Primary

Within the context of a primary classroom, the concepts of ethics and morality in children evolve gradually from being dictated almost exclusively by direct adult instruction during preschool to eventually being more heavily influenced by their pre-teen peers at the start of their middle school journey. It is a process that follows a similar sequence for all humans, but also one where each individual varies with respect to what phase they linger on for a shorter or longer period. Some of these stages might be oppositional in nature, and some might require the child to display anger through temper tantrums and other non-cooperative behaviors.

This requires tools for teachers to estimate the present developmental stage each student is neighbouring, and then facilitate the planning of interventions that help the child overcome their social-emotional plateaus while keeping the community within the classroom motivated and able to prioritize learning, without refusing any child their right to express their own individuality, but also without hindering the overall progress of the class towards understanding and mastery.

In this regard, our focus as adults should be on the promotion of prosocial behaviors and not on the punishment of antisocial ones, as it will be easier for the child to acquire a new repertoire of specific actions and practices than it would be to expect them to have the precocious self-awareness to understand what triggers them and then to act upon a willpower for restraint that their brains are still too young to possess in full.

The following insights are taken from studies that analyze three different strategies to achieve these results:

1. Projet Prima!r, from Luxembourg:

The country-wide intervention started from preschool to change the trajectory of antisocial behavioral patterns before rejection from peers and adults would cement them as a disorder. It included lessons delivered by both teachers at school and parents at home that sought to help children develop a set of competencies in both domains: social (social information processing, problem solving abilities in difficult social situations, peer relationship quality) and emotional (recognition and understanding of primary emotions, appropriate vocabulary, and regulation techniques).

Among other findings, they found that a positive praise-to-reprimand ratio was most effective in motivating learners to act prosocially, and that delaying positive reinforcement had a rather destructive effect. A very positive result was that some students who might have not shown prosocial attitudes at the time of training, would eventually display them one year after the fact, once their linguistic abilities had improved due to the language arts instruction received in school.

2. Altruism and Fairy Tales, from Czech Republic:

Through a metanalysis of studies dealing with aggression and prosocial skills to develop a framework for Czech schools, the researcher found that infants would acquire the ability to act prosocially through direct parental moralization, where the explanation for each prosocial convention had to be taught by the parent using emotionally rich verbal expression and avoiding neutral speech, and also through fairy tales that exemplify the desired social habits.

The literary aspect of this study includes references to the work of the Czech author Karel Čapek, and his classification of eleven motifs in traditional fairy tales, which can be considered when selecting the texts one reads to children as part of a prosocial intervention.

As the child grows into a more peer-oriented social compass, the researcher recommends introducing collaborative classroom learning dynamics, including but not limited to peer-teaching activities, where one student would attempt to help others who are not as proficient as them in certain topics, to encourage the manifestation of altruistic behavior.

3. PROSEL Program, from Italy and Spain:

They trained teachers from both countries on a program that frames social emotional learning (SEL) from a prosocial perspective (PRO), and that emphasizes inclusion to help students reach higher levels of performance in oral comprehension tasks, as well as looking to develop a replicable methodology for teachers to use without adding up too much labour on top of their other regular responsibilities.

The program used 15 sessions to get students and teachers from an introduction to SEL and PRO, and it included topics such as responsible decision-making and positive evaluation of others.

They obtained several positive results. Specific displays of prosocial behavior increased in frequency and quality, by way of the children realizing what such assistance meant from the perspective of the receiving person, and there were more spontaneous instances of children with special needs being integrated in free time activities by their peers.

References

Badía Martín, M., Escotorín Soza, P., Morganti, A. & Roche, R. (2019). EDUCATIONAL INTERVENTION FOR AN INCLUSIVE CULTURE IN PRIMARY SCHOOL: THE QUALITATIVE DIMENSION OF THE PROSEL PROGRAMME. CZŁOWIEK – NIEPEŁNOSPRAWNOŚĆ – SPOŁECZEŃSTWO. 4(46). 25-37. DOI: 10.5604/01.3001.0013.7571

Mareš, J. (2017). Prosocial Behavior Education in Children. Acta Educationis Generalis. 7(2), 7-16. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/atd-2017-0009

Petermann, F. & Natzke, H. (2008). Preliminary Results of a Comprehensive Approach to Prevent Antisocial Behaviour in Preschool and Primary School Pupils in Luxembourg. School Psychology International, 29(5), 606-626. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0143034308099204