{"id":978,"date":"2016-06-30T12:19:49","date_gmt":"2016-06-30T19:19:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/meditation\/?p=978"},"modified":"2016-06-30T12:19:49","modified_gmt":"2016-06-30T19:19:49","slug":"contagious-stress","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/meditation\/2016\/06\/30\/contagious-stress\/","title":{"rendered":"Contagious Stress"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This livescience.com news item caught my eye (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.livescience.com\/55199-stress-contagious-student-teacher.html\" target=\"_blank\">&#8216;Can You &#8216;Catch&#8217; Stress in a Classroom? Science Says Yes&#8217;<\/a> by S.G. Miller, livescience.com, 27 June 2016)<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Head lice and strep throat aren\u2019t the only things you can catch in a classroom. According to a new study from Canada, stress may be contagious, too.<\/p>\n<p>Researchers found that when 4th- to 7th-grade teachers reported feeling &#8220;burned out,&#8221; their students also had elevated stress levels.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>The article goes on to say that it isn&#8217;t known whether stress is passed from teacher to student or the other way around, but I suspect that transmission occurs in both directions.<\/p>\n<p>Reed students have finally begun talking about &#8216;stress culture&#8217;, but I marvel at how resistant Reed faculty have been\u00a0when it comes to talking about their own stress because it is so obviously pervasive. For over 30 years I have watched faculty (and students) engage in an annual cycle of binge-teaching, binge-scholarship, and binge-relaxation. At the same time we\u00a0deny that we binge-work even as we complain that\u00a0we\u00a0have no time for anything else. We burn the midnight oil with one eye watching the calendar crawl towards Friday. We grasp\u00a0at mid-semester breaks the way an alcoholic clutches\u00a0a near-empty bottle of hooch, and we pine for the next vacation and sabbatical. (Yet another symptom: faculty who are on sabbatical are invariably ashamed to admit their status to colleagues who are still teaching and they nearly always apologize for &#8216;looking so relaxed&#8217;.)<\/p>\n<p>My mother always used to say, &#8220;moderation in all things.&#8221; This quote is often attributed to Aristotle. I wonder if it ever gets mentioned in Hum 110?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This livescience.com news item caught my eye (&#8216;Can You &#8216;Catch&#8217; Stress in a Classroom? Science Says Yes&#8217; by S.G. Miller, livescience.com, 27 June 2016) Head lice and strep throat aren\u2019t the only things you can catch in a classroom. According to a new study from Canada, stress may be contagious, too. Researchers found that when [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":55,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[26,5,4],"class_list":["post-978","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-burnout","tag-stress","tag-teachers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/978","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/55"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=978"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/978\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":979,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/978\/revisions\/979"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=978"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=978"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=978"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}