Bat Encounters and Conquering Fear
Source/Author: Adrianne Finley Odell, Assistant Head of School
January 08, 2016
Over the holiday break, my family and I had an encounter with a bat. We were visiting our family home in Michigan, and our oldest daughter and her husband arrived a day before we did, only to find a bat in our bathroom. Terrified, she called her Dad for advice. He instructed her husband to get a box, coax the bat into the box and release it outside. Fortunately, her husband had the courage to complete the assignment. The next evening, our family sat down for our first meal together in the dining room. In between clinking forks and glasses, we heard an unmistakable noise of shrieking and fluttering coming from the air vent in the floor—gasp! another bat! Our younger daughter shared her sister’s fear and her bedroom was located just ten feet away from that air vent. Knowing that sleep would be impossible for her with the prospect of a bat on the loose, we eventually piled some heavy panels on top of the grated vent to ensure the bat would not escape into our airspace. The thought of a blood-sucking, blind, rabid, rodent flying into our hair, set us on edge until the next day when my husband installed an extra screen behind the vent to ensure our safety.
Whew! Close call! Well, not really. I have since learned, thanks to Bat Conservation International (batcon.org), that most of our ideas of bats are a myth. They see as well as just about any other mammal. They are more closely related to humans than mice. There are only three species of bats (out of 1300) that drink blood—and all live in Latin America. And bats have amazing echolocation abilities, making it highly unlikely that they will fly into one’s hair. In fact, bats are highly beneficial, serving as natural pollinators and seed dispersers as well as providing great pest control by consuming many insect pests every night. It is a lack of knowledge and the influence of pop culture that play into our misunderstanding of bats, and therefore our fear.
But bats are only one thing that we routinely fear without cause. In the spirit of a new year, many of us make resolutions, and we want to support our children in tackling their fears. I have been thinking about how I can conquer my personal fears and how Shorecrest teachers and administrators can create an environment to support our students to do the same. Think of the people in your life who inspire you due to their fearlessness and courage. What is it that allows them to overcome fear in situations that routinely paralyze many of the rest of us?
I recently read a Harvard Business Review article and learned about an approach that Stanford University’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, aka Stanford’s “d.school,” applies to help students increase their creativity by overcoming fear! They zero in on four key fears. I had never thought about how overcoming such fears could unleash creativity, but as I considered it further, I realized how powerful this method could be to helping me achieve my own goals, and how much our teachers at Shorecrest are already employing this approach with our children.
Fear of the messy unknown
Spend any time in Shorecrest’s Experiential School and you will quickly learn that stepping into the “messy unknown” is a key element of the learning experience for our youngest students. It is through the hands-on experiences that our students have that they gain new insights and discoveries. I listened to one of our Shorecrest parents recently tell me how they had their child, a student in our Experiential School, help make dinner, and that the activity gave their child the opportunity to learn so much more because they were willing to allow the mess that came along with a three-year old’s “help” in the kitchen. Allowing the mess also likely pushed that parent out of his comfort zone, further opening a portal to his own creativity.
Fear of losing control
Ok—I admit it. I am a bit of a control freak. But acceptance is the first step to recovery, right? One of the key tenets of our educational philosophy at Shorecrest is collaboration. It can be difficult to transition from a work model that is based on the effort you apply as an individual to one that is based on the efforts of a group. What if I work harder than the others but they get the credit? Or what if others don’t pull their weight resulting in a lower quality product? I know from personal experience, however, that ideas that have been developed through a group discussion process have consistently improved due to the input and experience of the group. You must, however, let go of the need to control in order to gain the greater result. This is a process that we model as educators and we teach to our students. It has even affected the design of our learning spaces to better facilitate group work. Fortune 500 companies employ similar tactics in the creation of their products and services. Our students are learning techniques at a young age that will help them in college and beyond. If we let go of our need for control, we gain so much more in the process.
Fear of being judged
Young children are fearless. We watch them in awe, wishing we still had the same courage to not worry about what others think about how we look or what we say. As we enter into adolescence we become hyper-judgmental about ourselves. At Shorecrest we work with students to overcome their fear of being judged. We help them build confidence by gaining mastery of a skill or becoming an expert on a particular subject. Our eighth graders, for example, have an assignment called a “passion project.” This is a project or activity in which they immerse themselves to gain a new skill or develop mastery during an in-depth study of their own choosing. Through this study they gain great confidence as an expert in the field. Throughout the Shorecrest experience, we give students many opportunities to practice a variety of skills to gain the confidence that comes through mastery of those skills. With such confidence, the fear of judgement wanes. As adults, we typically become very confident in the area of our chosen occupation because we know and understand it so well. We can reduce the potential for paralyzing fear of failure in other areas by taking on a little bit each day for something we are learning the first time and recognizing that no one becomes an expert overnight.
Fear of the first step
When I was younger, I always thought I would write a book. I still have visions of doing that, however, just sitting down to write an article like this does not come easily. I vacillate between ideas for what I will write about or how I might even start a book or an article. What I understand from people who write for a living, however, is that they just start. Get something, or even several ideas, down on paper. So, I did that. And slept on it. Then one morning, a cold, dark, quiet, winter Michigan morning where it was still dark outside at 7:45 am, the idea came to me. I already knew I wanted to write about overcoming fear, but it was when I realized I could share my bat story - show, rather than “tell” about fear of bats - that the article began to take shape in my mind. As it turns out, this is a key element of design thinking and something we teach our students beginning in the Lower School. One of the steps of design thinking is to “prototype,” or “build a representation of one or more of your ideas to show to others.” At Stanford, they teach students, “don’t get ready, get started.” So I did. And by doing so, rather than over-thinking it, there is less anxiety that builds as a result. Perhaps that is the exact advice I need to take to accomplish that long-held goal of mine to write a book… get started! It is also the exact advice for our students as they contemplate homework, long-term projects, or studying for a test or exam.
I often find great advice through quotes. One of my favorite quotes is from Teddy Roosevelt and is about conquering fear. He might have just as easily spoken about overcoming the fear of the messy unknown, fear of losing control, of being judged or taking the first step.
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly so that his place shall never be with those timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
