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By Dr. Jonathan Wai:

At the heart of wisdom lies a paradox. On the one hand, our homegrown instincts about the world can be deeply flawed; the bias built into each of us is exactly what the methods of science are designed to overcome. At the same time, wisdom proceeds directly from personal, lived experience. With these two forces in mind, Psychology Today sought life lessons from leading behavioral scientists, those whose expertise encompasses both. In this article, you will likely glimpse something personal about each of the contributors [Editor’s note: including wisdom from CMC Psychology Professor Ron Riggio!] – but also encounter valuable counsel for a meaningful life.

Read the rest of the article by Dr. Jonathan Wai, former CMCer and now Berger Institute Faculty Affiliate. Dr. Wai is a research scientist at the Duke University Talent Identification Program and a visiting researcher at Case Western Reserve University. He did his postdoctoral work at Duke University, holds a doctorate from Vanderbilt University, and graduated from Claremont McKenna College. He lives with his wife, kids, and cat. You can find his CV here.

This week, I had the honor of attending a talk by Lynn Karoly, senior economist at the RAND Corporation, at Pitzer College. Professor Karoly’s research focuses on child and family well-being and early care and education programs. At RAND, she conducts nonpartisan, policy-driven research within these fields.

Today, the key puzzle in early care and education (ECE) is how to provide access to high-quality early learning programs to children. Numerous factors must be taken into account in order to build a robust early education system: the monitoring and incentivizing of ECE services, strategies to grow and support qualified ECE workforce, and ensuring the system is aligned with standard K-12 education.

However, all of this extensive work is worth it. Professor Karoly’s research has proven that high-quality pre-school programs raise school readiness skills. These gains, moreover, are consistent across different races and ethnicities, as well as income levels. A rigorous evaluation of national, state, and local programs revealed mostly favorable significant effects in pre-math, vocabulary, and print awareness of pre-schoolers.

Unfortunately, this romanticized view does not portray reality properly. Once in school, children who are better prepared are overlooked as teachers try to get farther-behind students caught up. This reveals a caveat in the system: investing in ECE programs will not work unless these efforts are adopted on a nationwide scale. Thanks to the Quality Rating and Improvement System (QRIS), progress is on the way. In numerous states, the QRIS institution specifies minimum ECE program features through licensing and constantly monitors preschools for compliance. In fact, the state of California is currently being evaluated. Please join me in praising Professor Karoly’s efforts and hoping for advances in early care and education.

For more information, please visit http://www.rand.org.

Yolo Akili Robinson delivered a poignant speech at the Ath last night. He addressed mental health issues induced by unhealthy social constraints imposed on black males. Black males oftentimes are expected to be “stoic, rigid, and emotionally sparse.” They are expected to love sex with women and love sex with women without respecting them. These unhealthy norms, Robinson believes, have deep roots which lead back to slavery and the white-black/men-women dynamics in this system.

He told us five stories to illuminate some societal problems. The first story was about Robinson’s grandson who as an eight month fell and cried. This young boy’s father scolded Robinson for his comforting of this boy and said this boy needs not “grow up like a punk.” Robinson says this hypermasculinity is rooted in the inability to express emotion as slaves and leads to deep social problems today. For example it leads to rage which is turned into a way to express emotion “without expressing emotion.” It also leads to homophobia and sexism. Robinson elucidated this problem in black men, but many of these problems, he says, is caused by white men and are equally applicable to white men and represent issues with masculinity in general.

As men, we have the responsibility to treat women with respect (and this requires a lot more thought than this phrase implies) and as heterosexuals we need to treat homosexuals with dignity.

The beginning of a new semester comes with a return to time management, a heavy workload, and rotating obligations. Impending deadlines and mounting assignments are already starting to stir up familiar feelings of stress for a lot of students, and we’re still in the first month of school. A USA Today study showed that over a quarter of students feel stress has “negatively affected their academic performance,” with 85% indicating that at some point they felt overwhelmed by all of their responsibilities.

Yet with all of this, there are ways to counter the semester stress:

• Make thoughtful choices about academic and extracurricular activities.
• Determine whether you are making use of campus resources.
• Don’t procrastinate.
• Eat well, stay hydrated, and get enough sleep.
• Leave time for yourself.

These are things our parents and friends tell us. These are the things we try to tell ourselves. And we should take our own advice…

But here I am, it’s 11:30pm and I need to be up at 5am for work. I didn’t finish the paper I tried to start today, or the reading that needs to be done by this evening. I didn’t take the dog for a walk, and I definitely didn’t make it to the gym. But I did the dishes, cleaned the living room, and read half of the reading I needed to finish. I handled some paperwork, and celebrated one year of living in my townhouse. And I managed to binge-watch two seasons of Wentworth.

At the end of the day, I do the best I can. But choosing to be okay with what I did get done is what makes it possible for me to make a new list and start again tomorrow… after I get home from work.