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Nationally renowned journalist and author of Ashes of Waco: An Investigation, Dick Reavis, will speak Wednesday, Feb. 15, at 6 p.m. in Wyly Tower in a community forum.

Reavis will participate in a Q&A forum to include student representatives from the liberal arts disciplines, addressing the myriad of social and political struggles he has witnessed and written about as well as offering why he approaches subjects from the inside, rather than as an objective bystander.

The event, which is the first in the Mary Margaret Storey Journalism Lecture Series, is being co-sponsored by the journalism department and the College of Liberal Arts.  It is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served.

During his two-day visit to Tech, Reavis will also address two journalism classes.  Literary journalism students read Ashes of Waco this quarter, and he will discuss with them how he investigated and wrote the story of the surviving Branch Davidians and the government involvement when the mainstream media abandoned the story after the 51-day siege ended in April 1993.

He will also talk to media law students about the right of access for news gathering.

Reavis, who teaches journalism at North Carolina State University, has written six books and hundreds of magazine articles. He began his career writing for the underground press during the Civil Rights Era after moving from Texas to Alabama at age 19 to volunteer alongside Martin Luther King Jr.

Returning to Arlington, Texas a changed man, Reavis attended graduate school in philosophy at the University of Texas. (His bachelor’s degree in English is from University of Texas-Austin).  Upon graduation, he went to work as a reporter and later senior editor for the Texas Monthly, one of the most respected magazines chronicling current events, politics and sports in the South.

He was a trailblazer in the field of narrative journalism, using fictional literary techniques and immersing himself in his subject matter to tell the story.  Reavis covered topics as varied as Mexican guerilla warfare to the rights of smokers.  He chronicled his adventures traveling every state highway in Texas in a single year in the pages of the magazine to commemorate the 25^th anniversary of Texas Monthly.

Reavis is most noted for his investigation into the deadly 51-day siege of the Branch Davidian Compound in Waco, Texas, in 1993, resulting in the best-selling book Ashes of Waco, published by Simon & Schuster in 1995.  The book led to further government investigation and congressional hearings into the ATF and FBI siege, which left 76 people, including 20 children, dead.

Most recently at the age of 62, Reavis immersed himself in the world of an American day laborer to chronicle the experiences of truck drivers, construction workers and road crewmen, among other labor-intensive workers who often work long, hard hours for some of the lowest pay.  Catching Out: The Secret World of Day Laborers was published by Simon & Schuster in 2010.

An 8 year old boy throws a temper tantrum – albeit a somewhat dangerous one, where he pulls wood off the walls, and the police come in and pepper spray him.

What do you think? To spray or not to spray?

Story: Police pepper spray 8-year old

This is the latest of the blogs dealing with the vexed matter of motivation. A recap: I’ve been musing on the 10 Commandments of Motivation as categorised by two top Hungarians, Zoltan Dornyei and Kata Czizer, and wondering what their practical ramifications might be. In some senses, I’ve left the most interesting two till last. One is the imperative to create a pleasant relaxed atmosphere in the classroom. This is about the physical properties of the classroom, by the way, and not so much about the human relationships inside it – though one way of looking at it is to think about how the classroom atmosphere can facilitate good relationships and an atmosphere conducive to learning.

I’m loath to provide any recipes here as so much depends on the context you’re working in and, for example, the physical condition of a classroom in a state university in my part of post-communist Europe is very different from the state-of-the-art hi-tech private schools students might be in. But atmospheres can always be better and there is a framework to think about them provided by the senses. Why? Well, we know enough from research to have, to say the least, strong suspicions that brains do not thrive in environments with a narrow range of stimuli. In plainer English, poorly kept classrooms inhibit learning. I should say here I’m relying on one of my favourite books on this area – it’s Using Brainpower in the Classroom: 5 Steps to Accelerate Learning by Steve Garnett, and it says some hugely useful things about the classroom environment.

One place to start is with the display. I’m a great believer in displaying students’ work, even that of adults . It’s not just about self-esteem, though seeing your work displayed is likely to increase that. There are also important learning points here. Writing should always be for an audience, and displaying writing gives any bit of work a wider audience than just the teacher. The posters that come with English File can be enormously useful too. If they are legible from anywhere in the room and positioned at eye-level, long term recall of their learning points can be as high as 75%. If we replace these learning displays frequently, then obviously more knowledge can be learnt, almost passively, in this way.

Displays also provide a splash of colour. Now I’m a bit cynical about some of the wackier claims made for colour – but that maybe comes with the territory of being grumpy and middle-aged, and even I accept that dabs of colour provide necessary stimulus.

The other easy way into sensory stimulation is through the ears. Like the man said, music has charms to soothe a savage breast, to soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak… or in classroom terms it can shape atmospheres. Just giving students control of the music to be played at break time is one easy way of changing dynamics. Some claims about the effect of music go further– there are those who have it that listening to Mozart, for example, will raise the IQ, create fertile brains and promote creativity. Even if you’re sceptical about this stuff, it still makes sense that baroque music can create calm, drown out white noise, and if your students are doing writing maybe even promote that sense of relaxed alertness we need to get ideas flowing.

In other spheres those who’ve got a commercial interest in altering people’s moods use different smells to do so. Somewhere there may be a teacher who brings in cinnamon-scented incense to create a relaxed atmosphere. But for me, it’s enough to think about what the walls of my classroom look like, and how it sounds.

So you want to change? Really? At this time of year many people have taken stock and decided they want to alter some aspect of their lives, setting goals and trying to establish effective New Year’s resolutions. Most of these people fail miserably and do not make the changes they would like for reasons that will become clear.

These lessons have come through experimentation with hundreds of clients and through learning the hard way myself. One of my work specialism is now how to get lasting behavioural change so here is the best of what I’ve found. This year I have made some major changes I’ve utterly changed my diet and established regular gym workouts to transform my body, moved into my own place from living with others, made many sometimes painful relationship and business changes, got into the habit of seeing my niece regularly (who lives a way away), got divorced from aikido to marry cage-fighting, etc. I’ve also failed in some of my 2011 aims my books remains half-written but I’m OK with this and am learning why. Stuff happens, things beyond our control changes and we all do the best we can. Here’s how to give yourself the best chance possible of change in 2012:

The Rhythm of Behavioural Change

Why if we all have stuff we want to do differently do we find it hard to change? Why do most gyms sell 90% of memberships in January but 90% of these people are not there in March? Why are there still smokers talking about quitting but not doing it? Why don’t diets work? It doesn’t make sense at first glance that people don’t make changes that are obviously good for them, but we as systems in wider systems, are “homeostatic” we try and remain the same. Everything in the universe is constantly shifting but coal does not suddenly turn into diamonds without some energy. People too can often be the victims of our “bureaucracy of habit” which keeps us doing the same thing ad getting the same results even when we dont like them. As in physics a certain activation energy like the movement in striking a match is needed to overcome this and start a new self-perpetuating process. Change has a rhythm which involves initial excitement usually overcoming established entropy (January when you in the gym for example), a dangerous period where excitement has diminished but resistance remains high and the old system reasserts itself (February when most people start to quit the gym) and a maintenance period where the new pattern become self sustaining and requires some but little effort (March when you are a regularif you made it that far). Given this rhythm the time to get a personal trainer or gym buddy (support and reminder) is February not January. The good news is any pattern you can maintain for 90 days will likely continue.

 

Why New Years Resolutions Don’t Work And 9 Principles to make them work

1. No Commitment

“Well you know I should really give up smoking” “I kinda want to find a new job” “I guess my relationship could be better” Shut up you’re wasting your time and mine! What will you commit to doing? By commit I mean in the same way you’re committed to keeping your balls/ovaries. Real, 100% heart-felt commitment that is resistant to outside interference (because there WILL be some). Commitment involves connecting what we really want to change to what matters most to us. Change is emotional more than logical. This is the most important principle as deep values drive what we do and commitment aligned with them provides the necessary motivation for new action.

2. No alignment

The reason we say one thing and end up doing something else is that we have competing commitments. We want to go to the gym but we also want to relax after work. We want to eat vegetables but we also want the pleasure of eating cakes! Etc. Another way of looking at this is that we have different parts of ourselves and these need to be given a voice and aligned. If a change threatens another need/commitment it must be addressed or you will self-sabotage. What are the pay-offs of not changing? Behavioural change within oneself is actually a committee process! As many of our “commitments” are unconscious, the first stage is to identify what they are and give them a “voice”. Voice dialogue/Big Mind is a great way to do this. We may also have limiting beliefs that need identifying and addressing before any real change can happen. Successful change is aligned, authentic and paradoxically, self-accepting. If change is driven by one part ourselves Calvinistically judging and bashing another part there will be a rebellion before long (February usually)!

3. Not specific or positive

What very concretely are you going to do differently? A fuzzy commitment is no commitment at all. Let’s look at the two part of the first sentence in more detail: What specifically and measuredly (you have to be able to know if you’re done it or not), will you do differently (only commit to positive actions not the outcome or “don’ts” as the unconscious mind tends not to ignore the negative, so whenever you say “don’t eat the cake” your brain hears “eat the cake”). Break big things down into little doable things that don’t scare you (thanks to Paul Sheppard for reminding me of this one).

Example: “I will eat less junk”to will drink semi-skimmed milk, eat fruit as a snack and meat and vegetables in the evenings”.

4. No vision

What can you picture? New possibilities begin in the mind. Until we can start to imagining things being different we won’t start to work towards it so visualisation, with as much detail as possible is a key start. It’s not magic of course and you still have to go do the work to meet your goals so visualise this too, not just the end result.

Example: I wanted to be in a healthy loving relationship so I started to imagine what this might look like as I really hadn’t pictured it before

5. No embodiment

What do you need to embody? We are not just psychological and for change to occour and stick we need to change at the level of who we are. This is perhaps the hardest one to explain in a short blog whoever the list of embodied resources here will be a start. What is critical is that we need to practice a different way of being.

Example: Let’s say you’re working on being a better listener, what is the body of that? More open or closed? Faster or slower? When I made some shifts in this direction I realised I needed to be more aware of my back, more open, slower and have a more relaxed muscle tone. I’m still not a great listener but I’ve definitely improved and know what “the body” of this way of being is.

6. No reminders

How will you remember? This is a real simple one but easy to forget people forget what they said they were going to do as life get’s busy again and habit reinforces itself so we need to have reminders to do stuff. Anything reliable that you won’t miss will do high or low tech. On the latter front there are some good online tools for both measuring, publicly declaring and reminding you of change efforts such as these.

Example: When I started new exercise classes I put them in my diary and set-up reminders on my phone half an hour before.

7. Poor behavioural architecture

How can you make it easy for yourself? Think how hard it is not to drink alcohol if you work in a pub, you keep beer at home and you buy your food in a shop full of booze? How easy is it if you live in Saudi Arabia? While of course people do find ways to drink in “dry” countries, because it is a lot harder most people will drink less. Similarly, any change effort can be supported or hindered by how the things around you set-up the ease of particular decisions. Nudge is a great book on this.

Example: Getting smaller plates and only keeping healthy food in the house when dieting. Joining a gym close to your work. (I did these in 2011)

8. No support

Who’s helping? Who’s hindering? Our network of relationships can keep our current behaviour in place or support change efforts. We may also need to change our network to a more supportive one parole officers are very aware of this one! We are social animals and change is very difficult if tried alone. Good support is a mix of fluffy nice encouragement and kick-ass challenge and accountability (can be different people). We must also align any change efforts with cultural factors to go back to the Saudi example British ex-pats continue to drink when living in Saudi Arabia because of their national cultural identity. If they wanted to give-up finding non-drinking British role-models would help.

9. No consideration

What are you like? One size does not fit all and we all do change differently. What motivates us and how we like to learn and grow must be taken into account. Some people like a very goal orientated, measured approach, others a more flowing, organic or values driven way. Some are more private in their change efforts, some much more extroverted.

An Integral Model of Change

People tend to be good at looking at one or two of the areas I’ve identified but not all of them. To give yourself the best possible chance of behavioural change you should consider both the internal and external, plural and singular to use Ken Wilber’s classic model. You may find the best leverage where you are not used to working.

 

Inner psychological change, alignment and values work

“I”

 

Embodied and behavioural change

“It”  

Cultural alignment and social support

“We”

Behavioural architecture and resources for change

“Its”

Effective New Years Resolutions Conclusion

The principles and integral approach above will really help any resolutions you’re making this year. Behavioural change is also still a mystery in some ways, human beings are complex and hard to predict so experiment and enjoy

 

Resources:

PEESMART The behavioural change system I use at work

Why New Year’s Resolutions Don’t Work – an older smaller article on this I wrote

A Buddhist angle on resolutions

A trainer friend on values and resolutions

Online goal tools

Behavioural change coaching is of course available contact me on for support or try Paul Shepard, Dawn Bentley or Francis Briers if you don’t like me

Heart Magazine magazine named New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez  Woman of the Year for her dedication to childrens advocacy and her efforts to keep children safe and today she lived up to her reputation as she signed into law HB 172  - a law prohibiting corporal punishment as a disciplinary sanction in public schools. 
Earlier this month Martinez signed an Anti-Bullying Bill into law and HB172 will further increase protections for New Mexico school children. 
We spoke with renown Author and Educator Rosalind Wiseman, who recently hosted a bullying discussion from the White House, who had this to say:

Any school that condones or doesn’t explicitly condemn corporal punishment as a disciplinary strategy will have no credibility to talk to its students about bullying. Simply, if the students know the adults in the school can hit, slap them or worse, it sends the message that physical domination is how you address conflict. I honestly, can’t think of a worse policy to alienate our children.

New Mexico is now the 31st state to outlaw corporal punishment in public schools. The United States is one of the only developed countries in the world that allows Corporal Punishment in schools – with 107 countries having national bans in place.

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