Meerkat Moments.

Csíkszentmihályi, Mihaly to his friends, is not merely a qwerty disaster, not merely the only person in the world sure of getting himself when Googled, he is a renowned psychologist. His fame is ‘Flow’, the psychology of optimal experience. My friend, John, was having trouble with his boiler. The fan was stopping when it should have been going. To cut a long phone call short, “drown it in WD40”, which along with Gaffa tape has saved the world on numerous occasions. Next phone call. “It worked! I’m amazed how I went from despair to elation. Thank you.” As you can see from the diagram he had swung round from 9 o’clock to 2 o’clock in a trice. Take a bow John and Mihaly. I had the skill level and John had the challenge level and together we got to Flow. We had a Meerkat Moment, a “tchix, simple” that makes life worthwhile. It strikes me education seems to miss out the power of tchix, choosing rather to focus on the early evening hours between boredom and worry, with teachers spending their time trying to whip up a stiff meringue from an egg white apathy. Personally I can beat egg whites senseless and not get a result. But the possibility, even imaginary, of a Meerkat Moment would have those peaks standing up prouder than Madonna’s nipples. There is though an axial difference between teachers and pupils. Teachers are strong on the horizontal and students on the vertical; they tend to meet around 0,0 i.e. in apathy. The concept of them meeting in flow is a mere pipedream to all concerned. But is it possible? If one were to start with describing a Meerkat Moment and work back through its constituent skill requirements each with its own “tchix”, might they? Education is after all a very practical preparation for such moment so that they may be enjoyed, not the beating of apathy into the mere shapes of knowledge.