In recent weeks, I have been working with students on reducing their anxiety and stress, through some basic principles of project management.
Here is what we have been discussing in classes.
Towards the beginning of term, students can be a little bored, perhaps to the point of being a little underwhelmed.
At this time of year (week eight of ten) many students are overwhelmed with assignments and pending exams.
From the outset, I have been working with my students to whelm.
I ask Student to get out a calendar and plot all their assessment due dates. If there are clusters of assignments and exams falling around the same dates, students need to bring forward some of their tasks, to adjust their level of whelm,
In Year 11 Biology we have added addition terms to our meta-vocabularly. We have named extreme levels of whelm as #Hyperwhelm.
Very low levels of whelm, might be considered to be #hypowhelmed.
We are aiming to adjust the levels of whelm towards a target of iso-whelm.
The secret is to keep chipping away at small sections of larger tasks. One need to eat the metaphorical elephant, one mouthful at a time.
The final component in the realm of whelm is co-opting the wombles' song from the 1970's tv show.
"Underwhelmed, overwhelmed, wombling free......"
