LIFE
Doing well on the day is all that counts. Others, the worriers, can crumble under pressure ❞ ❝
go as far as saying she enjoyed the exams Tracy has noticed a certain gladiatorial spring to her step as the trials approach. “She seems to walk taller,” she says. “It’s as if she feels she’s preparing to go into battle, with the whole world watching – and is looking forward to it.” With her son, however, it’s a very different matter. Though the more academic of the two, whose natural home is towards the top of the top set, he finds the stress far harder to deal with. As a result, his sister, staying cool, calm and collected in the exam hall, often does much better than predicted. He, meanwhile, can struggle to remember to put his own name at the top of the paper, let alone muster the information into a coherent, well-argued essay.
image: corbis
Too slick to be true? Warriors and worriers may sound just a little too slick to be true. Families in Taiwan, however, could tell you otherwise. There, children in the ninth grade sit an exam competitive enough to make your eyes bleed. Pass it and you go on to senior school. Fail, as six out of ten do, and your formal education is finished. Researchers there found by unscrambling the genetic code of 800 students sitting the exam, warriors have the competitive edge, scoring about eight per cent higher than the worrier contingent. So what difference does all this actually make when it comes to your own child’s future prospects? On balance, think the experts, not that much, which should come as a relief to any parent terrified that their genetic inheritance has given their child something else to blame them for. For a start, schools, staffed as they are with clever people who understand children, have known that their pupils cope differently with stress for many years and – surprise, surprise – are really rather good at coming up with solutions for the problem. www.independentschoolparent.com
“Do we see these different types? Absolutely, yes,” says Mark Bishop, headmaster of Trinity School in South London. However, he adds reassuringly, “both school and home can do a huge amount to mitigate against any genetic predisposition to stress.” The book’s authors talk about stress inoculation, where over time, repeated exposure to anxiety-triggering events can make them less fearful. While Mark Bishop agrees, he also feels that helping children to understand why they’re feeling the way they do and what thoughts and feelings lie behind it is vital. So committed is he to the whole issue of mental wellbeing that the subject has recently been added to the curriculum.
It’s not clear cut And, as Jo Heywood, headmistress at Heathfield School, Ascot, and a scientist with a degree in medicinal chemistry points out, while the concept of warriors and worriers is “really interesting, it’s not as clear cut as that and I think it’s wrong to even to consider that it is.” Her pupils agree, to the point where they have come up with their own third category – waverers. “If we are about to sit an exam that has a finite amount of information to learn and we’ve learned it and we’re feeling great about our learning, then we’ll go in there and we’ll be like warriors. But when it’s a subject where there’s not a finite amount of information to learn such as languages where you can keep learning and find more words and vocabulary, we tend to be worriers because it’s harder to know if we have done enough,” say the girls.
Revision all the way Her advice is that pupils revise so thoroughly that the information is etched on pupils’ long-term memory. Unlike its short-term equivalent, as
Helping children to understand why they’re feeling the way they do and what thoughts and feelings lie behind it is vital
anyone whose mind has gone completely blank under stress can testify, it tends to hold up better under stress than its short term equivalent. As to how much time it’s worth spending on deciding how you’d tackle a sabre-toothed tiger; not much, is the advice – or at least, not yet. “The neuropsychology and biochemistry of learning and related academic achievement is at a very early stage and research in this area must be viewed with scepticism,” says chartered psychologist Dr Kairen Cullen. And of course there’s a practical issue, too. One day, no doubt, every good school will offer genetic profiling along with cello lessons and golf as standard extras. Until then, deciding whether we’re warriors, worriers or, courtesy of the girls at Heathfield School, waverers, is just one more thing to worry about. Top Dog: The Science of Winning or Losing by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman is published by Ebury Press and is priced at £20.00.
AUTUMN 2013 INDEPENDENT SCHOOL ParENT 43