Less cramming. More Frisbee. At Yale, students learn how to live the good life. - The W... - 0 views
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Santos designed this class after she realized, as the head of a residential college at Yale, that many students were stressed out and unhappy, grinding through long days that seemed to her far more crushing and joyless than her own college years. Her perception was backed up by statistics
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a national survey that found nearly half of college students reported overwhelming anxiety and feeling hopeless.
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“They feel they’re in this crazy rat race, they’re working so hard they can’t take a single hour off — that’s awful.”
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The idea behind the class is deceptively simple, and many of the lessons — such as gratitude, helping others, getting enough sleep — are familiar.
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All semester, hundreds of students tried to rewire themselves — to exercise more, to thank their mothers, to care less about the final grade and more about the ideas.
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But in ways small and large, silly and heartbreakingly earnest, simple and profound, this class changed the conversation at Yale. It surfaced in late-night talks in dorms, it was dissected in newspaper columns, it popped up, again and again, in memes.
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It’s the application that’s difficult, a point Santos made repeatedly: Our brains often lead us to bad choices, and even when we realize the choices are bad, it’s hard to break habits.
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In a way, the class is the very essence of a liberal-arts education: learning, exploration, insight into oneself and the world. But many students described it as entirely unlike any class they had ever taken — nothing to do with academics, and everything to do with life.
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There’s no longer the same stigma around mental-health issues, he said. “Now, so many people are admitting they want to lead happier lives.”
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The impact is not limited to Yale. Stories about PSYC157 spread around the world. Santos created a pared-down version of the class and offered it to anyone on the online education site Coursera.
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“We called it the ways in which our minds suck,” Forti said. “Our minds make us think that certain things make us happy, but they don’t.”
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There was a palpable difference on campus, several students said, during the week when they performed random acts of kindness.
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The biggest misconception people have about the class is that Santos is offering some kind of easy happiness fix. “It’s something you have to work on every day. . . . If I keep using these skills, they’ll, over time, help me develop better habits and be happier.
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So many students have told her the class changed their lives. “If you’re really grateful, show me that,” she told them. “Change the culture.
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for now students stood and clapped and clapped and clapped, beaming, drowning out even Kanye with their standing ovation. As if they had nothing but time.