Exuberance, The Passion for Life

Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, speaks about her book "Exuberance, The Passion for Life" at a conference on teacher wellness organized by the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth (CTY). Introduced by CTY's Dr. Charles Rowins. Topics include: mental health, genius, creativity, moods and mood disorders, depression, bi-polar disorder, teaching gifted and talented children, genetics, risk-taking and the joy of teaching. As Dr. Jamison writes in "Exuberance": "To teach well, I heard early and often, is to make a difference. To teach unusually well is to create magic."

[@tootnewt]

Thank you!

[@vidyadharpotla6452]

Very Very Interesting

[@benjamingeorgecoles8060]

I totally agree with her basic premise that exuberance is a wonderful thing that plays into teaching and science and life in general in an extremely positive, often underappreciated way, and I think she makes her case well. What I struggle with however... When she speaks of exuberance as pretty much the finest quality a person can have, and then claims the US has it in greater abundance than other countries, in many of which it's hardly appreciated at all... That just comes across as typical Americian jingoism/chauvinism/exceptionalism. She offers minimal explication for these points. I'm doubtful it was principally exuberance than drove people to the 'New World' in centuries past - or, at least as often, it was fear of the alternatives (war, starvation, oppression, etc.) and desperation, or, in the case of a fairly large chuck of the population of course, just brutal coercion. Plus a very large proportion of immigration to the US has been more recent, in a period when 'crossing the ocean' was not such a feat of courage. And does she really know the histories of other parts of the world (and their mass migrations, for instance)? Does she really understand the different shapes exuberance and its appreciation might take in those parts? Has she immersed herself in very different cultures? Or is she viewing the rest of the world through that American lens which shows it as a kind of backdrop, lacking in innumerable ways the greatness of America, and for the most part hardly worth knowing about? More generally, I think she would have done well to explain a little more what might make other kinds of people - people who are not so exuberant by nature - special too. She does gesture towards this, but you couldn't get to the end of this talk and not pity the non-exuberant, could you? They're missing out on so much. Especially as she more or less coyly refers to her own exuberance again and again, the talk starts to sound a little narcissistic at times - like, me and my kind are superior beings! Let me tell you how! Finally, just talking a little more about different forms exuberance can take, and different ways it can be learnt/acquired/nurtured/accessed, as well as stifled, would have been great. Alerting people to their exuberant sides! And what might be getting in their way.