[2021-12-11] Positive news
I've grown tired of the constant negativity in the news: Omicron, rising food prices, geopolitical conflict. I've had it, and I know that I'm not the only one.
So today I went in search of happier stories and came across Positive News—"the magazine for good journalism about good things." The entity's website states that it is "the first media organisation in the world that is dedicated to quality, independent reporting about what’s going right." It calls its reporting "constructive journalism," which focuses on "progress, possibility, and solutions."
I started scanning the site and paused on this story: ‘It undoes negative wiring’: rapper Loyle Carner on his ADHD cookery school. As the mom of a child with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), I welcome positive news about people with this condition, so I dove into the article.
Ben Coyle-Larner (a rapper who performs under the name Loyle Carner) started cooking at the age of seven. Like the students enrolled in the cooking school he co-founded, Coyle-Larner has ADHD and found that making meals helped with his condition.
Five years ago, he teamed up with social enterprise the Goma Collective to set up the Chilli Con Carner summer school. Based in London, England, the school teaches teens with ADHD how to cook. In the process, it gives them a "taste of sweet success"—a healthy alternative to the near-constant "diet of failure and anxiety" they're accustomed to. Goma’s Mikey Krzyzanowski explains what the students get out of the program:
"They get factual praise—they’re tasting the food and they know it’s good.... We tell them they’ve done something great and they can taste for themselves that we really mean it. It undoes loads of the pain and negative wiring that some of their schooling and even the people around them have been subjecting them to for a long time."
For one week each summer, the school teaches a dozen 14- to 16-year-olds how to make everything from fresh pasta to sushi rolls. Krzyzanowski adds:
"It’s so difficult to feel self-confidence as a kid: it’s always about these small increments of success. But with cooking, they start out thinking they can’t do it—and by the end of the day, they’re eating it."
Coyle-Larner recalls one student who had dropped out of school and was "crippled with shame." The youth turned out to be one of the most gifted kids at the cooking school, so much so that, at the end of the week-long program, he was offered an internship at a restaurant. Coyle-Larner points out:
"He’d been told he wouldn’t amount to anything, because he didn’t have the grades to get him there, and the next thing—he’s working in probably the best fish restaurant in the UK. That’s the real travesty: he’s so incredible at cooking, but in the first 16 years of his life, nobody found that out."
I love stories that reflect a departure from stereotypical perspectives on disabilities and abilities. This article reminds me of the story of Gillian Lynne. Before she became a successful ballerina, dancer, choreographer, actress, and theatre and television director, Lynne was a young girl who fidgeted, lacked focus and was underperforming in school. Her mother took her to a doctor. After listening to the mom's explanation, the doctor asked that they step outside the room to speak privately. Before leaving the young girl alone in the room, the doctor turned on the radio. Once outside the room, he asked the mother to watch her daughter, who was dancing to the music. The doctor is quoted as telling the mom: "Your daughter is not sick. She's a dancer."
I found the Positive News story uplifting, inspiring and challenging—in a good way. It may be impossible to escape negative news, and it may take more effort to find positive stories, but good news is out there, be that in our own lives or the lives of our loved ones, in our workplaces or our communities, or in our countries or the world.
