Welcome to our English 98 Service Learning Blog

One of the most significant things we humans can experience is the opportunity to do something for someone else. In Jonathan Field's blog "Awake at the Wheel," he summarizes it this way:

"“If you want to feel better,” they say, “you’ve got to give yourself away.” And, we seem to all publicly buy into that. But, while our minds say, “cool,” our actions all too often say, “my ass!” Which is a shame, because there’s now strong published research to support the notion that serving others, especially those less fortunate than us, really does go beyond helping others.

In his book, The Happiness Hypothesis, Jonathan Haidt reported the surprising results of an experiment designed to explore the impact of four different types of experiences on longer-term happiness. Haidt told 350 students to engage in four activities, one self-indulgent pleasure, eating ice-cream, and three gratifications-attending a new lecture, doing something out of kindness for a friend, and calling or visiting someone to tell them how grateful they were for that persons’ friendship.
The results were quite surprising, service cultivates the most happiness.

Eating the ice-cream was enjoyable (duh), but the pleasure was fleeting. Attending the lecture ranked as the least enjoyable, unless you were someone with what acclaimed positive psychology visionary, Professor Martin Seligman calls a “signature-Strength” for curiosity and learning. But, the bigger news was that the participants experienced more powerful and longer-lasting boosts to their states-of-mind from the acts of kindness than the acts of self-indulgence. In fact, many people even carried their improved moods into the next day.

Maybe that helps explain the blissed-out expressions on the faces of so many Buddhist monks, whose essential teaching is that of compassion and kindness."

In other words, doing acts of service and kindness leads to happiness that lasts. Pretty cool, huh? We want to provide a voice for that kind of happiness so voila! Here is our collective experience on serving others and its effects. Enjoy!