A Daughter and a Sister

I am
by eight-year-old Ava Schicke from Omaha, Nebraska

I am a daughter and a sister.

I wonder when I will die.

I hear the warm weather coming.

I see stars in the day.

I want to learn my whole ballet dance.

I am a daughter and a sister.

I pretend to be a teacher at home.

I feel like I am a teacher.

I touch hands that are growing.

I worry that I will never change.

I cry when something or someone dies.

I am a daughter and a sister.

I understand that teachers work hard for students.

I say that I don’t like bullies.

I dream about me not moving while trying really hard to run.

I try to become a good friend.

I hope that there is no more dying or killing.

I am a daughter and a sister.

Using Technology to Humanize the Classroom

“By removing the one size fits all lecture from the classroom and letting students have a self-paced lecture at home, and then when you go to the classroom, letting them do work, having the teacher walk around, having the peers actually be able to interact with each other, these teachers have used technology to humanize the classroom.”

~ Sal Khan, of Khan Academy

The Most Essential School Supply

My brother, David, works for Communities in Schools in Wichita, Kansas. He and my nephews, Leo and Levi, are featured in this public service announcement for a food program sponsored by the Kansas Food Bank. Food-4-Kids works with community schools to provides weekend food supplements to help keep kids engaged in school by addressing chronic hunger.

Food 4 Kids foodbags contain healthy, kid-friendly snacks that require no preparation such as:

• Peanut Butter (12-ounce jar) and a sleeve of crackers
• Beans and franks (pop-top can)
• Beef Jerky (1 ounce)
• Cereal (1-ounce bowl or box)
• Fruit cups (peaches, applesauce, etc)
• Raisins (snack-size boxes)
• Pudding cups
• Juice boxes (apple, orange, or other juice)
• Milk (aseptic pack boxes that do not require refrigeration)
• Cereal bars or granola bars

“Because the most essential school supply is food.”

Learning to Improvise

From “The Improvisational Brain,” by Amanda Rose Martinez, SeedMagazine, Dec. 14, 2010:

Aaron Berkowitz, a cognitive ethnomusicologist, who took on the task of demystifying improvisation as the focus of his dissertation work at Harvard, has a theory. He likens the process of learning to improvise to that of learning a second language. Initially, he says, it’s all about memorizing vocabulary words, useful phrases and verb conjugation tables. Your first day, you might learn to say: How are you? I’m fine. “These are like the baby steps beginning improvisers take. They learn the structure of the blues. They learn basic chords and get the form down,” said Berkowitz. But they’re still very limited in what they can do.

A dedicated musician will immerse himself in the recordings of his chosen genre or composer, just as a language student might absorb foreign films or tapes of people speaking. Over time, both musician and student accumulate more phrases and ways to combine them. “But you still can’t really invent anything. [The language learner] can’t talk about politics or the environment,” Berkowitz said. “You’re still thinking: ‘Uh oh, here’s comes a verb. I have to put it in the past tense. I have to put it at the end of the sentence before I can say this whole phrase.”

But eventually, through constant practice, you get to the point where, scientists believe, these processes get pushed down into the subconscious. They don’t need to be consciously worked out anymore. They become a subroutine. Suddenly you realize you’re saying things you haven’t heard or memorized. You’re able to free-associate. Your brain begins exerting control at a higher level, directing bigger chunks of information that can be expressed as whole ideas.

The trajectory of acquiring a language, according to Berkowitz, where you begin with learned phrases, achieve fluency, and are eventually able to create poetry mirrors perfectly the process of learning to improvise. In the same way a language student learns words, phrases and grammatical structure so that later he can recombine them to best communicate his thoughts, a musician collects and commits to memory patterns of notes, chords and progressions, which he can later draw from to express his musical ideas.

Read the entire article…

Can’t Read if We Don’t Teach Them

 

Lyrics from Shine
by John Legend, for the documentary Waiting for “Superman”

So dark, but I see sparks, if we don't snuff them out.
We gotta let them flame, let them speak their name.
Let them reach up to the clouds.
Can't eat if we don't feed them.
Can't read if we don't teach them.
There's no line if we just hide them.
Don't just let them die.

Let them shine.
Let them shine on.
Let them shine.
Let them shine on.

Stars flicker in the distance, lonely out in space.
They sing out when we're not listening, because we don't see their face.
We can let them die, we can make them high.
Hold the little miracles that live inside.
Let them shine.

We All Have the Capacity

“Kids will take a chance and if they don’t know they’ll have a go. Am I right? They’re not frightened of being wrong. Now I don’t mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative. What we do know is if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original. By the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong. And we run our companies this way. We stigmatize mistakes. And we’re now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make. And the result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities. Picasso once said that ‘All children are born artists. The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up.’ I believe this passionately. We don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather, we get educated out of it.”

~ Ken Robinson

“This animate was adapted from a talk given at the RSA by Sir Ken Robinson, world-renowned education and creativity expert and recipient of the RSA's Benjamin Franklin award.”

This is the Time

Two of six excellent letters of advice to new college students from “Ditch Your Laptop, Dump Your Boyfriend,” New York Times, September 25, 2010:
College is your chance to see what you’ve been missing, both in the outside world and within yourself. Use this time to explore as much as you can.
Take classes in many different subjects before picking your major. Try lots of different clubs and activities. Make friends with people who grew up much poorer than you, and others much richer. Date someone of a different race or religion. (And no, hooking up at a party doesn’t count.) Spend a semester abroad or save up and go backpacking in Europe or Asia.
Somewhere in your childhood is a gaping hole. Fill this hole. Don’t know what classical music is all about? That’s bad. Don’t know who Lady Gaga is? That’s worse. If you were raised in a protected cocoon, this is the time to experience the world beyond.
College is also a chance to learn new things about yourself. Never been much of a leader? Try forming a club or a band.
The best things I did in college all involved explorations like this. I was originally a theater major but by branching out and taking a math class I discovered I actually liked math, and I enjoyed hanging out with technical people.
By dabbling in leadership — I ran the math club and directed a musical — I learned how to formulate a vision and persuade people to join me in bringing it to life. Now I’m planning to become an entrepreneur after graduate school. It may seem crazy, but it was running a dinky club that set me on the path to seeing myself as someone who could run a business.
Try lots of things in college. You never know what’s going to stick.
— TIM NOVIKOFF, Ph.D. student in applied mathematics at Cornell

*     *     *     *     *

Devices have become security blankets. Take the time to wean yourself.

SmartSign.com

Start by scheduling a few Internet-free hours each day, with your phone turned off. It’s the only way you’ll be able to read anything seriously, whether it’s Plato or Derrida on Plato. (And remember, you’ll get more out of reading Derrida on Plato if you read Plato first.) This will also have the benefit of making you harder to reach, and thus more mysterious and fascinating to new friends and acquaintances.
When you leave your room for class, leave the laptop behind. In a lecture, you’ll only waste your time and your parents’ money, disrespect your professor and annoy whoever is trying to pay attention around you by spending the whole hour on Facebook.
You don’t need a computer to take notes — good note-taking is not transcribing. All that clack, clack, clacking ... you’re a student, not a court reporter. And in seminar or discussion sections, get used to being around a table with a dozen other humans, a few books and your ideas. After all, you have the rest of your life to hide behind a screen during meetings.
— CHRISTINE SMALLWOOD, Ph.D. student in English and American literature at Columbia

Read the other essays here…

Measuring Non-Standard Forms of Intelligence

UCLA professor Mike Rose from “The Meaning of Intelligence,” a conversation with Krista Tippett, Speaking of Faith, August 26, 2010:

It's like we have a ruler that is very precise for half of its width or length. Right? I'm interested in those folks that don't do well on those kinds of tests, that don't do well on the standard IQ test or don't do so well on the SAT test, let's say. What I want to know is what they know that's not being reflected in that test.

Or another angle on it is, I want to find out more about what didn't happen in their educations that made them do poorly on that test or in their life experience.

So let's take the IQ test…If someone does well on an IQ test, that certainly tells us something, right? They've got some smarts; there's no doubt about it.

But think of the folks who might not do so well on those kinds of tests because they didn't have a lot of formal schooling — and everybody admits that there's a direct correlation between amount of formal schooling and how well you do on tests like that. There's an intimate connection between those two things. So they didn't have a lot of formal schooling. They haven't had a lot of experience taking those kinds of tests.

They also don't invest as much in them. Those of us who have been through a ton of schooling, we've been socialized to know that when one of those things appears in front of us, we better try our damnedest to do well on it.

So there's all kinds of reasons through which we can explain somebody not doing so well on a test like that, reasons other than some intellectual deficiency. So then I say I'm interested in, well, gee, what happens when we go out into the world  with this person and we watch them work, let's say, or we watch them raise kids, or we watch them figure out how to make their way through the day or some complicated social relationships. What emerges that bespeaks of intelligence? What goes on right under our noses that bespeaks of some kind of smarts?

So the plumber who reaches up inside of the wall of an old building where he cannot see and he can only feel, and through feeling around the structures in there, feeling the rust, feeling moisture if there's any, feeling the way the thing is structured, he's visualizing what's back there that he can't see and then bringing a knowledge base to bear on trying to figure out what the problem may be. Think of what a complex set of mental operations are involved in that.

Or the hairstylist who is presented with someone who comes in and they have a botched dye job, let's say. And the stylist — and this woman said this to me when I was watching her work — she said, "The first thing I asked myself was what was that previous stylist trying to accomplish?" So what an interesting question to ask.

And what an interesting problem-solving road that takes her down. Now those kinds of things are not going to be picked up on an IQ instrument. They're not structured to get to that stuff. But those are certainly manifestations of intelligence.

Other People's Voices

Excerpts from "Voices in Your Head," Radiolab Blog, September 7, 2010:

Think about a small child sitting down solving a puzzle. If you watch any kid with their parent, anywhere in the world doing this kind of thing, you'll see them thinking together.

According to Lev Vygotsky, this is the beginning of thinking, this kind of dialogue. And at this point, it's completely external. It's all happening in that space between the child and her mother. And only over time does it become internalized.

And how that happens, Vygotsky thought, is as the child gets older, she'll start to take on the dialogue herself. She'll start to talk to herself. This is the stage we call private speech. We've all seen kids do this, right? Where they narrate every single thing they're doing. Put the ball in the box. Take the ball out of the box.

Now, what then happens in a few years further down the line, these kids who are narrating everything they're doing, then go to school and the teachers tell them, "Shh! Don't talk out loud." So they kind of get the message that they need to  start doing this internally.

So they start to whisper to themselves out loud. And then eventually, they whisper to themselves silently. Because the words are now in their head. And that's, according to Vygotsky's theory, is thinking.

The logic of it is that all our thinking is full of other people's voices.

*     *     *     *     *

Andrew Mason

Clearly, for a lot of people, hearing voices involves some psychiatric issues, which sometimes can be serious. Really serious. But here's the weird thing: the experience of hearing somebody else's voice in your own head is actually way more common than you would think. Surveys have been done about this and the number seems to be between five and ten percent of normal, healthy people have that experience or have had it at one time. Which brings us back to this Vygotsky situation.

What might be happening in those cases, at least if you ask Charles Fernyhough, is a kind of misattribution of your own inner voice. Those voices in your head which are you get mistaken to be from someone else.

A nice, simple, elegant demonstration of this is that you take some people who are hearing voices—people, in this case, with the diagnosis of schizophrenia—and you sit them down at a microphone with some headphones on. You show them some words on a screen and their task is to repeat the words—to read the words out loud.

The trick is, the researchers have rigged it to that the voice in their headphones—their voice—actually gets lowered just a little bit right before they hear it.

What the experimenters found is that most people—most non-voice-hearing people—when they were presented with the sound of their own voice lowered and then asked, "Is this you or is it a stranger or are you not sure?" the voice hearers made considerably more mistakes. Not only that, but when they heard their voices lowered, they would very often say, "That voice is coming from a stranger. That's not me. That's not myself. That didn't from me." Now, of course, that is a potentially frightening experience.

But not always. Let's just imagine that Vygotsky was right, that the internal voice of our thoughts is actually a blend of all of those external voices from our childhood: our mom, our dad, our sisters, brothers, whatever. They're all in there in some way. And that can actually be a comfort.

Opening and Closing

“We’re invited into this arena, which is a very dangerous arena, where the possibilities of humiliation and failure are ample. So there’s no fixed lesson that one can learn about the thing because the heart is always opening and closing, it’s always softening and hardening. We’re always experiencing joy or sadness.”

~ Leonard Cohen

 

[Thanks, Jonathan Carroll!]

Singing in the Brain

Excerpt from “Speaking in Tones,” by Diana Deutsch, Scientific American Mind, July/August 2010:

“…language and music have a lot in common. They are both governed by a grammar, in which basic elements are organized hierarchically into sequences according to established rules. In language, words combine to form phrases, which join to form larger phrases, which in turn combine to make sentences. Similarly, in music, notes combine to form phrases, which connect to form larger phrases, and so on. Thus, to understand either language or music, listeners must infer the structures of the passages they hear, using rules they have assimilated through experience.

In addition, speech has a natural melody called prosody. Prosody encompasses overall pitch level and pitch range, pitch contour (the pattern of rises and falls in pitch), loudness variation, rhythm and tempo. Prosodic characteristics often reflect the speaker’s emotional state. When people are happy or excited, the frequently speak more rapidly, at higher pitches and in wider pitch ranges; when people are sad, they tend to talk more slowly, in a lower voice and with less pitch variation. Prosody also helps us to understand the flow and meaning of speech. Boundaries between phrases are generally marked by pauses, and the endings of phrases tend to be distinguished by lower pitches and slower speech. Moreover, important words are often spoken in higher pitches. Interestingly, some pitch and timing characteristics of spoken language also occur in music, which indicates that overlapping neural circuitries may be involved.”

[See also: Diana Deutsch’s Speech-to-Song Illusion.]

The appreciation of music requires many of the same brain regions that are involved in the processing of language. These multipurpose regions include Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas.

 

Excerpt from “Signing, Singing, Speaking: How Language Evolved,” by Jon Hamilton, NPR: Morning Edition, Aug. 16, 2010:

Another idea about the origin of language is that it came from song. Ani Patel of The Neurosciences Institute in San Diego says this idea just feels right to a lot of people.

"We feel music just taps into this kind of pre-cognitive archaic part of ourselves," he says. So it seems to make sense that music came "before we had this complicated articulate language that we use to do abstract thinking."

Even Charles Darwin "talked about our ancestors singing love songs to each other before we could speak articulate language," Patel says.

Selling a Product to a Market that Doesn’t Want It

“Can I ask you to please recall a time when you really loved something, a movie, an album, a song or a book, and you recommended it wholeheartedly to someone you also really liked, and you anticipated that reaction, you waited for it, and it came back, and the person hated it. So, by way of introduction, that is the exact same state in which I spent every working day of the last six years. I teach high school math. I sell a product to a market that doesn't want it, but is forced by law to buy it. I mean, that's kind of—it's just a losing proposition.”

~ Dan Meyer, from “Math Class Needs a Makeover,” TED Talks (May 2010)

Immaterial Wealth

“The support, the privilege, really comes from having two parents that said and believed that I could do anything. That support didn't come in the form of a check. That support came in the form of love and nurturing and respect for us finding our way, falling down, figuring out how to get up ourselves…I learned more in those [difficult] times about myself and my resiliency than I ever would have if I'd had a pile of money and I could have glided through life. I honestly feel that it is an act of love to say, 'I believe in you as my child, and you don't need my help.' "

~ Peter Buffett, discussing his book, Life is What You Make It, on Morning Edition, NPR (May 6, 2010)

Seeing Stuff that Makes Real Change in the Real World

 

“You know, all I wanted to do was draw pictures of horses when I was little. My mother said, Well let's do a picture of something else. They've got to learn how to do something else. let's say the kid is fixated on Legos. Let's get him working on building different things. The thing about the autistic mind is it tends to be fixated. Like if a kid loves race cars, let's use race cars for math. Let's figure out how long it takes a race car to go a certain distance. In other words, use that fixation in order to motivate that kid, that's one of the things we need to do. I really get fed up when they, you know, the teachers, especially when you get away from this part of the country, they don't know what to do with these smart kids. It just drives me crazy…I get satisfaction out of seeing stuff that makes real change in the real world. We need a lot more of that, and a lot less abstract stuff.”

~ Temple Grandin, from “The World Needs All Kinds of Minds," TED Talks (February 2010)

To Map Out the World

Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly discussing The Toon Treasury of Classic Children’s Comics with Michael Silverblatt on KCRW’s Bookworm (February 4, 2010).

Francoise Mouly: Kids aren’t necessarily — the way we imagine they might be — looking for escape and fantasy. Actually, the seven year old, the eight year old, is eager for a way to map out information — to map out the world. And that’s part of the reason why comics appeal to them. Because they are a very instinctive way to structure information…As Art has often referred to it, it’s a story made manifest spatially. You have a very instinctive way to understand narratives and to understand character’s emotion…It gives you cues. It is in and of itself a medium that kids can use to understand all other kinds of visual information – much more than watching television or playing video games…They can go back to the same story and read it over and over again. And also because it’s done by one person — it’s drawn by hand — it inspires them to want to make comics.

Art Spiegelman: What makes this a real treasury rather than just a bunch of product put together in four hundred pages of offering [is that] so much of this is written and drawn by the same person…And here when we’re looking at Walt Kelly and Sheldon Mayer and, to a degree, John Stanley and certainly Carl Barks, they were really able to enter and make a whole world themselves. Really act it out, draw it, and write it. So you’re really throbbing inside one person’s brain. And to have that many brains presenting fully realized worlds, you feel it when you’re looking through these stories. They have a kind of urgency in their own way…These characters are a lot more complex than Spider Man. Little Lulu is so much more richer than Peter Parker.

A Refuge

Excerpt from Turning the Wheel: Essays on Buddhism and Writing by Charles R. Johnson:

These cultural questions, so eloquently expressed by Du Bois and King (and many others), which pose the ancient, pre-Socratic problem of how shall we live, consumed my imagination and intellectual interests from adolescence into adulthood. They kept me up late at night. They colored my perceptions of all I saw and heard in the 1960s and 1970s. They were behind my first practicing meditation when I was fourteen, falling in love with philosophy when I was eighteen, and equally behind my turn to writing novels at twenty-two. This historic devotion to freedom by black America’s finest leaders also prepared me in my depths for embracing the Buddhist Dharma as the most revolutionary and civilized of possible human choices, as the logical extension of King’s dream of the “beloved community,” and Du Bois’s “vision of what the world could be if it was really a beautiful world.”

Were it not for the Buddhadharma, I’m convinced that, as a black American and an artist, I would not have been able to successfully negotiate my last half century of life in this country. Or at least not with a high level of creative productivity, working in a spirit of metta toward all sentient beings, and selfless service to others as a creator, teacher, husband, father, son, colleague, student, lecturer, editor, neighbor, friend, and citizen, which, in my teens, were ideals I decided I valued more than anything else. The obstacles, traps, and racial minefields faced by black men in a society that has long demonized them as violent, criminal, stupid, bestial, lazy, and irresponsible are well-documented…

For me, Buddhism has always been a refuge, as it was intended to be: a place to continually refresh my spirit, stay centered and at peace, which enabled me to work joyfully and without attachment even in the midst of turmoil swirling round me on all sides, through “good” times and “bad.” So I am thankful for the perennial wisdom in its two-millennia-old sutras; the phenomenological insights of Shakyamuni himself into the nature of suffering, craving, and dualism; the astonishing beauty of Sanskrit, which I’ve been privileged to study now for five years; and the methods of different forms of meditational practice, the benefits of which fill whole libraries.

Being More Interested

"You should focus on being more interested than interesting.”

~ John Gardner

The Elementary Course

Mysticism for Beginners
by Adam Zagajewski, from Mysticism for Beginners

The day was mild, the light was generous.
The German on the café terrace
held a small book on his lap.
I caught sight of the title:
Mysticism for Beginners.
Suddenly I understood that the swallows
patrolling the streets of Montepulciano
with their shrill whistles,
and the hushed talk of timid travelers
from Eastern, so-called Central Europe,
and the white herons standing—yesterday? the day before?—
like nuns in fields of rice,
and the dusk, slow and systematic,
erasing the outlines of medieval houses,
and olive trees on little hills,
abandoned to the wind and heat,
and the head of the Unknown Princess
that I saw and admired in the Louvre,
and stained-glass windows like butterfly wings
sprinkled with pollen,
and the little nightingale practicing
its speech beside the highway,
and any journey, any kind of trip,
are only mysticism for beginners,
the elementary course, prelude
to a test that’s been
postponed.

Life Passions

"Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and the unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind."

~ Bertrand Russell

 

[Thanks Alex!]

Giving Happiness, Receiving Happiness

Cognitive develpmental neuroscientist Adele Diamond, speaking with Krista Tippett from “Learning, Doing, Being: A New Science of Education,” Speaking of Faith, November 19, 2009:

My husband who came with me to Dharamsala said, "If you're going to give [the Dalai Lama] a present, I want to give him a present, too." He wanted to give him a kite because he didn't think the Dalai Lama got to spend enough time playing.

And so then he found online that he could get a package of ten plain, undecorated kites very inexpensively. He asked me if I could find classes of school children to decorate them. I contacted a colleague, Kim Schonert-Reichl, and she helped me find a class of children with developmental disorders, many of them ADHD, who were either not on medication or on reduced medication because they were doing mindfulness.

They had heard of the Dalai Lama, and they were very excited to be decorating these kites. And there were two children per kite. On one side, they did self portraits, so it looked like a Picasso because half of the kite is one child's face and half of the kite is the other child's face.

My husband brings all these to Dharamsala and we get a private audience with His Holiness and we had the wisdom not to bring all the kites with us to the audience because the Dalai Lama said thank you but it was very clear he wasn't going to fly any kites; he's was going to put them in a drawer.

After that we went to visit Matthieu Ricard at Katmandu, where he has a Tibetan monastery. And he has many humanitarian projects in connection with that and one of them are schools for poor children. Any background, doesn't matter, religious or ethnic. They call it Bamboo Schools because the buildings are all made out of bamboo. So we went to these bamboo schools and we brought the rest of the kites and we gave them to the children there.

They had never flown kites before, and they were so happy to be flying these kites. And Matthieu was so happy to see the children so happy. And we took photos and videos and I brought them back to the class in Vancouver to the children who had been studying mindfulness and I showed them the pictures and they were so happy to see how happy they had made the other children.

Previous posts related to other topics from this interview:

• To Blur the Line a Bit (September 28, 2009)
• El Sistema (July 31, 2008)