It’s too short to excerpt — so here’s the whole thing.
This week, teach your students:
1. To understand themselves as learners (a.k.a. metacognition)
2. That intelligence is not innate; effort matters
3. Compassion
4. The excitement of creating real things for real audiences
5. The joy of exercise, play, and healthy living
Another reminder that not all things that count can be counted.
The Elementary Educator carries interesting stuff. You may wish to check it out.
1 Comment | 
Education, Learning, Learning styles, Motivation, Teachers, Teaching | Tagged: Education, education standards, Learning, Teachers, Teaching | 
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Posted by Ed Darrell
I used to love math tests. And math homework. When I knew the stuff, I’d start hearing Bach in my head and get into a rhythm of solving the problems (though I didn’t know it was Bach until much later — “Aha! That’s the math solving music!”).
But eventually my brain ossified, before I got calculus into it. I believe (this is belief, not science) that at some point rather early in life our brains lose the ability to pick up new math ideas. If you don’t have most of the stuff you need already in there, you won’t get it. I frittered my math ability away in the library and traveling with the debate squad, not knowing that I’d never be able to get it back. In my dual degree program, I ran into that wall where I had five years worth of credits, but was still a year away from the biology degree with a tiny handful of core courses for which calculus was a prerequisite. Worse, I was close to completing a third major.
And I’d failed at calculus four times.
So I graduated instead, didn’t go to grad school in biology.
Earlier this last evening I sat with a couple of new teachers in math at a parents’ night function for seniors. They commiserated over trying to make math relevant for students. One said he couldn’t figure out how history teachers survive at all with no mass of problems to solve at the end of each chapter (that was refreshing).
It’s a constant problem.
Then I ran into this story by Jennifer Ouellette at Cocktail Party Physics:
Students need to feel inspired, particularly when it comes to a difficult subject. While I was at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics last year as journalist in residence, I got to know UC-Santa Barbara mathematician Bisi Agboola, who generously shared his own story with me. Bisi was educated in the UK and failed most of his math classes through their equivalent of high school. “I found it dull, confusing and difficult.” As a child, he was determined to find a career where he wouldn’t need any math, finally announcing to his skeptical parents that he would be a woodcutter. He was crushed when they pointed out that he would need to measure the wood.
But one summer he encountered a Time-Life book on mathematics –- Mathematics by David Bergamini -– that offered “an account of the history of some of the main ideas of mathematics, from the Babylonians up until the 1960s, and it captured my imagination and made the subject come alive to me for the very first time.” It changed his mind about this seemingly dry subject. He realized there was beauty in it. He wound up teaching himself calculus, and told me he is convinced most physicists also do this. Today he is a PhD mathematician specializing in number theory, and exotic multidimensional topologies. Ironically, he still doesn’t much like basic arithmetic: “I find it boring.”
Jennifer is writing a book on calculus, how it’s real-life stuff. I hope it’s a great success. I hope it works. I hope some student is inspired to get calculus before her or his brain gets ossified.
More information:
Tip of the old scrub brush to Decrepit Old Fool.
Calculate how far you can send this message:
3 Comments | Books, College, Education, Learning, Mathematics, Teachers, Teaching | Tagged: Calculus, College, Education, Learning, Mathematics, Teaching | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Good teachers constantly search for good ideas and effective ways to make learning fun, efficient and thorough. So the search for new material and new ideas is constant.
Same on the web. Where are the good blogs? Where are the useful blogs? (Many days readers here ask those questions repeatedly.)
You’re a teacher, parent, or administrator? Take a look at this open thread at Clay Burrell’s Beyond Teaching (“I hate schooliness. I love learning.”) Clay asked for recommendations on favorite blogs about 21st century teaching.
Isn’t it astounding how many new, good teacher blogs show up every year? I found a dozen new sources in a few minutes.
4 Comments | Brain learning, Classroom management, Classroom technology, Education, Learning, Teachers, Teaching, Technology, Technology in the classroom | Tagged: Clay Burrell, Education, Education blogs, Learning, Teachers, Teaching, Teaching Blogs, Technology | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Bug Girl put this up, and you can watch it there and comment on it there in a lively and informative discussion, but it’s just too good not to show here:
Teachers, show it to your colleagues, and especially to your librarians and your administrators.
Students, show it to your teachers.
And, go thou and do likewise.
.
.
.
Oh, and note that Bug Girl’s post was a year ago.
Other stuff to see:
4 Comments | Education, Learning, Pedagogy, Teaching, Technology, Technology in the classroom | Tagged: Classroom technology, Classrooms, Education, Learning, Teaching, Technology, video | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Do the math: 930,000 U.S. kids with synesthesia, out of 60 million students. (Okay, “synaesthesia” for the British search programs.)
You might have one. A pyschologist in Britain did the research.
For the first time, psychologists have documented the prevalence of a form of synaesthesia – the condition that leads to a mixing of the senses – in a large sample of children. Over a twelve month period, Julia Simner and colleagues tested 615 children aged six to seven years at 21 UK schools and conservatively estimated that 1.3 per cent of them had grapheme-colour synaesthesia, in which letters and numbers involuntarily trigger the sensation of different colours.
“[This] implicates over 170,000 children age 0–17 in the UK alone, and over 930,000 in the USA,” the researchers said, “and suggests that the average primary school in England and Scotland (n = 168 pupils) contains 2.2 grapheme-colour synaesthetes at any time, while the average-sized US primary school (n = 396 pupils) contains 5.1.” Inevitably, the prevalence for synaesthesia as a whole, considering all the sub-types, would be even higher.
A hall-mark of grapheme-colour synaesthesia is that the colour triggered by a given letter or number is always the same – a fact the researchers exploited to identify the condition in school children.
Indeed, when asked to associate letters with colours, the children identified as synaesthetes showed more consistency over a 12-month-period than the other children did over a ten second period!
Researchers calculated about 5 such students in the average U.S. school, assuming a student population of about 400.
400! In Texas that’s a tiny high school that may have difficulty fielding a football team.
In Brain, a journal of neurology (abstract available, full text with subscription).
J. Simner, J. Harrold, H. Creed, L. Monro, L. Foulkes (2008). Early detection of markers for synaesthesia in childhood populations. Brain, 132 (1), 57-64 DOI: 10.1093/brain/awn292
Tip of the old scrub brush to Research Digest Blog.
Resources:
1 Comment | Books, Brain development, Brain learning, Learning, Neurology, psychology, Research, Science | Tagged: Books, Brain Science, Learning, Neurology, psychology, Science, Synaesthesia, Synesthesia | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
I just learned something you’d think a 25-year veteran of computers would know: To highlight a word in text, double-click it.
Granted, I rarely cut or copy just one word, so the advice is of very little use to me. Still, it saves fretting, and keystrokes.
I learned the trick reading “Pogue’s Posts” at the New York Times site — it’s a blog mainly about computers and technology. A couple of days ago, David Pogue posted on computer tips for basic computer users. That’s me, more and more. Long ago I ceased being up on the technical stuff, as the machines took over more and more of what we used to do by command, and as GUI took over from DOS.
And I’ve learned a lot over the years. It was useful when my wife was working at the Senate Computer Center and we could tap into the programmers’ minds with a beer after work — they told us about all sorts of commands for the line editor system that weren’t listed in the book, that I used to distinguish press releases and make speech texts easier for speakers to read — of course, no one knew we were using the system for press releases and speech texts, and for archiving information. The system hadn’t been designed for those purposes. We were early-day hackers of sorts.
But that was long ago, in a different state, and besides that computer is now on display in the Smithsonian.
I read Pogue’s piece with some interest. What else don’t we know? What else don’t I know?
* You can double-click a word to highlight it in any document, e-mail or Web page.
* When you get an e-mail message from eBay or your bank, claiming that you have an account problem or a question from a buyer, it’s probably a “phishing scam” intended to trick you into typing your password. Don’t click the link in the message. If in doubt, go into your browser and type “www.ebay.com” (or whatever) manually.
* Nobody, but nobody, is going to give you half of $80 million to help them liberate the funds of a deceased millionaire…from Nigeria or anywhere else.
* You can hide all windows, revealing only what’s on the computer desktop, with one keystroke: hit the Windows key and “D” simultaneously in Windows, or press F11 on Macs (on recent Mac laptops, Command+F3; Command is the key with the cloverleaf logo). That’s great when you want examine or delete something you’ve just downloaded to the desktop, for example. Press the keystroke again to return to what you were doing.
* You can enlarge the text on any Web page. In Windows, press Ctrl and the plus or minus keys (for bigger or smaller fonts); on the Mac, it’s the Command key and plus or minus.
* You can also enlarge the entire Web page or document by pressing the Control key as you turn the wheel on top of your mouse. On the Mac, this enlarges the entire screen image.
I knew some of that.
Pogue asked readers to send in their suggestions for tech tips. There’s gold in the comments. There are 1,000 comments.
What are your favorite tech tricks? Please post them here, as well as there, will you? I’m still learning.
2 Comments | Learning, Technology, Technology in the classroom | Tagged: computers, Learning, Technology | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Interesting discussion around how a student’s mood affects retention of material covered in homework, from the students at Extreme Biology.
What is your experience?
1 Comment | Brain learning, Education, psychology, Research, Science, Student projects, Teaching, Weblogs | Tagged: Education, Homework, Learning, psychology, Research, Student projects, Weblogs | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
How do you apply this information in your lesson plans?
Even babies chunk data for memorization. That is, even babies find it easier to remember things if the new items include chunks of already familiar information.
Not Exactly Rocket Science discusses new research that shows infants as young as 14 months use this memorization trick.
Which of these strings of letters is easier to remember: QKJITJGPI or BBCITVCNN?
Chances are, you chose the latter string, where the nine letters are the combined names of three television networks. This neatly illustrates a fundamental property of human memory – that we remember long strings of information more easily if we can break them down into bite-sized chunks. In this case, a nine-letter string can be divided into three lots of three letters. You probably use similar strategies for remembering telephone numbers, credit card details, or post codes.
Now, Lisa Feigenson and Justin Halberda from Johns Hopkins University have found that infants just 14 months old can use the same technique, delightfully known as “chunking” to increase the limited scope of their memories. Their work suggests that this technique isn’t something we learn through education or experience – it’s more likely to be a basic part of the way our minds process information.
Much more, here.
Leave a Comment » | Brain development, Brain learning, Education, Learning, Learning styles, psychology, Research, Teaching | Tagged: Brains, Education, Learning, Learning styles, Lesson plans, psychology | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
This is why football players remember the games better than they remember the practices.
Is this really news? It was a jarring reminder to me. Ed at Not Exactly Rocket Science (just before his blog was swallowed up by the many-tentacled Seed Magazine empire) noted a study that shows testing improves performance more than study.
But a new study reveals that the tests themselves do more good for our ability to learn that the many hours before them spent relentlessly poring over notes and textbook. The act of repeatedly retrieving and using learned information drives memories into long-term storage, while repetitive revision produced almost no benefits.
More quizzes instead of warm-up studies? More tests? Longer tests? What do you think? Certainly this questions the wisdom of high-stakes, end of education testing; it also calls into question the practice of evaluating teachers solely on the basis of test scores. Much grist for the discussion mill.
Here’s the citation to the study: Karpicke, J.D., Roediger, H.L. (2008). The Critical Importance of Retrieval for Learning. Science, 319(5865), 966-968. DOI: 10.1126/science.1152408
Karpicke is at Purdue; Roediger is at Washington University in St. Louis.
11 Comments | Best practices, Education, Education assessment, Education quality, History, Learning, Learning styles, Pedagogy, Research, Science, Testing | Tagged: Education quality, Learning, Science, Teaching, Testing | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
If you were wondering whether it’s still true that kids watch what you do rather than listen to what you say — yes, it’s still true. It’s more important to walk the walk than talk the talk — Gallup Management Journal features an article emphasizing the phenomenon, “The Sixth Element of Great Managing”:
One of the most powerful discoveries about how humans understand the world around them came about by accident. In the early 1990s, a group of researchers led by Dr. Giacomo Rizzolatti, a neuroscientist at the University of Parma in Italy, placed small electrodes in the brains of monkeys near the regions of the brain responsible for planning and carrying out movements. If the monkey picked up something, an electronic monitor that was connected to the wires in the animal’s brain would sound — “brrrrrip, brrrrrip, brrrrrip” — to register the firing of those neurons.
Then something happened — something so unusual that the researchers thought it had to be a mistake. If the monkey saw one of the scientists doing something — eating an ice cream cone, picking up a peanut or raisin, grabbing a banana — the monitor registered the firing of brain cells as if the monkey had done it, when all the animal did was watch.
“It took us several years to believe what we were seeing,” Rizzolatti told The New York Times. The structure behind the phenomenon was discovered to be what they called “mirror neurons,” cells scattered throughout key regions of the brain that mimic everything the monkey sees another do.
Subsequent research found a far more complicated set of mirror neurons in people. This “human see; human do” circuitry is believed to be why a yawn can be contagious, why even a newborn will stick out her tongue if she sees someone else do it, and why American boys sometimes mimic the idiosyncrasies of their favorite baseball players at bat. “It explains much about how we learn to smile, talk, walk, dance, or play tennis,” said a 2006 cover article in Scientific American Mind magazine.
If you want your students to be good at map reading, they need to see you reading maps. If you want your students to read, they need to see you read. The “mirror neurons” phenomenon should affect the strategies we use in the classroom.
File this under the “nothing new under the sun” category, or “oh, yeah, now I remember!”
1 Comment | Brain development, Brain learning, Education, Ethics, Learning, Learning styles, Teaching | Tagged: brain mirroring, Education, Learning, mirror neurons | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Ed Darrell on Texas's Colorado River
Come on in, the water's fine. Come often: Cleanliness is next to godliness.
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 