Stuck. Twice.

So two weeks ago we were stuck in a hospital room in
Miami (see previous entry), and this week we're stuck at home. Our personal teenager, not allowed to do any heavy lifting, cannot help shovel the worst snowstorm in DC history. Does a picture truly speak a thousand words? What a difference two weeks makes!


More snowpics at my Flickr Snow Gallery.

The first forty years of parenting are always the hardest.

My wife and I, having shepherding two kids through visits to various colleges throughout the northeast (cold, damp, gray), finally have one who wants to go someplace interesting. His application filed, he now needs to audition at the Frost School of Music at the University of Miami. Great! we think, a long weekend trip to visit the school, audition, and see a part of the country we've not yet toured. What could be better than Miami in January? Our itinerary set, we're headed for "the U", South Beach, and the Everglades on our latest 2-1/2 day ADD tour. Jeff auditions at the college, and we have a nice dinner after walking around South Beach and dipping our toes in the ocean. Then...

... the phone rings at 10:45 pm, with our college sophomore daughter bringing news that she's broken down outside Gettysburg with a flat tire, a dead battery, no cell phone, no AAA card, and only her laptop with Skype with which to communicate. Then...

... Jeff is having cramps and pain in our hotel room. First we think it's gas, but after a couple of hours we realize that we need professional treatment, so off to the emergency room we go. Chris, meanwhile, has gotten our AAA number, and used Skype to get a tow truck to get her back to Carlisle, PA. After five hours in the emergency room, Jeff is diagnosed with acute appendicitis, which will require immediate surgery. Then...

... after the surgery, which took a bit longer than normal because his appendix was tucked up high, touching his liver, his temperature shoots up, as does his white blood cell count. No trip to the Everglades today! Then...

...we wait, day after day, for some information from a doctor. The surgeon drops by once each day sometime between 11 am to 11 pm, while the infectious disease doctor makes her visit between 9am and 2am! Communication is difficult, and there seems to be little sense of urgency. As one IV after another is hooked up, we have little knowledge of what progress is being made.
Finally, on Friday, a week after arriving, Jeff is released, and we can try to figure out how to get home before the snowstorm hits and has us diverted to Newark!

A few lessons here: hire good people so you don't have to be at work for the place to run well, be flexible, the DC area is blessed with great medical care compared to some other parts of the country, a good health insurance plan is critical (come on, Barak), and paradise isn't so great if you're spending it in a hospital room.

More bad electronic news

Our kids' brains are turning to mush! Well, not exactly, but from a story in The New York Times:

"The average young American now spends practically every waking minute — except for the time in school — using a smart phone, computer, television or other electronic device, according to a new study from the Kaiser Family Foundation... And because so many of them are multitasking — say, surfing the Internet while listening to music — they pack on average nearly 11 hours of media content into that seven and a half hours.

"While most of the young people in the study got good grades, 47 percent of the heaviest media users — those who consumed at least 16 hours a day — had mostly C’s or lower, compared with 23 percent of those who typically consumed media three hours a day or less. The heaviest media users were also more likely than the lightest users to report that they were bored or sad, or that they got into trouble, did not get along well with their parents and were not happy at school.

"The report is based on a survey of more than 2,000 students in grades 3 to 12 that was conducted from October 2008 to May 2009.

"On average, young people spend about two hours a day consuming media on a mobile device, the study found. They spend almost another hour on “old” content like television or music delivered through newer pathways like the Web site Hulu or iTunes. Youths now spend more time listening to or watching media on their cellphones, or playing games, than talking on them."

We've got ours, too bad for you!

The election results in my home state of Massachusetts yesterday seem to bode ill for the passage of health care reform. Of course, Massachusetts went through this exercise half a decade ago, and all state residents are now covered by a plan similar to the one pending in Congress. If I seem to have a couple of dogs in this fight, I do. At the Nora School, our health plan costs have been going up 20% each year, necessitating benefit cuts on our teachers to maintain reasonable costs. My adult son, the genetic inheritor of a pre-existing condition (type 1 diabetes), cannot get health insurance unless he works for an employer who offers it. Or moves to Massachusetts.

In case there was any doubt that our future is electronic.

Here's a 13-minute video by Alex Roman created almost entirely in a computer. There are a few digital photos used as part of it (the Milwaukee Art Museum has those cool wings), but the music and almost all the architecture and creatures were created in a computer. One photographer referred to it as a "soak," and I'd agree. Watch it full screen with the TV off and the lights out!

The Third & The Seventh from Alex Roman on Vimeo.

Homework help

A couple of new websites have crossed my browser recently which may be of use to students and teachers. The New York City Library has set up a deep website with lots of resources and live help between 4:30pm and 6:30pm every day. It includes an interactive whiteboard where students can draw their geometry or algebra problems and get live help. My understanding is that the service is not limited to students in New York City.
A second site requires payment, but tutor.com promises immediate and live help in almost any subject. It might be just the thing at 10pm when that quadratic equation won't fall into place! The pricing is reasonable (I've paid 3x this amount for a live tutor), but the 24/7 aspect is what really sells it.
I'd love feedback from anyone who uses either of these sites.

A new generation gap

The New York Times described on Saturday a new generation gap, between people born in '80s, '90s, and Oughts. Those in their twenties spend more time talking on the phone and using email, while their younger siblings (our current students) spend more time texting, and instant messaging. The author describes young children referring to the Amazon Kindle as "daddys' book" and drawing a finger across a computer screen expecting a response like the iPhone. All of which points up the importance of us Digital Immigrants to remain curious and keep on learning. Though I'm still not ready to tweet!

Welcome 2010!

Happy New Year!

Sitting at home again, as we have done for many years... we'll make it to midnight only because we're waiting up for our youngest son!

I've often said that learning is important because the world is a fascinating place. As we hear over and over again about the 10 best this of the year and the ten worst that of the decade, NASA puts things in perspective.

The Hubble telescope provides us with this image of hundreds of thousands of stars moving about in the globular cluster M13, one of the brightest globular clusters in the northern sky. It can be found in the winter sky in the constellation Hercules, and can even be seen with the unaided eye under dark skies.

M13 is home to over 100,000 stars and is located at a distance of 25,000 light-years. In other words, the light in the picture left these stars in 22991 BCE! (For historical perspective, Abraham was ready to sacrifice Isaac in around 1800 BCE. Where will you be in 22991 CE?)

These stars are packed closely together in a ball approximately 150 light-years across, and they spend their entire lives whirling around in the cluster. Near the core, the density of stars is about a hundred times greater than the density in the neighborhood of our sun. These stars are so crowded that they can slam into each other and form a new star, called a "blue straggler." The brightest reddish stars in the cluster are ancient red giants. These aging stars have expanded to many times their original diameters and cooled. The blue-white stars are the hottest in the cluster.

M13 is one of nearly 150 known globular clusters surrounding our Milky Way galaxy. Globular clusters have some of the oldest stars in the universe. Scientists believe they formed before the disk of our Milky Way, so they are older than nearly all other stars in our galaxy including our own sun.

This image is a composite of archival Hubble data taken with the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 and the Advanced Camera for Surveys.

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
Acknowledgment: C. Bailyn (Yale University), W. Lewin (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), A. Sarajedini (University of Florida), and W. van Altena (Yale University)

Holiday Plagarism

or maybe not, as they cited their sources!

Happy Holidays

Only on the Internet, the most bizarre Nativity scenes... this egg timer is my favorite.

Hope you have a restful winter break... after digging out!

Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind

On Friday, November 20 at the Learning and the Brain Conference, Mara and I heard from Gary Small, MD, author of iBrain, who spoke about Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind.

For years we’ve been hearing about the differences between Digital Natives (under 25), who have good tech skills, and Digital Immigrants (their parents), who have weaker tech skills. Small has studied the neural networks of the two groups, and finds that the Digital Natives have much less development in those that control social interaction.

He spoke of the Natives’ relationship to technology is personal, and had us do an experiment exchanging cell phones while we monitored our emotions. For those of us who only turn on our phones when making a call it wasn’t too exciting, but when I replicated the experiment at a faculty meeting, the younger faculty clearly felt the anxiety of disconnection and potential loss of privacy.

No real news here, our brains are changing moment to moment, with neural circuits strengthening with use and weakening with disuse. Giving teachers everywhere hope, Small told us that young brains are missing empathy not because kids are naturally rude, or that societal civility is on the decline, but because that part of their brains has not yet developed.

By adolescence, 60% of connections are pruned, and in a Darwinian twist, between the ages of 8 and 18 is tech time. Our kids have been born with access to limitless information, 24 hour news and entertainment, but with less time for face to face interactions and thus are slowed in their development of empathy and complex reasoning skills.

With social networking (i.e. Facebook, MySpace, Twitter), they are aware all the time of what everyone is doing, which leaves little time for reflection. As they are constantly reacting to others, their individuality and creativity are stifled. One of my favorite phrases to hear at Nora from kids just sitting around is “I’m bored,” because it means they’re having to create something out of nothing, rather than thoughtlessly respond to external stimuli.

Technology develops the Dopamine pathways which are precursors to addiction. In a 2007 Harris poll, 8.5% of college students showed multiple signs of addiction, including escaping problems through playing games, lying about play length, sensitization to fighting stimuli. The inflamation of these neural pathways is a major reason for Alzheimer’s Disease.

In one of Dr. Small’s studies on these neural pathways, he studied the effect of gaming on face to face interactions. Digital immigrants were better able to rapidly identify emotions than digital natives, who were only able to identify happy faces faster than angry, unless the face displayed violent emotions.

The connection with ADHD is not certain. Does video gaming cause the brain to display symptoms of ADHD, or do people with ADHD gravitate to the fast-paced stimulation of video games? Studies are ongoing.

Next week's field trip to the Corcoran

Edward Burtynsky: Oil from Corcoran Gallery of Art on Vimeo.

Learning and the Brain

Mara and I are just back (at 11 pm last night) from the Learning and the Brain Conference at MIT, where we spent three solid days in workshops. We not only learned about cognitive overload, we experienced it! As I unpack my notes I'll have more to say, but three big take-aways for our practice as teachers, students, parents, and humans, are:
-our brains need quiet time, away from the noise and stimulation of our culture, in order to solidify memory and learning,
-sleep is critical to our ongoing brain development,
-the neural structure of our brains is changed by our cultural stimulation, for which the best antidote is reading (books, not screens),

I'll have more, but right now I have to dig out from three days of missed emails! But later today I promise myself that I'll take a two-minute meditation break.

Schroedinger's Cameraman

From Chicago Public Radio's "This American Life."

If you can't see this, the direct link is here.

3 Bombs

A fascinating op-ed in yesterday's NY Times by Thomas Friedman about the differences between our lives and our children's lives. He compares the nuclear threat from the Soviets that shadowed our (boomer) childhoods with the three threats that he now sees challenging his children's lives: the nuclear threat from terrorists, the economic threat from a government deeply in debt, and the environmental threat from global warming. The element that creates the most anxiety is not knowing exactly when any of these "bombs" will go off, and the fact that only the nuclear threat is being seriously addressed. There are a couple of nice quotes in the article. From environmentalist Rob Watson: "Mother Nature is just chemistry, biology, and physics... Mother nature always bats last, and she always bats a thousand." And from John Holdren: "We're driving in a car with bad brakes in a fog and heading for a cliff. We know for sure that cliff is out there. We just don't know exactly where it is. Prudence would suggest that we should start putting on the brakes."

One of Tom's most thought-provoking columns.

Scream Trumpet

Apropos of absolutely nothing, here's a video showing one person's ranking of the top 5 high-note movie trumpet solos. In a previous life, I had dreams of being the next Maynard Ferguson.

Whew! September's Over!

Over the past 19 years I've seen the first month of the school year become just as busy and hectic as the final month of the school year, and man, I'm sure glad it's over. We've had one all school hike, two class retreats (with another next week), an expulsion, the beginning of soccer season, assemblies on drugs, recycling, and community service, back-to-school night, an evening poetry reading, an evening college application workshop, and the blending of new students and teachers into a new community. All in all it's been great, quite positive (except for the expulsion), and the new folks are proving to be great additions to our community. Alas, it's still exhausting, in a way that seems more intense than it was in 1991. Perhaps it's having more students, or the general anxiety caused by (choose any 3) the economy, 9-11, health care, angry town halls, our children's future prospects, or any of the myriad of issues we carry with us each day. As the days turn cooler (how do you like living in San Francisco East) our pace will slow a bit, and hopefully allow us to become more reflective and think more deeply about how and why we go about the work we take on. Soon enough the pace will pick up, as we begin to budget and plan for the 2010-2011 school year!

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on Flow

One of the really good thinkers of the past couple of decades, his concept of "Flow" posits that people perform best when they have a high degree of skill and strong (but not unreasonable) challenges. Lots of implications for our teaching, and education in general.



If you're not familiar with the TED conferences, their videos and podcasts are well worth checking out at ted.com.

Convergence

What will the world be like in 20 years, when our students' children are starting school?