Tag Archives: Adolescent

CA Middle School students’ solution to corporate dominance of government

Some students at Medea Creek Middle School in southern California, have a very clear understanding of what’s broken about our economic and governance systems. Probably a much clearer idea than most Americans.

Here is a brief article including the less-than-9-minute video they made to explain it to the rest of us:

ularresistance.org/young-students-solution-to-corporate-rule/

In the first paragraph there is a link to the school’s website if you’re interested; it’s a pretty cool website.

Kudos and thanks to these young thinkers and voices.

What might Albuquerque, Bernalillo County, and New Mexico middle schoolers be capable of that we’re not taking advantage of?

Please feel free to share this widely..

Tom

Kids With ADHD Can Train Their Brains, Study Finds

Because there’s so much in the media about ADHD and medication and behavior and side effects, I thought many would find this article interesting.

Kids With ADHD Can Train Their Brains, Study Finds

BY LINDA CARROLL
Kids with ADHD may be able to learn better focus through a computer game that trains the brain to pay attention, a new study suggests.

The game was part of a neurofeedback system that used bicycle helmets wired to measure brain waves and gave immediate feedback when kids were paying attention, researchers reported Monday in Pediatrics.

Giving kids feedback on what their brains are doing is “like turning on a light switch,” said Dr. Naomi Steiner, the study’s lead author and a developmental and behavioral pediatrician at the Floating Hospital for Children at Tufts Medical Center. “Kids said ‘Oh, this is what people mean when they tell me to pay attention.'”

To test the system, Steiner and her colleagues randomly assigned 104 Boston area elementary school children to one of three groups: no treatment, 40 half-hour sessions of neurofeedback or 40 sessions of cognitive therapy.

The kids getting neurofeedback wore standard bicycle helmets fitted with brain wave sensors while they performed a variety of exercises on the computer. In one exercise, kids were told to focus on a cartoon dolphin.

When people pay attention, theta wave activity goes down while beta waves increase, Steiner explained. If the kids’ brains showed they were paying attention, the dolphin would dive to the bottom of the sea.

Parents’ reports on ADHD symptoms six months later showed a lasting improvement in kids who had done neurofeedback. Perhaps more telling, kids in the other two groups needed an increase in medication after six months, while those in the neurofeedback group did not, said Dr. Anthony Rostain, an expert unaffiliated with the new study and a professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

“It is good news,” Rostain said. “But the results were modest. It’s not a magic bullet. It’s not going to replace medication.”

One major weakness of the new study is that it depended on parental observations, said Sandra Loo, an associate professor of psychiatry at UCLA. It’s possible that some of what the researchers are seeing is a placebo effect, Loo said.

I Got Schooled – Practice #5 – More Time in School

Here is the final I Got Schooled  practice #5 – More Time in School

M. Night Shyamalan (The Sixth Sense) has written a book (I Got Schooled)  describing how – and how not –  to close the education gap in the U.S. It should be very supportive in the current conversation and climate regarding what’s wrong with – and how to fix – New Mexico education.

For five years through his MNS Foundation, Shyamalan studied what is succeeding in closing the education gap — that depended only on practices inside the classroom itself and that were scalable.

He discovered closing the achievement gap depended on five practices and couldn’t be figured out by examining just any single practice by itself.

These five practices must be implemented together to have any substantive effect:

•            Effective teachers – dropping poor; hiring good; why it’s important; how to do it

•            Leadership – how it’s important; what it looks like; how to do it

•            Feedback – critical: frequency, consistency, teacher/principal usability

•            Smaller (high) schools –part of the “system” that turbocharges the other practices

•            More time in school – summers matter – children of low income and of color fall behind a month every summer; by the time they reach third grade they are so far behind it’s virtually impossible to catch up

Covered: successful schools, programs, clinical studies, and data and statistics, including: Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP), Uncommon Schools, Achievement First/Endeavor, FirstLine schools, North Star Academy, Arthur Ashe, Los Angeles Green Dot Public Schools, and more.

The study also found four popular, expensive practices contribute little to closing the education gap:

•            Small classroom sizes

•            Master’s programs and Ph.D.’s for the teachers

•            Paying teachers like doctors

•            Funding the schools at $20,000 per pupil

MORE TIME IN SCHOOL

  • More time in school is needed to overcome the deficiencies inherent in low-income, inner-city family environments
  • Upper-income families use an average of 2,153 words every hour; middle-income families use 1,251; welfare families use 616
  • Average words per year for upper-income are 11.2 million; middle-income families 6.5 million; welfare families 3.2 million words
  • By age four that is a gap of some 30 million words
  • The number of words a four-year-old can understand and speak relates directly to the number of words they have heard
  • By the time poorer kids reach third grade, they are already so far behind it is virtually impossible to catch up
  • Early intervention (preschool) with significant hours of exposure closes the gap
  • Consistency and good quality here are critical
  • Our natural tendencies are to blame failures of others on something flawed inside them, and while attributing our successes to merit and our failures on chance
  • American families that tend to obsess about pre-K education are the ones that need it least
  • The children who would most benefit from preschools are the least likely to be enrolled in them
  • Even then, generally, preschool effects disappear nearly completely by the third year after the program
  • Lower-income and African-American kids stay more or less even with upper-income, white suburban classmates – so long as school was in session
  • They fell behind a month or more every summer!
  • Summer matters far more than any has thought
  • Student test scores change powerfully by what happens between June and September
  • Lower-income student families cannot compensate for middle- and upper-income families’ ability to continue to enrich their children’s experiences over the summer
  • Current standard in most places is 180 days of school a year, each one between six and seven hours long
  • Before the Civil War, Philadelphia’s schools were in session more than 250 days a year; New York’s were open all year except for a two-week break in August
  • While more classroom hours is a serious part of closing the gap, five hundred additional low-quality hours taught by a teaching staff full of below-average instructors who are neither observed regularly by their principals nor given the quantitative and qualitative feedback they need is a waste
  • Keep kids in school longer during the year and you won’t need superheroes to close the gap. Most teachers can do the job just fine
  • And this practice is scalable

Only $1.50-per-day more for a healthy diet! Really!

This seemed like a timely and useful article – Tom

“If you want to eat a more healthful diet, you’re going to have to shell out more cash, right? (After all, Whole Foods didn’t get the nickname “Whole Paycheck” for nothing.)

But until recently, that widely held bit of conventional wisdom hadn’t really been assessed in a rigorous, systematic way, says Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, a cardiologist and epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public Health.

So he and his colleagues decided to pore over 27 studies from 10 different developed countries that looked at the retail prices of food grouped by healthfulness. Across these countries, it turns out, the cost difference between eating a healthful and unhealthful diet was pretty much the same: about $1.50 per day. And that price gap held true when they focused their research just on U.S. food prices, the researchers found in their meta-analysis of these studies.

“I think $1.50 a day is probably much less than some people expected,” Mozaffarian tells The Salt, “but it’s also a real barrier for some low-income families,” for whom it would translate to about an extra $45 a month or $550 a year.

Still, from a policy perspective, he argues, $1.50 a day is chump change. “That’s the cost of a cup of coffee,” he says. “It’s trivial compared to the cost of heart disease or diabetes, which is hundreds of billions of dollars” — both in terms of health care costs and lost productivity.”

Read the whole article  here.

Closing the education gap – new book – “I Got Schooled”

This summary, borrowed from Amazon:  I Got Schooledoffers a look at America’s educational achievement gap that could only have come from an outsider. 

Famed director M. Night Shyamalan has long had a serious interest in education. The MNS Founda­tion he and his wife started once gave college scholarships to promising inner-city students, but Shyamalan realized that these scholarships did nothing to improve education for all the other students in under-performing schools. When he learned that some schools were succeeding with similar student populations, he traveled across the country to find out how they did this and whether these schools had something in common. He eventually learned that there are five keys to closing America’s achievement gap. But just as we must do several things simultaneously to maintain good health— eat the right foods, exercise regularly, get a good night’s sleep—so too must we use all five keys to turn around our lowest-performing schools.

These five keys are used by all the schools that are succeeding, and no schools are succeeding without them. Before he discovered them, Shyamalan investigated some popular reform ideas that proved to be dead ends, such as smaller class size, truculent unions, and merit pay for teachers.  He found that the biggest obstacle to school reform is cognitive biases: too many would-be reformers have committed themselves to false solutions (*) .

This is a deeply personal book by an unbiased observer determined to find out what works and why, so that we as a nation can fulfill our obliga­tion to give every student an opportunity for a good education.

(*) Not the answer to closing the education gap:

  • small classroom sizes
  • master’s programs and Ph.D.’s for the teachers
  • paying teachers like doctors
  • funding the schools at $20,000 per pupil

Truly a book worth reading … and sharing … widely.

Here is a 58 minute video interview with M. Night Shyamalan that’s worth watching         [click here to watch].

For busy people, I am posting a summary at  tommilesabq.com  of each of the five practices MNS Foundation discovered that “moved the needle” in closing the gap.

 

One key difference between kids who excel at math and those who don’t

Great article from Quartz Daily News – qz.com                   [Read the whole article here.]

“I’m just not a math person.”

We hear it all the time. And we’ve had enough. Because we believe that the idea of “math people” is the most self-destructive idea in America today. The truth is, you probably are a math person, and by thinking otherwise, you are possibly hamstringing your own career. Worse, you may be helping to perpetuate a pernicious myth that is harming underprivileged children—the myth of inborn genetic math ability.

Here are some summary points:

For high school math, inborn talent is just much less important than hard work, preparation, and self-confidence.

Again and again, we have seen the following pattern repeat itself:

  1. Different kids with different levels of preparation come into a math class. Some of these kids have parents who have drilled them on math from a young age, while others never had that kind of parental input.
  2. On the first few tests, the well-prepared kids get perfect scores, while the unprepared kids get only what they could figure out by winging it—maybe 80 or 85%, a solid B.
  3. The unprepared kids, not realizing that the top scorers were well-prepared, assume that genetic ability was what determined the performance differences. Deciding that they “just aren’t math people,” they don’t try hard in future classes, and fall further behind.
  4. The well-prepared kids, not realizing that the B students were simply unprepared, assume that they are “math people,” and work hard in the future, cementing their advantage.

Thus, people’s belief that math ability can’t change becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The idea that math ability is mostly genetic is one dark facet of a larger fallacy that intelligence is mostly genetic. Academic psychology journals are well stocked with papers studying the world view that lies behind the kind of self-fulfilling prophecy we just described.

Convincing students that they could make themselves smarter by hard work led them to work harder and get higher grades. The intervention had the biggest effect for students who started out believing intelligence was genetic. (A control group, who were taught how memory works, showed no such gains.)

But improving grades was not the most dramatic effect, “Dweck reported that some of her tough junior high school boys were reduced to tears by the news that their intelligence was substantially under their control.” It is no picnic going through life believing you were born dumb—and are doomed to stay that way.

While American fourth and eighth graders score quite well in international math comparisons—beating countries like Germany, the UK and Sweden—our high-schoolers  underperform those countries by a wide margin. This suggests that Americans’ native ability is just as good as anyone’s, but that we fail to capitalize on that ability through hard work. In response to the lackluster high school math performance, some influential voices in American education policy have suggested simply teaching less math—for example, Andrew Hacker has called for algebra to no longer be a requirement. The subtext, of course, is that large numbers of American kids are simply not born with the ability to solve for x.

One way to help Americans excel at math is to copy the approach of the Japanese, Chinese, and Koreans.  In Intelligence and How to Get It, Nisbett describes how the educational systems of East Asian countries focus more on hard work than on inborn talent:

1. “Children in Japan go to school about 240 days a year, whereas children in the United States go to school about 180 days a year.”

2. “Japanese high school students of the 1980s studied 3 ½ hours a day, and that number is likely to be, if anything, higher today.”
3. “[The inhabitants of Japan and Korea] do not need to read this book to find out that intelligence and intellectual accomplishment are highly malleable. Confucius set that matter straight twenty-five hundred years ago.”
4. “When they do badly at something, [Japanese, Koreans, etc.] respond by working harder at it.”
5. “Persistence in the face of failure is very much part of the Asian tradition of self-improvement. And [people in those countries] are accustomed to criticism in the service of self-improvement in situations where Westerners avoid it or resent it.”

Besides cribbing a few tricks from the Japanese, we also have at least one American-style idea for making kids smarter: treat people who work hard at learning as heroes and role models. We already venerate sports heroes who make up for lack of talent through persistence and grit; why should our educational culture be any different?

Math education, we believe, is just the most glaring area of a slow and worrying shift. We see our country moving away from a culture of hard work toward a culture of belief in genetic determinism. In the debate between “nature vs. nurture,” a critical third element—personal perseverance and effort—seems to have been sidelined. We want to bring it back, and we think that math is the best place to start.

Read the whole article here.

Follow Miles on Twitter at @mileskimball. Follow Noah at @noahpinionWe welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com

The more things change, the more they stay the same

From a letter to Benjamin Franklin from Mr. Benjamin Vaughn, January 31, 1783

“School and other education constantly proceed upon false principles, and show a clumsy apparatus pointed at a false mark; but your apparatus is simple, and the mark a true one; and while parents and young persons are left destitute of other just means of estimating and becoming prepared for a reasonable course In life, your discovery that the thing is in many a man’s private power, will be invaluable!  Influence upon the private character, late in life, is not only an influence late in life, but a weak influence.  It is in youth that we plant our chief habits and prejudices; it is in youth that we take our party as to profession, pursuits, and matrimony.  In youth, therefore, the turn is given; in youth the education even of the next generation is given; in youth the private and public character is determined; and the term of life extending but from youth to age, life ought to begin well from youth, and more especially before we take our party as to our principal objects.  But your biography will not merely teach self-education, but the education of a wise man; and the wisest man will receive lights and improve his progress, by seeing detailed the conduct of another wise man.  And why are weaker men to be deprived of such helps, when we see our race has been blundering on in the dark, almost without a guide in this particular from the farthest trace of time?  Show then sir, how much is to be done, both to sons and fathers; we invite all wise men to become like yourself, and other men to become wise when we see how cruel statesmen and warriors can be to the human race, and how absurd distinguished men can be to their acquaintance, it will be instructive to observe the instances multiply of pacific acquiescing manners; and to find how compatible it is to be great and domestic, enviable and yet good-humored.”

From The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Vaughn was born in 1751, and studied medicine in Edinburgh and was elected to Parliament.