Republican consultant and strategist, Noelle Nikpour: “Scientists are scamming the American people right and left for their own ‘finansual’ gain.”

It’s all too obvious:

Donchaknow?

It’s an old story:

If anything, the stories of corruption and incompetence serve to mask this deeper scandal: the rise of a predatory form of disaster capitalism that uses the desperation and fear created by catastrophe to engage in radical social and economic engineering. And on this front, the reconstruction industry works so quickly and efficiently that the privatizations and land grabs are usually locked in before the local population knows what hit them – Naomi Klein (2005).

The at-risk “local population,” I’m most familiar with would be teachers, school administrators, and school board members who believe that the school reform movement is aimed at improving education. It isn’t. It’s about dismantling government and creating a more favorable business climate.

Paul Rosenberg makes the connection between disaster capitalism and current education policy, pointing out that cash-strapped state and local governments are willing to jump through reform hoops, such as lifting restrictions on charter schools and pegging teacher evaluations to student test scores to qualify for federal money. This, despite a glaring lack of evidence that proposed policy changes will actually do any good.

The more I see and hear of it, the less it sounds like good is what the reformers have in mind. Take Arne Duncan, for example. Our Secretary of Ed is regularly critical of some aspect of the education system. Last week, it was teacher preparation programs in schools of education. I’m not going to defend them, since my undergrad training program was pathetic. But Jim Horn is right; when Duncan attacks teacher training programs, and in the next breath praises simple certification mills that churn out Teach For America temps on 2-year urban adventures, what should we conclude about his commitment to quality? Horn suggests that, instead, Duncan should be going after business schools for the chaos they’ve visited on our economy. Indeed.

Duncan:

I believe that education is the civil rights issue of our generation. And if you care about promoting opportunity and reducing inequality, about promoting civic knowledge and participation, the classroom is the place to start. Children today in our neediest schools are more likely to have the least qualified teachers. And that is why great teaching is about more than education—it is a daily fight for social justice.

I don’t get it; this seems altogether backward. I say, “Education is about more than great teaching.” It’s also about informed policy implementation, professional development (which was his original point), and an economic climate favorable to families and child welfare. The opportunity, inequality, and civic knowledge he is so concerned about is mere rhetoric, coming from him, and it’s being dished out in a decidedly undemocratic manner. If he or any in the reformistocracy had a sincere interest in civil rights they’d be fighting to right a host of social wrongs on multiple fronts rather than leaning exclusively on teachers. The business class, though, is in its ascendancy, and it’s looking for new colonial conquests.

This realization was brought home for me the other day when I ran across a couple of essays by the agrarian writer, Wendell Berry. Berry has been writing for at least the last few decades about agricultural policy and the tension between agrarianism and industrialism. The news is not good. According to Berry, we had less than half the number of farmers in the United States in 2002, than we had in 1977. Realizing that the neoliberal reforms we see being promoted in education are already well-established in the food production network is not comforting, but it does bring the issues into sharper focus.

In The Idea of a Local Economy, Berry points out that, as concern for environmental degradation has been established as a policy issue, it has done so at the cost of being oversimplified. Much the same could be said about education:

We have built our household on the assumption that the natural household is simple and can be simply used. We have assumed increasingly over the last five hundred years that nature is merely a supply of “raw materials,” and that we may safely possess those materials merely by taking them. This taking, as our technical means have increased, has involved always less reverence or respect, less gratitude, less local knowledge, and less skill. Our methodologies of land use have strayed from our old sympathetic attempts to imitate natural processes, and have come more and more to resemble the methodology of mining, even as mining itself has become more technologically powerful and more brutal.

And so we will be wrong if we attempt to correct what we perceive as “environmental” problems without correcting the economic oversimplification that caused them. This oversimplification is now either a matter of corporate behavior or of behavior under the influence of corporate behavior. This is sufficiently clear to many of us. What is not sufficiently clear, perhaps to any of us, is the extent of our complicity, as individuals and especially as individual consumers, in the behavior of the corporations.

Berry offers a critique of “free market” capitalism and points out, among other things, that:

The “law of competition” does not imply that many competitors will compete indefinitely. The law of competition is a simple paradox: Competition destroys competition. The law of competition implies that many competitors, competing on the “free market” will ultimately and inevitably reduce the number of competitors to one. The law of competition, in short, is the law of war.

As an alternative, Berry proposes that we develop the idea of local economies based on two principles, neighborhood and subsistence. This seems like as reasonable a proposal for school policy as it does for agriculture. Meet local demands with local solutions. Local capacity to solve problems must be conserved, and not delegated to distant others.

While wildfires burn hundreds of thousands of acres near here, and we choke on the smoke, I’ve been out cutting winter firewood. It makes sense, in a way, since it has to be done before winter, and the smoke makes every other kind of outdoor activity a lot less fun. It’s hot, heavy, work.

While I was out in the woods working, I was thinking about this video that John Connell posted in which the narrator and chief engineer of a monumental stone-moving project, Wally Wallington, declared, “I try to do this without any mechanical machinery at all. I use mostly sticks and stones for my equipment; no pulleys, no hoists, no metal levers – just try to use gravity, too – I believe it’s my favorite tool.”

Building Stonehenge – This Man can Move Anything

Wallington is a retired carpenter. And now, thanks to the internet, he’s a physics teacher. He has his own website, The Forgotten Technology, where he shares some of the theory behind his project idea. He claims to have moved a 30′ X 40′ barn 200 feet, by hand.

Watching him lift and move those heavy concrete blocks made my woodpile seem small, even though my sore back and tired legs tell me otherwise.

Yet another dire warning about the need for workers who can “thrive in the global economy:”

[T]he Commission concludes that reform in mathematics and science will be possible only if we “do school differently” in ways that emphasize the centrality of math and science to educational improvement and innovation…. As a society, we must commit ourselves to the proposition that all students can achieve at high levels in math and science, that we need them to do so for their own futures and for the future of our country, and that we owe it to them to structure and staff our educational system accordingly.

Gerald Bracey urges us to think critically when we use international comparisons to guide education policy:

Principle 23 of the “principles of data interpretation [pdf]” that organize “Reading Educational Research: How to Avoid Getting Statistically Snookered,” reads “If the situation really is as alleged ask, ‘So what?’” The question does not call for some smart-ass response, it calls for an evaluation of the consequences of the situation. So the U. S. is not #1 in mathematics or science testing. So what? So, very little.

First, comparing nations on average scores is a pretty silly idea. It’s like ranking runners based on average shoe size or evaluating the high school football team on the basis of how fast the average senior can run the 40-yard dash. Not much link to reality. What is likely much more important is how many high performers you have.

Bracey brought this report from the OECD to the attention of the EDDRA list, Top of the Class: High Performers in Science in PISA 2006

Figure 1.2 depicts the number of 15-year-old students proficient at Levels 5 and 6 on the PISA science scale by country. Both the proportion of top performers within a country and the size of countries matter when establishing the contribution of countries to the global talent pool: even though the proportion of top performers in science is comparatively low in the United States, the United States takes up a quarter of the pie shown in Figure 1.2, simply because of the size of the country. In contrast Finland, that educates the highest share of 15-year-olds to Levels 5 and 6 in the PISA science scale, only contributes 1% to the OECD pool of top-performing 15-year-old students, because of its small size.

The US seems to be putting up a fair number of high performers, comparatively.

I am 100% in favor of quality math and science education. And since the Cargegie Commission understands that “America’s young people care deeply about problems such as global warming, world hunger, and poor health and want to be involved in solving them,” I hope they don’t forget to mention this to the corporate interests that are causing all these problems. We’ll want their cooperation when we get around to buiding our “sustainable future.”

The 21st century isn’t what it used to be. In 1991, before I joined the staff, my school was awarded a $748,500 grant from RJR Nabisco to develop “innovative programs to improve education” as part of an initiative called New Century Schools. Louis V. Gerstner Jr., chairman and chief executive of RJR Nabisco Inc. said, “Rather than tinker at the margins, the grant winners have volunteered to be educational pioneers and devise model programs that can be adopted by local communities nationwide.”

The staff went into high gear. We became a science-focused magnet school. There were science specialists and guest speakers. We had intensive professional development, invention conventions, star-gazing nights, family science festivals, and a special Discovery Room with shelves full of kits and equipment for science activities that became a resource for the rest of the community.

By the time I joined the staff in 1997, the grant money was spent and the project was no longer being materially supported. We had a new principal, some teacher turnover, no more science specialist in the Discovery Room, no science curriculum development, and the school had moved on, adopting a literacy focus.

In 2004, we moved into a fantastic new state of the art building, built to replace the aging original structure. We now have wireless internet, tight windows, a special wing for Music classes, and small-group instructional spaces for special programs so they don’t have to meet in the hall. It works well, and I am very glad to be there.

This year we became a 21st Century Community Learning Center with a grant-funded after school program for academically at risk and low income students.

We will not have a school science fair this year, though, because the after school program consumes so much staff time and energy.

We expected the New Century would be all about innovation and discovery, but it’s been downgraded to basic skills. And Lou Gerstner is still out there trying to reform us. Now he asks “…why we are at this point — why after millions of pages, in thousands of reports, from hundreds of commissions and task forces, financed by billions of dollars, have we failed to achieve any significant progress?”

He thinks we need national standards. I think we are very tired of these people tinkering at the margins and telling us what to do.

The internet is full of important and interesting things to know about, and it’s hard to manage the volume. Abundance easily becomes overload. I’ve been reading about the economy, Obama, Gaza, Arne Duncan, reading theory, Obama, poverty, and the economy. Oh, and every now and then, cats. I have no interest at all in cats.

Maybe this is normal. This is the age of multi-tasking, after all. But is multi-tasking the best way to get things done? The answer may come from brain research, rather than behavior management. Rather than going on an information diet or simply trying to do more things, more efficiently, Torkel Klingberg, author of The Overflowing Brain, named the Most Important Book of 2008 by SharpBrains, suggests that we learn to exercise our memory. The problem as he sees it is that many of us suffer from an attention deficit trait due to the normal limits of working memory, which brain science now tells us can be enhanced through training exercises.

Klingberg says:

The information age has provided us with high technology which fills our days with an ever increasing amount of information and distraction. We are constantly flooded with on-the-go emails, phone calls, advertisements and text-messages and we try to cope with the increasing pace by multi tasking. A survey of workplaces in the United States found that the personnel were interrupted and distracted roughly every three minutes and that people working on a computer had on average eight windows open at the same time. There is no tendency for this to slow down; the amount and complexity of information continually increases.

He attributes frequent distractions and the need to multi-task as the two major contributors to information overload. And he doesn’t even mention teaching elementary school. If he did, I’m sure he’d have added classroom management to his list.

Working memory, he explains, is a scarce resource. His research shows that working memory can be improved through training exercises, and that the improvement generalizes to enhance our ability to focus on everyday tasks beyond those used in the training environment. He also says that fluid intelligence, related to working memory, can also be increased.

This is hugely interesting, since one of the major problems in teaching is the difficulty so many students have remembering what teachers feel they should know after going over and over the same material. “Training our brains might thus be a way to keep up with the increasing demands of the information age,” Klingberg writes.

It might also be a way to get through the semester.

Other links for this topic:

Attention Must Be Paid – a review of Klingberg’s book at Inside Higher Ed.

Try Thinking and Learning Without Working Memory – general background information on working memory.

Articles by Klingberg – especially noted: “Training of Working Memory in Children with ADHD,” (2002) for the Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology, which has good background info on ADHD.

More about Promising Cognitive Training Studies for ADHD.

The last of my three articles for the NY Times Lesson Plans blog was posted yesterday. The deal was to write 3 or 4 pieces during September, and I managed to put three together, saying about as much as I have to say, for now at least, in that forum.

The second piece I wrote was about the value of community to the school environment. Nothing says Alaska like the people here, as most of the country may eventually figure out. Sooner, I hope, than later. I described a lesson opportunity that presented itself when our Alaska Native Ed program tutor brought a moose heart to school to show the kids.

Most of the comments were very positive, although there was some push-back on my assertion that community values are overlooked in our current accountability structures, and that community is an important dimension of any school. Someone said I was suggesting that “the demand for accountability is damaging to children,” which isn’t what I said. Alexander Russo said, “This NYT teacher blogger thinks accountability is overly “individualistic,” which also isn’t what I said. But he gets close enough to win a nod from me.

People want to make it seem like teachers oppose ALL accountability when we object to the current half-assed, test-based accountability system. My little story was about something that didn’t come out of any curriculum guide, or even a lesson plan, and was the product of what we call a “teachable moment.” If I had to plan on having a moose heart handy, I’d never teach that lesson. But that doesn’t mean I don’t know what to do with one when a moose heart suddenly appears. Every school community has it’s own potential to show the kids things that are unique to its area, that are worthwhile, and maybe even necessary for them to know. But this stuff isn’t standardized. Accountability structures, to be fair, need to be broadened to distribute responsibility and to reflect the values of local communities.

My third article was about how I use our class website to help the kids take a closer look at their experiences, and celebrate ordinary things as they learn to write for a live audience. The second commenter took issue with me for overlooking a grammatical error in a kid’s writing, and she called their work “boring and trivial.” This comment got the treatment it deserved from other commenters, which left me free to sit back and watch. The discussion devolved to more or less a rehash of the classic meaning vs. behavior question about what should be emphasized in school. This is a major problem, maybe THE major problem we have putting new technology to contructive work in public schools, after we get it there. The most striking thing to me was that my humble little classroom writing project was made to sound revolutionary in the face of the teacher-as-nitpicker model of writing instruction.

A lot of positive comments were left for the kids on their site. Some of them mentioned the Times article, so I put it up on the screen in the front of the classroom, and showed the kids what people out there in the world were saying about them – good and bad. I think they were amazed at how a bunch of adults who don’t even know them could waste so much energy arguing about what we’re doing in our classroom.

The best comment on the Lesson Plans blog, though, was posted just this evening. It’s from a person who grew up here, attended school here, and now works at Duke University Hospital. He wrote:

This article inspired both a longing to be collecting blueberries at the top of Murphy Dome, and the wish that a teacher had been able to use technology in this fashion when I was in elementary or middle school. I don’t know what I would have written about, but once the flow began I am sure the unlimited tablet at my fingertips would have been heavily used.

This emphasizes how connected we can be, if we make an effort. The kids wrote more this afternoon than they’ve written in any single hour so far this year.

Here on the edge of the edge of the continent, my family’s view of the 2008 Olympic Games is a little fuzzy since we’re too far out of town for cable service, and the rabbit ears antenna won’t pull down the local broadcast signal. We do (as of 6 months ago) have a decent wireless internet connection, though, so it looks like we can follow along on the web if we feel like huddling around the computer. But it just won’t be the same as using the tube.

I’ve been getting my news about the Games on the net, where there’s been a lot of publicity about China during the run-up to the opening ceremony. Stories about the $40 billion spent on infrastructure, the devastating earthquake in May, choking smog in Beijing, media censorship and the detention of political activists, the military occupation in Tibet, and China’s economic ties to Sudan have highlighted various criticisms from human rights groups.

But this, according to Naomi Klein, may all be a part of “China’s sheer awesomeness.” Klein writes:

The games have been billed as China’s “coming out party” to the world. They are far more significant than that. These Olympics are the coming out party for a disturbingly efficient way of organizing society, one that China has perfected over the past three decades, and is finally ready to show off. It is a potent hybrid of the most powerful political tools of authoritarianism communism — central planning, merciless repression, constant surveillance — harnessed to advance the goals of global capitalism. Some call it “authoritarian capitalism,” others “market Stalinism,” personally I prefer “McCommunism.”

She sees the Olympics, for China, as a showcase for attracting foreign investment. For some US companies, the Games offer a market not only for consumer products, but also for the latest cyber-surveillance technologies to ensure the safety of athletes and VIP’s. According to Klein, “there are now 660 designated ‘safe cities’ across the country,” with cutting-edge surveillance equipment that will remain in place and even be expanded once the games have become ancient history.

Klein’s article is an updated version of a longer piece published in Rolling Stone last May. She tells the story of a visit she made to China. She spoke to a young entrepreneur there who is developing face-recognition software based on code he bought from a US firm, L-1 Identity Solutions, a US defense contractor. Klein says, “You have probably never heard of L-1, but there is every chance that it has heard of you.” L-1 has a database of over 60 million records.

The Chinese surveillance system, supported by US multinational corporations like Honeywell, Cisco, and General Electric (owner of NBC, the Olympic broadcast network) is ambitious, reminiscent of Orwell’s Big Brother. Not only does the system employ thousands of hidden video cameras, but it includes speech and face recognition capabilities, all linked to a database that tracks phone calls and credit card transactions, among other things. It’s part of a larger project that offers one-stop shopping for police investigations.

The larger project is known as the Golden Shield, or the Great Firewall, and was documented in 2000 by Greg Walton, a British researcher commissioned by the human rights group, Rights and Democracy, to look into how Chinese security forces were using information technology to monitor political activists. He made a connection between Western firms and the state security systems, but his findings were overlooked in the wake of the 9/11 attack on the WTC. According to Klein, rather than sparking critical outrage, Walton said, “…the paper was ‘mined for ideas’ by the U.S. government, as well as by private companies hoping to grab a piece of the suddenly booming market in spy tools.”

Knowing that state security functions are being contracted out to companies like L-1 is not reassuring:

Over the past decade, contracting for America’s spy agencies has grown into a $50 billion industry that eats up seven of every 10 dollars spent by the U.S. government on its intelligence services. Today, unbeknownst to most Americans, agencies once renowned for their prowess in analysis, covert operations, electronic surveillance and overhead reconnaissance outsource many of their core tasks to the private sector.

I wonder, who regulates the military-industrial complex, when the line between public and private ceases to exist? Where are the limits?

Ah, well…but this isn’t really what the Olympic Games are about, though some would want to make it so. Anywhere a large spotlight is shined, people will try to use it. The Olympics generate a lot of goodwill, a lot of drama, and a lot of money.

I’m still going to enjoy the competitions – those that I get to watch, anyway. I always feel inspired watching people who’ve dedicated themselves to reaching beyond conventional limits in pursuit of excellence.

Unlike David Brooks, I don’t believe that Education is The Biggest Issue – as he conceives it, anyway. Brooks says, “America’s lead over its economic rivals has been entirely forfeited, with many nations surging ahead in school attainment,” because of an “educational slowdown” around 1970, which resulted in too few skilled workers to meet the demands of a surge in technological progress. “The relatively few skilled workers,” he says, “command higher prices, while the many unskilled ones have little bargaining power.”

But isn’t that what unions are for? Bargaining power?

From Schools as Scapegoats (Mishel and Rothstein, 2007):

Statistically, the falling real wages of high school graduates has played a bigger part in boosting the college-to-high-school wage ratio than has an unmet demand for college graduates. Important causes of this decline have been the weakening of labor market institutions, such as the minimum wage and unions, which once boosted the pay of high school–educated workers.

[...]

What made semiskilled manufacturing jobs desirable was that many (though not most) were protected by unions, provided pensions and health insurance, and compensated with decent wages. That today’s working class doesn’t get similar protections has nothing to do with the adequacy of its education. Rather, it has everything to do with policy decisions stemming from the value we place on equality. Hotel jobs that pay $20 an hour, with health and pension benefits (rather than $10 an hour without benefits), typically do so because of union organization, not because maids earned bachelor’s degrees.

Brooks, who believes the “skills gap” is widening inequality, and that “Boosting educational attainment at the bottom is more promising than trying to reorganize the global economy,” wants to sidestep labor market and economic policy solutions to what he implicitly recognizes as the bigger problem – the global economy – by calling on schools to crank out more skilled workers. For what? For a shrinking supply of “knowledge worker” jobs.

Using the college “wage premium” as the sole factor to explain a widening gap between the poor and the affluent is easy. But then, that’s the point, isn’t it?

The Wall Street Journal provides a concrete example of the Declining Value of Your College Degree.

Mishel and Bernstein, writing for the Economic Policy Institute, explain that “…wage inequality is driven by a slew of factors, of which differences in education is but one.” Other factors include trade deficits and globalization that send manufacturing jobs overseas leading to the loss of good jobs for non-college-educated workers, declining union representation, and unemployment.

I’m all for “boosting educational attainment” in whatever form that may happen to take, which is why I was intrigued by Brooks’ mention of “Schools, Skills, and Synapses” by James Heckman [pdf]. Heckman discusses how cognitive as well as noncognitive abilities affect our lives, and points out that differences between children from advantaged and disadvantaged families appear early in life, pointing out that education policy is largely directed toward improving cognition, but (no surprise to most of us) “…more than smarts is required for success in life.” He claims that gaps in noncognitive and cognitive abilities can be traced to adverse early environments, and that “A greater percentage of U.S. children is being born into adverse environments.”

I and most teachers, I think, have long observed that many learning difficulties seemed to be linked to domestic home-life problems, and that there are a lot more of them than there used to be. So, the good news is that there is research to support this observation.

The bad news is that the longer we wait, the more expensive and difficult it is to effectively manage these problems, which is why Heckman and Brooks both advocate early intervention. In the meantime, we deal with the fallout in our classrooms. Brooks calls it “human capital development,” an outrageous term that reduces students to an economic commodity and belies his concern for our collective well-being. He believes that “America rose because it got more out of its own people than other nations.” How narrow-minded can you get?

What are some of the noncognitive skills Heckman identified? Well, they include physical and mental health, perseverance, attention, motivation, and self confidence. Every one of these is within a teacher’s realm of responsibility, and worthy in their own right, regardless of whether they enhance a person’s economic worth. In fact, attention to these human qualities sets great teachers apart from the clinicians. They’re impossible to test for, and they aren’t called upon until their exercise is required, but they are the foundation we need to build, and build upon.

Raising the bar, making school more rigorous, banging the drum for accountability, none of theses can begin to make a dent in the life of a kid who locks herself in the bathroom at night to hide from her mother’s boyfriend.

Artichoke’s post about metaphor and education, and creativity, has me thinking about the lines and tensions in teaching. She notes the contradiction for art teachers working in schools with “The emphasis of verbal communication in a subject which is often about an individual language that has nothing to do with words.” Her post was provocative, as usual.

Most notably, this time, she sent her readers off to read a deliciously descriptive story, Lost in the Sahel, in which Paul Salopek tells about a journey to Africa. He wrote:

The Sahel is a line.

But it is also a crack in the heart—a tightrope, a brink, a ledge. See how its people walk: straight-backed on paths of red dust, placing one foot carefully before the other, as if balanced upon a knife edge. The Sahel is a bullet’s trajectory. It is the track of rains that fall but never touch the sand. It is a call to prayer and a call for your blood, and for me a desert road without end.

The Sahel is the transitional region between Africa’s Sahara, to the north, and the savanna to the south. It’s a troubled and troublesome place that embraces both beauty and brutality. It’s a boundary, a borderland, a place that is home to “Arabs and blacks, Muslims and Christians, nomads and farmers, a landscape of greens and a world of tans. Some 50 million of the world’s poorest, more disempowered, most forgotten people hang fiercely on to life there.” Read this piece. Thinking about lines, tensions, and metaphors, it evoked some connections with school for me that I want to record here.

The classroom is also a line. Lines separate as well as join. In school we divide knowing into discreet subject areas, and we move from one to another on a schedule defined by the clock, and signaled with a bell. Curriculum is also a line. It has a scope, and a sequence. It defines a finite body of knowledge to be presented for consideration and consumption by students in the various grade levels, which are likewise linearly ordered. And evaluation, that is also a scheme in which graded judgments are attached to student performances in order to report and record their “progress” down the line.

Lines impose structure and order. Cause and effect, too, is a linear kind of knowing. Lines are used to explain and to predict as we come to recognize patterns in sequences of events.

There is a line, too, between the left and right hemispheres of our brains. And this line is a boundary that, like the Sahel, both separates and unites. This point was eloquently made by Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroanatomist who describes the neural meltdown she experienced on a December morning in 1996 when she had a stroke.

Taylor explains how the right and left brain hemispheres are very different places. The right hemisphere is about the present moment. It thinks in pictures and sensations. It is conscious of the energy that flows throughout the universe. The left hemisphere organizes that information by associating it with everything we’ve ever learned, and it uses language to do its work. It helps us to construct the common shared reality that we use to orchestrate events in the world, creating meaning from sense impressions. Taylor tells what happened when the chatter in her left brain went silent, when she said goodbye to her life, and experienced nirvana. Her realization that this experience is a gift within the grasp of each of us at every moment motivated her to recover and encourage people to “run the deep inner peace circuitry of our right hemispheres” and perhaps create a more peaceful planet. Her message is a powerful story of transformation and a window into a frontier that the world desperately needs us to explore and navigate.

This line, the fissure that divides our left and right brains, I see now, may be the most important boundary in all of creation. For teachers it is a zone of vital importance. We need to learn as much as we can about this place, and how to navigate it, because too much of our work is located in left brain isolation.

A good place to begin would be the Brain Rules principles described by John Medina. “If you wanted to create an education environment that was directly opposed to what the brain was good at doing, you probably would design something like a classroom.” – John Medina.

Medina says that schools are designed so that most real learning has to occur at home, and when I think about what “home” is for some kids, it’s scary to think about what that might mean. The Brain Rules site is a promotion for Medina’s book, but it is also exceptionally informative. He lists 12 “brain rules,” or principles derived from brain research, and each principle is linked to a short video. The topics he discusses include exercise, attention, memory, sleep, stress, and exploration, among other things. Kids would enjoy this, teachers should be familiar with this research. Good lessons for us all, as we work to make classrooms interesting and engaging places for kids to learn things that matter.

I’m also thinking that compassion meditation is something to begin learning more about as we explore the possibilities for running that “deep inner peace circuitry.”