WONDER OF THE MOMENT

This week, both The New York Times Magazine and Newsweek have articles about the awful, sticky, supremely difficult problem of educating America’s children, especially the ones who are functioning below grade level.
    What a horrendous spiritual lapse!  How can it be that  America, the Land of Opportunity, has no idea how to teach its children?  How can we have abandoned our young people to such a degree?  The way things stand now, if you grow up in a middle-class home, you’ll probably get a good education.  If you grow up in a poor home, and—like Justice Sonia Sotomayor—you have dedicated, strong-willed mentors, you may get a good education.  Otherwise, it’s like a throw of the dice.
    Back when I was racing through a quick-teacher-preparation program at the State College at Boston, I noticed that no one was teaching me how to teach.  The practice-teaching portion of the program had ten of us taking turns teaching a summer school class of fifth-graders.  The instructors simply watched us present lessons we amateurs had invented by ourselves.  The more poster-board displays we stayed up late painting, the higher the student-teaching grades we received.
    The problem continued as I proceeded through my teaching career, through old math and new math and back to old math, through see-and-say, phonics, and combined methods.  I was on my own inventing ways to get the ideas across.  Fellow teachers with more years behind them helped.  But they were just telling me what they had tried and found useful.  None of us was operating from a scientific body of knowledge.  
    When I switched from teaching elementary school to teaching high school science, I still had to invent approaches as I went along, getting better with experience, but still flying by the seat of my pants.
    At last, some dedicated educators are trying to solve this problem.  They are in touch with their own spiritual paths, and, lucky for America, those paths cross the paths of America’s schoolchildren.
    Let me know your thoughts about this problem.  I’ll have more to say about it in my next post.

Teenaged brains are different from adult brains.  The neurons in the frontal cortex of an adolescent brain are among the last to become fully myelinated.  Myelin acts like insulation on an electric cord, making nerve impulses pass along faster and more effieciently.  So those adolescent frontal cortex neurons are less useful than they will be in a few years.  
    Alas, the frontal cortex is the site where conscious judgment takes place.  So teens are somewhat lacking in judgment.  They don’t assess situations very well, and they make poor, sometimes risky choices.
    How could Nature have allowed this situation to evolve?  Why hasn’t natural selection long since weeded out such un-fitness?  All we can do is guess.  But to do such guessing, it helps to remember that for tens of thousands of years, the life and social organization of our species has been quite different from present times in developed countries.  
    People lived in clans or tribes, and elders were in charge.  (This is still the case in many parts of the world.)  So poor judgment in adolescents may not have been a problem.  In fact, an immature frontal cortex may have helped.  One way the brain matures is by pruning:  Connections among immature neurons that aren’t being used, die away; whereas those being used a lot become strengthened.  So the influence of elders on the adolescent may have become permanent in this way.
    Another possible advantage of an immature frontal cortex in teenagers may be courage.  These young people must now leave home and start lives of their own.  It’s probably no accident that we humans have elaborate rituals and ceremonies around becoming adult and getting married.  In any culture, whether teens leave home physically or merely psychologically, they must be brave enough to let go of parental protection, to become adults among adults, to marry and take on the responsibility of raising their own children.  Even in societies where very young women are married off to older men, courage is a requirement.
    There are probably lots of other very good reasons to view teen brains as highly fit for their purpose.  Let me know your ideas.
    Meanwhile, I’m not giving up on Nature!

In the middle of the 19th century, Gregor Mendel’s experiments on pea plants revealed the secrets of heredity.  In the early 20th century, Thomas Morgan and his students, experimenting with fruit flies, found that genes on chromosomes were the causes of heritable traits.  Through much of the rest of the 20th century, Barbara McClintock’s experiments with maize (corn) demonstrated astonishing control genes that jumped about among chromosomes.
    Did these investigators choose their organisms?  Or did the organisms choose the investigators?  
    Mendel wanted to perform rigorously controlled crosses between specific plants.  He wanted to cross purple-flowered plants and white-flowered plants, smooth-seeded plants and wrinkly-seeded plants, tall and short, etc.  So he couldn’t allow chance pollinations to interfere.  The pea flower is perfect for this.  Pea flower petals stay closed during pollination.  The male anthers develop just above the female pistils, and the flower self-fertilizes before opening.  Mendel could open each flower before fertilization, snip out the anthers, and keep them in labeled packets while their pollen ripened.  Then he could brush his choice of pollen onto his choice of pistils to perform the crosses he wanted.  Yet Mendel couldn’t have known in advance that the traits he chose would all be separately heritable.  He couldn’t have known each would show both a dominant and a recessive version, allowing Mendel to use mathematical ratios to uncover heredity’s secrets.
    Thomas Morgan’s original plan was to experiment on mutations.  Fruit flies were ideal for this because they could be attracted into the lab with ripe bananas, because they were small enough to keep and breed in tiny, labeled bottles, and because their life cycle took only ten days, allowing series of experiments to take place over convenient periods.  But Morgan and his students discovered fruit flies had much more to offer.  Multiple mutations appeared, some connected with the sex of the insect, and odd chromosome aberrations made it possible to determine the exact location of any on each of the four fruit fly chromosomes.
    Barbara McClintock spent a lifetime working in maize genetics.  On each maize plant, the male flowers are the tassels at the top of a stalk, and the female flowers are the silks protruding from the corn ear.  Once pollinated, each silk results in a single corn kernel growing from the cob.  In her fields of corn, McClintock could simply cover the tassels and ears of each stalk with paper bags to prevent chance pollination.  Then, like Mendel, she could cross-pollinate or self-pollinate at will.  But corn offered so much more:  Each kernel showed the results of a single pollination with color, pattern, and texture.  Each chromosome had knobs and other oddities by which to identify it, so that McClintock could study genetics directly through her microscope.  Comparing kernels and chromosomes in this way, she became conversant with jumping genes.
    Somehow each of these geneticists found their true tasks and their soul-mate organisms.  Was it their own luck or divine guidance?

I must apologize: I usually post on Tuesdays and Thursdays. This post is a day late.  And therein lies a story.  Wednesday night (Feb. 24) through Thursday afternoon (Feb. 25), I had quite an experience with my computer.  I have had nearly identical experiences in the past with cars and cell phones.
    The car experiences centered around accidents that rendered my own car undriveable.  One call to my insurance agent plus another call to the agent’s favorite rent-a-car, and a tow truck is pulling my own car to a body shop for evaluation and repairs, while I whisk into a temporary loaner.  I am on my way after a delay of one hour or less.  America wants me ON WHEELS.
    The phone experiences centered around broken or lost cell phones.  In one case, my cell phone just died.  I brought it to a branch of the company that had sold it to me.  The phone had been manufactured in the days before SIM cards, but the biggest honcho in the shop knew how to export my personal directory from my phone to her computer, and then from her computer to the SIM card of the new phone she was selling me.  Back in touch with the world in 45 minutes!  Next came a lost phone (with, obviously, a lost SIM card).  But by then the lost phone had been one I could sync to my computer, and voila, new phone: back in touch in no time.  America wants me CONNECTED.
    With computers, I am a Mac person, and my tech-guy is my husband.  Last fall, I suddenly realized my computer life had totally outgrown the “back-up onto a flash drive” way of life.  So I consulted with my tech-guy, and he outfitted me with an external hard drive, along with Leopard 10.5.7 and Time Machine backing me up daily.  
    Then Wednesday night my beloved old iMac died utterly.  Oh, no!  My thoughts flew to the emails I was expecting in answer to the ones I’d just sent, to the proposal an agent had asked for, to…, to…, to…..  Thursday morning I decided to buy a new computer rather than pay for an expensive repair.  I dropped the external hard drive into my purse and took the bus downtown to the Apple Store on Michigan Avenue.  I bought a gorgeous new, wide-screen iMac, left my hard drive in the capable hands of the set-up crew, and took a bus back home.  By the time I ascended to my third-floor apartment, my set-up guy was on the phone telling me my new iMac was now a super-modern, identical version of my old iMac.  All I had to do was drive down and pick it up on my way to acupuncture.  America wants me ONLINE.
    Here's a question: Is this good for us?

A visit to the Templeton Foundation website got me thinking about similarities between ourselves and other animal species.  The question posed on the site was, “Does evolution explain human nature?”  The answer written by Simon Conway Morris, “Except where it matters,” was really thought-provoking.
    In my last two posts, (February 16 and 18), I talked about the many ways we have come to see powerful similarities between ourselves and other animal species, even very distant ones.  Many of these similarities, like tool-use and problem-solving must involve something like thought.    
    But Morris points out that we may be going overboard about the similarities between other animals and ourselves.  It’s not surprising that other animals resemble us in “thoughtful” ways: after all, we did evolve from common ancestors, so of course we share many characteristics.  Yet are the recently discovered, surprising resemblances blinding us to certain essential differences?
    The difference Morris emphasizes is our intuition for the ineffable, our capacity to ponder the awesome and the sacred.  And he points out that this capacity results from our ability to use language.  
    In our enthusiasm over teaching a chimpanzee to use symbols to communicate with us—in our amazement over a parrot’s ability to name colors, count, and say when he wants to quit working—we may have forgotten the immense gulf that separates the most human-like orangutan in the world from Socrates or Renoir or Joan of Arc or Mother Theresa.   
    What are we to make of this gulf?  As Morris puts it, “…how did we come to be so different, in fact, so very odd?”  He suggests that our leap toward cosmic truths may be, not the happenstance of evolution, but our destiny.  
    And what might that mean?  Wow!  Here come a whole lot of new questions.  But I love answers that lead to new questions—new food for thought.  In fact, this is part of what Morris is talking about.  We are certainly a puzzle-solving, puzzle-posing, puzzle-seeking animal!