Wonder of the Moment

Searching for What Makes an Effective Teacher

Julie Simon Lakehomer — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 23:29:05 +0000

In my last post, I mentioned a recent article in the New York Times Magazine about a handful of educators intent on figuring out how to teach effectively.
   One of these educators, Doug Lemov, has been studying teachers who are already effective. (There have always been effective teachers, but they haven't been studied!) He has distilled what they do and what they say about what they do, into a forthcoming book, “Teach Like a Champion: The 49 Techniques That Put Students on the Path to College.” These techniques are already part of the 16 charter schools he helped found called Uncommon Schools. Uncommon Schools also has a lot in common with other effective charter schools I posted about last year (September 18, 2009).
   Another educator trying to figure out how to teach well, Deborah Loewenstein Ball of Michigan State, focuses not on technique, but on knowledge: What does a teacher need to know about math in order to be an effective math teacher? She has come up with Math Knowledge for Teachers. It comprises not only ordinary math, but knowledge of what might be going on in a student’s head with respect to math. The NYT Magazine article quotes Ball as saying, “Teaching depends on what other people think, not what you think.” Yet another educator mentioned in the article, Pam Grossman of Stanford, is trying to figure out the best techniques to use to teach literature.
   This turn of events in education research heartens me. At last, after an extended, damaging period of inattention, education seems to be attracting quite a few imaginative, spiritually alive investigators. These people seem determined to ferret out or invent excellent, effective teaching methods. They seem devoted to the principle that every single child can learn if only their teachers know how to teach them. And they are proving, with test results, that this is true. What a much more wonderful America we will live in when every child has every opportunity to learn.

Education: A Spiritual Challenge

Julie Simon Lakehomer — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 19:09:29 +0000

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.

Teen Brains: Why Are They the Way They Are?

Julie Simon Lakehomer — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 18:00:46 +0000

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!

Free Will, or Destiny?

Julie Simon Lakehomer — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 19:28:19 +0000

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?

America, Land of Cars, Cell Phones, Computers

Julie Simon Lakehomer — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 20:07:54 +0000

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?

The Thinker - The Puzzler

Julie Simon Lakehomer — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 18:58:06 +0000

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!

Are You a Stranger or My Cousin?

Julie Simon Lakehomer — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 16:38:49 +0000

In my last post (February 16) I talked about how, more and more, animal nature resembles human nature. Discoveries like the ones I mentioned in that post have paralleled discoveries that human and animal genes are often the same, or so similar, it’s clear they are simply mutations of the same ancient genes.
    By the middle of the 20th century, we learned that genes were made of DNA, and soon after, we learned that all living things used the same DNA code for making proteins from genes. So clearly, all life must have evolved from the same, common ancestor. But without investigating, biologists assumed that every species had its own, unique set of genes.
    Then investigators began to find similar genes and proteins among species. And not just among closely related species like finches or turtles or primates. Organisms as dissimilar as clams, grasshoppers, and elephants turned out to have versions of some of the same genes.
    Perhaps as a result of these discoveries about animal and human nature, and about animal and human genes, we have made a 180-degree turn from seeing ourselves as different from other animals, to seeing ourselves as the same as other animals.
    But are we? Or are we not? Is this a biological question? Is it a mental question? A spiritual question?
    To me, it is certainly an intriguing question. I can think of a number of answers, which I’ll write about in my next few blog posts. Let me know what you think!

Six Un-Differences Between Humans and Animals

Julie Simon Lakehomer — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 19:01:25 +0000

Recently I visited the website of the Templeton Foundation, an institution that (fortunately!) devotes time, space, and money to exploring connections, conflicts, and resolutions between science and spirituality. When I visited, the question/discussion at hand was whether evolution can explain human nature.

For me, here’s a sub-question: Is there a difference between animal natures and human nature?

Some years back, biologists emphasized tool use by humans as the really important difference between Homo sapiens and other animal species. But this “difference” became problematic:

Observers witnessed chimpanzees in the wild dipping twigs into tiny holes in termite nests, withdrawing the termite-covered twigs and sticking them in their mouths to lap off a mouthful of termites—repeating the procedure over and over, just like a human eating a meal from a plate.

Oh…all right…but chimps don’t manufacture tools as humans do.

Well, actually, stripping leaves and side branches from twigs for termite-dipping isn’t that far from chipping flakes from stones to produce knives.

But humans truly alter natural materials….

Alas, there are crows that will use their beaks to bend a wire handle on a bird-sized bucket to produce a device with which they dip up seeds from a container of water.

OK, but humans design tools to solve problems.

Well, what of rooks that obtain water, or food floating in water, from a lab cylinder only half full of water by dropping in stones to raise the water level so that their beaks can reach the water or the floating food?

You can see this tool-use difference really doesn’t stand up.

Another major biological difference between ourselves and our animal cousins is language. Yet a number of experiments on chimpanzees and other primates, not to mention Alex, Irene Pepperberg’s experimental talking parrot, demonstrate the apparent abilities of these animals to use abstract symbols and even actual words and phrases, to communicate real ideas.

These are not the only arguments that demolish supposedly clear differences between us and our animal relatives. Experiments show capuchin monkeys have a sense of fairness. They willingly perform tasks for a cucumber slice or grape reward. But if one monkey gets a cucumber slice and sees another monkey receive a grape for the same task, the cucumber-receiving monkey soon refuses to perform the task. and behave enviously or resentfully when they are treated unfairly. Animal rights organizations, animal rescue organizations, and the Environmental Protection Agency have also done their part to blur or erase the differences between humans and other animals.

So, rightly or wrongly, over the past several decades, lots of humans have come to see animals as much less different from us and much more like us.

Human and animal nature: an interesting topic, don’t you agree? What do you think?

Revelation: Genes Cause Stuttering

Julie Simon Lakehomer — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 18:26:44 +0000

Coming upon one cellular miracle or another always puts me in awe of the universe of life. And it remains true that we learn a lot about the astonishing functions of cells when we investigate errors in their functioning.
     In my last post (February 9) I spoke of the real, cellular changes that can make us sick or sicker when we’re stressed. Biological and sociological researchers looked at what goes wrong in cells of people and of experimental rats when their cortisol levels depart from normal.
     Today we awoke to news of a genetic cause for stuttering. Like all genetic “causes,” this one is complex. (We have to give up the simplistic notion of “a gene for” this or “a gene for” that. Even eye color doesn’t really work that way.)
Here is how the newly discovered genetic causes of stuttering work:
          1) All cells have a waste problem. They take in or manufacture structures, molecules, or parts of molecules that eventually must be gotten rid of. Within each cell are lots of microscopic organs, and one such “organelle” is the lysosome. A lysosome gets rid of waste molecules by digesting them down to useful parts; the useful parts can then provide energy, or building blocks for new molecules.
          2) Lysosomes, in order to function properly, require plenty of genetic action. Some genes code for enzymes that transport waste molecules into the lysosomes. Some genes code for enzymes that do the digesting inside lysosomes. Some genes code for enzymes that reprocess what is left after lysosome digestion. And some genes code for switches that turn on these various genes.
          3) Now what would happen if any of these genes mutated and didn’t work? If a cell had not just one, but two copies of such a mutated gene, the work of that cell’s lysosomes might slow or stop. The cell would accumulate more and more undigested waste molecules. If the cell were a neuron, in somebody’s brain, the accumulating waste might interfere with proper brain function. And if the faulty brain neuron was involved in speech, it might cause stuttering!
     So stutterers are not at fault for stuttering, and their parents are not to blame, and neither are their teachers.
But what about people who have one or another of these lysosomal gene mutations, yet don’t stutter? Or what about the ones who start out stuttering, but then get over it? Well, as with all biological discoveries, this one leads to more questions to investigate.
     We can count on awesome answers that make us grateful to inhabit this endlessly miraculous universe.

Stress vs Health

Julie Simon Lakehomer — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 19:33:27 +0000

The January 13 issue of NewScientist magazine carries an article about how poverty can lead to more and earlier deaths from breast cancer.     This correlation between poverty and illness crops up from time to time. But what’s really interesting about this particular article is that it presents data from a collaboration between biologists and sociologists. The data illustrates at the cellular level what the link may be between poverty and terrible cancer outcomes. First: high cortisol levels in experimental animals result in numerous cancerous tumors. Second: women living in poor neighborhoods show unusual patterns of cortisol levels. Third: cortisol empowers tumor cells to nourish themselves and grow.
   It’s not as if we need to be told that stress can cause and increase illness. It’s not as if we need to be told that spiritual health can maintain and improve physical wellness.
   But in our hard-driving, antii-spiritual culture, it’s easy to brush off ideas about positive energy as luxuries we don’t have time for. "Positive energy" may be a nice hobby for the touchy-feely set; but we’ll get to spiritual development when we get some free time, when we (finally) take a vacation, when we retire, when….
   We need to consider our own spiritual development. And we need to consider the spiritual needs of our less fortunate neighbors. More on this next time!