End of my 3rd semester: a few thoughts about teaching

I think I know why students are sometimes confused. 

I tell them, "I want you to think for yourselves." At the same time, I say, "Do exactly what I say to do."

The two statements aren't perfect polar opposites, but they do set up a kind of disconnect: You could imagine the students asking, "Why do you tell us exactly what to do if you want us to think for ourselves?"

It might be worthwhile for me to explicitly state, "Do exactly what I say to do SO you can learn how to think for yourselves."

The Home-Schooling Advantage: A Dad's View

1. When the car breaks down on the side of a highway, it's a moment for expanding the kids' vocabulary.

2. Technological advances have made home-schooling easier. For example, most basic cable plans include access to PBS Kids, The History Channel, The Discovery Channel, and The Golf Channel.

3. Courses include Advanced Topics in Popular Culture, which is easy to teach when Dad is driving and really wants to listen to The Flaming Lips on the minivan's sound system.

4. A visit to the grocer’s produce section is an educational field trip, therefore tax-deductible.

5. Home-schooling encourages practical understandings of subjects like agriculture, botany, chemistry, and cultural heritage, especially when Dad breaks out the home-brewing kit.

- Colin Foote Burch
(c) copyright 2009 Colin Foote Burch

Our youngest child turns 3 years old next month; so much learned, so much still to learn

Sadie, our third-child surprise, the one we almost named Merlot due to her likely inspiration, will turn three years old next month.

Her birthday is on Bastille Day. There's significance in that. I'm sure of it. I just haven't figured it out yet.

Sadie has two older sisters, ages 6 and 8, neither of which were nearly named after a red wine.

My wife and I learned gobs from our first two. Every developmental stage has its normal traits, like the tantrums of the "terrible twos" and potty training.

On the other hand, each child is different. We identified attention-deficit disorder in our oldest daughter when she was 6 years old. We suspected a degree of anxiety in our middle child when she was 4 years old.

In both cases, we sought professional help. We looked into conventional medical approaches to these problems as well as emerging remedies like neurofeedback, which has been the subject of mainstream medical research in Germany. My wife and I believe that our love for our children must be guided by critical minds that insist on multiple sources of information for anything we consider. While it is impossible to know everything, our approach removes some of the variables in decision-making -- and it has been fruitful. With our intentional involvement at home and the help of a licensed doctor, the oldest daughter can maintain focused attention for much longer, and the middle daughter is less anxious in her daily life.

But there remains the simple fact -- even as we begin our third run through the preschool years -- that we have so much to learn. Researchers say that the human brain develops dramatically during the first five years of life -- so much so, that my wife and I feel the burden of properly navigating Sadie's third and fourth years. How do you do it perfectly? When no one has ever done it perfectly?

Well, there is some good news for us.

Well, first, we've done made it through the preschool years twice already. And if you have done so, you ought to pat yourself on the back.

Second, we know where to look for good information. We have culled the good authors, books and Web sites from the mediocre and the bad.

Third, we know how to love Sadie. We make direct eye contact with her. We hug her and kiss her all the time (probably not difficult for most parents, yet extremely important at this stage of development). We spend time with her, even when it is difficult to peel ourselves away from our computers.

Sadie has been on her own learning curve. We don't let her do whatever she wants -- especially when what she wants to do involves wet toilet paper --never mind her persistence and fits. Surviving these episodes requires a level of patience and endurance that my wife and I do not possess naturally, and I'm sure many American parents feel the same way.

Yet in the end, all the little struggles are worth it. We see the outcomes of our preschool-year efforts in the 8-year-old and the 6-year-old.

I cannot wait for the next year with the little girl we almost named Merlot. I want to help that little brain develop to its full potential.

-Colin Foote Burch

One way to edit a thesis (not necessarily recommended)

My daughter's new t-shirt

'Mindfulness' training might help schoolchildren relax, pay attention

Patricia Leigh Brown's article in The New York Times Saturday explained a promising approach to quieting the minds of schoolchildren.

OAKLAND, Calif., June 12 — The lesson began with the striking of a Tibetan singing bowl to induce mindful awareness.

With the sound of their new school bell, the fifth graders at Piedmont Avenue Elementary School here closed their eyes and focused on their breathing, as they tried to imagine “loving kindness” on the playground....

As summer looms, students at dozens of schools across the country are trying hard to be in the present moment. This is what is known as mindfulness training, in which stress-reducing techniques drawn from Buddhist meditation are wedged between reading and spelling tests.

Mindfulness, while common in hospitals, corporations, professional sports and even prisons, is relatively new in the education of squirming children. But a small but growing number of schools in places like Oakland and Lancaster, Pa., are slowly embracing the concept...

Brown wrote that some big research institutions are studying "mindfulness" and how it works.

“Parents and teachers tell kids 100 times a day to pay attention,” said Philippe R. Goldin, a [Stanford University] researcher. “But we never teach them how.”

That's not to say that "mindfulness" training is completely advocated by researchers.

Although some students take naturally to mindfulness, it is “not a magic bullet,” said Diana Winston, the director of mindfulness education at the U.C.L.A. center. She said the research thus far was “inconclusive” about how effective mindfulness was for children who suffered from trauma-related disorders, for example. It is “a slow process,” Ms. Winston added. “Just because kids sit and listen to the bell doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll be more kind.”

A-ha! So moral, ethical and religious trainings are still necessary. As Winston suggests, there never really is a single silver bullet to human problems, is there? But this research indicates that "mindfulness" can be a tool.

Some teachers told Brown that the techniques have not worked for every student.

But [Yolanda Steel, a second-grade teacher at Piedmont,] noted that some students tapped pencils and drummed on desks instead of closing their eyes and listening to the bell. “The premise is nice,” Ms. Steel concluded. “But mindfulness can’t do it all.”

Words like "Tibetan" and "Buddhist" and "mindfulness" will alarm some parents, especially many more conservative religious folk, but I think they could suspend worry until they have considered two points.

First, focusing attention is not the same as "emptying" the mind, which produces a state that might make children more susceptible to manipulation -- or, as some religious folks will contend, dark spiritual influences. Focusing the imagination on something healthy and positive is not, at very least, the same as emptying the mind. I cannot remember who told me this, but somewhere along the way I heard someone define the Biblical word for meditation as "mulling over" or "chewing over" a certain idea. Could relaxing and repeating certain Biblical or liturgical phrases be detrimental? To me, this is not the same as repeating songs over and over in a revival service.

Second, some research suggests that focused meditation strengthens the brain. An article in the June edition of Men's Journal addressed meditation techniques in which a person will relax and focus on a repeated phrase. "When Harvard researcher Sara Lazar recently compared the brains of American meditators to a control group, she found that parts of the cortex responsible for attention were on average 5 percent thicker," the article said.

To me, techniques for focusing attention (as long as they do not involve "emptying" the mind) involve the same electrical patterns in the brain that are addressed in neurofeedback. Neurofeedback helps people redo the electrical patterns in their brains. Before neurofeedback can begin, the clinician must record the electrical patterns in the brain (an electroencephalograph). Clusters of electrical activity in certain parts of the brain can indicate attention-deficit disorder, depression, anxiety, bi-polar disorder, and other problems. After the diagnosis, to help remedy these problems, a clinician specializing in neurofeedback will program a computer system based on the diagnosis. When the time comes for the patient's office visit, the clinician will attach sensors to the head of the patient. The patient will sit in front of a screen that might have a video-game style race track or a movie. When the patient's relaxation and focus get into the right zone -- when the electrical patterns move away from those clusters and into other parts of the brain -- a car will move along the race track or the movie will fill the entire screen.

Exciting times for brain research.

Read Brown's article at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/16/us/16mindful.html?ex=1182830400&en=981d7c4981c880cc&ei=5070

-Colin Burch

An argument against deporting illegal workers

The Wall Street Journal has an article today about the impact that illegal-immigration raids have on public school administrators and students. When workplaces have been raided and illegal workers taken into custody, some public school students have lost one or both parents to Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, who take the parents away for undefined “processing.” Ostensibly, many of these students, unlike their parents, were born in the U.S.A.

These circumstances might provide the strongest argument against deporting illegal immigrants. A comparison of U.S. public education performance with that of other industrialized, techno-centric countries produces a sobering conclusion: When public school kids have lost their parents, they have lost their only real source of education.

-Colin Burch