Category Archives: Challenging the Status Quo

Mistakes made by Doctors, Educators, Government and what we can do to change it.

“Read Slowly and Change Your Brain”

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wall-street-journalThe banner across the top of today’s Wall Street Journal read: ”Read Slowly and Change Your Brain.” The accompanying article didn’t actually extol the benefits of reading reaaallly slowly, but rather the benefits of actually reading books, literature, and fiction, which is sadly becoming a more and more rare phenomenon.  Apparently the number of those over 18 who read is getting smaller and smaller. A study in 2011 indicated that only 76% of this population had actually read a book in a year. The article is worth a read, a slow read, not a scan or an “F” pattern read. (An “F” pattern read is reading the first line, then scanning down the left side and reading just the first few words on the left side of a few lines.)

The article lists the benefits of properly reading books. This included:

  • Deepens empathy and provides pleasure
  • Heightens concentration
  • Enhances comprehension, particularly of complex material
  • Improves listening skills
  • Enriches vocabulary
  • Reduces stress

Not a bad list, and let’s add relaxing, entertaining, thought provoking, educational, and, yes, it does change your brain. What a deal!

One of my ongoing concerns about our society is what I perceive to be a drop in processing skills. The lower the processing ability (short-term and working memory), the more simplistic is thought. The ability to think is rather important, and people who can think seem to becoming fewer and further between. I’m girding myself as we get started in a new election cycle. I hate to see and hear one more election that is orchestrated by those who should be selling breakfast cereal rather than explaining the views of a politician in one-liners. Perhaps if the majority of the population could process better and understand more, we could actually look at issues in depth and we wouldn’t need to sum everything up with a one-liner.

Take some time and read a book; actually, lots of books.

Interview with M. Night Shyamalan

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M. Night ShyamalanI’m a morning-news junkie. I get up and turn the news on in my bedroom, then go down to the kitchen to get coffee and turn on a different news channel and then go up to my bathroom to shower and get ready and turn on a third news channel. I feel I need to know what is going on in the world, I don’t need to know who shot whom at what bar last night or how the traffic is doing unless I have to drive to the airport so I skip local news and look for national and international news and stories that actually address important issues. Between a few different sources I hope to get at least an approximation of what is really going on.

This morning an interview caught my attention because it was about education. As it turned out the interview was with M. Night Shyamalan who is a movie guy—writer, producer and director. The interview was a discussion of a book that he has just written entitled, “I Got Schooled: the Unlikely Story of How a Moonlighting Movie Maker Learned the Five Keys to Closing America’s Education Gap.” Since I was getting ready to go to the office I couldn’t give the program my undivided attention but I found it quite interesting.

Regarding Mr. Shyamalan, I don’t know what he goes by—is it “M” like in the James Bond movies or “M. Night” or “Night”—I don’t know because I don’t really follow much of anything relative to movies but, this fellow seemed quite bright and evidently with the help of some other bright people really looked into the subject of American education. Very often outsiders do a much better job of assessing a problem than do the experts who “should” know.

Mr. Shyamalan spoke of an event that helped shape his perception of what needed to be done in order to understand and address the inequality of education in America. This event was a discussion with a physician who taught at the medical school at the University of Pennsylvania. The doctor related how he would enlighten the incoming medical students regarding health. He evidently told his students that the real key to health involved only five pieces:

#1 Get 8 hours of sleep

#2 Have a healthy diet

#3 Exercise 3 times per week

#4 Pay attention to your mental/brain health

#5 Don’t smoke

These pieces make individual and collective sense but the big point was that you have to do all five—doing only four out of five did not produce a particularly good outcome.

This “aha moment” helped Mr. Shyamalan evaluate the educational data differently and formulate a set of criteria that would produce the needed outcome in total.

This “aha moment” for Mr. Shyamalan was also an “aha moment” for me this morning. Certainly one of the most frustrating aspects of my work is getting folks to address all of the pieces—not to miss or add pieces but to address the totality of their program. I have known that a huge part of our success with children has been our understanding of and our commitment to working with the whole child and addressing the gestalt of that child. Frustration comes when families do some of their program along with “some of this and some of that.” This revelation really reinforced to me the need to do all of the pieces. I’m sure as I continue to give this more thought I will gain even more insights.

I apologize if everything I related about the interview is not totally accurate. I was, after all, trying to get ready to run to the office for my first Skype meeting but I think I’m being reasonably accurate. I will order Mr. Shyamalan’s book and let you know what I think.

NACD parents—please write down the five keys to health and do your best to follow all of them. I think this is right on. Take care of yourselves.

At Least We Know How to Stand in Line

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Hello from Paris! It’s 12:30 a.m. and I’m out enjoying the wild nightlife.

photo-13Not really. I’m sitting in a very hot, very humid, very closed Charles de Gaulle airport. It has been one of those very wonderful travel days. (Up at 3 a.m. to get to the airport in Bucharest, get on a flight to Paris, sit on the very hot, very humid plane for three hours before they decide it’s broken and they can’t fix it, wait around until after 8 p.m. to catch another flight. My connection left many hours ago. Eventually I will get on a plane to Salt Lake City, which I think is about another 12 hours or something. Oh, the joys of international travel. And let’s not talk about the endless lines, or if there is not a narrow corridor, generally masses of people converging on a target location.

Forgetting the mess of trying to get home, I have had a very good trip, seeing kids and families in London, Rome, and Bucharest. Got to discover “Old Bucharest” last night with one of our families and earlier in the week to visit their home outside of the city with another of our NACD families. I was really impressed by these folks. They are a lovely bright couple with a beautiful little boy named Tudor, who will be having his first birthday this weekend.

Happy Birthday, Tudor!

As always when I travel in Europe, I am impressed with how tuned in and informed many of the folks are to the rest of the world in comparison to many in the States; and I’m always so impressed by how bi- and multilingual so many of the people are. The wonderful young couple that I was privileged to get to know speak their native Romanian, French, English, and Greek. Perhaps more, but at least those, and they are economists not linguists. Most of the families I met with in Romania spoke very acceptable English.

Historically in the States we do a terrible job of not only teaching other languages, but also of perceiving that we really should do so. Growing up outside of Philadelphia, I had Italian friends whose parents or grandparents spoke Italian, but not one of them learned Italian. And that was often true of others who had family in their homes using their native languages. It would seem to be part of American/English language arrogance.

Languages as they are generally taught in our schools are really pretend, not designed with the intention of teaching you to actually be functional let alone fluent in the language. Typically schools start way too late and the curriculum constructed poorly. After my first year of Spanish in 9th grade, I had learned only one phrase, “Roberto es stupido.” It wasn’t just Roberto who was stupido; so was the teacher and the instruction. I had two years of Spanish in high school and another two years in college, but I think I learned more in a month in Spain than in four years at school. How many people do you know who took languages in school starting in junior or senior high who can actually speak the language? Fortunately many schools, particularly charter and private schools, are doing a much better job now of teaching other languages, starting in Kindergarten and, if possible, earlier and incorporating immersion as a significant focus, if not the focus, of the program.

Beyond the societal issues, research is showing that being bilingual helps build cognitive function and even can slow down Alzheimer’s. We as individuals in the US need to perceive the need to join and understand the rest of the world, to help our children understand that they live in a big world that they need to appreciate, understand, learn from, and join.

We in the US may not teach our children to pay attention to the rest of the world or to speak more than one language, read, or do math very well; but there is something our schools are good at, and evidently better at from my observations, than most of the European countries, and that is how to stand in line. Perhaps really teaching our children to speak another language or two from an early age might be a better focus. Reading would be nice too.

I hate standing in lines, any lines. Perhaps if more people were lousy at it we would find a way to minimize them—a better way. We need lots of better ways. Let’s keep creating them.

Parental Lesson #1: Talk to Your Children

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Could the key to your child’s success be as simple as talking to them? Could our educational and probably cognitive decline be at least in part attributable to less and less quality time that permits parents to simply talk to their children? I believe that the foundation of cognition–the ability to think, hold pieces of information together, and manipulate information–is based on auditory processing. Decades of measuring the processing abilities in children and adults as well as developing tools to help develop processing skills has demonstrated tens of thousands of times that your complexity of thought is built upon and limited to how much auditory information you can process and manipulate. We all have the potential to do better; we all have the ability to do better; we just need the opportunity to do better.

 

Related Links:

The NACD Simply Smarter Project

Simply Smarter Kids: Memory

The Simply Smarter System: Video Teaser

 

Related Articles:

TSI – Auditory Processing: What is It?

NACD Journal – Parenting 101: A Child’s Education Begins with Educating the Parents