The Creativity Crisis

Another brilliant article from Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman. Excerpt:

Plucker recently toured a number of such schools in Shanghai and Beijing. He was amazed by a boy who, for a class science project, rigged a tracking device for his moped with parts from a cell phone. When faculty of a major Chinese university asked Plucker to identify trends in American education, he described our focus on standardized curriculum, rote memorization, and nationalized testing. “After my answer was translated, they just started laughing out loud,” Plucker says. “They said, ‘You’re racing toward our old model. But we’re racing toward your model, as fast as we can.’ ”

Newsweek link here

NYTimes: The Moral Life of Babies

Good Babies... Nice Babies... Moral-Baby Experiments...

Here is an article by Yale's Paul Bloom

TED talk: Stuart Brown says play is more than fun

"Play has a biological place, just like sleep and dreams do."

TED Talk: Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity

Building a Better Teacher - NYTimes

A good teacher is valuable and undefinable by most. S/he is both knowledgeable and adept at transferring that knowledge to others who may not be so inclined. Elizabeth Green's article, "Building a Better Teacher," that appeared in the New York Times' March 7, 2010 edition, explores those who are trying to pinpoint what an effective teacher is and how to transform that knowledge into new information and techniques in which to train teachers.

I find this sort of research interesting and frustrating. Interesting, because it is able to identify what we need to do differently for our children in a way that is doable. Frustrating, because public school are part of an often large system and can't change and adapt nimbly enough to reflect the science behind education. Which seems ridiculous. But time after time we are faced with examples of clear research that should inform how we do things but is instead greeted with ambivalence, ignorance and/or resistance. Our education system should reflect the current knowledge as it is its job to teach it.

Here is the article.

This Emotional Life

This 3 part series explores the emotional brain exploring such topics as depression, PTSD, love, attraction, autism, bonding, fear, anger, happiness, etc. I think this series was thought provoking and informative. Although parent/child issues (a lot about bonding) are mostly addressed in "Episode 1: Family, Friends & Lovers," I found all three parts equally important as they all delve into the science behind who we are as emotional beings and what that means for us and those we interact with. Hopefully, the understanding gained from programs like these will lead to greater empathy towards those facing emotional problems.

Here is the blurb provided on their website about the series:

The Emmy Award-winning team of Vulcan Productions and the producers of NOVA have created a three-part series that explores improving our social relationships, learning to cope with depression and anxiety, and becoming more positive, resilient individuals.The series was produced by Kunhardt McGee Productions.

Harvard psychologist and best-selling author of Stumbling on Happiness, Professor Daniel Gilbert, talks with experts about the latest science on what makes us “tick” and how we can find support for the emotional issues we all face.

Each episode weaves together the compelling personal stories of ordinary people and the latest scientific research along with revealing comments from celebrities like Chevy Chase, Larry David, Alanis Morissette, Robert Kennedy, Jr., and Richard Gere.

And here is the link to the series' page where you can watch all three episodes and learn more about the subject matter.

Neil deGrasse: "It's about: How do you think?"

The following is an excerpt from an interview that Neil deGrasse gave NPR's Linda Holmes:

LH: Do you think that's the fundamental problem, is lack of curiosity?

NdT: Yes. Something we all have as kids and is beaten out of us as adults. Parents come up to me, "How do I get my kids interested in science?" They're already interested in science. Just stop beating it out of them.

LH: How do you think it gets beaten out of them?

NdT: Because we tell them to shut up and sit down after spending a year telling them how to walk and talk. We teach them how to walk and talk, and they start touching things -- "Oh, don't touch that, Junior. Sit down. Stop making noise. Stop banging on the pots and pans." Every one of those is an experiment. It's an experiment in acoustics. But you don't want your pots dirty, so you tell them to stop.

You're afraid your dish might break, so you tell them to stop playing with the china. Well, what's the cost of replacing your dish? A few dollars. If it's expensive, maybe twenty dollars. Why is it that you don't spend that, but you'll easily write a check to send your kid to some fancy school for thirty or forty thousand dollars a year? "Oh, because at the end, they'll have the degree from this school." It ain't about the degree." It's about: How do you think? That doesn't have to come from an institution, it comes from your trajectory through life and whether your appetite for learning, whether your urge to query the unfolding of nature around you is nurtured or quelled. That's the difference. "Squashed." "Quelled" is too calm. "Squashed."

What happens, the kid goes and plays in the mud. "Don't play in the mud; you'll get your clothes ..." There's bugs in the mud. That's kinda cool. They turn over a rock. "You'll get dirt on your clothes." There's millipedes under the rock. Let the kid find the millipedes. Plucks the -- off the rose -- "Don't break the rose like that; that's a rose." No, they want to see what's inside the rose; it's kinda interesting. The middle is not the same as the outside. Let the experiment run its course.

LH: So the people who are incurious adults had their natural curiosity, according to this theory ...

NdT: They don't know that they're not curious. They're just trying to protect their home. They don't want it to get messy. They don't want it to be noisy.

Who is it that we say are the best kids in the class? The ones that shut up and pay attention to the teacher, not the ones who are jumping up and down and breaking things. Kids should be allowed to break stuff more often. That's a consequence of exploration. Exploration is what you do when you don't know what you're doing. That's what scientists do every day. If a scientist already knew what they were doing, they wouldn't be discovering anything, because they already knew what they were doing.

This is a fundamental disconnect between what's going on in the educational system and what it takes to be a scientist. So the system does not promote interest in science. People who are scientists today are scientists in spite of the system, typically, not because of it.

LH: So there's a lack of support in the educational system for science, but not necessarily in the ways people would think about.

NdT: That's correct. There's a lack of support for scientific curiosity. There's a curriculum, there's a book ...

LH: And increasingly, standardized testing.

NdT: You learn, and they test you, and you need a high score on the test, and the teacher only likes the kids who get the high score and the kids who are quiet while they're teaching, because they're the well-behaved ones. What are we promoting in society? Well-behaved automatons that spew back what they learned in a book. That's not science. You can get a parrot to do that. Give me somebody who sees -- now this could get dangerous, right? Somebody who sees a wall outlet and wants to stick a wire into it to find out what happens. So you don't want kids dying from their experiments, so yes, there's a certain oversight as a parent you have to exercise. But any sensible parent would know what those limits are. I would claim that those limits are much higher than what are normally granted the behavior of chidren.

LH: It's interesting, because I think there is a popular perception that kids aren't learning science, and it's interesting to hear the perspective that that has little to do with learning specific scientific information, because I think a lot of times, you'll hear, "They need to be in school more hours, more months of the year..."

NdT: And I don't have a criticism of that. My problem is not that you're learning things rather than thoughts -- how to think. That's not the problem. It's that we believe that that's the measure of what it is to be educated. That's the problem. It's an aspect of what it is to be educated; it's not the measure of things.

LH: The quantity of information that you have.

NdT: And that's what the school system tends to cherish, not only in the curriculum, but in who learns it. That's why you have kids with their straight-A averages embossed on their jackets, and you're supposed to be impressed that they got A's. And no one seems to ask, "Well, tell us your insights about world affairs. Tell us your deepest thoughts about the nature of mathematics." "Oh, we didn't learn that in school." That's the reply.

LH: "They told me it wasn't going to be on the test."

NdT: "They told me it wasn't going to be on the test." "Oh, I should know that -- I got straight A's." See, the measure of what they should know comes to them from their grade, not from the act of gaining insight itself. So I don't ... I'm going to ... it's not time for me to do it yet. I'm saving up for it.

LH: Saving up for what?

NdT: Saving up my energies to make that case. I mean, it's in this interview now, but I'm not ready to make that why I show up on television. There's still some universe things I want to get off the table.

LH: But ultimately, that's your bigger agenda.

NdT: I'm going to be in your face.

LH: You're going to be the pro-curiosity guy.

NdT: I'm going to be back in your face. That's right.

Here is a link to the Science Friday that Neil deGrasse did with Ira Flatow that also discusses how to encourage science literacy and curiosity in our children.