+ Kids Need to Learn Manners, Says a Pediatrician

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Perri Klass, MD, writes in the NY Times that she as a pediatrician doesn’t call children “rude” or even describe them that way in her medical records.

But she does make judgements, she says, and so do all pediatricians.

Finding “Miss Manners’ Guide to Rearing Perfect Children,” by Judith Martin very useful, she called her to ask why Martin feels so strongly that manners are at the heart of the whole parental enterprise.

Martin said, “Every infant is born adorable but selfish and the center of the universe.”  It’s the parent’s job to teach that “there are other people, and other people have feelings.”

Writes Klass:

The conversations that every pediatrician has, over and over, about ‘limit setting’ and ‘consistently praising good behavior’ are conversations about manners.

And when you are in the exam room with a child who seems to have none, you begin to wonder what is going on at home and at school, and questions of family dysfunction or neurodevelopmental problems begin to cross your mind.

Dr Barbara Howard, an assistant professor of pediatrics at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and an expert on behavior and development, tells Klass that a child’s manners are a perfectly appropriate topic to raise at a pediatric visit.

Howard says

It has a huge impact on people’s lives — why shouldn’t you bring it up?  Do they look you in the eye?  If you stick your hand out do they shake it?  How do they interact with the parents; do they interrupt, do they ask for things, do they open Mommy’s purse and take things out?

She suggests that the whole “manners” concept might seem a little out of date; cast it as “social skills.”  These days, “social skills” are a very hot topic.  They are necessary for success in school; they affect how you do on the playground, in the classroom, in the workplace.

Social skills are a profound set of challenges that complicate the lives of families living with children on the autism spectrum.  Such children have great difficulty learning social codes, deciphering subtle body language or tone of voice, and catching on to the rules of the game.

Therapy for these children can include systematic training in social skills.  Sometimes the training uses scripts for common human interactions.

“You Can Teach This Stuff”

One message that comes through is that “you can teach this stuff,” says Howard, “and we maybe aren’t teaching it as well as we should to children who are developing normally.”

Of course, one of the long-term consequences of being a rude child is that you become a rude adult.  Perhaps even a rude doctor.  There are bullies on the playground and bullies in the workplace.

It’s always disconcerting, writes Klass, to see an adult with 20years or more of professional practice under their belts, who still sees the world only in terms of his own wants, needs and emotions.  I want that so give it to me; I am angry so I need to hit; I am wounded so I must howl.

Klass likes Miss Manners’s approach because it lets a parent respect a child’s intellectual and emotional privacy –  I’m not telling you to like your teacher; I’m telling you to treat her with courtesy.  I’m not telling you that you can’t hate Tommy; I’m telling you that you can’t hit Tommy.

Your feelings, little one, are your own private business; your behavior, on the other hand, is public.

It is a counterintuitive lesson, and the first big one, that there are other people out there whose feelings must be considered.  And it affects a child’s most basic moral development. 

For a child, just as for adults, manners represent a strategy for getting along in life; they also offer a chance of successful intellectual engagement with the business of being human. 

Klass says

As a pediatrician, I worry about the trajectories of children’s growth and development: measuring a baby’s head size, weighing a toddler, asking about the language skills of a preschooler.  Manners are another side of the journey every child makes from helplessness to autonomy.

And a child who learns to manage a little courtesy, even under the pressure of a visit to the doctor, is a child who is operating well in the world, a child with a positive prognosis.

source: Perri Klass’s article in the Science Times on 1/13/09.  www.nytimes.com

tutoring in Columbus OH:   Adrienne Edwards  614-579-6021   or email  aedwardstutor@columbus.rr.com 

+ Lead-Exposed Kids Prone to Brain Loss, Violence Later

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May 27 (Bloomberg) — This is Rob Waters’s article:

Young children exposed to high levels of lead 25 years ago were more likely as adults to have smaller- than-normal brain structures that regulate impulses and to commit violent crimes, studies found.

Lead is known to damage the developing brains of children, robbing them of IQ points and causing mental retardation in severe cases. In the U.S., lead was banned from house paint in 1978 and phased out of gasoline by 1996. Yet the toxic metal lingers on the walls in millions of dwellings built before the 1950s, especially in poor communities like those in Cincinnati where these studies were conducted.

The findings, released today in two papers in the journal PLOS Medicine, came from a study of children exposed to lead at least 25 years ago. The research documents the long-term behavioral damage from lead and, for the first time, the effects on key brain structures, said Kim Dietrich, professor of environmental health at the University of Cincinnati, and a co- author of both studies.

The results “provide a clear warning sign that early lead exposure disrupts brain development in ways that are likely to be permanent,” said David Bellinger, a neurology professor at Harvard Medical School, in an editorial that accompanied the two studies. He was not involved in the research.

Dietrich and his colleagues began the research by recruiting pregnant women in inner-city Cincinnati from 1979- 1984. The researchers measured the lead in the blood of the women during pregnancy and of their children throughout their youth.

Paint Chips

Most of the families lived in rental housing or public housing projects where lead paint often flaked off the walls, joining the dust on the floor. The babies would put it in their mouths as part of “normal hand-to-mouth behavior we see in all kids between 6 months and 2 years of age,” Dietrich said in a telephone interview today.

Two decades later, Dietrich tracked the arrest records of 250 of the participants, by then ages 19 to 24, and found that the more lead they had in their blood as children, the greater the likelihood they were arrested as adults. That was especially true of arrests for violent offenses such as assault, rape and domestic violence.

Scientists have changed their views about what level of lead in a child’s bloodstream constitutes a threat. When Dietrich began his study, the threshold for danger was 30 micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood, he said. In 1991, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control slashed that number by two- thirds and set 10 micrograms of lead as the hazard level.

Blood Lead Levels

In Dietrich’s group, the average blood lead level of all the children in their early years was 13.4 micrograms. For each additional 5 micrograms of lead in their blood during their first six years of life, the chance that they would commit a violent crime after they turned 18 rose by 48 percent, the research found.

In the second study, collaborating researchers at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital used MRI imaging devices to map and measure the brains of 157 of the people who had been part of Dietrich’s project. The scientists focused on regions of the frontal lobe and cerebral cortex known to be involved in executive function, impulse control and regulation of hostility and aggression.

Though their technique was capable of detecting whether these areas were larger or smaller than expected, the scanning found only brain loss, said Kim Cecil, an imaging specialist at the hospital.

`All Loss’

“It was all loss, no region became larger,” Cecil said in a telephone interview today. “The higher their blood lead levels when they were children, the greater their brain loss” as adults.

When lead gets into the bloodstream and reaches the brain, it takes the place of calcium inside cells, Cecil said. It may trigger a loss of brain volume by accelerating a normal process of planned cell death, she said.

“We don’t know if the damage occurred all at once during a critical time period or from many years of exposure,” she said.

The research also showed that males were far more likely than females to lose brain mass, Cecil said.

One possible explanation, she said, is that estrogen “offers some protection against cell destruction from lead.”

While the banning of lead from paint and gasoline and efforts by public health officials to safely remove lead paint from older buildings have lowered the number of children with elevated lead levels in their blood, there is still much work to be done, Dietrich said.

Today’s studies “are a warning from the past of things we need to avoid in the future,” Dietrich said. The threat “hasn’t gone away. We’ve learned that lead’s toxicities are expressed in a variety of ways and at lower levels of exposure than we ever would have imagined 10 years ago.”

source: this is Rob Waters’s article on May 27, 2008 at www.bloomberg.com

tutoring in Columbus OH:   Adrienne Edwards   614-579-6021   or email   aedwardstutor@columbus.rr.com

+ Yoga Calms Classrooms…

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This is Kathryn Nelson’s article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune:

There were no leotards or expensive yoga mats in this exercise room — not even a tidy floor mat to stretch on.

Instead, this group of yoga novices was delving into the soothing art of Yoga Calm in their suit jackets, nylons and name badges in the middle of a Minneapolis school library.

The Minneapolis School District employees were learning how to calm their rambunctious and sometimes challenging students using a rather novel method: yoga.

Their instructors, fellow employees-turned-yoga-gurus, are hoping to change the way schools think about educating their students, one downward-dog stretch at a time.

The instructors, Julie Hurtubise and Kathy Flaminio, have trained more than 500 staff members in 37 Minneapolis schools during their yearlong sabbatical.

Going school to school, the pair instructs fellow district employees on Yoga Calm, an offshoot of traditional yoga that emphasizes the connection between mind and body and focuses primarily on young people.

District employees in turn use the techniques in their classrooms, teaching proper breathing, calming stretches and self-affirmations to their pupils, usually during daily classroom sessions.

Though skeptics may scoff at the approach, Hurtubise and Flaminio say they’ve seen some pretty amazing results.

Aside being more limber, Flaminio said kids are calmer, more focused and less likely to act aggressively. Teachers are also using yoga to sooth students before tests or counseling sessions, she said.

Yoga “gives them an ability to participate and problem-solve in different ways,” Hurtubise said. “It gives them skills and strength and confidence for all students.”

And the relaxing exercises don’t just apply to learning environments. Students are also using their yoga skills outside the classroom.

“So many kids come from such chaotic places, but we can help them get ready to learn and be part of a classroom,” Hurtubise said. “It just develops all sorts of skills.”

It’s proved helpful for one student whose father died and whose mother is now terminally ill. For others, it provides an outlet for personal frustrations.

“All kinds of kids can find strength in this,” Hurtubise said. “They see themselves differently and the world differently.”

The focus is on stillness, and control.

The yoga instructors met by chance just last year. Both were interested in taking a year-long, partially paid sabbatical from their district jobs as an occupational therapist and social worker — both working with special-needs students — and both loved practicing yoga.

Together, they decided to design a low-cost and relatively simple class curriculum based on Yoga Calm, which was developed in Oregon by a husband-and-wife team of teachers — Lynea Gillen and Jim Gillen, who provided expert advice and guidance for the program here.

Now, Hurtubise and Flaminio hope their approach can be spread to other school districts around the nation.

Much of the program focuses on the core yoga principles of stillness, listening, grounding, strength and community. No expensive yoga mats or exercising equipment are needed. In an era of annual budget cuts, teachers are finding relief in an effective curriculum that doesn’t stretch their already tight budgets.

Desiree Hoggatt, a special education teacher at Lucy Craft Laney Community School, was one of the dozen instructors learning Yoga Calm during a recent Monday program.

Hoggatt, who has taught for 12 years, said she was looking forward to helping her special-needs students learn yoga techniques.

“I’m looking to help relax the kids,” she said. “Yoga gives [students with learning disabilities] an outlet for their extra energy.”

Though the district seems enthused about the work of Hurtubise and Flaminio, Yoga Calm has sparked some debate as well. Traditional yoga has roots in Buddhism, causing some community members to question the relationship between religion, public schools and Yoga Calm.

Though Yoga Calm conveys no underlying message of religion, the pair said, a few parents and students have questioned the teaching. The yoga team often invites those with qualms to their instructional meetings so they can observe the curriculum.

With the end of their sabbatical quickly approaching, Hurtubise and Flaminio are trying to figure out their plans, as both seem torn between continuing their yoga work and returning to their school jobs.

“It’s been a great year and we’ve learned a lot, but we feel like it’s just started,” Hurtubise said. “[Yoga] is really just in little pockets here and there. We’d like to see an overall shift, which isn’t easy to create.”

At the very least, the pair say they will continue “teaching teachers” Yoga Calm.

“We hope to bring it to all of the district,” Flaminio said. “It’s the first time in my life where I feel like all of these things are coming together.”

source:Kathryn Nelson wrote the piece for the Minneapolis Tribune on 5/20/08.  www.startribune.com    Nelson is a University of Minnesota student on assignment for the Star Tribune.

tutoring in Columbus OH:   Adrienne Edwards   614-579-6021   or email  aedwardstutor@columbus.rr.com

+ The Blank Stare: Developing Foundational Cognitive Structures

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Betty K. Garner writes in “Educational Leadership,” the Journal of the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, that unresponsive students may need us to help them develop cognitive structures.  She says it’s never too late.

Garner describes three operative categories of cognitive structures:

•  Comparative cognitive structures  help us process information; they identify how bits of information are alike and different; they include recognition, memorization, conservation of constancy, classification, spatial orientation, temporal orientation, and metaphorical thinking.
• Symbolic representation structures  help us transform information into culturally acceptable coding systems such as verbal and nonverbal language, mathematics, music and rhythm, graphics, and other communication systems.
• Logical reasoning structures  – such as deductive and inductive reasoning, analysis, systhesis and evaluation –  help us process information and make it possible for us to generate NEW information.

The article addresses the first of these categories: comparative cognitive structures.

These are so basic that we assume everyone has them.  But Garner’s case studies established that many middle and high school students had yet to develop cognitive structures:  they offered blank stares when asked to make “obvious” connections.

The cause of such a deficit might be within the child’s family: there is often little real communication between adults and children.  Another causative factor is excessive passive exposure to media.  For these and other reasons, children come to school without the necessary cognitive tools.

How are such capabilities developed? 

People develop cognitive structures through reflective awareness (becoming purposefully and reflectively aware of the information their senses take in), and visualization (mentally representing this information).

Students take in sensory information every waking minute and filter it through their values, beliefs and feelings.  Many of them don’t recognize what they are doing.  They receive all information as if ithey were seeing and hearing it for the first time each time.

When teachers encounter resistance to learning, they need to identify whether cognitive structures are lacking; if necessary, they should intervene to help students develop them.  Garner says some students need our help to become reflectively aware. 

We need to teach them first of all how to systematically collect sensory data. 

Recognition

The ability to identify a match or fit between two or more pieces of information is one of the first cognitive structures to develop.  An infant recognizes his mother’s face: it is not those faces, it is HER face.

We often take recognition for granted, but it’s more sophisticated than we think and absolutely necessary for most professionals, including doctors or air traffic controllers.

Many children entering school perceive everything as “stuff.”  Begin to teach them to observe.

For example, a teacher writes four sentences on the board and asks, “What do you notice?”  These children have been helped to develop the ability to notice things, and so they say “Each sentence starts with a capital letter;” “The punctuation at the end of one is different because it’s a question;” “There is a pronoun in the second sentence.”

They have begun to be little detectives.  They are recognizing what they learned before and remembering it.  They are even beginning to create connections and make up rules in their minds.

Garner suggests that before beginning a lesson, a teacher place relevant materials or objects where students can see them, and ask “What do you see?  What do you notice?”  As students become reflectively aware of sensory data, the way is being paved for a closer fit when they encounter similar data again.

Memorization

The ability to store information depends on other cognitive structures to classify information for access, contextualize it in time and space, label it, and identify specific logical or metaphorical connections, writes Garner.

Strengthen this ability: encourage students to reflect on how they make connections, identify patterns, formulate rules, and pull out abstract principles to create meaning.

Too often students confuse imitation with learning.  Imitation is a preliminary form of memorization in which they depend on short-term memory and then simply imitate what has been modeled.

A student might memorize a spelling word but not be able to define it, use it in his own writing, or recognize it when he’s reading.

He should be encouraged to visualize and illustrate the word’s meaning; he should try to classify relationships between his spelling words and other words.  This way, he’s actually using his memory to create meaning for himself.

“Conservation of Constancy”

This term refers to the ability to understand how some characteristics of a thing can change while others stay the same.  For example, to see what changes and what stays the same when a suffix or prefix is added to a word, or how 1/2 and 6/12 can be equal.

This is one of the most basic cognitive structures.  It is crucial for learning: assessments are based on the assumption that students can conserve constancy.   Students who lack this cognitive structure fail to benefit from their experiences. 

Because their perceptions are limited to concrete sensory data and literal interpretations, they force information into preconceived notions.  Without conservation of constancy it is difficult for students to think abstractly, plan, problem solve, discern relevance or transfer information from one situation to another. 

Teachers should frequently ask students to compare how things are alike and different, both at a physical and an abstract level. 

For example, one teacher assisting his students in drawing a scale map of Africa first gave them a map.  He asked them “What do you notice about this map of Africa?” 

It was big, they said, had lots of colors, the countries were different shapes.  Then  conversations began, about how the size of a country might affect its political power or its wealth; how languages might be different; how do they get along.

Instead of giving them a map on which to label the countries, he had them draw the map to scale, asking what would stay the same and what would change.  The size of things would change, they decided, but the shapes would stay the same, as would their relationship to longitude and latitude.

Classification

The ability to identify, compare and order information to create meaning on the basis of relationships enables students to process information so it is accessible to them.

To classify, students need to apply criteria for whether or not an object belongs to a set.  Students can begin to develop these skills by manipulating real objects.  Only after they understand the principle of membership in a set can they classify abstract information. 

Garner has students work in small groups with an assortment of 20 to 30 small objects (most of which they contribute from their desks or personal belongings).  She observes what the students do: some begin to  handle the objects, other just wait for instructions.

After a short time she asks “How would you make sense of this stuff?” and they usually look confused.  She encourages them to think about how they might be organized.  Gradually, they begin putting all the pencils in a pile, keys in another, and so on.

At this point, she explains that they have worted objects according to like kind, which is the most basic way of classifying them.  Then she tells them to think of 15 or so other ways to classify them.  They look at her with disbelief, she says, but gradually they begin listing the most obvious criteria first: materials, or color.  Then they think of country of origin, purpose, cost.  The class discusses how they use classification in everyday life, and then how those experiences would be different if no classification existed. 

In this way, without using preprinted graphic organizers or preset criteria, the students have discovered patterns based on their own criteria.  They have not been deprived of the opportunity to develop their own cognitive structures.  

Garner feels that problems with the classification structure are the reason many students seem to make little progress with content (e.g. punctuation rules), even though they encounter it in worksheets to be filled out year after year.

Spatial Orientation

The ability to identify relationships among objects and places has far-reaching implications for learning and life.  Students who are disorganized, confuse right and left or cardinal directions, or form letters backwards problably need help with this cognitive structure.

There are three kinds of space we must commonly deal with: physical space, representational space, and abstract space.

Physical space involves 3-dimensional objects and their relationship to us and to one another: students with difficulty judging spatial relationships in the physical world usually have difficulty  grasping more abstact spatial relationships. 

Representational space uses two-dimensional symbols and graphics to identify relationships: writing uses directional lines to form letters and numbers; math uses representational space in geopmetry, number systems and  statistics; PE offers representations of plays on a field; spatial elements are integral to design in art.

Abstract space uses mental images to represent spatial relationships: mentally mapping a trip; visualizing molecular structure and planetary orbits; boundaries and topography in social studies.

Awareness of spatial relationships can be strengthened by naming specific locations when giving directions (“put the book on the lower left shelf”), or asking students to note the location of something before they talk about it  (“in the middle left of the picture I noticed a green tree; the tree is smaller than the one on the right and they both have shadows under them”). 

In this way students become more reflectively aware of what their senses are telling them — and are also developing language skills.

Temporal Orientation

The ability to process information by comparing events in relationship to when they  occur involves more than just telling time.  It is essential for planning, organizing, communicating and record keeping, as well as understanding most content areas.

When we tell children to “think before you act,” we assume, says Garner, that they have temporal orientation.  This cognitive structure helps students control impulses by inserting time for reflection between stimulus and response.

Students without temporal orientation are often confused when presented with an unfamiliar task.  They don’t know where to start because they can’t plan ahead or systematically sequence their actions.  Teachers can help at many points think actively about what’s happening now,  what has happened before, and what will happen in the future.  Every class will offer opportunities to stop and notice the implications of time on the subject or object at hand.

Metaphorical thinking

This truly means emphasizing similarities – while overlooking differences between things. 

It is a form of comparative thinking, and equips students to generate fresh insights through making unusual connections.  Many creative student will express their understanding as a metaphor.

Language is peppered with metaphors.  Your students will delight in finding them and discussing the appopriateness of the imagery they contain.  Let young writers come up with their own, which may be more effective than some famous writer’s choice.  And in science and math, metaphors can make all the difference in grasping a new fact or situation.

…

Garner writes that although it seems most efficient simply to cover material in order to pass tests, it may be truly more efficient to equip students for ongoing learning by using the everyday curriculum to fortify cognitive structures. 

“Investing teaching energy in cognitive structures helps students learn how to learn.”

Quick Tips

• Build caring relationships with students.  Struggling learners will work with you if they trust you and know you care.  Spend time with them and listen to them.
• Encourage students to be reflectively aware.  Prompt them to notice what their senses are telling them.  Encourage them to suspend judgement and give themselves time to process information.
• Urge students to use their imaginations.  When students can see (or hear, feel, taste or smell) information in their minds, they can carry it with them when the information is out of sensory range.
• Maximize each lesson.  Analyze content, activities, and assessments to identify which cognitive tools the lesson draws on and how the undertaking might develop cognitive structures.
• Use open ended prompts, such as “What questions come to mind as you think about this?’ – ”What kind of pattern do you notice?” —  ”What do you wish were easier?  Why?” (encourage elaboration without giving verbal or nonverbal cues as to which responses might be correct) – ”What do you wonder about?” – ”How is this like life?” —  ”How would you explain this to someone?” 

source: article by Betty K Garner in “Educational Leadership,” the journal of the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, March 2008 issue. www.ascd.org

tutoring in Columbus OH:   Adrienne Edwards   614-579-6021   or email  aedwardstutor@columbus.rr.com

+ One-Eyed Intruder in Childrens’ Bedrooms

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Tara Parker-Pope, in the NY Times, writes: 

Here’s one simple way to keep your children healthy: Ban the bedroom TV.

By some estimates, half of American children have a television in their bedroom; one study of third graders put the number at 70 percent. And a growing body of research shows strong associations between TV in the bedroom and numerous health and educational problems.

Children with bedroom TVs score lower on school tests and are more likely to have sleep problems. Having a television in the bedroom is strongly associated with being overweight and a higher risk for smoking.

One of the most obvious consequences is that the child will simply end up watching far more television — and many parents won’t even know.

In a study of 80 children in Buffalo, ages 4 to 7, the presence of a television in the bedroom increased average viewing time by nearly nine hours a week, to 30 hours from 21. And parents of those children were more likely to underestimate their child’s viewing time.

“If it’s in the bedroom, the parents don’t even really know what the kids are watching,” said Leonard H. Epstein, professor of pediatrics and social and preventive medicine at the School of Medicine and Biomedical Science at the State University of New York at Buffalo. “Oftentimes, parents who have a TV in the kids’ bedrooms have TVs in their bedrooms.”

Moreover, once the set is in the child’s room, it is very likely to stay. “In our experience, it is often hard for parents to remove a television set from a child’s bedroom,” Dr. Epstein said.

Dr. Epstein and his colleagues put monitoring devices on bedroom TVs and all the other sets in the house. In one two-year study, the devices in half the homes were programmed to reduce children’s overall viewing time by half. (Children had to use a code to turn on any TV in the home, and the code stopped working once the allocated TV time for the week had been reached.)

Although all the children in the study gained weight as they grew, relative body mass index dropped among those with mandatory time limits. The researchers found that cutting into TV time did not increase exercise levels. Instead, the children snacked less, lowering their consumption more than 100 calories a day. The study, published Monday in The Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, did not break down the data by bedroom television viewing.

But in 2002, the journal Pediatrics reported that preschool children with bedroom TVs were more likely to be overweight. In October, the journal Obesity suggested that the risk might be highest for boys. In a study among French adolescents, boys with a bedroom television were more likely than their peers to have a larger waist size and higher body fat and body mass index.

The French study also showed, not surprisingly, that boys and girls with bedroom TVs spent less time reading than others.

Other data suggest that bedroom television affects a child’s schoolwork. In a 2005 study in The Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, researchers looked at the television, computer and video game habits of almost 400 children in six Northern California schools for a year. About 70 percent of the children in the study had their own TV in the bedroom; they scored significantly and consistently lower on math, reading and language-arts tests. Students who said they had computers in their homes scored higher.

Why a bedroom television appears to have such a pronounced impact is unclear. It may be that it’s a distraction during homework time or that it interferes with sleep, resulting in poorer performance at school. It could also suggest less overall parental involvement.

Another October study, published in Pediatrics, showed that kindergartners with bedroom TVs had more sleep problems. Those kids were also less “emotionally reactive,” meaning that they weren’t as moody or as bothered by changes in routine. While that sounds like a good thing, the researchers speculated that having a TV in the bedroom dampened the intensity with which a child responded to stimulation.

Another study of more than 700 middle-school students, ages 12 to 14, found that those with bedroom TVs were twice as likely to start smoking — even after controlling for such risk factors as having a parent or friend who smokes or low parental engagement. Among kids who had a TV in the bedroom 42 percent smoked; among the others, the figure was 16 percent.

“I think it matters quite a lot,” Dr. Epstein said. “There are all kinds of problems that occur when kids have TVs in their bedroom.”

So while many parents try to limit how much television and what type of shows their children watch, that may be less than half the battle. Where a child watches is important too.

source: this is an article by Tara Parker-Pope in the NY Times on 3/4/08  www.nytimes.com

tutoring in Columbus OH:   Adrienne Edwards   614-579-6021   or email   aedwardstutor@columbus.rr.com

+ Reaching Dropouts With New Media

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Los Angeles educators, facing unrelenting pressure to raise low high school graduation rates, are turning to YouTube, MySpace, test messaging, and radio waves to reach students at risk of dropping out of school.  They also hope to lure back thousands who have already left.

The LA Unified School District is the nation’s second largest, with 708,000 students.  It is believed to be the first to use social networking sites and text-messaging communications as a vital part of a dropout-reduction strategy.

The primary messengers to these at-risk kids will be students who have come back to finish their diplomas after abandoning school, said Debra Duardo, the director of LA Unified’s dropout-prevention and -recovery program. 

They will post video testimonials on YouTube, and build groups on popular MySpace message boards to spread the word about their own experiences and the alternatives that exist for earning a diploma.  It does not usually require a return to one of the district’s giant four-year high schools, for example.

There is a list of at least 17,000 dropouts to recover.  The district’s graduation rates have been under fire — especially since the mayors campaign last year to gain some control over the school system.

“The new media approach is very creative and thoughtful and should reach kids where they are,” said Russlyn Ali, the executive director of the Education Trust-West, an Oakland-based research and advocacy group that supports increased rigor in high schools for all students. 

“For the district to take this on is a very big deal, but where they run a risk is if it ends up being dropout recovery for the purpose of recovery only and not for getting these kids meaningful diplomas that prepare them for college and work.”

Independents studies, including Education Week‘s Diplomas Count report — put the ditrict’s graduation rate at 50%.  A Harvard University study showed that just 39% of Latino and 47 % of African-American students in the district who should have graduated in 2002 actually did so.  But  District officials say those figures are too low: they cite 25.5% as their latest dropout figure.

The goal is to reduce the dropout rate by 5% this year.

The outreach enterprise is called My Future, My Decision.  It builds on a previous anti-dropout campaign, in which district leaders hired 80 special counselors to work in the middle and high schools where the largest numbers of students are concentrated.

These “diploma-project advisers” identify which students are most in danger of dropping out and then work with those children, meet their parents, and design an individual graduation plan for them.  The plan may include catching up on credits by taking online courses, enrolling in classes at a community college, or switching to an alternative placement such as contiuation high schools, which are small schools for students older than 16 who may need evening courses and other accomodations if they work or have children.

The advisers also go door to door to find students who have already left.  But the limitations of that approach are what drove district leaders to look for alternative ways to reach them.

They sought advice from the peers of the teenagers they most want to reach.  “What they told us is that we needed to be online, on the social networking sites that they use to communicate with each other,” said Ms. Duardo.

Ads on two of LA’s youth-oriented radio stations have already been launched and will continue for several weeks.  An ad campaign is also under way to get youths to send a text message from their cellphones to a number that triggers an immediate return of messages to their phones — written in abbreviated “text speak” — with tidbits on the higher earning power of high school graduates and referrals to the district’s dropout prevention Web site.

 source: Teacher Magazine online (www.teachermagazine.org) on 10/18/07

tutoring in Columbus OH:   Adrienne Edwards   614-579-6021   or email  aedwardstutor@columbus.rr.com  

   

+ Fear is Easiest Emotion to Perceive in Others

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New research has found that the brain processes images of fearful faces faster than images of neutral or happy faces, according to a study by Vanderbilt reasearchers.

“There are reasons to believe that the brain has evolved mechanisms to detect things in the environment that signal threat.  One of those signals is a look of fear,” says  David Zaid, co-author (along with Eunice Yang and Randolph Blake) of the new study.  It will appear in the November 2007 issue of Emotion.

Researchers set out to determine if we become aware of fearful, neutral or happy expressions at the same speed, or if one of those expressions reaches our awareness faster than the others.  Because humans process facial information in less than 40 milliseconds, researchers had to find a way to slow down the speed at which subjects process it.

Yang, the lead author, realized that a technique being used in Blake’s lab might be a solution.  The technique, continuous flash suppression, keeps people from becoming aware of what they are seeing for up to 10 seconds.  Using this technique, the team had research subjects look at a screen through a viewer, similar to the eyepieces of a microscope, which allowed different images to be presented to each eye.

Many images were rapidly presented to one eye while a static image of a face was presented to the other.  The multiple images served as visual “noise”, suppressing the image of the face.  The subjects indicated when they first became aware of seeing a face, enabling the researchers to determine if the expression on the face had any impact on how quickly the subject became aware of it.

The subjects became aware of faces that had fearful expressions before neutral or happy faces, the team found.  They believe a brain area called the amygdala, which shortcuts the normal brain pathway for processing visual images, is responsible.

“The amygdala receives information before it goes to the cortex, which is where most visual information goes first.  We think the amygdala has some crude ability to process stimuli and that it can cue some other visual areas to what they need to focus on, said Zaid.

Zaid and his colleagues believe the eyes of the fearful face play a key role.  “Fearful eyes are a particular shape, where you get more of the whites of the eye showing,” he said.  “That may be the sort of simple feature that the amygdala can pick up on, because it’s only getting a fairly crude representation.  That fearful eye may be something that’s relatively hardwired in there.”

A surprising finding was that subjects perceived happy faces the slowest.

“What we believe is happening is that the happy faces signal safety.  If something is safe, you don’t have to pay attention to it,” said Zaid.

Next researchers will explore how this information influences our behavior.  “We are interested in exploring now what this means for behavior,” said Yang.  “Since these expressions are being processed without our awareness, do they affect behavior and decision making?  If so, how?”

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health.  Blake and Zaid are investigators at the Vanderbilt Kennedy Center for Research on Human Development.

source: www.sciencedaily.com; adapted from material provided by Vanderbilt University.

tutoring in Columbus OH:   Adrienne Edwards   614-579-6021   or email  aedwardstutor@columbus.rr.com

+ Why Did I DO That?! — The Subconscious Mind In Charge

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Psychologists at Yale altered people’s judgements of a stranger by handing them a cup of coffee.

College students, on their way to a lab to participate in a study, “bumped into” a lab assistant who was holding texbooks, a clipboard, papers and a cup of hot (or iced) coffee.  The lab assistant asked the students for a hand with the cup.

Students who had held a cup of iced coffee rated a hypothetical person they later read about as being much colder, less social and more selfish than did their fellow students, who had momentarily held a cup of hot liquid.

Although it seems improbable, studies such as this one are sending the message that the subconsious mind is “primed” in subtle ways we had never imagined.  People tidy up more thoroughly when there’s a faint tang of cleaning liquid in the air.  They become more competitive if there’s a briefcase in sight, more cooperative if they glimpse words like “dependable” and “support”. 

These studies demonstrate how everyday sights, smells and sounds can selectively activate goals or motives that people already have.

The new studies reveal a subconscious brain that is far more active, purposeful and independent than previously known, according to an article by Benedict Carey in the Science section of the NY Times.  Goals such as whether to eat or mate or order a latte are like neural software programs that can only be run one at a time.  The unconscious can — and will – run the one it chooses.

Have you ever wondered how you can be generous one moment, and petty the next?  Or behave rudely when you think you’re being polite?

“When it comes to our behavior from moment to moment, the big question is, ‘What to do next?’” said John A. Bargh, professor of psychology at Yale and co-author of the coffee study, which was presented at a recent psychology conference. 

“Well, we’re finding that we have these unconscious behavioral guidance systems that are continually furnishing suggestions through the day about what to do next, and the brain is considering and often acting on those, all before consious awareness.” 

He adds, “Sometimes those goals are in line with our conscious intentions and purposes, and sometimes they’re not.”

Psychological “Hot-Wiring”

Researchers who build these studies sometimes call  their method  psychological hot-wiring.  In a study at Stanford, participants played an investment game with an unseen opponent.  When there was a briefcase and a black leather portfolio at the end of the table, participants were far more cutthroat than when there was a backpack on the table.

In a Dutch experiment, undergraduates filled out a questionnaire while sitting in a cubicle with a pail of water in which there was a splash of citrus-scented cleaning fluid.  After a snack, these students covertly cleared away crumbs three time more often than a comparison group where there was no such scent.

Hank Aarts, a psychologist at Utrecht University and senior author of this study said, “That is a very big effect, and they really had no idea they were doing it.”

The brain appears to use the very same neural circuits to execute an unconscious act as it does a conscious one. These circuits are located in what used to be called the reptilian brain, well below the conscious areas of the brain.

Studies suggest a “bottom-up” decision-making process, in which the ventral pallidium is part of a circuit that first weighs the reward and decides, and then interacts with the higher-level, conscious regions later, says Dr. Chris Frith, professor of neuropsychology at University College, London, and author of “Making Up the Mind: How the Brain Creates our Mental World.”

Scientists have not yet pinpointed the exact neural regions that support conscious awareness, but there’s little doubt it involves the prefrontal cortex, the thin outer layer of tissue behind the forehead.  Experiments show that it can be the last neural area to know when a decision is made.

From an evolutionary perspective, the bottom-up order makes sense: the subcortical areas of the brain evolved first and would have had to help individuals fight, flee and scavenge well before the conscious “human” layers were added later.  Dr Bargh argues that in this sense, unconscious goals can be seen as open-ended, adaptive agents acting on behalf of the broad, genetically encoded aims.  They are automatic survival systems.

And there is more: several studies have shown that once covertly activated, an unconsious goal persists with the same determination as one we consiously pursue.  When study participants were primed to be cooperative, they were assiduous in their teamwork, helping others and sharing resources for the duration of games that lasted 20 minutes or longer.

Mark Schaller, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver says, “Sometimes nonconscious effects can be bigger in sheer magnitude than conscious ones, because we can’t moderate stuff we don’t have conscious access to, and the goal stays active.”

Researchers do not yet know how or when exactly unconscious drives may suddenly become conscious, or under which circumstances people are able to override hidden urges by force of will.  But at least we now know that, sometimes, our unconscious instincts can make us helpful and attentive to others!

sole source: article in Science Times (NYTimes) on 7/31/07 by Benedict Carey.

tutoring in Columbus OH:   Adrienne Edwards   614-579-6021   or aedwardstutor@columbus.rr.com

+ Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: OCD

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An article in Time Magazine by Jeffrey Kruger describes the difficulties that haunt a person with OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder).   He describes a man leaving work whose car bumps a pothole cover.  He had seen a child on a bike: had he hit the child?  The driver circles back and back and back for hours, checking everything around, before he can finally allow himself to complete the drive home.

A little anxiety is a good thing.  Cavemen needed to know there was no lion near the family cave.  They also needed to be able to imagine places the lion might be.  “There’s a creative, ‘what if’ quality to this thinking,” says clinical psychologist Jonathan Grayson of the Anxiety and Agoraphobia Treatment Center in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania.  “It’s evolutionarily valuable.” 

Seven million adults, teens and children in the US are now thought to have OCD in one form or another.  Most of them hide it.  Since one family member disabled by the disorder can destabilize an entire household, a single case can mean several collateral victims. 

Judith Rapaport, chief of child psyciatry at the National Institute of Mental Health and author of “The Boy Who Couldn’t Stop Washing”, says, “Having these traits is a universal experience.  You have to show long-standing interference with function, and that eliminates most people.” 

“Everyone has intrusive thoughts, but most people consider them meaningless and can move on with their lives,” asserts psychologist Sabine Wilhelm, associate professor at Harvard Medical School and director of the OCD clinic at Massachusetts General Hospital.  “For people with OCD, the thoughts become their lives.” 

OCD often masquerades as other things: depression, bipolar disorder, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism, even schizophrenia.

Since victims often conceal their problems for years, they ensure that no diagnosis, right or wrong, can begin to be made.  The average lag time between onset and diagnosis is thought to be 9 years; it is often as many as 8 years more before effective treatment is prescribed.  Entire childhoods, entire careers can be lost.

What Causes OCD? 

OCD is a neurochemical storm in the brain.  For years, diagnosticians had assumed it was caused by the almond-shaped structure called the amygdala.  Researchers now know that the orbital frontal cortex and the caudate nucleus (seated high in the brain), and the thalamus (lying deeper) are also players.

“These areas are linked along a circuit,” says Dr. Sanjaya Saxena, director of the OCD program at UC San Diego.  That particular wiring is supposed to regulate your response to the stimuli around you, including how anxious you are in the face of threatening or frustrating events.  “That circuit,” says Saxena, “is abnormally active in people with OCD.”

“OCD has had a slow research start, says Gerald Nestadt, co-director of the OCD clinic at Johs-Hopkins University.  But all that is changing.  A burst of new genetics studies is turning up insights; scanning technologies are pinpointing the parts of the brain that trigger the symptoms.  

Compelling, if controversial, research, has linked OCD to infection.  Investigators at the University of Chicago and the University of Washington studied a group of 144 children — 71% of whom were boys — who had tics or OCD.  All the kids, it turned out, were more than twice as likely to have had a strep infection in the previous three months.  For those with Tourette’s symptoms, the strep incidence was a whopping 13 times as great.  The tics and OCD are probably an autoimmune response, according to this theory.

Fixing OCD:  Options 

The first step, no matter how or when the disorder hits, is usually comparatively short-term behavioral therapy, using a technique known as exposure and response prevention (ERP).  In this method, OCD sufferers don’t try to avoid their source of anxiety but actually seek it out.  Eventually, the theory goes, emotional nerve endings grow desensitized to the stimulus.  The goal is to tough it out until that happens.

At the Obsessive Compulsive Foundation convention in Atlanta last summer, Jonathan Grayson offered some sufferers a quick taste of ERP.  He invited audience members with dirt and germ anxieties to come forward and sit beside him on the ballroom carpet.  He told them to touch the carpet and bring their fingers to their lips.

Left to themselves, most would have refused, or, if they went along, would have spent hours scrubbing in the bathroom afterward.  Instead, they sat with Grayson and the anxiety, learning that the pain does subside.

Extended treatment involves a graduated series of such exposures, each a bit more challenging.

Medication helps too.  Antidepressants such as Prozac and other selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) can help quiet the anxiety enough that patients can begin ERP, and stay with it.  Practitioners are more reluctant to give medication to children, but they are careful not to stay with ERP alone for too long if it isn’t producing results.  “The longer a child struggles with an illness, the more impact it’s going to have,” says Dr John Piacentini of UCLA’s child OCD clinic.

A growing group of investigators are experimenting with drugs targeting glutamates.  The best medication so far (riluzole) was originally developed for Lou Gehrig’s disease.  In a small study at Yale, half the subjects experienced a 35% remission, and almost all the rest improved a little.

There is a much more invasive therapy  —  deep brain stimulation (DBS), in which electrodes are implanted in the brain and connected by wires embedded in the skin to a pacemaker-like device in the chest.  Low doses of current can then be applied as needed to calm the turmoil in certain areas of the brain.  It has already been used in about 35,000 people world-wide to treat Parkinson’s disease; FDA approval is pending for OCD treatment as well.

“Many of our OCD patients are able to re-engage in life rather than being stuck at home,” say neurosurgeon Ali Rezai of Cleveland Clinic, who performs DBS surgery for Parkinson’s and has researched it for OCD.

But for the vast majority of sufferers, the treatment never needs to go this far.

Sole source: (online) article in Time Magazine by Jeffrey Kluger with reporting by Dan Cray and Rachel Pomerance.  Article can be found at www.time.com

tutoring in Columbus OH:   Adrienne Edwards   614-579-6021   or aedwardstutor@columbus.rr.com