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Students Don't Know How to Have a Conversation

4/26/2014

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Interesting article in The Atlantic on how young students today are lacking the ability to hold a conversation due, in part, to the massive use of technology. The author is a teacher of junior English students. Paul Barnwell offers some interesting statistics.

According to the Pew Research Center, one in three teens sends over 100 text messages a day. More than half of teens use texting to communicate daily with friends, versus only 33 percent who regularly talk face to face. Cell phone use is rampant at most schools (mine included), despite attempts to restrict or even integrate it into the curriculum.

But in our zealous rush to meet 21st-century demands—emailing assignments, customizing projects for tablets and laptops, and allowing students to BYOD (Bring Your Own Device)—we aren’t asking students to think and communicate in real time. Online discussion boards and Twitter are useful tools for exchanging ideas. But they often encourage a “read, reflect, forget about it” response that doesn’t truly engage students in extended critical thinking or conversation.

Further he writes,


Sherry Turkle, a psychologist, MIT professor, and the author of Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less From Ourselves, has dedicated her career to researching people’s relationships with technology. Much of her writing has shaped my skepticism for tech-overload and its impact on conversation. In a New York Times column, Turkle wrote, “Face-to-face conversation unfolds slowly. It teaches patience. When we communicate on our digital devices, we learn different habits … we start to expect faster answers. To get these, we ask one another simpler questions. We dumb down our communications, even on the most important matters.”

One interesting solution he offers is to record students conversations on a variey of topic. He noticed that students tend to become more engaged and take critical discussions more seriously when they know that they are being recorded.

Read the rest here: My Students Don't Know How to Have a Conversation

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Johann Sebastian Bach: Johannes - Passion

4/19/2014

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Even if you are not religious, the power of Bach's Passion of St. John is palpable. Particularly, the first rousing and dramatic Herr, Herr, Herr Unser Herrscher (Lord, Lord, Lord, Our Master). The recording below is from Japan and the conductor is Masaaki Suziki. Watching the conductor as he moves all the parts of the chorus is in itself is an experience! As the saying goes, not all musicians believe in God, but they all believe in Johann Sebastian Bach.

This article by Wong and Proctor summarizes the composition nicely:

St. John Passion

Bach's St. John Passion is gloomy, stressful, highly emotional, and powerfully meditative. Its depth comes from its subtlety. There is no noble hero, no mustache-twirling villian, no hummable tunes. As difficult as it was to work within the confines of John's text, Bach was able to create a moving work with musical, spiritual, and psychological unity of form.

Happy Easter!
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Mihály Csíkszentmihályi: Flow, Creativity & the Evolving Self 

4/15/2014

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Mihály Csíkszentmihályi discusses creativity and the myth of the self destructive creative artist. In fact, historically, the arts and music was part of life and not and adjunct to it. In his research,  Csíkszentmihályi found that highly creative people live fairly normal, productive, healthy lives. Poets and playwriters tend to have more mental health problems but he attributes this to how the public receives their work. The public receives the creativity of scientists, etc. much different and that accounts for the difference.

He also discusses the theme of resilience and finds that creative people come from either fairly disruptive families with death of significant people. They overcame difficult childhoods. However, equal number of children came from parents who were artists, professionals, and who supported them. Thus, creativity does not necessarily spring from trauma or upper middle class backgrounds.

Interesingly, "normal" families do not produce highly creative children and people. Part of this may be due to not stretching and challenging their children's (or their own!) vistas and horizons. It is not so much an issue of social or economic background but is connected to what Selligman in his book Flourish refers to as Grit. So, he challenges parents to stretch themselves a bit for the sake of their children.  

In his book Flow, he writes that there are 5 conditions that support the development of creativity: 

1. Clarity: Teenagers  feel that they know what is expected of them. Goals and feedback are unambiguous. 


2. Centering: The young people feel that their parent or care giver is interested in what they are doing in the present moment, in their concrete experience. They are not so preoccupied with what college their child will get in to or obtaining a well paying job.


3. Choice: Youth feel that they have a great deal of choice, including breaking the parents' rule provided they take the consequences.


4. Commitment: Trust that allows the youth to  to feel comfortable bough to set aside the shield of his or her defensiveness and become unselfconsciously involved in whatever he or she is interested in.


5. Challenge: The adults in the child's life prove increasingly complex opportunities for action for their children.
 

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Vivaldi - Spring

4/12/2014

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Vivaldi captures the mood of the seasons so well!. I posted his "Winter" during the bitter cold of last January. Now comes spring. Enjoy!
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Thug Notes - Macbeth

4/12/2014

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Sparky Sweets has created this You tube channel which summarizes and analyzes many of the classics of English literature. It is very humorous but a remarkable example of synthesis. His analysis is spot on as well!
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Digital overload: How we are seduced by distraction

4/8/2014

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Great article in the Globe and Mail about the downside of digital media. Here are some interesting snippets:

“Of course, everything can’t speed up,” says David Levy, a professor at the Information School of the University of Washington. “You can’t speed up the time needed to be intimate with one another. Thinking is not an activity you can speed up. It needs time to muse and reflect, and some of the things we need to do in order to think, like walk, or read deeply, or even take naps, simply don’t fit into this globalizing idea of more-faster-better.”

In fact, being “always on” may look good in a society that glorifies busyness, but it’s a killer intellectually. Last year, researchers at King’s College Institute of Psychiatry in London reported the constant use of e-mail and other social media – what they called “unchecked infomania” – led to a temporary 10-point drop in the IQ of the study’s participants. That was twice as much as pot smokers.

Read the rest here:
 Digital Overload 
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    My Pensées

    The title of this blog is an allusion to the famous work of Blaise Pascal.  This blog represents the variety of my interests and thoughts on any given day and are  strung together, like Pascal's Pensees, in no particular order. I work in the field of mental health and education. I write and am a social justice advocate. I enjoy poetry, jazz, spirituality, politics and a potpourri of other interests that you will see reflected in this blog.

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