Blog Archives

Assessing Assessors

11/29/2014

I came across this article (H/T National Review) that has application for every level of education. It is an article from Inside Higher Ed entitled “Assessing Assessment”.

Assessing Assessment

Nelson writes:

True learning is not about having the right answer, so measuring whether students have the right answers is at best incidental to the essential aims of education. True learning is about mastering the art of asking questions and seeking answers, and applying that mastery to your own life. Ultimately, it is about developing the power of self-transformation, the single most valuable ability one can have for meeting the demands of an ever-changing world. Meaningful assessment measures attainment in these areas, rather than in the areas most congenial to the economic metaphor.

How best to judge whether students have attained the sort of freedom that can be acquired by study? Demand that they undertake and successfully complete intellectual investigations on their own. The independence engendered by such projects empowers students to meet the challenges of life and work. It helps them shape lives worth living, arrived at through thoughtful exploration of the question: What kind of life do I want to make for myself?

His solution:

Assessors should thus turn all their ingenuity toward measuring the quality of the students’ learning environment, toward measuring students’ engagement with their teachers and their studies, and toward measuring activities in which students practice the freedom they have been working to develop in college. The results should be used to push back against easy assessments based on the categories of economics. 

Higher education, on the other hand, would do well to repurpose most of the resources currently devoted to assessment. Use them instead to do away with large lecture classes — the very embodiment of education-as-commodity — so that students can have serious discussions with teachers, and teachers can practice the kind of continuous assessment that really matters.

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I Don't Like Half the Folks I Love

11/27/2014

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H/T to Andrew Sullivan at The Dish. A great song for my relatives and friends south of the border. Happy Thanksgiving!! Kidding I love AND like you all! But as Grandpa Suomi used to say, "good you come, good you go!"

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Steve Kuhn's Stories Of Scott Lafaro, Stan Getz, and John Coltrane

11/24/2014

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Great interview with Steve Kuhn by Jonah Jonathan who has worked with a lot of the jazz greats including Scott Lafaro, Bill Evans, John Coltrane and others. Scott Lafaro was a bass player that played with Bill Evans and died after only performing for 5 or so years before a car accident. Scott's death had a major impact on Bill Evans as Scott was part of the original trio. I have included Evan's trio, Waltz for Debbie where Scott plays bass.

Kuhn discussed Scott's personality and the impact his sudden death had on him. Kuhn also discussed Coltrane and some of his quirks. Kuhn says that he met Coltrane in New York.

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Research that PTSD (and residential school syndrome) is biological

11/20/2014

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The article, Is Trauma Genetic? Scientists Say Parents are Passing PTSD to kids is relevant for exploring issues relative to First Nation experience in Canada - namely residential school syndrome. As this article, Residential School Syndrome, in the BC Medical Journal argues, Residential school syndrome is a suggested diagnostic term that might be appropriately applied to survivors of the Indian residential school system. Many of these former students have presented to the author with sufficiently similar concerns to suggest a common etiology. The suggested diagnostic criteria may further the discussion of what appropriate care might be provided. Many of the suggested diagnostic features are similar to the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder, but with specific cultural impact. Healing of this disorder has important long-term implications for Canadian society.

The journal suggests that the symptomology of residential school syndrome is similar to that of PTSD. For most people who attended Indian residential schools, there is no symptomology other than that similar to other people who have attended a boarding school for an extended period of time. However, for a significant minority of Indian residential school students, there is symptomology quite similar to post-traumatic stress disorder. More specifically, there are recurrent intrusive memories, nightmares, occasional flashbacks, and quite striking avoidance of anything that might be reminiscent of the Indian residential school experience.

At the same time, there is often a significant detachment from others, and relationship difficulties are common. There is often diminished interest and participation in aboriginal cultural activities and markedly deficient knowledge of traditional culture and skills. Often there is markedly increased arousal including sleep difficulties, anger management difficulties, and impaired concentration. As might be the case for anyone attending a boarding school with inadequate parenting, parenting skills are often deficient. Strikingly, there is a persistent tendency to abuse alcohol or sedative medication drugs, often starting at a very young age.

From a biological point of view, PTSD occurs when the dysregulation induced by that trauma becomes a body’s default state. Provoke a person with PTSD, and her heart pounds faster, her startle reflex is exaggerated, she sweats, her mind races. The amygdala, which detects threats and releases the emotions associated with memories, whirs in overdrive. Meanwhile, hormones and neurotransmitters don’t always flow as they should, leaving the immune system underregulated. The result can be the kind of over-inflammation associated with chronic disease, including arthritis, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. Moreover, agitated nervous systems release adrenaline and catecholamines, both involved in the fight or flight response, unleashing a cascade of events that reinforces the effects of traumatic memories on the brain. This may partially explain the intrusive memories and flashbacks that plague people with PTSD. Extreme stress and PTSD also appear to shorten telomeres—the DNA caps at the end of a chromosome that govern the pace of aging.

The research emerging from neuropsychologists is that PTSD might be embedded genetically. As Shulevitz writes, people who have been subject to repeated, centuries-long violence, such as African Americans and Native Americans, may by now have disadvantage baked into their very molecules. The sociologist Robert Merton spoke of the “Matthew Effect,” named after verse 25:29 of the Book of Matthew: “For unto every one that hath shall be given ... but from him that hath not shall be taken.” Billie Holiday put it even better: “Them that’s got shall have; them that’s not shall lose.”

Rachel Yehuda, a Jewish psychologist, studied the impact of PTSD on children of parents who had been interned in concentration camps during the Holocaust. She, discovered that the children of PTSD-stricken mothers were diagnosed with PTSD three times as often as members of control groups; children of fathers or mothers with PTSD suffered three to four times as much depression and anxiety, and engaged more in substance abuse. She would go on to discover that children of mothers of survivors had less cortisol than control subjects and that the same was true of infants whose mothers had been pregnant and near the Twin Towers on 9/11.

In terms of residential schools, in the early ’80s, a Lakota professor of social work named Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart coined the phrase “historical trauma.” What she meant was “the cumulative emotional and psychological wounding over the lifespan and across generations.” Another phrase she used was “soul wound.” The wounding of the Native American soul, of course, went on for more than 500 years by way of massacres, land theft, displacement, enslavement, then--well into the twentieth century--the removal of Native American children from their families to what were known as Indian residential schools. These were grim, Dickensian places where some children died in tuberculosis epidemics and others were shackled to beds, beaten, and raped...

In a now classic 1946 study of Lakota children from Pine Ridge, the anthropologist Gordon Macgregor identified some predominant features of their personalities: numbness, sadness, inhibition, anxiety, hypervigilance, a not-unreasonable sense that the outside world was implacably hostile. They ruminated on death and dead relatives...

American Indians suffer shockingly worse health than other Americans. Native Americans and native Alaskans die in greater proportions than other racial or ethnic groups in the country, from homicide, suicide, accidents, cirrhosis of the liver, pneumonia, and tuberculosis. Public health officials point to a slew of socioeconomic factors to explain these disparities: poverty, unemployment, lack of health insurance, cultural barriers, discrimination, living far from decent grocery stores. Sociologists cite the disintegration of families, the culture of poverty, perpetual conflict with mainstream culture, and, of course, alcoholism. The research on multigenerational trauma, however, offers a new set of possible causes.

The impact of this is that children of historical trauma are more likely to have a collision with another traumatic event. In the past few years, Yehuda has helped design and has co-authored studies with Cindy Ehlers, a neuroscientist at La Jolla’s Scripps Research Institute, along with others, who advanced the high-risk hypothesis for Native Americans. A host of studies have shown that significantly more American Indians endure at least one traumatic incident—assault, an accident, a rape—than other Americans (among the subjects in this particular study, the rate was 94 percent); that the risk of being assaulted and contracting PTSD seem heritable to about the same degree (30 to 50 percent); and that trauma, substance abuse, and PTSD mostly seem to happen in early adulthood. “What is being inherited in these studies is not known,” writes Ehlers. But the fact that all these bad things emerge at the same point in the kids’ development argues for some degree of genetic or epigenetic influence. Another way of saying it is that maybe these young adults are finding themselves at the center of a particularly cruel collision of genes and history.

Part of the solution that the Jewish community uses to address these issues is "commemoration"An old joke has it that all Jewish holidays amount to the same thing: “They tried to kill us. They failed. Let’s eat!” When Jews retell the tales of Egyptian slavery—hunger, humiliation, murder—they’re performing acts of catharsis in the company of others whose forebears also outlasted their tormentors. The Cambodians suggest looking forward. During my time in Lowell, I visited a wat, a Buddhist temple, and met a monk who explained, through a translator, that he advises people who come to him for help to accept what cannot be changed, focus on the future, and trust that all injustices will come out right in the end.

In a counterintuitive way from the way most collective remembrances and even therapeutic interventions work, Hinton argues that treatments should focus as much, if not more, on techniques for calming oneself down than on awakening demons and that these should be rooted in the patient’s own traditions. For his clients, he uses meditation, mindfulness, stretching, the visualization of images that promote self-forgiveness and loving-kindness. For instance, Buddhism prizes a quality called upekkha (the word comes from Pali, an ancient Indian language): equanimity. This entails distancing oneself from emotions and disturbing thoughts; a Buddhist metaphor is to think of them as clouds in the sky, and let them scud away, and so that is something practitioners of culturally adapted CBT might have people do. “We have Southeast Asian patients imagine love spreading outward in all directions like water,” writes Hinton. “This is because in Buddhism water and coolness are associated with values of love, kindness, nurturing, and ‘merit-making,’” that is, doing good deeds such as giving to the poor or to the temple.

Yehuda found that in commemoration and remembrance, tone also matters. As Shulevitz writes: so it is important to remember. But tone also matters. What made Yehuda the saddest while cataloguing the stories of survivors’ children, she told me, were the descriptions of childhood homes that felt like graveyards and the children’s sense that laughter desecrated the memory of the dead. Death, she says, must not quash life: “Living and laughing and being joyous and almost disrespectful to those who suffered—it’s what they’d want you to do, without forgetting them,” she says.

Finally, none of this tells us specifically what to do for the next generation. Perhaps one of the most popular approaches emerges from social work and public health: It is to help mothers with PTSD deal with their infants so that they don’t reproduce their angst in their young children.

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The Making of Poems - Lucille Clifton

11/17/2014

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Hat tip again to Andrew Sullivan at The Dish for sharing the poetry of Lucille Clifton (well actually his poetry editor, Alice Quinn). This particular poem, I really like. It is entitled, The Making of Poems:

the reason why I do it
though I fail and fail
in the giving of true names
is I am Adam and his mother
and these failures are my job.

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Hell is quoting other people

11/17/2014

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Below is a fairly good vignette and summary of three famous phrases from philosophers; namely Descarte's. "I think therefore I am", Sartre's "Hell is Other people", and Wittgenstein's, "Whereof one cannot speak, one must stay silent". While, his summary is basically good, I did write to clarify his comments on Wittgenstein as I have used him as an inspiration for textual analysis in my graduate work. Wittgenstein moved away from his central views in Tractus Logico when he wrote Philosophical Investigations. I did actually e-mail him (pedantic I know! - don't judge me!). This text below is from my proposal.

Wittgenstein doubted that it is possible to have thoughts without language. “When I think in language, there aren’t ‘meanings’ going through my mind in addition to the verbal expressions: the language is itself the vehicle of thought” (Wittgenstein, 1958, p. 108). As McGinn (1997, p. 12) explains, for Wittgenstein, language is both a source of philosophical problems, and also the means to overcome them. As Wittgenstein (1984) wrote, “we are struggling with language. We are engaged in a struggle with language” (p.11). Our approach to language is a philosophical problem because we want to uncover what a particular word means, what it represents, and herein lies the problem. So, for example, when we ask a question, we are asking the nature of that particular phenomenon which constitutes our world. Wittgenstein reminds us to pay attention to the kinds of questions we ask because not every question is helpful. Like the theologian Lonergan, he cautions us on the kinds of questions we should be asking. The reason for this is because in the very act of framing this question, we are tempted to adopt an attitude toward this kind of phenomenon, which Wittgenstein believes, makes us approach it in the wrong way; in a way which assumes that we have to uncover or explain something. When we ask ourselves philosophical questions aimed at discovering the true nature of something, we take up a stance towards these phenomena in which they seem suddenly bewilderingly mysterious, for as soon as we try to catch hold of them in the way that our questions seem to require, we find we cannot do it; we find that we no longer know (McGinn, 1997, p. 18). For Wittgenstein, the nature of a phenomenon (e.g. sexuality) that constitutes our world is not clarified by attempting to explain an answer to a question but is instead revealed in the kind of statements we already make about the phenomenon .

His method of textual analysis relates grammar not simply to a language considered as a system of signs, but instead to our use of language. Wittgenstein (1958) famously declared, “the meaning of a word is its use in language” (p. 20) and further that “one cannot guess how a word functions. One has to look at its use and learn from that” (p. 109). Meaning is not grasped through examining sentences of ordinary language but must be revealed through an analytic process. This analytic process involves being attentive the context of words uttered in a specific setting.

Words derive their meaning from their use in what Wittgenstein referred to as “language games”. It is important not to misinterpret what is meant by the term “game”. By game, Wittgenstein does not mean something casual, flip, or that people are trying to play tricks on each other through the use of a word game. Instead a “language game” means that words and phrases only come alive within a culture or a specific context. Wittgenstein uses the term “language game” in connection with the means by which we teach students language and the activity of using language within the context of purposeful action. Scholars and some linguists who have viewed language only in terms of its formal properties suppose that there are three basic types of sentences; assertions, questions, and commands (Mcginn, 1997, p. 57). Wittgenstein’s suggestion that we look beyond the formal properties of a sentence and instead at the “language game” as the ground upon which distinctions between meaning of sentences are to be drawn, lead us not with just three types of sentences but countless numbers.There are countless kinds of sentences: countless different kinds of use of what we call “symbols”, “words”, sentences”. And this multiplicity is not something fixed, given once and for all; but new types of language, new language-games, as we may say, come into existence, and others become obsolete and get forgotten. (Wittgenstein, 1958, p. #23)

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Crazywater

11/13/2014

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As the CBC reports: "A filmmaker who was born and raised in Inuvik, N.W.T., is using his feature length documentary to spark a conversation about alcohol.

Starting in Yellowknife on Sunday, Dennis Allen will tour nine N.W.T. communities to show his film Crazywater as part of the Healing Film Festival to mark National Addictions Week.
This looks like a good film to promote and encourage discussion on the whole issue of mental health and addictions."

Crazywater (Clip) by Dennis Allen, National Film Board of Canada

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The Basement Tapes Complete

11/8/2014

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Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan (if you have not seen his blog The Dish, you should) for sharing the release of Bob Dylan's Complete edition of The Basement Tapes. I am a huge Dylan fan and one of my favourite albums was, in fact, the original Basement Tapes recorded with The Band after he recuperated from his motorcycle crash. It is, in my view, completely underrated as a collection.

Amazon has this collection for sale here: Bob Dylan: the Basement Tapes Complete

I listened to some of my favourites on the samples provided on the MP3 and it is interesting to hear the evolution. Some of my favourites from the origins collection include:

Too Much of Nothing (haunting)
Lo and Behold (love the playful spirit)
Clothes Line Saga (great lazy day song!)
Million Dollar Bash (fun song about a party)
Orange Juice Blues (great blues song actually sung by The Band)
Yea! Heavy and a Bottle of Bread

Too many to list. I am just excited with the new collection and it is on my Christmas wish list!!

The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band did a really great cover of his famous "You ain't goin' nowhere"

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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, education, and human rights. I write and am a human rights advocate. I enjoy poetry, jazz, spirituality, politics and a potpourri of other interests that you will see reflected in this blog.