Ibktim

HargreavesBC: Az T Lead Institute. Taryl Hansen: inspiring advocacy for teachers leading learning

HargreavesBC: RT @scrapally: Arizona is on track with Ontario giving out Parenting Kits through First Things First @HargreavesBC @AZFTF

HargreavesBC: Inspiring video evidence of student advocacy for high quality teacher learning http://t.co/QUlufH2Wiw @azk12 @tarylhansen @SirKenRobinson

RT @HargreavesBC: Back to the future. England's exam system returns to the stinging 60s!! http://t.co/UpVXpYtdFC @NAHTnews @ssat @pasi_sahl…

@MrJonesHistory @NatGeoLive @carlzimmer i think it does not matter how long ago any extinct species we can ''revive'' as it were ,

@MrJonesHistory @NatGeoLive @carlzimmer ,as long as it is experimented in a closed environment

CHARLOTTE, NC—Bobcats owner Michael Jordan announced Wednesday that he has officially hired Patrick Ewing as the team’s assistant coach purely to watch the former New York Knicks center lose more.

FORT MEADE, MD—Members of the National Security Agency told reporters yesterday that if they thought the electronic surveillance program known as PRISM invaded the privacy of law-abiding citizens, the newly updated PRISM 2.0 will be far, far ...

LOS ANGELES—In an exclusive preview to fans gathered in Los Angeles this week for the E3 gaming conference, Microsoft officials reportedly unveiled an ultra-realistic new game for their upcoming Xbox One console that requires players to press the B ...

A reader writes:

It doesn’t seem like you read that article with a critical eye.  The author cherry-picked facts to support what appears to be a predefined solution.  He keeps talking about required minimums, but then mentions they actually attend 25% more days. The minimums don’t mean anything; how many days/hours are they actually going is the only thing that counts.  If American schools are only meeting the required minimum but other countries are exceeding the minimum then you’re not making a fair comparison.

Another:

As someone who grew up in the “system”, I can tell you with first-hand experience that, in Taiwan, I was spending roughly 14 hours a day “in class”, with about 10 hours in school and 4 hours in cram school. On weekends, I was having up to 6 hours of cram school lessons. This is the reality of education in Asian countries.

Another points to a similar experience in another Asian country:

The thing is, India as a whole may require 800-900 hours per year, but that, I imagine, only applies to Indian government schools (equivalent to US public schools) that are on the whole, pretty bad. Most middle-class kids go to private schools in India, where the instructional demands are much higher. The kids I know in India go to school from 9 am to 3 pm, but before and after school they have extra private tutoring, especially in 10th and 12th grades when their performance on the exams determines their future. Additionally, in 12th grade they take nationwide or statewide exams for entrance into medical school or engineering school, and for each of these entrance exams they take more specialized tutoring. So the 800-900 hours does not begin to represent the total amount of academic work done by these kids.

Not that I’m recommending this approach. I think it’s brutal.

New research suggests a connection between the two:

[Y]ou have only so much mental energy during a day. From what [management professor Christopher] Barnes’s research suggests, the amount of sleep you get predicts the discipline your body can produce. Why? Sleep deprivation depletes the glucose level in your pre-frontal cortex, Barnes writes. This has consequences for your decision-making: If you don’t get enough sleep, you leave your self-control engine running on empty. If you do get enough sleep, you restore that fuel base. …

“Organizations need to give sleep more respect,” Barnes writes. “Executives and managers should keep in mind that the more they push employees to work late, come to the office early, and answer emails and calls at all hours, the more they invite unethical behavior [like cheating] to creep in.”

AsapSCIENCE tries to answer this question.

It happened in Hong Kong, where the man went to see a doctor for a swollen abdomen, which actually turned out to be a cyst on his ovary.

The subject suffered from two rare genetic disorders, one of which, congenital adrenal hyperplasia, increases male hormones meaning they had a beard and a "micropenis", the Hong Kong Medical Journal reported.

The other - Turner Syndrome - affects peoples X and Y chromosomes.

The patient, who grew up as an orphan, was found to have no testes, and stopped growing after puberty at the age of 10.

The Vietnam-born Chinese patient decided to continue "perceiving himself as having a male gender with the possible need of testosterone replacement."

The Sun

The guys from Dollar Shave Club introduce their brand new product, One Wipe Charlies - peppermint-scented environment-friendly butt wipes for men, with a video done in the same manner as their first one.

click for bigger
Massimo Pietrobon has created this map of Pangaea, the prehistoric original single continent, before the current ones have formed, outlining on it the political borders of contemporary countries.

Pangea Politica | via

The Tetris Printer Algorithm created by Michael Birken, allows you to create different shapes in Tetris, using the blocks as pixels. The following video shows it in action, creating classic 8-bit video game characters.


More details about Michael's Tetris algorithm - here

Youtube pranksters Roman Atwood and Dennis Roady are scaring people at the beach, where they accidentally spray people with a fake skunk.


via

Since Hadoukening, Quidditching or Vadering are already old, a new photo fad is emerging from Japan, with school band members fighting each other with their magical musical instruments.



More - after the jump







via

The Believer has posted his 1945 essay “The Freedom of The Press,” originally composed as the preface to Animal Farm, with footnotes by John Reed. An excerpt from Orwell with Reed’s comment:

Obviously it is not desirable that a government department should have any power of censorship (except security censorship, which no one objects to in war time). But the chief danger to freedom of thought and speech at this moment is not the direct interference of the MOI [Ministry of Information] or any official body. If publishers and editors exert themselves to keep certain topics out of print, it is not because they are frightened of prosecution but because they are frightened of public opinion. In this country intellectual cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face.

That people were willing to live in a state of denial—ignoring war, ignoring injustice, ignoring tremendous threats to themselves and even the planet—continually amazed Orwell, and he struggled with the cartography of complacency. In a letter to a friend, he wrote, “In the face of terrifying dangers and golden political opportunities, people just keep on keeping on, in a sort of twilight sleep in which they are conscious of nothing except the daily round of work, family life, darts at the pub, exercising the dog, mowing the lawn, bringing home the beer, etc.” In “Notes on Nationalism,” Orwell marveled at “the lunatic habit of identifying oneself with large power units.”

And therein lies the answer to our twenty-first century state of denial. Our identities are under siege: advertising, education, the arts. We are built up and destroyed by lifestyles and categories (of race, of class, of culture) that exist primarily to contain, delimit, divide and exploit the human experience. If there’s anything you think you need to buy to be who you are—whether it’s curtains from Ikea or a CD or a book or liposuction or take-your-pick—you don’t own yourself.

Recent Dish on Orwell here, here, here and here. Recent Bukowski on censorship here.

HargreavesBC: @CarolCampbell4 @BenLevinOISE @MELGREENAN @Kathleen_Wynne You must know Campbell's Law! Imposed thresholds always create perverse incentives

Here is how a journalist described a class she watched a few months ago in a Northern California high school.

In the 1986 comedy Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Ben Stein famously plays a high school teacher who drones on about the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act while his students slump at their desks in a collective stupor. For many kids, that’s history: an endless catalog of disconnected dates and names, passed down like scripture from the state textbook, seldom questioned and quickly forgotten.

Now take a seat inside Will Colglazier’s classroom at Aragon High School in San Mateo. The student population here is fairly typical for the Bay Area: about 30 percent Latino, 30 percent Asian and 40 percent white. The subject matter is standard 11th grade stuff: What caused the Great American Dust Bowl?

Tapping on his laptop, Colglazier shows the class striking black-and-white images of the choking storms that consumed the Plains states in the 1930s. Then he does something unusual. Instead of following a lesson plan out of the textbook, he passes out copies of a 1935 letter, written by one Caroline Henderson to the then-U.S. secretary of agriculture, poignantly describing the plight of her neighbors in the Oklahoma panhandle. He follows that with another compelling document: a confidential high-level government report, addressed to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, decrying the region’s misguided homesteading policies.

Colglazier clearly is a gifted and well-trained educator, a history/economics major and 2006 graduate of the Stanford Teacher Education Program. But what sets this class apart from Ferris Bueller’s is more than the man; it’s his method—an approach developed at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education that’s rapidly gaining adherents across the country. At a time when national student surveys show abysmal rates of proficiency in history, trial studies of the Stanford program demonstrated that when high school students engage regularly with challenging primary source documents, they not only make significant gains learning and retaining historical material, they also markedly improve their reading comprehension and critical thinking…..

Colglazier builds his thought-provoking classes using an online tool called Reading Like a Historian. Designed by the Stanford History Education Group under Professor Sam Wineburg, the website offers 87 flexible lesson plans featuring documents from the Library of Congress. Teachers can download the lessons and adapt them for their own purposes, free of charge. Students learn how to examine documents critically, just as historians would, in order to answer intriguing questions: Did Pocahontas really rescue John Smith? Was Abraham Lincoln a racist? Who blinked first in the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Russians or the Americans?

Most history teachers do not teach like Will Colglazier or the cartoon figure teacher in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.  Colglazier is an exception, albeit according to the journalist, one who joins many others in using  historical thinking to gain deep understanding of the past rather than a heritage approach, that is, using facts from the past to recreate a present that tells Americans who they are, who they were, and the nation they are part of.

As I and many others who have been in classrooms have pointed out, most history teachers tilt toward the heritage end of the spectrum of history teaching but many do incorporate historical approaches in their lessons (See here and here).

Why?

One answer looks at how external testing, state academic standards, federal accountability regulations, teacher certification, and the unofficial national curriculum of Advanced Placement influence what teachers present. These omnipresent structures in the policy terrain set the boundaries within which teachers teach. To answer the above question on why teachers tilt toward “traditional” teaching, then, I also want to identify other factors that often go unmentioned by those eager to improve the teaching of history in K-12 schools.

Consider that cultural beliefs about the function of public schools to socialize children and youth into the dominant civic and social values (e.g., honesty, respect for others’ values, cooperating) are anchored in age-graded school structures. They become a powerful organizational mechanism for carrying out societal expectations (i.e., kindergarten prepares children for the first grade, a high school diploma is essential to going to college or getting a decent job). Teachers operating separately in their classrooms move 25 to 30-plus students through a 700-page history text, and give frequent tests to see whether students have learned the required knowledge and skills.

Moreover, age-graded secondary schools have history teachers teaching five classes a day (with at least one planning or “free” period and lunch) usually involving up to three different preparations (e.g., world history, U.S. history, and economics) with a student load of anywhere between 125 to 165 a day. The sheer whirl of traversing these classes between 7:45 AM-3 PM is exhausting for 22-year-olds. Imagine what it is like for 62- year-olds. When grading homework, reading essays, and checking quizzes are factored into the workload of most history teachers—don’t forget most teachers see individual students before school, during planning periods and lunch, and then after school–the daily decisions and fast pace of the day, much less the unpredictable emotional ups-and-downs that accompany working with teenagers, exhilarate and exhaust teachers. These social beliefs and school structures added to the public expectation that every student passes a test to graduate and then goes to college merge to create intense workplace conditions that influence how teachers teach.

Yet history teachers are hardly passive agents that societal expectations and school structures pour into a mold. Teachers bring their life experiences, formal and informal knowledge, and personal beliefs about children, learning, and serving the community that also influence what and how they teach history. And this is where blends of heritage and historical thinking pedagogy enter the picture.

Both constrained and autonomous, teachers accommodate to external demands and organizational structures while carving out a niche for themselves in which they can make independent decisions about how they organize their classrooms, group students, and teach.  Most history teachers end up picking and choosing different practices to put a tattoo on their teaching yet fall somewhere in the middle part of a continuum of teaching practices.

While most teachers use a version of the heritage approach, a small minority like Will Colglazier work within the constraints of the age-graded school and make other teaching choices based on their beliefs about learning, children, and knowledge of history.

Consider New York teacher Linda Strait (a pseudonym). A researcher who observed her teach a hybrid of both traditions of teaching. She teaches U.S. history through lectures, guides discussions, and controls what content is taught and how.

Yet in her Civil Rights unit, she offered a series of lessons beginning with a videotape “The Shadow of Hate” after which students divided into small groups to discuss and list their reactions on wall charts; an ungraded quiz on a reading Strait had assigned; a roundtable discussion of four questions she posed to the class; a two-day simulation of a local skating rink that refused to admit minorities with the teacher role-playing the owner and students making pitches to her to keep or drop the policy. Then two days of reviewing notes, writing in-class practice essays for the 11^th grade Regents tests that would draw from the Civil Rights unit.

Strait tells the researcher, “I try to throw in as many activities and projects, but I still feel that I am too heavily the center of it.” She has invented a hybrid of the two teaching traditions out of the choices she made within the constraints of state and school district policies, the structures of the age-graded high schools, her knowledge of the subject, personal experiences, and beliefs about how her students learn U.S. history (pp. 16-28).

Will Colglazier is part of a minority of teachers using historical thinking pedagogy. Most teachers of history blend both pieces of it and the heritage approach; they hug the middle.

With the publication of Radical and a few years after founding StudentsFirst, a policy advocacy organization, former Washington, D.C. Chancellor of schools continues to push her reform agenda nationally, one that was severely burned when she exited the district after only three years in office. Well versed in being a celebrity, Rhee made the rounds of high profile media (e.g., Jon Stewart show) pushing her new book and the organization that she leads. So why should anyone kiss Rhee–”America’s most famous school reformer“– goodbye?

Because she is a divisive figure and damaged goods as an educator.  Both mean that her celebrity-hood as a school reformer–on the cover of Time magazine, chatting with Oprah and Jon–will give her visibility in 24/7 news cycle but not lead to any substantial elected or appointed political or educational office.

No President will appoint her Secretary of Education; no governor will appoint her state superintendent of education and no school board will appoint her as their school chief. She is a polarizing, radioactive figure who will set off Geiger counters and create instant political turmoil and  organizational instability–outcomes that may be good for media attention and garnering large speaker fees but disastrous for those responsible for making schools better and improving student performance.

In the absence of actual work with states, districts, schools, and classrooms, her reputation as a divisive figure forever trailed by a dark hovering cloud of cheating on test scores will tarnish  her efforts to have any direct impact on students,  pushing her  further and further down the food-chain of celebrity status.  She will slip into the land where once highly touted educational celebrities such as Joe Clark   (here also) and Chris Whittle  (here also) became answers to the game: Whatever happened to _______ ?

Won’t her advocacy organization StudentsFirst lobbying state legislators for more charters, vouchers, performance evaluations for teachers, and the end of seniority for rehiring laid-off teachers make a difference? I doubt it for the following reasons.

Compared with the efforts of the deep-pocketed Koch brothers in influencing state legislatures through the American Legislative Exchange Commission (ALEC), or the well-funded Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), Rhee’s organization is minor league in political acumen,  expertise, and experience in political advocacy. Nor does StudentsFirst have any bench strength; it is all Michelle.If  she leaves the organization out of fatigue or pique, no more StudentsFirst. Moreover, such political work to be effective is back-channel and under the media radar. Such work is not Michelle Rhee, considering her few years in Washington, D.C. and since.

But there is something that Rhee can do to reduce the radioactivity, remove suspicions about her motives, and regain a pinch of credibility that she carried as a school reformer when the mayor of Washington, D.C. appointed her in 2007.

That something is for her to return to the classroom and teach for three to five years. Teaching will redeem her soiled reputation as a fame-seeking missile interested only in snatching the headline, the interview, the donor’s dollar. She will regain her credibility as someone who cares about school reform by teaching and working to have her students do well in school and in life. She might even move on, were she so inclined, to take state and federal leadership posts.

Although I hope she will make such a counter-intuitive move, for I do admire her energy, intensity, and commitment to students, I doubt that will occur. Celebrity-hood, once tasted,  becomes addictive and, so often, spirals downward as the addict seeks the next moment-of-glory fix. With regret, I blow a kiss goodbye to Michelle Rhee even now as she rides the cresting wave of “America’s most famous school reformer.”

“Our four-year-olds do have a place in school, but it is not at a school desk,” said Ed Zigler, Yale University psychologist who helped design Head Start in President Johnson’s “War on Poverty” and led the Office of Child Development in President Nixon’s administration. He wanted K-12 systems to welcome all young children but was concerned about pre-kindergartens becoming another academic boot camp for four-year-olds.

Many others, however, were strongly opposed to putting preschoolers into an already bureaucratized, ineffective K-12 system. For example, the head of the Commonwealth Foundation (PA) asked: “Would you hire a carpenter to remodel the first floor of your home if he was already working on the second and third floors and doing a poor job? Would you expect the results on the second and third floors to improve just because the carpenter was also remodeling the first floor?”

Both quotes stake out different positions on the significant policy question whether preschools for all children should be part of the existing K-12 system–as it is in Oklahoma, New York, Georgia, and New Jersey–or be part of the private market for child care in homes, churches, and corporate-owned facilities as it has been in most cities and suburbs for decades or, another option, a mix of public schools and private child care. These policy options capture the dilemma facing decision-makers on the issue of expanding access of three- and four-year-olds to preschool in the U.S.

The quotes come from Elizabeth Rose’s historical study (pp. 98, 179) of early childhood education from Head Start to universal preschool called The Promise of Preschool.
In tracing the trajectory of publicly-funded preschools since the mid-1960s, Rose points out how important business leaders were in the political coalition that pressed state and federal policymakers for expanded preschools in the 1970s and their continued presence since then.

“Corporate reformers,” as critics have labeled current reform advocates, include CEOs. They have been crucial members of the political coalition promoting both targeted access (only for poor children) and preschools for all children. With so much rhetoric flung  at “corporate reformers” (see here and here), it is worthwhile to remember that educational policy making is largely a political process that needs a big tent to cover a wide array of supporters.

Rose does more than tell readers of the role that business leaders had in driving the expansion of preschools for poor and middle-class children over the past half-century. In describing and analyzing the history of preschools since the mid-1960s until the present, historian Rose presents recurring policy dilemmas–re-read above quotes for divergent policy choices–and extracts a number of lessons that can inform current policy decisions. There are a few lessons that she lists that I would like to elaborate in this post.

* Inflated claims of what preschools can do for all three- and four-year-olds  are seldom achieved.

Just as hype surrounds the newest technological innovation for schools to buy and deploy, similar exaggerations accompany expanding preschool. Listen to a state superintendent of education touting preschools:

“It’s like finding out there’s an effective polio vaccine. Once you have seen the … evidence of what preschool can do for children, it becomes almost obscene not to call for universal preschool (Rose, p. 226). Or the governor of Oregon saying that expanding Head Start would be “the most significant–and most effective–anti-drug, anti-crime, and pro-education strategy” for the nation (Rose, p. 225). That providing preschool can solve larger social problems as poverty, crime, and drugs is like saying that doing exercises regularly when you are three- and four-years old will mean you will be physically fit for the rest of your life.

Life doesn’t work that way.  Preschools do not innoculate young children for the rest of their lives from pursuing bad habits, making poor choices, and avoiding mistakes.

Hyping preschools (or new technologies) may help mobilize initial political support but, historically, has led to unrealistic expectations for what can be achieved resulting in  disappointment and splintered coalitions.

*Historically, framing preschool as education rather than child care has succeeded  politically.  Yet divorcing one from the other is a policy error because U.S. families need both high-quality child care provided by private and community care-givers  and high-quality public schooling.

Business and civic leaders, educators, and parents chose strategically since the 1980s to frame preschooling as an educational issue because they believed that it paid off as an investment and was at or near the top of issues voters and taxpayers ranked as important for decision-makers to address. In doing so, advocates  stressed the importance of four-year-olds learning academic skills, having well-trained teachers, and access to proper facilities.  Calling preschool “pre-kindergarten” made it part of the K-12 system. It was a strategic decision that has worked.

In making the choice, however, promoters of “pre-kindergarten” easily slipped into denigrating child care as “custodial” and “warehousing.” Moreover, policy and voter attention shifted from just-as-important needs of infants and toddlers for high-quality child care to getting young children ready for kindergarten. Some states such as Illinois and New York have provided a full range of programs for infants through five-year-olds recognizing that both first-rate child care and preschools are needed.

These are a few of the lessons that Elizabeth Rose has drawn from her study of past and current efforts to alter the schooling and care of the young in the U.S.

In an excerpt from his new book, Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking, Daniel Dennett offers guidelines for sound thinking, which includes a wariness of what he calls “deepities”:

A deepity (a term coined by the daughter of my late friend, computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum) is a proposition that seems both important and true – and profound – but that achieves this effect by being ambiguous. On one reading, it is manifestly false, but it would be earth-shaking if it were true; on the other reading, it is true but trivial. The unwary listener picks up the glimmer of truth from the second reading, and the devastating importance from the first reading, and thinks, Wow! That’s a deepity.

An example:

Love is just a word.

Oh wow! Cosmic. Mind-blowing, right? Wrong. On one reading, it is manifestly false. I’m not sure what love is – maybe an emotion or emotional attachment, maybe an interpersonal relationship, maybe the highest state a human mind can achieve – but we all know it isn’t a word. You can’t find love in the dictionary!

We can bring out the other reading by availing ourselves of a convention philosophers care mightily about: when we talk about a word, we put it in quotation marks, thus: “love” is just a word. “Cheeseburger” is just a word. “Word” is just a word. But this isn’t fair, you say. Whoever said that love is just a word meant something else, surely. No doubt, but they didn’t say it.

Norm Geras submits a few of the deepities he’s encountered:

Some deepities I have grown to love and laugh at are these. There’s no such thing as an enduring human nature. Oh, you reply, so human beings don’t need to eat or rest? There aren’t common abilities like the use of language and such? Comes back the reply: we didn’t mean that by human nature; we meant that not all humans are greedy, or power-loving, or interested in unlimited wealth. So it turns out that the denial of an enduring human nature amounts to some changeable or non-universal features of the human character not being unchangeable. What else is new?

In a tutorial I used to run on the Modern Political Thought course at Manchester, I would sometimes ask students if there are any biologically-based differences between men and women. You’d be surprised how many of them answered ‘No’. What?! How about the ability to bear children? Oh… we thought you meant differences like being cleverer or more fit to govern. So there are possible differences then? Yes, perhaps.

Julian Baggini talked to Dennett. On Dennett’s engagement with science and philosphy:

He may not be crudely scientistic, but it is true that these days Dennett spends more time around scientists than other philosophers. “I find the discoveries in those fields mind candy, just delicious,” he says. “If I go to a scientific conference I come away with a bunch of new things to think about. If I go to a philosophy conference I may come away just having learned four more wrinkles in the debate about something philosophers have been thinking about for all my life.”

But Dennett also maintains that we need philosophy to protect us from scientific overreach. “The history of philosophy is the history of very tempting mistakes made by very smart people, and if you don’t learn that history you’ll make those mistakes again and again and again. One of the ignoble joys of my life is watching very smart scientists just reinvent all the second-rate philosophical ideas because they’re very tempting until you pause, take a deep breath and take them apart.”

Recent Dish on Dennett’s tips for arguing here.

From a review of Permanent Present Tense, Suzanne Corkin’s account of the fascinating life of Henry Molaison, perhaps the most famous amnesiac:

When he was 27, a disastrous brain operation destroyed his ability to form new memories, and he lived for the next 55 years in a rolling thirty-second loop of awareness, a ‘permanent present tense’. During this time he was subjected to thousands of hours of tests, of which naturally he had no recall; he provided data for hundreds of scientific papers, and became the subject of a book (Memory’s Ghost by Philip Hilts) and a staple of popular science journalism; by the 1990s digital images of his uniquely disfigured hippocampus featured in almost every standard work on the neuroscience of memory.

Henry, of course, did not comprehend his condition:

His short span of consciousness led to repetitive behaviour – making the same observation repeatedly, or mechanically eating two lunches in a row – but his conversation was characterised by a gentle wit and quizzical, punning exchanges that seemed to test every statement for possible meanings. … In many respects he displayed the serenity and detachment promised by the Buddhist ideal of living in the now, freed from regrets about the past or anxieties for the future. He was certainly more content than his most extreme opposite, Solomon Shereshevsky, the subject of A.R. Luria’s The Mind of a Mnemonist. Shereshevsky’s inability to forget became a life-destroying torment. ‘The trail of memory can feel like a heavy chain,’ Corkin observes, ‘keeping us locked into the identities we have created for ourselves.’ Henry was, by contrast, ‘free from the moorings that keep us anchored in time…’

Jenni Ogden, who worked with Henry, observes his lasting impact on science:

The last chapter, ‘Henry’s Legacy’, recounting the dramatic final journey of the most famous brain in the world, is a page turner as exciting—more exciting— than the best thriller, and takes us into the future; a future more mind-boggling than any science fiction book. After nine hours of in situ MRI brain scanning in Boston, followed by a delicate autopsy to remove the brain from the skull, followed by more scanning, Henry’s carefully protected brain had its own seat for the flight across America to the University of California, San Diego. There it was cut into 2,401 very thin slices, each one photographed. Now there is more work to do as the slices are stained and mounted on large glass slides, and the digital images used to create a 3-dimensional, stunningly detailed model of Henry’s brain that will be freely available on the internet. In the epilogue of her book, Dr. Corkin reminds us of the lovely man Henry was, as the people who cared for him and worked with him say their goodbyes, and reminisce about the good times they shared with the man who never remembered them.

(Photo: Henry Molaison at aged 60, 1986, taken at MIT by Jenni Ogden, author of Trouble In Mind: Stories from a neuropsychologist’s casebook, OUP, 2012.)

In an interview about his new collection of autobiographical essays, This is Where My Obsession with Infinity Began, Joe Bonomo reflects on how he approaches the form:

When writing essays I’m guided in part by Wallace Stevens’ definition of a metaphor, that an ordinary object slightly turned becomes a metaphor of that object. Though my life and upbringing are pretty ordinary, when I’m following an autobiographical impulse what I hope to do is to turn myself – that is, my experiences, and my reflecting and commenting on them – in such a way as to render myself representative, emblematic of the human condition. Guillermo Díaz-Plaja said that “The essayist, really, is an arbitrary wanderer over a theme that remains hidden,” but one way a theme emerges for the essayist is via attentive, honest and candid self-interrogation. I think that the charge of any essayist is to ask, “Why does my experience matter beyond the fact that it’s my experience,” and “How might it be made to matter to others?”

When George Saunders’ Tenth of December was released, the New York Times magazine declared it to be “the best book you’ll read this year,” and many others offered similar encomiums. Elizabeth Minkel noticed that a few dissenters from the praise asked just how great a short story writer could be:

[I]t was suggested that someone who can’t seem to accrue enough pages to pen the Great American Novel couldn’t actually be considered the writer of our time. The whole debate volleyed around the bookish corners of the Internet for a few days, one of those weird, insular, overly prescriptive bouts of literary navel-gazing. Whatever, I said. The conversation was an irrelevant one. I loved George Saunders. I was going to love this book.

After reading the collection, she fears the critics might be onto something:

If it’s so important to me to figure out how these stories work, it feels similarly important to understand how the sum of their parts seems to fall short. I felt, at times, that the stories themselves were unevenly matched: big famous ones, like the two bookends, “Victory Lap” and the final, eponymous story, shine so brightly that some of the others feel like paler echoes. And then there’s the literal echo — Saunders’s language, the tricky rhythm of modern colloquialisms that’s often so beautifully awkward — in the words of that Times piece, it’s frequently “a kind of heightened bureaucratese” — can feel gimmicky in story after story, the sheen wearing off a bit. These criticisms — the pace, the shtick —  are ones I and many, many others have leveled before all sorts of short story collections — and it’s there that we loop back around to the silly question of whether a writer who only produces short stories can really be considered the pinnacle of the profession. The question makes me cringe, for reasons I can’t quite articulate — maybe it’s because it does feel like a weird, insular, overly prescriptive bout of literary navel-gazing. Or maybe it’s because I’m beginning to suspect that it’s true.

Veronique Greenwood runs down research showing just how much our genealogical pasts converge:

Chances are, if you have a famous ancestor far enough back that finding out about them is a surprise, you share them with a small city of other people. And the farther back you go, the truer that is. In 2004, statistician Joseph Chang, computer scientist Douglas Rohde, and writer Steve Olson used a computer model of human genetics to show that anyone who was alive 2,000-3,000 years ago is either the ancestor of everyone who’s now alive, or no one at all. Think about that: If a person alive in 1,000 BCE has any descendants alive today, they have all of us—even people from different continents and isolated populations. This line of thought led to the revelation that everyone of European heritage alive today is a descendant of Charlemagne, who ruled over much of Europe as the first Holy Roman Emperor. As science writer Carl Zimmer wrote last week, it’s “Charlemagne for everyone!” (Zimmer’s excellent post covers a recent paper that looked at actual genomic data from European populations and came to a similar conclusion: All living Europeans, from Turkey to England, Spain to Finland, are related many times over.)

She sees our sameness as an asset:

Given that people—especially those in melting-pot countries with only a vague sense of where they came from—often search out their genealogies to find their special background, this information might be a bit disconcerting. Everyone’s genomes and families are not as enduringly specific as we tend to think. But while genetics doesn’t reflect much of our imagined genealogical uniqueness, it’s shown that we’re more closely tied to our species as a whole than we might have realized. We’re all part of this enormous human fabric, full of fascinating tendencies and bizarre biochemistry. And research is revealing more and more about humanity as a whole and our incredibly beautiful, incredibly unlikely perch in the universe. That’s a tradition to be proud of.

Jonathan Rée notices the rise of funeral ceremonies tailored to self-described rationalists and humanists:

The decline of hardline rationalism about bereavement may be part of a global social trend towards blubbering sentimentality and public exhibitions of grief: Princess Diana and all that. But there could be something more serious behind it too: a suspicion that the no-nonsense approach to death advocated by pure-minded atheists bears a horrible resemblance to the attitudes that lie behind the great political crimes of the 20th century – Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the massified deaths of two world wars, the millions discarded as obstacles to progress in the Soviet Union and China, and of course the Nazi death camps.

He finds an all-too-human reason supporting the trend:

Love has always been the main issue in our dealings with the dead; and love is nothing if not an attitude of one physical being towards another. The 17th-century poet John Donne, in an ingenious poem called “A Valediction, forbidding mourning”, tried to argue that a love that depends on the apprehension of another person’s body – on “eyes, lips and hands” – is the province of “dull sublunary lovers”, unlike the refined spiritual love – “like gold to aery thinnesse beat” – that dwells wholly in the mind. But Donne can never have convinced himself, let alone anyone else.

To love someone is to treasure the hint of a smile, the strength of a hand, the set of a jaw, the plant of a foot or the curl of a lock of hair. And one of the disconcerting things about death is that it does not immediately annihilate these charms, as we might expect and even hope: more than a trace of them lingers in the cold corpse. A fuss about a trifle, of course. Or perhaps not. It is easy to mock the foibles of others; rather harder to face up to our own.

Have you seen those 30-second ads by AT & T with six year-olds sitting around a table answering questions from an adult about whether more is better than less and whether faster is better than slower?

The kids, cute as buttons, answer that faster is better than slower and, of course, more is better than less. If you have not seen the ads, see here and here. They highlight AT&T’s  speed and services in a humorous way.

And the ads have been hits, according to market researchers. Ad agency BBDO released the series–called “It’s Not Complicated”–last November and they have soared in ratings as measured by how many times tweets mentioned the ads.

I have watched these ads many times and I finally put my finger on what bothered me about them. What got to me was not that the values of speed and quantity were being reinforced with kids–hey, the first-graders’ responses are cute and you gotta smile when you see a gap-toothed little kid jump up and down in excitement. What bothered me was the degree to which the pervasiveness of beliefs in technology and its generous fruits are held in America and is now peddled to all of us explicitly without a blink or doubt… by first graders.

Not only in “Silicon Valley” (CA),  Austin (TX), Seattle (WA), Boston (MA), and New York (NY) where high-tech businesses and culture flourish but also in small towns, leafy suburbs, and along Main Streets elsewhere are these strong beliefs in the power and glory of technology prized. What are some of these social beliefs?

*New technologies can not only solve global warming, cancer, and low reading scores but also entertain us daily and make life at home easy.

*New technologies spur change, altering old and familiar ways of doing things. Thus, change means improvement. Improvement leads to  progress and progress  is good.

*Fast is better than slow.

*More is better than less.

None of these beliefs and the values they mirror, of course, is new. They were in the DNA of  colonists in Pre-Revolutionary America, mid-19th century pioneers,  homesteaders and entrepreneurs, early 20th-century captains of industry, and greenhorn immigrants disembarking at Ellis Island. Relishing the use of new technologies from the plow to the mechanized reaper, from canals to railroads, from the stethoscope to the X-ray, from the classroom blackboard to the iPad–Americans have seen these inventions as unvarnished progress in solving vexing problems. It was America on the move, creator of the new and destroyer of the old.

What’s new is that these beliefs have been converted into facts and made explicit; they are so commonplace as to appear in ads where six year-old foils shout them out.

So what?

No rant against technology here. After all, I have a full array of devices in hand and at home to use for work, play, and managing my life. What bothers me is that the taken-for-granted  acceptance of these beliefs now made explicit has silenced serious examination of their flip side, the negatives of these entrenched views.

Where, for example, can issues of how new information technologies erase boundaries between work and home, where you are on call 24/7, be examined?  Where can issues be discussed of new communication technologies not leading to more democracy but being used by dictatorships (e.g., Syria, North Korea, China) to stay in power  or how new technologies worsen existing problems (e.g., fracking for oil, loss of privacy)?

In the home already saturated with labor-saving and entertainment devices? Hardly. Few families can examine openly beliefs they cherish.

Perhaps in the old media of newspapers, television, and books where such opportunities do exist but, unfortunately, they are largely ghettoized into newspaper op-eds, Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) programs, and seldom read academic studies.

Sure, there have been some academics and public intellectuals from Langdon Winner to Neil Postman to Evgeny Morozov who have pointed out the political and social downside to a technology-rich culture viewed as crucial to economic growth and solving age-old problems. Moreover, a few social scientists have compiled experimental evidence on multi-tasking, distractions, and the perils of doing things speedily. And some philosophers have laid to rest the deeply embedded notion of inevitable progress as a positive good. A nano-fraction of the public read these studies.

Where, then, can the pluses and minuses of technological innovations  be examined? Perhaps you have already guessed where I am going for an answer. Public schools.

There are some schools and teachers who within the disciplines of science, math, history, English get students to think critically about past and present issues including analysis of media ads, technological innovations, and the beliefs students hold about these issues. Not many, however.

Most public schools are enmeshed in a standards, testing, and accountability regime aimed at sending everyone to college. Critical thinking, media literacy, and analyzing the pros and cons of technological innovations are seldom in evidence in most school settings, given the past three decades of making schools an arm of the economy.

I do wonder about those six year-olds who made those ads for BBDO and what they learned while the camera was on. What if their teachers asked them whether faster was better than slow in doing a school project or helping a friend or eating dinner with a parent? I do wonder.