Learning and the Brain Conference - Reaching for Greatness - Sunday

Keynote 6 - Sir Ken Robinson - You, Your Child, and School:  Teaching to Their Talents, Passions, and Potential
(Disclaimer of bias:  I adore Sir Ken Robinson.  I have zero ability to be objective.  I will gush.)

There are groups all over the world having this conversation - about how we develop systems of education that are faithful to the talents of our children.  Around the world, this is happening in the face of a political headwind.

We all have some deep talents, and there is a need for education to develop them and provide access to them.

Politicians of all parties seem to take the view that education is a form of preparation for something that happens later on.  It's like a holding camp for the jobs market.  This is how they became so focused on the need to raise academic standards and lead to the downgrading of vocational programs.  Society depends on people pulling on the rope together, but our education systems have come focused on competition for political reasons.

"I'd rather have an electrician rewire my house than a man with a PhD in electrical engineering."  The unemployment rate would be lower if we didn't tell kids they had to reach a level above of what they want to do to contribute to the world.

"If you design a system to promote certain abilities and downgrade others, don't be surprised when that happens."

All grandparents think that their grandchild is the smartest, most beautiful, wonderful child that ever was born.  However, like every other child, each is a human being, who grows and depends on resources to live.  As humans, we have curiosity and have desires to create culture and change the world rather than adapt to it.

Speaking multiple languages doesn't mean you are linguistically gifted.  It has to do with your background and environment.  There is a natural capacity that the environment develops.  Nobody teaches you to speak.  You couldn't teach it if you wanted to because you don't know how you do it either.  They learn to speak because they want to and because they can.  Learning is natural.

Learning is the natural process of acquiring new skills and understanding, and it is a gift of nature (God).

We have education systems because
- there are things that are important to us culturally and want to make sure kids don't miss them.
- there are some things we want kids to learn that are to difficult to learn left to their own devices.

A school is a community of learners, where people come together to learn with and from each other.

Video showing extreme enthusiasm - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzry8ATXvX0&disable_polymer=true

All kids love to learn, but many have a problem with education and school because of the pressures inherent in the system that have been caused for political reasons.  Humans have a sense of enthusiasm and enchantment in discovery and learning.  That joy of learning should impel learning.

We fall for the lie that if you do well on tests you will get better jobs and live happier lives.  It used to be true, but it is not anymore.  We need forms of education that fit the way the world really is.

Technology has utterly transformed every aspect of childhood, from work to play.  Kids are rarely outside.  By the time a child is 7, he has spent two years in front of a screen and one year of that time alone with the screen.

After contracting polio, he was sent to a special needs school for the physically disabled.  He was at school with people who had cerebral palsy, partial blindness, heart problems, etc.  None of the children thought anything about it.  They didn't see each other in terms of disability.  A boy with CP sat next to him who had very clear thinking, but the lack of muscle control kept him from speaking well.  He wrote with his feet and had excellent penmanship.

Reflecting on his childhood as he was writing recently, he had this thought.  "If you have a narrow view of ability, you have a broad view of disability.  Our education systems are structured around a narrow view of ability."  People probably have abilities that you don't notice just because you aren't looking for them.  We have to broaden our view of ability, intelligence, and creativity rather than compliance and linear skill development.

Capacity is different from ability.  You may have the capacity to play the cello, speak multiple languages, or be a master of calligraphy but not have the ability to do it because no one ever taught you.  If you don't find the thing you love and are good at, you will get through the day; but you won't really enjoy it.

There is a difference between physical energy and spiritual energy.  You can be exhilarated in your spirit while being physically exhausted when you are doing something you love.  You get energy from doing the things you love.  People are like that too. There are people whose energy you sync with, and you fall in love with them.  You just love being with them.  There are people drain the energy from you.

Paul McCartney and George Harrison's music teacher didn't think either of them had any particular musical ability.  He had half the Beatles in his class and missed it.  Elvis wasn't allowed in the glee club because they said he would ruin their sound.

"The aim of education is to enable students to understand the world around them and the talents within them so that they can become fulfilled individuals and active, compassionate citizens."
(Personal note:  This is a secularized statement that perfectly aligns with the GRACE Vision Statement:  Students at GRACE Christian School will be grounded in God’s Word and challenged to achieve academic excellence as they prepare to use their gifts and abilities effectively to follow God’s plan for their lives.)

Human talent is highly diverse.  Life is organic, not linear.  Every life is unique and unrepeatable.  We need a broad enough curriculum to let them find their talents.  (I have never met anyone who doesn't have special needs.  There are just some that are more obvious.  It's in the nature of human beings to have special needs.)


"To be born at all is a miracle, so what are you going to do with your life?" - Dahli Lama

Every one of us bears the imprint of humanity, but we all bear it differently.  People settle for too little.  At a time when we are better off than any other time in history, the most prevalent condition among people is depression.  We must create conditions for human growth.

You can raise the value of education without raising the status of teachers.  Politicians are focused on the curriculum rather than the teachers.

Wikipedia shows us that knowledge is a shared fabric and shows what people can do when they collaborate.  There's never been anything like it.

"I don't know.  I've never thought about that.  What do you think?" - Dahli Lama  (Great teachers are great learners, and they ask others to teach them.)

Concurrent Sessions C
Part 1 - 10,000-Hour Myth: Lessons From Child Prodigies (Young Children) - Ellen Winner, PhD

The Anti-Talent View 
- "Every child is born with the capcity for becoming richly musical so long as he or she is brought up properly.  There is no inborn talent for music ability." - Sinichi Suzuki
- Ericsson believes that deliberate practice can lead to high achievement in any domain.  It must be designed to improve performance, structured, effortful, and motivate by improvement, not enjoyment.
- Ericsson's study was based on 40 people divided into 4 groups.  Because the highest two groups practiced more than the bottom two groups, it was concluded that there was a direct correlation between practice and expertise.  Correlation is not causation, and the method is flawed scientifically.  Perhaps innate proclivity (talent) motivates more practice.

Evidence for Drawing Talent: Early Skill and Rage to Master
- Practice is necessary, but it is not sufficient for greatness.  There are individual differences innate to the human being. 
- Prodigies are precocious and learn rapidly.  The come to you already with greater skill.  You can't tear them away from their domain.  They have an intense desire to master that skill.  They tend to make discoveries on their own with little scaffolding from adults.
- Realistic drawing studies of young children show early skill is shown prior to practice in some kids.

These were drawn by two different 3-year-olds.

These are drawn by the same child as he aged.  The first one was at 4 years, 7 months.  The others were drawn at 6.

These were drawn by the same child at 3, 4, and 6.





Experimental Evidence for Talent
- To sight-read music, while playing the piano, you must look at the notes ahead while playing the current notes.  This involves working memory.  Experiments measured working memory in children using span tests.  It was found that deliberate practice led to better sight-reading skill but that working memory predicted sight-reading skills regardless of the amount of deliberate practice.  Therefore, working memory can limit ultimate attainment.
- Gobet and Campitelli studied 104 chess players.  Assessed the deliberate practice hours and whether they had reached Grand Master level.  They found that deliberate practice accounted for 34% variance in national rating.  In the 34 that had achieved Grand Master level, the average practice time was about 11000 hours, but the range was from 3016 to 23608 hours.  Some in the study spent 25000 hours without reaching Grand Master level.
- Deliberate practice is harder to measure in some fields than others.  
- One of the problems with the deliberate practice studies is that they are looking at people who are already elite.  You need a random sample to get an accurate view.

Is Talent in Drawing a Splinter Skill?
- Prodigy study: Drake and Winner - 12 drawing prodigies who achieved realism 2 years ahead of their peers were compared to a control group of typical drawers.  They were given IQ tests and visual-spatial tests.  IQ was not correlated to artistic skill.  There were two areas in which the artists visual-spacial skills were better or faster, but not all.  They did not find the underlying core capacity that might lead to realistic drawing talent.


Potential Dangers of the Anti-Talent View
- Drive and talent are associated, not learned.  
- Parental pressure cannot replace or overcome rage to master.
- If the child doesn't achieve, the implication is that the child just didn't work hard enough.

An argument among attendees about whether gifted kids could be gifted in domain-specific or domain-general areas.  Suggestions that parents might not be able to influence because of kids resistance, so a parent could enlist a peer as a stealth strategy.


Part 2 - Fantastic Failures: How Learning from Great Minds Can Help Students Reach Their Potential - Luke Reynolds, PhD

- We are so deeply interested in our students' success that we might be failing them.
- When a student fails, how do you respond?  You should help them figure out how to go deeper and examine the causes.
-  Told a story about a movie making him believe that people who drove vans were killers.  Kids can get wrong ideas in our head without even knowing it.  It is sometimes necessary to unlearn things that we have deeply ingrained in our minds.
- "I want you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand.  It's when you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through, no matter what." - Atticus Finch
- Start with your passion and what causes a creative burst, and you will walk right into any standard a state can devise.  If you start with the standards, you might not ever get through to the passion.
- For the kid who feels like they don't belong, the goal of education is telling them that they do belong.

- Christopher Reeve's wife gave him the will to live after his accident when she said, "You're still you, and I love you."
- Charles Dutton took a book of African American plays into solitary confinement with him while he was in prison.  He said "I found my humanity in that cell and I was a changed man when I got out."  He asked the guards if he could start a theater group in prison and kept asking until they let him do it.  Upon release, he went to Yale and then Broadway, movies, and television.  Perhaps, if he had read these plays and gotten him involved in acting in school, he might not have ended up in that cell.
- JK Rowling was rejected by 12 publishers.  They thought Harry Potter was too weird a concept and didn't know how they would market it.  The agent who took her on told her children's books don't make a lot of money.  Bloomsbury's editor brought it home planned to reject it as well, but her daughter started reading it.  She told her mom, "If you don't publish that book, I'll never speak to you again."  

- You should have high standards for all kids, but you have to walk through it with them through the context of their life.  Join them where they are to get them to the standard.
- How do you want to be measured?  When kids talk about you ten years from now, what do you want them to say?  Measure others in that way, too.  
- Don't get so distracted by data that you forget the authenticity of learning.  It's not always measurable.

- If you can find a way to make a paper or speech on something a kid likes, you can accomplish the same skills without making them hate or fear it.  Find ways to reduce pressure on kids.  
- When you ask kids to tell you a story, they don't get scared about public speaking.  They are achieving all the elements you would have on your rubric, but there's no fear and loathing because they don't see it as a big deal. (Personal Note to Kellie: I will change my rubric a bit for next year's element speeches.  On the delivery part, I will change PVLEGS to how natural the delivery is to encourage them to be themselves or personify the element naturally.)
- You can reach any standard with creative methods.  If you are with your kids in the store, and you need 11 things (standard), you can say to your kids, "Aliens are coming to destroy the earth.  These are the 11 items we need." (method)  The more creative the method, the less pressur the kids will feel. 

Concurrent Sessions D

Part 1 - The Science of Innovation: Overcoming Obstacles to Creativity in Your Classroom - Anthony J. McCaffrey, PhD

All his students have been diagnosed with some sort of learning impairment.  

uPuzzles (Universal puzzles) can be adapted to any subject matter.

Show a doodle and ask what they see.

When asking people to solve a puzzle, it is difficult to get people to break out of the common use of an object to see how else it could be used.  Asking students to break those objects down into descriptions of their parts might help them see it in a different way.  

When asking people to design something new, they often get fixed on making variations to already established things.  If you are asked to design a new candle, you will probably only change color, size, scent, or shape.  You should focus on what other people have overlooked.

Design puzzles in such a way that the solution includes a feature that is commonly overlooked.

The brain hates nonsense.  It wants to make sense of what it sees and hears.  Nonsense makes the brain work hard.  Sometimes it needs clues, which is why it often becomes clear when someone else says what it is.  

Three degrees of separation among concepts.
Example: Brick and Banana - A brick can be used to make a building.  A supermarket is a kind of building.  Supermarkets sell bananas.  You can do this with vocabulary words in any subject (e.g. Mitosis and Basketball)

Noun-Sense (leads to metaphorical meaning)
Take any two nouns and have students tell what they could mean. (e.g. Diamond messages, Stake puddle, Dictionary treatment, Jello marriage, Drama mitosis)

Memes and Themes
Show a common meme and have kids write the words based on the material.

Strange Line
Give students a strange sentence (He met himself just yesterday.) and ask them to come up with the scenario.  When you present a text, before reading it, give students an interesting line.  Ask them what they think it means with no background or context. (To be or not to be.  That is the question.)  Then, when they are reading, they can find out what it really means.  

Complete the Famous Saying
Ask not what your country can do for you . . .
One small step for man . . .
Then, compare their answers to the real answer.

How did that happen?
Give two unrelated sentences. (The king is dead.  The evergreen trees are flourishing.)  Ask students to give a narrative chain of events to get from one to the other.  If you do it in history, you can use something like "Chauffer takes a wrong turn.  Sixteen million people died."  They fill in the details of how WWI started.  In Biology, you could use "The sun is shining.  People can breathe."

Making Headlines
Give a news story or historical event.  Have kids write the headline.  You could then look at real headlines from the time.

Group Creativity - Brainstorming in groups is not very effective.  Extroverts dominate, and they speak differently depending on who is in the room that they want to impress or don't want to be embarrassed in front of.  Brainstorm alone first.  Come together to share ideas.  Don't brainstorm together.

Shoevolution
Give students a collection of pictures of shoes.  Ask them to design a new shoe with aspects of two others.  Show the new shoes as a new collection of pictures.  Then, have them do it again with the second set of shoes.  Discuss adaptations.  

Brainswarming
Put goal at the top and resources at the bottom.  Figure out where the things can come together to find the solution.

Automaticity is the enemy of creativity.  It is an important neural process for everyday living, like why you can sit in a chair without fear, but it stops you from having new ideas of what to do with that chair.  To overcome automaticity, 

Learning and the Brain Conference - Reaching for Greatness - Saturday

Keynote 3 - Robert J. Sternber, PhD - Teaching for Wisdom, Intelligence, Creativity, and Success

"I've never seen so many people in one place at 8:30 on a Saturday morning, so even if this talk is bad, I've seen that."

Primary Motivation
The people who are smart in unusual ways do not test well.  The goal of instruction and assessment should be to reach all students equitably.  We mistakenly emphasize memory and analytical skills when the skills needed for life are creative, practical, and wisdom-based.  They need to have ideas of their own and an interest in the common good.

Secondary Motivation
Traditional testing emphasizes skills that kids from high socioeconomic status have but not those that kids from low socioeconomic status have, trapping them in a cycle.

WICS model - Wisdom Intelligence and Creativity Synthesized
This should supplement, not replace, traditional techniques.  Memory and analysis still matter; they just shouldn't be overemphasized to the point they are today.

"I got into this business because I crapped out on standardized tests.  They put me into stupid classes where they asked me to do stupid work.  I did stupid work.  They were happy.  I was happy.  Everybody was happy, but it wasn't right."

The world is changing so fast that there must be creative skills to adapt all the time.  You need creative skills and attitudes to come up with ideas.  You need wisdom to ensure your ideas achieve a common good over the short and long terms through the infusion of positive ethical values.

Creativity Intelligence  
- Coming up with ideas that are both novel and useful.  It's partly an ability but it is also an attitude.  - Creative people defy the crowd, themselves, and the zeitgeist.  There is often pressure on teachers to NOT develop that because creative people can be kind of a pain.  We typically try to fit in with the crowd because we don't want to be embarrassed and then regret it and are embarrassed by it later.
- Creative skills can be taught and assessed using words like create, design, invent, imagine, and suppose.  Use these in your projects and test questions.  (e.g. Suppose what it would be like if . . . and write what you think the solution would be).
- Creative people redefine problems in order to analyze solutions and are willing to overcome obstacles.  Recognize that the more creative idea, the less people are going to like it, so you have to believe in and sell it yourself.
- You can learn as much from your students or more than you can from yourself because you may have become entrenched in certain ideas because of your own expertise.  It's hard to be creative in a hyper-analytic world.
- If you want to foster creative thinkers, you have to tolerate ambiguity, help them find what they love, and create an environment in which outside the box thinking is valued.
- To assess creativity, ask yourself to what extent the product is informed, novel, compelling, and task-appropriate.

Analytical Intelligence 
- Ability to makes sense of or see order in complexity or even chaos.
- Important, just shouldn't be focused on at the expense of other skills.
- In the real world, unlike test items, analytical thinking comes in problems that are not predefined, unstructured, and have no multiple choice options.  There isn't one correct answer, and they sometimes come with emotional stakes.  Is there another way you can ask the question that will allow the kids to show the same skill?  Ask how they can see this in their own life and how they would handle it.
- The research shows that those who are good scientific thinkers are not good at the SAT and ACT.
- skills can be taught and assessed using words like analyze, compare and contrast, evaluate, explain, judge, and critique.  (e.g. Critique the ethics of a certain experiment, discussing why you believe that the benefits did or did not outweigh the cost and why.)

Practical Intelligence
- Common sense has almost no correlation with IQ.
- Based on informal and intuitive knowledge
- "You don't have to be the best student in the class to have something to contribute to the world."
- Most of what is important that is learned in a school is not the curriculum or what is directly taught, but the skills of being in an environment like a school
- Practical skills can be taught using words like use, apply, implement, convince, put an idea into practice.
- Teach students to ask these questions to develop practical intelligence.  How can I make this work?  Whose help do I need?  What resources do I need?  What are the obstacles to making this work?  Who will benefit?  Assess based on feasibility of the solution and its persuasiveness. (Personal note:  Remember this for the Global Solutions Project in Physics.)

Wisdom
- You can be smart but unwise through unrealistic optimism, egocentrism, the belief in our own omniscience, omnipotent, or invulnerability, and lack of ethical engagement. (Personal note: I cannot help but think of President Trump through this description.)
- Wisdom is the use of our knowledge, skills, and attitudes toward a common good, balancing the interests of all.  It must involve looking at the bigger picture.
- A wise person considers the long and the short term.  Sometimes you have to take a short-term loss for a long-term gain.
- A wise person seeks an ethical solution to complex problems.
- Dialogical thinking - Understanding other's points of view and how they are similar and different from your own.
- Dialectical Understanding how what is viewed as true or acceptable changes over time and place.
- Wise people seek to understand others and their points of view, feel compassion toward others, and understand all sides of a problem.  They seek to understand not only what they know, but what they do not know and what cannot be known.  They are open to new and possibly uncomfortable experience.
- The increase in emphasis on standardized tests, multiple choice problems, and memory and analytical thinking has led to a generation of leaders who can do those things without wisdom.
- Measurable and objective standards aren't everything.  College admission standards aren't based on height, even though it is measurable and objective.
- To evaluate wisdom based products, look for how the solution was arrived at.  Does it take into account the common good, positive ethical values, long and short-term consequences, and the interests of all?

Successful intelligence is figuring out what you want to do, revising as needed, moving on with new solutions.

Take the same material you already teach and adjust the questions you ask to assess creative, analytical, practical, and wisdom-based thinking skills.  Any teacher can do this.

(Personal note:  This has been my favorite speaker so far.)


Keynote 4 - Yong Zhao, PhD - Personalizable Education for All Children
(Disclaimer of bias:  I am not a fan of personalized education, so I am likely to be skeptical.)

"In my village in China, the IQ test was to ride water buffalos.  I was a terrible water buffalo rider, so I ended up in school."

The "7 keys to college readiness" only make you ready for something that doesn't exist.  It matters what kind of college or what major.  We have these things because we want them out of our basement.  We might as well call it "out of our parents' basement readiness" but it doesn't mean anything.  Yet, we let it drive our education today.  We are still thinking about education as training for more schooling.

First, there was ELA and Math.  Being good at those (SAT) would make you successful.  Then we added social studies and science (ACT).  Then, there were the 4Cs.  "If you don't know the 4Cs, you do not deserve to live in the 21st century.  You didn't have to communicate in the 19th century.  No one in the 14th century had to be creative."  (Obvious sarcasm)  Then, there was IQ v. EQ.  We keep adding things.  If we discover something that's good, we decide everyone should have it.  If all successful people have a certain trait, we decide we have to teach it to everyone.

What makes a person successful? (not people, A PERSON)
- There is no one human trait that makes a person successful.
- That means there is no curriculum that works in all settings, all the time, for all people.  You can prescribe the future.
- "I'm thankful that my father didn't try to give me tutorials on riding the water buffalo to make me more successful."
- How you react to the randomness matters.

- Learning can happen outside of schools.  If you really wanted to learn the equivalent of a college education, you could do it without going to college.  Schools are just the ones who credential that.

- A child does not walk into a future (that we have made them ready for).  They create a future.  

- They are all different.  We should stop trying to make them the same in the name of readiness.  "When you throw a dead bird, you can predict its trajectory.  You can't do that when you throw a live bird."  Kids are live birds, so let's stop treating them like we can predict their trajectory.

- When we prescribe something because it is useful, we are ignoring the fact that other talents could also be useful to that person. (Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer)  Not everyone relies on the same set of skills or talents to succeed.  

- The achievement gap cannot be closed by trying to make everyone the same (the problem with percentiles - someone has to be worse than me).  Human nature is to be involved in a community, but the SAT is set up to make you selfish.  The way to do well is to have people worse than you take it at the same time, not necessarily to do well yourself.

- Mass Mediocrity vs. Unique Greatness

(Personal note:  Anyone who tells you to teach to the middle should be slapped.)

If our job is to cultivate unique talents, how do we do that?  We can personalize the learning by giving multiple options, content, time constraints, locations, and perspectives.  You must learn X, but you can decide how and when.  They should be co-owners of their education.  

(Personal note:  I don't know how you fit this into daily, quarterly schedules.  I am also skeptical about letting the child lead because they have an even more limited perspective than we do.  I am on board with some choice and some agency, but there is still value in having the teacher create parameters.  There are things that they won't learn because they don't even know it is out there.)

Traditional school is like making a garden.  If I want to grow roses, I get rid of tulips.  We should be a nature preserve, cultivating and protecting each thing that grows.


Keynote 5 - Ransom W. Stephens, PhD - Your Pursuit of Greatness, Author of The Left Brain Speaks.  The Right Brain Laughs and ebook Your Pursuit of Greatness
(co-discover of the Top Quark - How am I in the same room with these people?)

If I can corrupt you (teachers), it's like exponential growth because the corruption will spread.

Time is like a river.  Your accomplishments, whether they last a few minutes or few millenia, will wash out to sea.  You have about 31000 days in your life.  What will you do with them?

Timescales of existence
- Second - awareness
- Day - action
- Month - billing cycle
- Season - sowing and reaping
- Year - evaluation and perspective
- Decade - accomplishment
- Life - all you get

Personal note:  This is amazing.  I've never thought of time in this way, but it is going to change the way I think about it from now on.  Each brings a different perspective.  If you are worrying, you will be able to change that by looking at it on a different timescale.

"Paradise is easier to find than it is to recognize."  This is why we often look back at a time and remember how great it was and wish we had enjoyed it more at the time.

Ask these questions:  What matters to you?  Why do you NEED money? What will you do?
- How do we acquire ambition?  Ask a 10-year-old.  (When you are 10, you care less about what other people think than you will again until your 40s.)
- Our brains construct reality by using past context and present pattern recognition to make future predictions.
- A pattern is any experience we can realize in less than .2s unless it is something we have never seen before.  This creates one problem:  We tend to recognize patterns even when there isn't one.
- Nature's dilemma - Good, fast, or cheap - Pick two.  Nature chooses fast and cheap because assuming the worst is best for survival.
- Recognizing patterns before we are aware of them leads to prejudice, whether racial, gender, or ideas.  We aren't even conscious of the thought we are already having.
- Two extremes - People who only recognize black and white and aren't burdened by nuance have much prejudice.  People who see everything in shades of gray and find nuance in everything have post-judice.  They are subject to more danger because they are still trying to find the nuance before they make a judgment.  Most of us are in the middle.

The education miracle
- 250000 years ago, people were aware of only months and seasons and only about 30 miles
- 25000 years ago, people were aware of only abou 50 years and only about 100 miles
- Now, peopl are aware of billions of years and about 500000 miles
- K-12 conveys a quarter of a million years of human knowledge

What do we do every day?  Lead a herd of horses to water.  Repeat.  Repeat.  Occasionally, we push their heads down toward the water.

Developing talent into ambition.
Education leads to talent.  If they like it, they want to learn more, looping it back to education and increasing talent.  If you do that often enough, it drives them and becomes an ambition.

Bliss, Blunder, and Fear
We put off our passions and ambitions for fear of failure, believing there is a time when all the resources will be in place to keep us from failing.  When you decide to go for it (or when your students decide to go for it), the worst case scenario is that culture would be better.  No matter what level you get to in the process, even if you ultimately fail, it is a higher level than you are currently at.

Do you have what it takes?  The people who have what it takes have two things in common. Determination and resilience, the ability to survive and overcome failure.
- Resilience comes from failing gently
- The ability to delay gratification overcomes IQ deficits EVERY time.
- Resilience is a skill that can be developed by reflecting on and analyzing success and failure (How did you get there?  How does it inform the next time?) and obstacles.

Be probabilistic, rather than realistic.  You can't do everything you set your mind to, but the odds are you won't set your mind to something you cannot do.

Parent problem:  They say they want their child to "go for it," but they really want them to be safe.  They encourage them to take safe, money making jobs so that they won't have to worry.

Recognize the challenges you have overcome before.  Apply that to the challenge you face now.  Whether you are 8 or 80, you have experienced success at some level before.  Mine the lessons learned from that to tackle the next thing.  List your top 20 greatest accomplishments (dig deep), your 5 worst failures, your top 5 fears and the safety nets you want.  Analyze how you succeeded, got through the failures, used (or are likely to use) the safety nets.  Is our mode of making money going to be our aspiration or just support the pursuit of our aspiration?  Don't think so much about the most catastrophic worst-case scenario.  Think about the most probable one.

Then ask what you are waiting for.  Are you ready?  There will be times when it seems like you don't have a snowball's chance in the Mojave desert, but sometimes it snows in the Mojave.


Concurrent Sessions B
Part 1 - Being Human: Genes, Skills, Values, and Settings - Jerome Kagan, PhD

All negative outcomes require a pattern that involves genetic and experiential vulnerabilities, triggers, and immediate circumstances.  For 90% of the outcomes scientists study, the biggest predictor is the socioeconomic class in which you were reared.  It influences everything from your peers to the quality of food you eat to the books and music you were exposed (or not exposed to).  

Children automatically identify with those of their own class.  The exception is that a very few very poor kids can live without recognizing their poverty.  Some who do become successful suffer from imposter syndrome.

The local circumstances in which you live at the moment a trigger occurs will make a huge difference in the outcome.  The murder rate in Manhatten is slower than that of Chicago because the rich and power mingle more in Manhatten.  The alcoholism rate is high in Russia, so you are more likely to turn to that when you encoutner stress than if you live somewhere where there are fewer alcoholics.  Japan has a high suicide rate, which continues to create more suicidal people.  

Humans' strong frontal lobe allows us to suppress and hide our animus (natural and perosnal feelings, personality traits, and tendencies that come from our biology) so that we will appear normal to others.  Some genetic vulnerabilities result in desirable outcomes, like math, music, or language.  Others result in undesirable outcomes, like cognitive compromises or a low threshold for uncertainty.

Triggers and stressful circumstances create feelings that we may not know how to interpret, so we decide they are anxiety, depression, or shame.  We are actually choosing the language.  It does not represent the biology.  

Each developmental stage is marked by particular talents, emotions, and beliefs.  
- Younger than 8 months, they have poor memories for the immediate past.  They don't really know if something is unusual because they don't yet have a pattern for usual.
- Infants older than 8 months are vulnerable to uncertainty (which is when they start crying when they see a stranger or are separated from the caregiver they are accustomed to).
- The second year is when humans start showing uniqueness. They can start making inferences about the thoughts and feelings of others, start using language to interpret the world, develop some sense of right and wrong, and have awareness of one's feelings, plans, and thoughts.  This is the result of brain growth in the neurons between the halves of the brain.
- Between age four and puberty, children improve at integrating present and past, experiencing guilt, identifying with family members, class, ethnic group, or religion.
- Puberty is accompanied by the ability to think hypothetically, separate possible from less possible causes, and the belief that they have exhausted all solutions to a problem.  Testosterone quiets the amygdala, so boys start responding to stress more calmly than girls do.  
(The sequence of these changes are universal, but the timing changes across various societies and historical eras.  You can't stop them from acquiring the skills, but you might delay or accelerate them.)

Most adults refuse to accept that this progression is a result of accidents without meaning but don't know how to interpret their desire for meaning and struggle to make sense of their life script. 

Kids are confused because they have no meaning attached to their existence.  We went from a belief in something metaphysical as a source of meaning to a belief in authorities.  Then, authorities failed us and we became disillusioned.  Then, evolutionary science made us think we were meaningless accidents.  This generation doesn't have a reason to get out of bed.  This is a crisis.  (Note:  This is not my interpretation of what the speaker said.  It is what he actually said.)


Part 2 - What Makes the Human Mind Special?: Insights from Non-Human Animals - Laurie R. Santos, PhD  
(Disclaimer of Bias: This talk was extraordinarily based in evolutionary psychology.  The phrase non-human animal makes me crazy.  Humans are not just another kind of animal.  Humans are special creations.)

Comparitive cognition:  Studies primates and dogs to compare with human cognition.  
- When first meeting someone new, you will likely ask, "Where are you from?" because we think it tells us something about that person.  
- Rhesus monkeys have a strong social structure.
- Humans have a cultural environment that other animals do not have (except for domesticated dogs because they experience human culture).   

Humans are really weird:  We do things that no other species does.  From the arts to marriage ceremonies to pedagogy to stock trading.  What cognitive capacities allow us to be so weird?  
- Most proposals are that there's some human unique smart congitive capacity (like use of language or tool usage).
- She proposes that there's some human unique glitchy congitive capacity.

- Humans want to get what is going on our heads into someone else's head.  We are the only species that have that.  Just at the end of the first year of life, kids start pointing to get you to look at what they are looking at.  Chimps that sort of point, but it is to get something, not to share an experience.  

- Both humans and animals have behavioral contagion (fish schooling, mirroring behaviors, picking up or losing an accent, unconscious peer pressure).   

- Humans and some animals have emotional contagion that come from behavioral contagion.  We are typically happy around people who smile or act excited.  Yawn contagion and getting the giggles from someone else's laughter seem to come from this.  This is why sit-coms use laugh tracks.  (Personal note:  I have observed this in movie theaters recently.  I had watched Casablanca several times, but there were lines I had not found funny before watching it in a theater with other people who laughed.)

- Chimps have contagious yawning.  Dogs don't really yawn but do mimic the behavior by opening their mouth.  Chimps don't truly laugh but have a heavy breathing that can be heard while they are playing.  They do seem to make these sounds more when another chimp is doing it as well.

What is unique to humans?  

- Mental contagion (like a Vulcan mind meld).  Do we pick up the beliefs and mental states of someone else?  We can mentally represent someone else's thought but keep it separate from our own thoughts (but it can affect what we think as well).  

- There can be interference of your perception when you can tell what someone else's perception is.  

- There can also be interference of your belief if you can tell that someone else believes differently than you do.  

- This happens in the prefrontal cortex of the human brain as well as the areas of the brain in the parietal lobe that represents the thoughts of others.

- Primates can use the perception of others against them.  Rhesus monkeys will steal food from someone who isn't looking because he can tell the person won't know.  A complicated experiment that is too difficult to describe in notes shows that rhesus monkeys do not seem to have their beliefs influenced by the beliefs of others.

- There is, of course, a cost to this.  Other people's bad information might make you unable to solve a problem when you could have solved it on your own.  Teachers must be careful of their bad information because it could be passed on to the student.  In an experiment, children did something they did not need to do when they saw someone else do it, but chimps cut to the chase and skipped unneeded steps even if they saw someone else do them.  Dogs also skip the irrelevant steps.

- Mental contagion allows us to experience culture and like the same books other people do, but it can also make us trust people we shouldn't.

The frightning implications of this are the effects of movies, the internet, and other media may cause kids to absorb the beliefs of what they are seeing represented on a screen.

The positive implication is that your content is probably pentrating more than you think it is.

(Apology for Previous Bias:  I got more out of this than I thought I would.  There was a lot of interesting information in spite of the worldview conflict.)

Part 3 - The Superhuman Minds: How the Science of Savants Shows Us How to Free the Genius in Children - Berit O. Brogaard, PhD, DMSci

Divergent thinking - Synesthesia
An unusal mixing of the senses.  Link color to numbers or sounds.  Link words to tastes.  Runs in families.  

- Grapheme-color synesthesia - The person has very specific colors and brightness associated with numbers that are unique to that individual.  The pop out effect - If shown mixed numbers, they can find the different ones quickly because they appear to be in different colors.  
- Number pattern synesthesia - More likely to choose codes in patterns
- Calendar synesthesia - The calendar is projected in front of them mentally.
- Fear-color synesthesia - Things that present a danger cause your visual field to become clouded.  Serves as a warning system.
- Sound-color synesthesia can be so extreme that it leads to legal blindness in noisy places because it interferes with the visual field.
- Sound-taste synesthesia can make food taste different if you hear certain sounds.
- Person-smell synesthesia - Associates a smell with a person.
- Word sound-shape - a type of synesthesia we seem to all have (Bobo Kiki Question)

Savant - A perosn with a radically enhanced cognitive ability in a narrow subject area.  Occurs in 105 of people with autism and some people with brain injury.
- Kim Peek is lacking the three main connection between the two sides of his brain.  No knowledge defects were apparent.  He was known as a megasavant or human encyclopedia.
- Human computers Kay and Fro could tell you exactly what they ate and were wearing or what the host of a game show was wearing on a specific date.
- Daniel Tammet knows Pi to 23000 digits and can calculate at high speeds.
- Card counters can sometimes keep track of 8 decks at the same time in a game of blackjack.
- Derek Amato - a salesman who had never played the piano.  He injured his brain diving into a pool.  When he woke up, he had an intense desire to play a piano, so he went to a piano store and started playing.  A year later, he had released to albums and was on a world concert tour.

Colored refrigerator magnets where different letters are different colors could actually induce synesthesia in some children.

Perfect pitch is strongly correleated with Sound-Color Synesthesia.

Personal note:  This lady seems to be interested in causing kids to have synesthesia.

Use of color can use learning and memory even if your brain is neurotypical.
- Red draws attention.  Marking mistakes in red draws the child's attention to them and may reinforce the mistake.  Write key points in red.  Write homework lists in red.
- Green and blue produce calm because of their short wavelength.
- Orange and yellow lift mood.  Orange tinted glases have made depressed people feel better.
- Use blue paper for especially complex information because it enhances understanding.

Ask kids to write with word pictures.  Instead of saying, "She is afraid," write, "Her eyes were wide, breath quickened, every muscle in her body felt tight."

Give kids prompts of things that don't typically belong together (internet, skiing, your teacher's desk) and have them write a science fiction story.

In case you are having trouble following these notes, she was a little jumbled and her slides had conversion problems, so I had a hard time taking coherent notes.

How can we create flow in the classroom?  Playing a game

Learning and the Brain Conference - Reaching for Greatness - Friday

Pre-Conference Visit to the MIT Brain Imaging Lab
Wow!  That's all I can say about this visit.  Is it because the machine is amazing?  No.  I mean, it is but it looks like one you have seen in any medical drama.  Is it because the facility is amazing?  No.  It pretty much looked like an office with a bunch of computer screens.  Why was it amazing?  The people who work there.  We were lead on the tour by a safety coordinator, a neuroscientist, and an engineer.  They couldn't have been any kinder or more patient with all of our questions.  They were also super smart but could explain things in a way that anyone could understand.

Any notes or actual information I could post here would not make sense if you weren't there.


Keynote 1 - Scott Barry Kaufman, PhD. - Finding Your Personal Greatness
Started by saying he was terrified because he felt a moral dilemma due to his hatred of the word greatness, which is the theme of the conference.  In order to keep his integrity while presenting at the conference, he decided to redefine it as personal greatness and give a talk he never has before.

He was in special education.  Had been told that he was learning disabled and not college material (which the adults in his life thought would relieve his anxiety).  He spent a decade of his career to redefine intelligence because there was such a divide between those who were considered intelligent and those who had " special needs."

New Definition: "Intelligence is the dynamic interplay of engagement and ability in pursuit of personal goals."

Then, redefining intelligence didn't sit well.  He wanted to think more about what really matters.  He connected with the work of Maslow and the other humanistic psychologists (Personal disclaimer of bias:  I do not connect with Maslow's work and find humanistic psychology dehumanizing.)  Quoted a 1966 unpublished essay by Maslow in which he said "self-actualization is not enough" and discussed why it was important to seek the good of others and not just oneself and that they must be motivated by values that transcend oneself.   Not long before his death, he began to call for transhumanistic psychology.  (Showed pictures of unfinished manuscripts and handwritten notes Maslow wrote just before he died, showing very different ideas than those you learn in elementary psychology with the pyramid.)  Side Note: Maslow never talked about or showed a pyramid.  He discussed, instead, the balance of needs and growth.  Maslow asked, "Why do we leave mystery and awe in the churches?"

"Suddenly, intelligence didn't matter to me anymore."  Kauffman revised the hierarchy of needs.

Safety - He describes a cycle of needs for safety (more complex than the absence of danger), connection, and self-esteem (including competence and the healthy regulation of narcissism) as the basis for security.

Growth - He also describes a cycle of growth, that includes love, purpose, and exploration.  Cognitive exploration is about both intellect (including curiosity) and openness to experience.  The combination of those two results in creative thinking.

Love - Asked for audience definitions.  He got committed selflessness, duty to meet the needs of others, unconditional support, and value.  He then gave Maslow's description of Being-Love as admiring, enjoyable, constantly growing, having a quiet ego, healthy authenticity, and with minimal expectations ("steady, small maintenance doses").

Purpose - Choose the right goals (Strive wisely).  Live your purpose (pursue wisely).

Transcendence - Integrates the rest of the needs in harmonious ways.

Don't achieve greatness without achieving personal greatness, or you will feel like a fraud.  Talent development must be about advancing the whole person, not just the skill.  Developing a sense of awe in students is possible, and it should be important to us.  We can give them reverence for the material.  (Personal note:  This is so much more meaningful in my work as a Christian school teacher than it was in public school.  It is easier to bring a sense of awe when we recognize God's sovereignty and plan in all of our curriculum.)

If you are interested, you can assess your personal greatness at selfactualizationtest.com
Characteristics include freshness of appreciation, acceptance, authenticity (which is more like dignity or integrity, not just being a jerk), equanimity (grit with grace), purpose, efficient perception of reality, humanitarianism, peak experiences, good moral intuition, and creative spirit.


Keynote 2 - Gail M. Saltz, MD - The Power of Different:  The Link Between Disorders, Creativity, and Genius
Psychoanalysts should be talking to educators because many mental health issues show up in school.

Has a program where a historian and a psychologist examine some of the great minds (e.g. van Gogh, Einstein).  Almost all have a mental health issue or a learning disability.

The typical brain has 100 billion neurons and 100 trillion synapses (connections).  There are 180 defined areas in the rain.  It would be difficult for people's brains to be the same because of all those connections.

Brain differences are normal until it interferes with a person's ability to live and operate daily.  Then, it becomes something diagnosable.  Almost all have a genetic component, but it is not destiny.  We don't treat the diagnosis; we treat the symptoms.  Treatment minimizes suffering in order to keep people on their developmental path.

Brain difference issues have benefits if you have some symptoms.  If you have no symptoms, you might not be able to benefit.  If you have too much of a symptom, you may to ill to benefit.  There is a sweet spot when it comes to brain differences.  Any brain area that gets used gets strengthened, making it more likely that it will be used again.  If there is no treatment, a pathway can become overwhelmingly strong. (e.g. Untreated depression will lead to more and deeper depression.)  Having some symptoms but not too many allows you to take advantage of the strengths.

Strengths of dyslexia
- Ability to discern patterns
- Increased visual-spatial relations
- A wider span of attention
- Greater empathy, resilience, and perseverance

Strengths of Distractability
- Exceptional originality and creativity
- Impulsiveness helps you act on "out of the box" thoughts
- Intuition
- Doesn't inhibit thoughts, leading to new ideas
- Most CEO's of major companies have some form of ADHD.

Strengths of Anxiety
- Alertness, diligence, attention to detail, perfectionism
- Drive
- Vigilance
- Can accurately assess emotions in others
- Ability to predict outcomes
(Problem: Long-term cortisol exposure leads to brain cell death.  Need treatment.  Excitement anxiety is good and leads to better performance, but if everything feels like a mortal danger, you cannot function.)

Strengths of Melancholy (Depression)
- Empathy
- Insight
- Realism (Paying attention to real issues rather than glossing them over for the sake of happiness)
- Obsessiveness
- Perfectionism

Strengths of Mania
- Diversity of thought
- Rapid associations
- Heightened linguistic ability
- Confidence
- Quickened senses
- Passionate drive
- An incredibly high number of great writers live with hypomania (just beneath the manic phase)

Strengths of Divergent (Schizotypal) Thinking
- Problem-solving ability
- Persistence
- Risk-taking
- Sensitivity to environmental stimuli / more nuanced

Strengths of Autism Spectrum
- Ability to classify objects
- Increased peripheral visual acuity (perhaps the cause of decreased facial recognition)
- Increased drive to analyze or construct systems or patterns
- Attention to detail
- Perseveration / find comfort in repetition (a strength in the right job)

The average time from a child's first symptom to treatment is 5 years.  Parents are resistant to believe that their child has a problem.  Dandelions don't need as much nurturing and attention as orchids.  Some people who think differently are orchids and need treatment for growth.

The Human Connectome Project has scan 12000 brains of people without diagnoses to lay a roadmap for the "normal" thinking brain.  This should help with diagnosis, treatment, and education.

We can educate better if we know their strengths.  We should spend 80% of our time developing strengths and 20% shoring up weaknesses.  Expose kids to many things to see what lights their psychological fire.  Recognizing the strengths of all kinds of thinking will redue stigma and allow all students to flourish.


Concurrent Sessions A
Part1:  Raising the Next Great Innovator: What the Quirky Lives of Franklin, Einstein, and Marie Curie Teach Us About Creative Genius - Melissa A. Schilling, PhD, Author of Quirky

Studying a random sample of people will not result in finding innovators.  She spent an entire year studying Steve Jobs and his history and family.  Comparing multiple innovators results in interesting results because on the surface, it is not apparent what they have in common.

Used a protocol to make a list of the most famous inventors, scientists, and thinkers who had multiple innovations.  They also had to have multiple biographies written about them and first-person source material to have a lot of data to draw from without the bias of just one biographers' interpretation.  

When the protocol was run, she found 32 people, from which she chose the 8 that had the most in common.  She was bothered the so many of them were white men and was highly pressured to choose a more diverse population to study.  After she tried to, she decided it was not science anymore if she tried to make her data fit the social norms of the time in which she was living instead of following the protocol.  Also, there is more diversity in the group than skin color.  Tesla was Serbian.  Einstein was Jewish.  Steve Jobs was broke at the beginning.  Edison had a mental illness.  Curie was a Polish woman.  Elon Musk grew up in South Africa and left by himself at the age of 17.  These aren't stories of privilege.  

There was only one woman who made the list because female access to education was so low for so long.  Most of these great innovators were so driven that they focused on their work to the exclusion of everything else.  Marie Curie's daughter refers to her as Madame Curie in her biography and says, "She did not love family and friends.  She loved only science."  This total devotion may also account for the low number of women historically because they felt they must devote themselves to work or family only and would not be able to do both.

Articles by Schilling on this topic. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3190195 and https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/pdf/10.1287/stsc.2017.0044

1. Innovators are also not typically genial.  They are usually socially awkward and sometimes don't care that they are.  Einstein was disliked to the point that his teachers wouldn't write him recommendation letters.  He also didn't fit with the protocols of proper behavior, sweeping Newton's theories away as nothing.  Pierre and Marie Curie "dreamed of living in the world quite removed from human beings."  It is thought that Pierre was likely autistic.  Tesla said, "It is not humans that I love, but humanity."  He was in love with a pigeon (who he said loved him back).  If he were alive today, he would be diagnosed with OCD and mania.  One of Elon Musk's employees said, "You have to understand that he loves humanity.  He just doesn't like people that much."  Edison had few friends and intentionally shut himself off from his employees.  Dean Kamen believe that if you said something was impossible, you just meant that YOU couldn't do it, and he would tell you so.  Steve Jobs was known to be against all social norms, wearing no shoes, parking in a handicapped spot every single day, refusing to put a license plate on his car, etc.  Innovation comes from people who don't care what other people think.

What we can do:
Embrace weirdness.
Stop trying to achieve consensus.
Allow people to work alone in creative endeavors.
Brainstorm individually before doing group work.
Brainstorming teams produce fewer ideas and almost no innovative ideas.
Innovation comes from quiet time, alone, without external stimuli.
Stop scheduling all of kids time if you want them to think creatively.

Meanwhile, someone from a different room, hearing a different speaker tweeted this quote. "Collaboration as a key to creativity and learning." I wonder what the data shows.

2.  Innovators have extreme self-efficacy.  They might not come across as confident in normal situations, but they have a great degree of faith in their ability to overcome obstacles to achieve their goals.  The line between hubris and self-efficacy may be blurry (the difference may be in whether or not you actually get it done).  Elon Musk responded to NASA telling him that they had been working on reusable rockets for years and hadn't been able to do it with, "I think I can do it."  Tesla looked a photo of Niagara falls and told his father that he would harness that power and send it hundreds of miles (when he was 14).

What we can do:
- Create opportunities for early wins in school by lowering the stakes of losing.
- Read hero stories to kids.  They gain self-efficacy vicariously by hearing stories of people overcoming obstacles.

3.  Innovators are extremely idealist and altruistic (except for Edison).  They aren't usually in it for money or popularity.  They often think they are working for God or working on behalf of humanity.  Ben Franklin gave up family (his son was a British loyalist) for the cause of liberty.  Dean Kamen urinated into the water purifier that he invented and drank it to show that it worked.  Because the people who need clean water don't usually have money, he has poured money into it just because people need it and he wants to help clean up the mess.  Elon Musk said, "If something is important enough you should try, even if the probable outcome is failure."

4.  Innovators have a need to work.  They don't want to do anything else.  They get a dopamine rush from working, so the work is their reward.  They lose all sense of time while they are working.  Edison never wanted to not be working.  He was said not to "comprehend the limitations of the strength of other men."

What we can do:
- Keep them stimulated.
- Rethink the hours of work.

5.  Innovators are usually in the right place at the right time with the right resources.  (Personal note:  They call it luck.  We call it God's sovereignty.  He puts the right people in the right place at the right time.)

Formal education is not necessarily correlated with innovators.  Curie was the only formally educated person on the list.  Elon Musk has a bachelor's degree, but he only showed up for the tests.  The other six had very little formal education.  They were largely self-educated.  Several read all the books in their public library, and Ben Franklin started the public library system.  Standardization is a cage for the innovative thinker.  These innovators had high achievement in fields they weren't trained for because, as outsiders, they could see things people in the field could not.  We can, however, as educators create more opportunities for more kids by the environment we create.

Part 2: Unlocking Student Talent by Brian Pete and Robin Fogarty

The person doing the talking is the person doing the learning.  When you are comfortable with the person you are talking with, the learning will be better, so get to know each other.

There's a great analogy about birds on wires and a cat that won't make sense to anyone who wasn't at the conference.  It can't be explained here, but you have to teach your kids to fly, not sit on higher wires.

Developing talent comes from deliberate practice.  We create the structure that they think within.   We must be deliberate and thoughtful about the structure we create and let them move within it.

Perfection is an illusion.  If you are obsessed with perfection, they've got some pharmaceuticals for that now.

Exposure isn't enough to help a student find their passion.  We can push them to try a little more and go a little further to get to the point where passion can be found.  Stimulate the curiosity that is already there.

To Ignite:
- Inspire - Aspirations, hallmarks, novelty
- Invigorate - Challenge, creativity, competitiveness
- Instill - Mindset, confidence, burning desire

To Practice
- Repetition - Deliberate practice strengthens Myelin in the brain (Myelin is the insulating material on the neuron.  As it gets stronger, thinking gets better and faster because it increases working memory.)
- Resistance and Results - Increase their "reachfulness."  Put the goal just out of reach, so they have to stretch to get there.
- Recovery and Residual - Evolving routines develop "pattern-thinking."  Mental memory is developed.

To Coach
- Engage - Coach and talent become a trusting team.  What matters is that the kids believe that you believe in them.
- Elevate - Hone achievement with feedback one level so that they know how to do better on the next level.  Teach them to teach themselves
- Exceed - Goal setting, imagination, metacognition

Don't sit too long.  Stand up occasionally while processing learning.  "The latest research shows that the brain is connected to the body."

Creating a little obstacle in practice makes them remember it better because of the greater brain attention.  Do it the normal way once.  Then do it again with an element missing.

Four lobes of the brain.
- Occipital - Center of Vision
- Parietal - Integration of Senses
- Frontal - Center of Thinking
- Temporal - Center of Hearing

Application is the only way you know they learned something.  If you want to get them thinking, you have to get them talking.  When you ask someone for directions, you always repeat them out loud.  Hearing it isn't enough.  You have to hear yourself say it to activate the Parietal and Frontal lobes, not just the temporal lobe.

In video games, the player is wrong 80% of the time, but if it is appropriately challenging, they will go back and play again.

AB Pyramid game.

Note:  This was the best conference of the day, but the notes may not reflect that.  We were doing so much stuff and it moved so fast that it was easy to learn from but hard to take notes on.

Thanksgiving Post 2 - Mr. Freeman

This November, I am writing about teachers I am thankful to have had in my life and the impact they continue to have on my teaching.  This week, let me tell you about my 8th grade Earth Science and PE teacher, Mr. Jim Freeman.

The first day of 8th-grade is mostly listening to the policies of classes.  There might be the occasional getting-to-know-you game, but in a school where you have had the same classmates all day for years, there isn't much of that.  About halfway through the day, we had gotten to our science classroom, when a very tall, dark-haired teacher walked in, closed the door, and said, "Why should Christians study science?".  He then proceeded to talk for 30 minutes about the history of scientists who honored God with their work, the value of studying creation, and the impact Christians who study science can have on society. 

I sat, enraptured by this lecture.  Let me say that again.  I, a middle school student, hung on every word of a lecture, my eyes tracking every move of this man as he walked around the room, for thirty minutes.  I left the room that day, thinking that we were going to something important that year and that I was all in.  Throughout that year, I remained enthralled any time he broke into a lecture, which he enjoyed doing on a fairly regular basis.

There is an assumption, among people who don't know better, that a teacher or youth minister must be entertaining to engage students and hold their attention.  If that is true, educators and ministers are in real trouble.  We are simply not capable of being as entertaining as the media that floods their lives.  We can never be as engaging as their phones.  What I learned from Mr. Freeman that I carry into my classroom is that engagement comes first from instilling a belief that what we do in this room matters. 

I wish I could find my notes for that Earth Science class because they were a virtual transcript of the lectures that followed.  I couldn't get enough of this teacher and this class.  Was it because he was fun?  No (although he was a fun person).  Was it because he was entertaining?  No (even though he had that in him, often breaking into song).  Was it because he had some technique that made his lessons engaging to middle school students? No (although I am sure he learned things like that in his teacher training).  It was because he communicated the value of his class from minute one and passionately stuck to it all year.  For that, and all the books he inspired me to read, I am thankful.


Extra:  As a side note, Mr. Freeman was also my PE teacher.  It's hard to communicate how much I loathed PE.  I was tall, awkward, and afraid of the ball.  There were two positive moments that year.  The first came when we were playing softball.  I stepped up to the plate, and he said, "Just keep your eye on the ball," an instruction that is pretty terrifying if you are afraid the ball will hit you in the head.  I did it, though, and for the only time in my life, I actually hit the ball.  We'll ignore the fact that I was so surprised that I had hit it that I forgot to run to the base.  The second was the only time I was good at something in PE.  This was an all girls' class, and he decided that we needed to learn some self-defense.  We learned a few punches and kicks and how to use our keys to stab an attacker in the eyes.  One day, he lined us up, held his hand out at the level of his head, and told us to kick his hand.  I was the only one who could reach his hand.  I had been dead last at everything in PE for my entire life because of my height and awkwardness.  Now, for the first time, my height was an actual advantage. 

Thanksgiving Post 1 - Mr. Danny O. Watkins

This week at our faculty meeting, our professional development coach was doing a presentation about Growth Mindset.  She made a very sad statement that she could not think of one teacher who made a real impact on her.  I have always known I was blessed to have some great teachers, but as I was mentally making a list and coming to five without even giving it much thought, I was struck by just how many great teachers God put in my life.  Since November has started and Thanksgiving is on its way, I am going to write about one of these teachers each week.  I'll handle them in chronological order.  I would start with my sixth-grade teacher, Mr. Tom Dorrin, the person who turned my personality from fragile to one that can teach middle schoolers, but I just wrote in detail about him in January. This week's post will be about Mr. Danny O. Watkins, my history and homeroom teacher in the 7th and 8th grades.

History was not "my thing."  I didn't hate it, but if I had to list my classes in order of preference, history would always be at the bottom of that list.  Most of the history teachers I had were named Coach Something (Before you turn away, I've known many fabulous teachers who also coached athletic teams.  If, however, you introduce yourself to anyone except for you players as Coach So-and-so, you have a problem.  Your players should call you "Coach."  To everyone else, you are communicating that you teach a class because you have to in order to keep your sports job.  Okay, rant over.) Back to the gist of the story.  I was not inclined to love a history class.

In 7th grade, I was enrolled in Mr. Watkins' North Carolina history class and homeroom.  I don't quite know how to describe what made him so special, but I'll start with this: He's the most positive individual I've ever known.  He could find something good in anyone.  We loved him so much that my two friends and I weren't even bothered when he asked us to sing "How Firm a Foundation" with three-part harmony in homeroom EVERY day.  We just stepped up and did it for no other reason than he wanted us to. 

During that year, I learned a lot.  I learned about Winston Churchill, Frank Boyden of Deerfield Academy, George Washington Carver, W.E.B. DuBois, and Czar Nicholas and Alexandra.  What's that?  That doesn't sound like North Carolina history to you?  Yeah, we didn't care.  He taught what he loved.  You could study from the book for your tests, but he taught the parts of history that he was passionate about.  By the way, I learned about all those same things in American history the next year.  I get that this would not fit with the curriculum driven world in which we teach today, but in 1989, he made me fall in love with parts of history I might not have if he had stuck to the book. 

In particular, I became interested in the story of Czar Nicholas and the family and Rasputin.  In the 8th-grade, I read the book Nicholas and Alexandra for no other reason than the joy Mr. Watkins took in talking about this story.  To this day, if I am flipping through channels and see Rasputin, I stop and watch.  Ten years after this, I was in a Tulsa art museum that had an exhibit of imperial art.  They had Alexandra's crown a desk used by Nicholas.  I stood in that museum with tears running down my face.  I would not have had an emotional response to a crown and a desk if Mr. Watkins had not made me care so much about that family.

While I believe in my curriculum, what I learned from Mr. Watkins is the power of a teacher communicating the passion they have for what they are teaching.  For that and his relentless positivity, I am thankful.