Silver Jacket

Category: Education

  • Bootstraps or Leather Straps? Your Call.

    BouncerDo people with better memories store more information in their brains? Maybe not. Last month a cognitive neuroscientist (Edward Vogel at the University of Oregon) published a paper in Nature showing that certain types of memory capacity may have less to do with how much raw data you can store than with how selective you are at letting in relevant information. (Here‘s a press release describing the experiment.)

    Notably, Vogel describes the brain filter that keeps the bad stuff out as a nightclub bouncer. Regrettably, I think my brain hires bouncers from a temp service. Sometimes I get the "come one, come all" circus caller who will let in hobos, Hiltons, and stray cats ("Hey look at that piece of lint! Oh, wow, tin foil!") and sometimes I get the off-duty SWAT team member ("I’m sorry, did you just say something?").

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  • Worlds of Possibility

    TnlaptopcrankI nearly shed a tear today reading a brief quote by Nicholas Negroponte about his effort to provide $100-laptops to every child in the developing world, whether they want one or not. (They may not even know they want one.) The part that misted my eyes I’ve put in bold.

    Giving the kids a programming environment of any sort, whether it’s a tool like Squeak or Scratch or Logo to write programs in a childish way — and I mean that in the most generous sense of the word, that is, playing with and building things — is one of the best ways to learn. Particularly to learn about thinking and algorithms and problem solving and so forth.

    As mental prosthetics, computers are literally mind-bending, mind-expanding tools. Giving naive, undereducated children, presumably bubbling with glorious potential, their own personal computers will explode their universes. I’m talking new dimensions. Now imagine giving them the freedom to PLAY in that space, to BE CHILDISH and create things from scratch. That’s an experience perhaps as powerfully transformative as learning to read and write.

    I can only compare it to my own bursts of self-realization within the worlds of LEGO, HyperCard, and LSD. But next to those, this is like handing a kid a fucking magic wand.

  • Fractals Aren’t Just for Hippies

    GdfractalI was struck today by the similarities between two essays encouraging interdisciplinary science education. These excerpts are both worth the read, but if you’re in a rush, just compare the parts in bold. The first:

    General science education, often an afterthought, needs to be reconsidered, because scientific literacy is more important than ever. It’s not just essential to being a competent citizen who can understand, for example, why hydrogen fuel cannot solve energy shortages, or that a child who swallows a pencil lead will not get lead poisoning. Science is also critical because it is blending with the other realms of human knowledge.

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  • Don’t bogart the happy pills, human!

    HappydogGiving psychoactive meds to pets has become a pretty common practice, but I never considered whether zoo animals need them too. Apparently they do, as National Geographic documents. I only question one of Nat Geo’s examples:

    "Polar bears are notorious for pacing," explained zoo veterinarian Doug Whiteside. "They wander in the wild for long distances and probably have this internal drive to walk, and zoos can’t provide them with the huge distance."

    Whiteside said Misty significantly reduced her pacing when she was given the drug [Prozac] in 1995. She only had to stay on it for five months to cure the disorder. [emphasis mine]

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  • Legal Lessons Learned

    PhotocopySo I’m reading a National Geographic booklet aimed at elementary school students, called Looking at Cells by Rebecca L Johnson. In a spread called "Thinking Like a Scientist" that explains how to measure small things in micrographs, I see a picture of a paramecium, labeled "Paramecium x110". Next to it there’s the following chunk of text:

    Check It Out

    Suppose you have permission to photocopy the picture of theParamecium, and you enlarge it to twice its size. Would the magnification of x110 still be correct? Explain.

    Note how it says, "suppose you have permission to photocopy the picture," instead of, "suppose you photocopy the picture," or even, "photocopy the picture."

    Derrrrrr. Somehow the issue of copyright infringement has made its way explicitly and incongruously into a children’s science booklet.

    (The inside cover lists the picture credit as "page 27 (middle) ® M. Abbey/Visuals Unlimited".)

    I imagine the writer put it more simply before a lawyer or editor touched it up. Because we wouldn’t want 4th graders running around with enlarged b&w photocopies of a paramecium taken from Visuals Unlimited. Knowing kids, they might digitize the photocopies and post them on the internets, or store them on their iPods. How would VU make money THEN?

    I also imagine copyright-conscious kiddies, attentive to the wording’s specific subtext, enchanted by the possibilities of a Creative Commons future. "Suppose you have permission…" Wow! Suppose I have permission! It’s telling me to imagine a wondrous world where I’m legally allowed to photocopy this image I hold in my hands! What a spectacular sight that would be! Then I could perform ALL KINDS of measurements on it! But, aw shucks, for now I’m just stuck with my dreams.

  • Watching TV Makes You Better at Watching TV

    Cathtub2Steven Johnson wrote recently in the New York Times Magazine that "Watching TV Makes You Smarter." Oh, how I would love to believe that. Even if it’s true, Johnson makes the claim only about recent television programming, not what I watched during my long school vacations. Zero mention of Punky Brewster, MacGyver, or Yo! MTV Raps.

    You see, I used to watch up to 12 hours of television a day. I often wonder how much more I could achieve with my mind if I had spent that time reading or, heck, watching paint dry. I sometimes console myself by saying that it didn’t rot my brain–there are many types of literacy, and watching so much TV just made me learn to think in a particular way. Maybe not a way useful to the classroom, but a way that will make me wildly suited to some fabulously constructive endeavor someday. For a while I was very interested in going to grad school for media studies. Finally, a way to turn my years of experience with TV into an asset!

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  • Playing Their Game

    EndersgameAccording to an article in The New York Times on Wednesday, Les Perelman of MIT has noticed two things about the scoring of the essay section in the new SAT. First, score is highly correlated with essay length: "If you just graded them based on length without ever reading them, you’d be right over 90 percent of the time." Second, score is not correlated with accuracy: according to the official guide for scorers, "You are scoring the writing, and not the correctness of facts."

    Oh, boy, what fun! Manic fabricators will have a field day.

    I can’t help but reminisce about my own days of pre-college standardized testing. The College Board, which administers the SAT, also administers the AP exams. Taking the English Literature AP, I had a problem. I felt pretty good until I got to the big essay section at the end. It asks a question and then says, "Answer this using one of the books listed below or an equally high-brow piece of literature." I don’t remember the question, but I wasn’t comfortable answering it using any of the suggested tomes. I also could not bring to mind any other classic I had read recently that I could apply to the essay. Fuck.

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  • Ivy League Fools

    SealThe Brown Daily Herald is the student newspaper at Brown University, my undergrad alma mater. Each year they publish an April Fool's issue full of fake, ridiculous news stories. Five years ago I played dumb and wrote an angry letter to the editor. Here is my letter, and the online responses to it from the Brown community.