Month: April 2010

Getting the mind to wander

The mind tend to wander when working at repetitive tasks that don’t require much brain processing. So the brain just switches over to thinking about long-term things. There is even a specific part of the brain, called the “default network” that starts up when we zone-out. That, at least, is what I summarize from looking at some neuroscience research by Malia Mason and others (2007) on wandering minds.

What’s interesting is that the default network tends to be used for “certain kinds of self-referential thinking, such as reflecting on personal experiences or picturing yourself in the future” (Zimmer, 2010). That means introspection. Introspection is the point of Personal World, so it follows that we should want our students’ minds to wander during Personal World.

So how do we design the Personal World time and environment to encourage daydreaming? Repetitive tasks aid mind-wandering, as will anything that is rote that does not require acute cognitive focus. Raking the garden, doodling should be encouraged, in fact, anything that encourages boredom.

I would think also, that reducing the cognitive load would also be beneficial, which might also mean no music. Yet music helps isolate the individual, particularly when they’re using ear buds. Perhaps quiet, “boring” sounds would be best, coming a shared radio so students can’t choose to listen to something else. Of course, if you’re listening to the music on your mp3 player then you tend to tune out the songs anyway so maybe it all falls out in the wash.

Of course this could all be malarkey, based as it is on a single study, so I’ll end with the words of caution that coms at the end of the article:

Although the thoughts the mind produces when wandering are at times useful, such instances do not prove that that the mind wanders because these thoughts are adaptive; on the contrary the mind may wander simply because it can. – Mason et al., 2007.

Daydreaming …

Focused work. We like to see our students focused on their work and we give them long blocks of time to do so. It is hard, however, for anyone to stay on task for two hours straight. You have to allow for a certain amount of mind wandering and daydreaming. What a lot of neurologic research is uncovering is that zoning-out is an essential part of putting the pieces together and helps with learning.

When we are no longer even aware that our minds are wandering, we may be able to think most deeply about the big picture. – Zimmer (2010)

Daydreaming by Edward Harrison May (1876) (from Wikimedia Commons).

While we sleep the brain assembles information into coherent patterns, helping us learn and process emotions. Carl Zimmer has an article in Discover Magazine on how unfocused daydreaming accomplishes the same thing.

Video games and real war

“It’s going to be a constant question for us as a society and for the military whether or not, as they become more game-like, that creates an effect that makes it easier to kill people in a way that you might not want to make it easier to kill people.” – Clive Thompson on On The Media (2010)

On The Media had one of the most though provoking pieces this weekend that I have ever heard. It was based on the video footage of the tragic killing of two Reuters journalists in Baghdad, and the wounding of two small children in a van that came to rescue the injured, by a US helicopter gunship. The program dealt with the tragedy itself, the question of war crimes and the propriety of Wikileaks in publishing the video.

They also addressed the marked similarities between the video footage and scenes in modern video games. What was most interesting was that the interviewee, Clive Thompson, argued not that video games were becoming too much like war and desensitizing players, but that war is becoming too much like video games.

It’s been generally acknowledged that the further away the person is, the less you can see them, the more they’re just a blip on the screen, the easier it is to pull the trigger. – Clive Thompson on On The Media (2010)

Audio of the piece called “Virtual War” is below:

Shiloh (and the battle of)

We hiked in Shiloh on a beautiful spring day just about a week before the anniversary of that formative battle of the American civil war. Trail #4 traces the battle from the first contact of union and confederate pickets near what is now Ed Shaws Store and Peach Orchard Restaurant, all the way to the park center where General Grant formed his last line of defense.

[googleMap name=”Ed Shaws Store” description=”Start of Trail #4″ width=”400″ height=”400″ mapzoom=”13″ mousewheel=”false”]35.116, -88.362[/googleMap]

The hike winds its way across mowed fields and through rolling, forested tracts. With the leaves not yet on the trees this was the perfect time to make this hike. Two years ago, the last time the middle school did this trip, they did it a little earlier in the year in below-freezing temperatures. Apparently it was great for character building.

We weren’t quite as lucky in the character building department, it was a nice clear day, not too hot and not too cold. On the five mile hike and our students got a lot of practice navigating by compass. However, we had to take to the paved roads about a third of the way through in order to have lunch before meeting park ranger Paul Holloway for a demonstration of an infantryman.

Paul Holloway about to charge.

Mr. Holloway was superb, bringing into sharp relief the similarities and contrasts between soldiers in the two armies. He wore a brown coat, colors which could have been on either side, and demonstrated a rifle which was impressively loud, smokey and heavy.

Before sitting beneath a tree for our class discussion of what we saw that day we took in the visitor center and the movie, made in 1956, about the Battle of Shiloh. I though the movie was quite informative if a bit understaffed, but my students picked up on the fact that the amateur thespians kept stealing glances at the camera. Not to mention getting up and charging again after they’d been shot. They also detected a subtle bias toward the South from the narrator and in the content of the movie.

The rifle demonstration was extremely useful in setting the stage for the movie, but I though the five mile hike was also important because the students got the chance to feel the distance and then consider that what took us a couple of hours, took an entire day of hard fighting.

Confederate mass grave.

Intrinsic motivation in the real world

rewards tend to focus the brain more narrowly on the specific task that earns the rewards—thus making it harder to encourage employees to develop creative, innovative solutions. – Laura Vanderkam (2010)

Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us by Daniel Pink

How do you motivate people in the creative economy? Apparently not with bonuses. The best way to get people to be creative is to motivate them in ways that “takes the issue of money off the table, so they can focus on the work itself” according to Daniel Pink in his book “Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.” Laura Vanderkam’s (2010) review of the book in the City Journal provides an excellent overview.

… leaders create an environment where people want to do their best. This involves giving people lots of autonomy over their time, their tasks, their techniques, and their teams; providing them an opportunity to work toward mastery of their professional craft; and imbuing their work with a sense of purpose. Laura Vanderkam (2010)

And translated into education Pink advocates the same approach as Montessori,

encourage mastery by allowing children to spend as long as they’d like and to go as deep as they desire on the topics that interest them. – Pink (2010)

It’s good to be reminded of the importance of intrinsic motivation every now and then. There are always forces, most often subtle but sometimes not, that push toward making sure students do well in the standardized tests and cover everything in the curriculum. High schools want to see good grades in all the subjects.

But what if a student just wants to write, and they just pour their heart into it. The other subjects suffer, especially the least interesting ones, but my goodness how their writing improves. What then? …

Apprentice Essays

Apprentice texts short pieces, a sentence or a paragraph long, that introduce students to the style of good writers. Remember that wonderful turn of phrase or vivid image that just leaped out at you? Students find the cadence and the style and mimic it with a topic of their own.

Another similar approach is to type out entire texts, word for word, just to get a feel for the rhythm of good writing. It’s something to try with essays.

Pickwick Landing Hydroelectric Dam

[googleMap name=”Old Turbine” description=”Pickwick Landing Hydroelectric Dam” width=”490″ height=”490″ mapzoom=”14″ mousewheel=”false”]35.072711, -88.250578[/googleMap]

The hydroelectric dam at Pickwick Landing on the Tennessee River is an almost ideal place to observe electricity generation and transmission. It was a serendipitous discovery though. After our failure to arrange a tour of a dam in Arkansas on the last immersion, we did not even try with this one.

The dam is right next to Pickwick Landing State Park where we camp when visiting the Shiloh National Battlefield. We’d arrived early at the park on the day before our visit to Shiloh, and having seen the dam and its locks on Google Maps’ satellite image (click the satellite button on the map above), I thought it might be useful if we drove over.

Turbine for hydroelectric dam. High voltage power lines in the background.

Coming around the northern side of the dam we spotted, right next to a parking lot, an old turbine from the dam that had been set up for display. It is amazing how big these things are, but what was really neat is the fact that if you listened, you could hear the whine of the modern turbines coming from the generators deep inside the dam.

Standing over the old turbine was an enormous high-voltage wire tower, sparse metal frame and truncated arms like a benevolent grandparent leaning over a plump, but scared child. The line of towers are connected to the generation station in the dam by power substation just across the street from the old turbine. The substation’s large transformer drums were obvious even from across the road.

Crossing southward over the dam, there is a road that runs westward along the edge of the river that allows a good view of the downriver side of the locks. We were lucky enough to see a barge passing through, although with the traffic on the river the locks are probably always busy.

Barge exiting the lock.

When we got back to the park the students draw a diagrams of the dam. They don’t do nearly enough diagrams given the importance of drawing in connecting the body and the mind (something I plan on rectifying in the next cycle) so this was a good experience for them. It was also a reminder to always keep their writer’s notebooks with them because then they could have drawn their diagram while they were at the dam looking at the thing.