EDU270: Lesson 7: The Male Brain

Classroom Plan: 7B

Last fall, I took an Administration of Justice course called Neurology and Law where we spent quite a bit of time talking about the underdevelopment of the human brain, and why it was that the government has decided that at 18 you are an adult. In fact, there is no good reason why individuals are legally an adult at age 18: it most closely stems past the typical age of the end of a 16^th and 17^th-century-modelled apprenticeship, and more interestingly, some sociologists have recently said that the “teenager phase” is a recent phenomenon, no older than about the 1920’s when America had a strong enough economy that children didn’t have to turn to the work force in their teens.

That being said, understanding the underdevelopment of the human brain before age 23 or 25 (depending on the sex of the individual in question, not to mention other factors), and after having read The Female Brain by Louann Brizendine, I’ve implemented policies into my classroom that help teach time management, organization, and other higher executive functions so that I can train my students well. I give them three bathroom passes every semester. If they need to go to the bathroom, they use a pass. If the semester ends and they still have their passes, they’re rewarded with 5 extra credit points each. This is one of many policies I have teaching them to be aware of the choices they’re making and to think outside of what they think and feel right now.

After reading and pondering the debate about teens lacking adult reasoning capacity, yet being held to adult consequences, what do you think this means for you as a teacher?

Since I have recently taken Neurology and Law, and had classroom debates about juvenile delinquents in relation to social process theory and biological theory, I’ve already struggled with the concepts of teenaged brains. On the one hand, how can we hold children responsible for their actions when their biology leads them to think and believe things that maybe they can’t control or foresee to control? But on the other hand, how can they become responsible adults if we don’t model for them the expectations of the real world? At least in the case of criminal law, the world expects them to behave in a certain way, and we as educators are responsible for making them aware that life is about choices, and that there are consequences to certain choices.

Teaching summer school, I feel like I had this exact challenge this week. One of my female students from a lower socio-economic small town had a personal problem at home that she emotionally brought with her to school this week (which is not altogether uncommon for high school students to do). Because of this personal problem, she chose to fall asleep in class, to be openly disrespectful to me inside and outside class, to not participate in the group activity (she was on her computer instead, even though I asked her to put her computer away), and she had no interest in taking up my offer to make up a bad essay grade from last week. She claims she wants to do better, but when it comes down to accomplishing the work, she gets distracted by Facebook and Youtube. When I walk by and see that she’s on those webpages, she’ll close them, and then distract her classmates around her.

I’ve been speaking with my colleagues about her and I feel like this cognitive underdevelopment issue comes up a lot, second only to conversations about how her home life is affecting her judgment. I feel like this is the hard part about teaching: one the one hand, I want to be compassionate, to understand that she is going through things that likely require comprehension way beyond her maturity level –and to that end, I’ve given her extra chances which in retrospect I realize isn’t fair to the other students who don’t get those chances. On the other hand, I also realize that by giving her extra chances that I’m enabling a set of expectations that the rest of the world isn’t going to meet. Once she’s out of my class, the world won’t say, “Wow, you had a bad weekend? That sucks. Just for that you’re exempt from real work for the next week, and feel free to fall asleep in class.” This is the hard part about teaching: I’ve been keeping my classroom policies and keeping high expectations of her, but I meet those with kindness and with a good word before and after class. While she doesn’t seem to respond well to my face, hopefully I’m doing some good work in the long run.

EDU270: Lesson 6

·  Music. Go to the Web site Changing Brains: Effects of Experience on Human Brain Development and select Watch Online. When that link opens, view the video titled Music. After watching the video, answer the following questions:

1. Describe the Mozart effect. Can listening to music make a person smarter, explain.

The Mozart Effect includes claims from researchers at UC-Irvine who studied college students on testing days. One group of students listened to Mozart ten minutes before the test, and the other group of students sat in silence for ten minutes before a test. The students who listened to Mozart ended up testing 8% higher than those who sat in silence.

The claims for the Mozart Effect are, of course, conditional. This quality of testing only helps for the first fifteen minutes after ten minutes of listening to classical music. Additionally, the Mozart selections need to be happier and faster in selection for the Effect to work.

Contrary to the claims of marketing and products, having a baby listen to Mozart will not turn him or her into a Little Einstein, and listening to Mozart does not automatically make a person smarter; the video warns against believing second hand research that sounds too good to be true. Instead, the video claims that children who are proficient in music have better language and math skills, have better vision, and better movement related to spacial reasoning. The “jury is still out” on whether music makes and develops these skills, or whether children who already have these inclinations are naturally drawn to music to develop these skills further.

2. What impact does music have on learning?

While the Mozart Effect might disappointingly have dubious claims, music can positively affect the learning environment. While researchers are still trying to decide whether brain skills lead to music or music to brain skills, it’s still important to allow children under the age of 20 to develop their music proficiency thus helping their math skills, their vision, and their movement. Interestingly, listening to music affects both the prefrontal cortex and the temporal lobe –and very few tasks activate both sides of the brain.

While viewing the same Web site, click on RESOURCES on the left navigation bar. Go through each resource under Music.

3. Describe something new you learned that you did not already know.

I did not know that the Mozart Effect was only effective for fifteen minutes after listening or that it specifically spoke to a happy, fast Mozart music. I’ve been using what I thought was the Mozart Effect in my classroom playing classical music of all kinds, more specifically quieter, slower classical music because I thought the happy, fast stuff interrupted their thoughts too much. Whoops.

4. Indicate how this information will help you in the classroom.

I believe I’ll still continue to play slower, quieter classical music in my classroom. Even if I know it isn’t strictly the Mozart Effect, I’ve had positive feedback from students who come in and say that they feel more relaxed doing work in my room when they hear that “good” music.

·  Math. Go to the Web site Changing Brains: Effects of Experience on Human Brain Development and select Watch Online. When that link opens, view the video titled Math. After watching the video, answer the following question:

The DVD highlights ways to help young children gain a basic math foundation at home. Describe how you, as a teacher, can do this same thing in the classroom.

Because I teach English at a higher level, the lessons involving math won’t seem so much like math, particularly because of the subject area compartmentalization in higher learning courses. That being said, I understand that there are different kinds of learners, and because English is a subjective subject, some students have a hard time with the abstract concepts. To that end, I’ll often structure note-taking lessons to three things to remember about this author, or five themes in this story. When I relate the abstract concepts of English to numbers, the students who are more objective, math-proficient students can do better at remembering –and later, recalling—that information.

While viewing the same Web site, click on RESOURCES on the left navigation bar. Go through each resource under Math.

1. Describe something new you learned that you did not already know.

I did not know that math skills were stored in three different parts of the brain, two of which were different forms of gyruses. Interestingly the frontal gyrus is where the memory is stored in relation to mathematical concepts. I had no idea that memory is related to math, though in retrospect it makes sense.

2. Indicate how this information will help you in the classroom.

Now knowing how crucial memory is with math, I’m going to incorporate more lessons involving breaking down abstract concepts to numbers –and claiming years when books came out doesn’t quite qualify. I can focus more on “three” types of diseases afflicting those on the Mayflower, and which “two” types of poisons did Roger Chillingworth use to kill Arthur Dimmesdale. What were the numbers of girls in The Crucible who started the Salem Witch Trials, and which number of American Revolutionaries wrote The Federalist Papers?

After watching the videos on Math and Music, how does this information impact you as a teacher?

Both of these lessons impacts me as a teacher in understanding how complex life lessons can be. Fortunately, I feel like we are leaving an age when instructors are only proficient in their own subject matter and ignorant to how all of the subjects relate. These lessons in music and math help me as a teacher understand how two of my students' required subject areas can relate to my subject (also required for them). Better, often math-focused students are students who claim they don't like English because of its subjectivity. They claim that "numbers are simple" or that "numbers don't lie" or "numbers are clear", all phrases that distance them from the humanness of being a student of English, a student of human behavior, of story, of relating emotion to action and consequence. At least in understanding how a music and math student relates to the world, I can find ways to incorporate lessons into my English curriculum that these students can relate more to and thus understand English as a subject matter that isn't as abstract and confusing as they may have previously assumed. 

Lesson 5

1. Language. Go to the Web site Changing Brains: Effects of Experience on Human Brain Development and select Watch Online. When that link opens, view the video titled Language. After watching the video, answer the following questions:
1. Describe the research presented on the Changing Brains site related to language development.

Because of Sensitive Periods, young learners can learn more language and language skills than older learners. On the one hand, this applies to our first language: children need to hear voices and language in utero, and need to hear language used in the first months of life. Children need to be read to, and need to have conversations with adults where adults use long, complicated sentences with difficult vocabulary. While the child doesn’t understand those words or structures, the child will be better off with language skills later down the line.

This applies to language skills for bilingual students as well. Because the language centers have such a sensitive period at this age, research shows that it is actually good for students to speak one language at home and one language at school.

It would seem through this research that language is a kind of investment with interest: if you make early investments in language during sensitive periods, more returns will yield further down the line with a more eloquent, sophisticated identification with language.

2. List three activities that parents can do to help their child learn a first language.

1. Parents can read to their children.

2. Parents can have long conversation with their children involving detailed, complicated, long sentences.

3. Parents can answer questions with fully detailed answers, and can ask questions back that engage their child in conversation.

3. Summarize the latest research on learning a second language, including the 'Sensitive Period."

Because the language centers have such a sensitive period at this age, research shows that it is actually good for students to speak one language at home and one language at school. According to the video, America’s recent push to include bilingual instruction side by side with learning a first language is actually good for the young brains, because there is no evidence that children need to learn and understand their first language before they learn and understand a second language as well. Learning the two languages side by side allows the language centers to develop as early as possible.

While viewing the same Web site, click on RESOURCES on the left navigation bar. Go through each resource under Language.

4. Describe something new you learned that you did not already know.

While I knew that sensitive periods were why we learn languages like Spanish and Latin in school, I had always grown up in school systems that taught me Spanish from middle school through college. I had no idea that modern research suggests higher retention in bilingual speaking abilities from an even lower age. It makes me wish I were growing up now, at least to the point where I could take Spanish from a younger age. From middle school on I must have taken about 7 years of Spanish collectively and all I remember is food words: I only remember food words, and that because I worked in two Mexican restaurants.

5. Indicate how this information will help you in the classroom.

I have a few ESL learners and always felt bad that all I remembered from taking Spanish was food words. This new research relieves some of that self-imposed guilt: I love the idea that their reading comprehension is actually strengthened by their ability to speak one language in one environment and another language in a different environment.

I also love the idea of using big words and complex sentences verbally with my students. I already do this and have made sure students have a safe environment where they can stop and ask me questions if they don’t understand what I’ve said, but at least practicing these more complex words and meanings in front of them lends more of a possibility of their ability to listen and understand way beyond merely seeing a word in a book and thinking they know what the meaning is.

2. Reading. Go to the Web site Changing Brains: Effects of Experience on Human Brain Development and select Watch Online. When that link opens, view the video titled Reading. After watching the video, answer the following questions:
1. Describe milestones in reading development.

According to the video, some of the major milestones in reading development include both reading under the guidance and instruction of a parent, but at a stage in sensitive periods when nursery rhymes especially make a difference. Once young learners move beyond the nursery rhyme stage, they can identify a relationship with words better.

Phonetics help with this, too; students who can learn to group words through phonetics are more adept readers further down the line.

Students who don’t read or experience nursery rhymes in sensitive periods end up behind left behind in education. Often these readers because dyslexic because they can’t see the similarities in words: they need to hear them.

2. What does research suggest about the activation areas in the brain for at-risk children vs. those that received pre-reading skill training?

Children who received pre-reading skill training had areas of the brain that lit up similar to where an adult’s brain does while learning (of course not an exact match, but well on their way). Children who were at-risk and had no pre-reading training with language and comprehension had brains that did not light up at all. It was like they weren’t even reading.

I’ve experienced this in my own small way through two high school students. They were traumatized in their youth by abusive parents who didn’t read to them or care for them in the way those boys deserved. One of them ended up in foster care, and another had to have a day go into prison to relieve the abuse. Both of these boys, now, struggle with reading comprehension and with abstract concepts because neither of them have the foggiest idea what nursery rhymes are and therefore missed that early identification with language, with words relating to one another, and rhyming.

3. What method was used to test these children?

These children were tested in MRIs with brain images compared next to the brain images of adults, and the brain images of their peers. These images, then, were compared next to images of their peers after a three month period.

While viewing the same Web site, click on RESOURCES on the left navigation bar. Go through each resource under Reading.

• Describe something new you learned that you did not already know.

Perhaps the most I got out of the lesson was the phonetic relationships and grouping words. I found the most interest in the point of data that argued that when students could learn to group words based on their phonetics and not solely on their meaning, these phonetically advanced children ended up being 30% ahead of the rest of the class in reading comprehension further down the line. This is fascinating to me because 30% is a huge jump, and I never would have thought that general reading comprehension was tied to how the words sound.

• Indicate how this information will help you in the classroom.

This information will help me in the classroom so that I make sure to stop and spend more time on the words themselves. While I teach high schoolers who likely have already built their reading skills before they come to me, I love the idea that I can continue to have them read out loud and stop them occasionally to make sure they understand what they’ve read in our text.

After watching the videos on Language and Reading, how does this information impact you as a teacher?

I don’t think I’ve ever realized quite to what degree the importance of speech patterns on language and reading. I am the kind of teacher who often repeats a phrase or a story because I want everyone to benefit from that knowledge. I have a set of adjectives (like everyone does) that becomes my slang, and I try very hard for those words I use to be words that aren’t common. I’ve always attributed this to my being a writer before I was a teacher, and I wanted to have a good vocabulary in my writing so that my prose didn’t seem so simplistic.

As a teacher, I realize that the repetition of those more difficult words are actually good for students because they can see those many uses verbally. In fact, one of my learning outcomes for them is to see that words can have many meanings, that I can use more complex words in several different situations and have them still understand its use. Part of this is context, but part of it is honestly the bad habit of my using the same set of words.

Because I have a few dyslexic learners, I see now that this is actually a good thing: dyslexic learners often don’t see the relationship between words on the page and words spoken, so hopefully I’ve smoothed this transition between using these words online in our learning management system and my saying them aloud. I also make my students read aloud. We play “pass the pug” which is very much like popcorn: I read for a while so that they can see what level they need to try and get to (speed, breathing, intonation, diction, etc.) and then I pass a pug Beanie Baby plushie to a student who, then, reads. When the student reads a minimum of one paragraph, he/she passes it to another student. Everyone gets a chance to read aloud. I now see just how valuable that lesson is.