Think-Thank-Thunk

Oh, so this is what it’s all about.

A great spot to find video clips you can use in class. Lots to choose from–and growing.

TeacherTube.com

A couple of weekends ago a colleague of mine related to me a conversation she’d had with some elementary teachers. The topic of the conversation was a specific icebreaker game called “blanket drop.”

According to these teachers, girls are always better at this game than boys. Hands down. No contest. They went so far as to say, “Never make teams of boys against girls for this game. The girls will crush them. Every time.”

They were emphatic that this is true, but had no idea why.

Understanding my passion for the topic of sex differences, she thought I might have the answer. Indeed, if you read the literature, it won’t take long for you to find the research that supports this observation.

But still–I wanted a little proof. So I tried it in my own room. Then, I wanted a little more proof. So yesterday, in a call for data, I shot out the following email to all staff here in St. Croix Falls. If you’re reading this, and you teach, please consider taking part in my admittedly unscientific (but still totally cool and fun) research.

Here’s the email:

Hello everyone,

I’ve stumbled upon a topic that is fascinating me: brain-based gender differences.

Recent research has shown some striking differences between how boys and girls sense and interpret the world around them. I think this is so interesting that I am inspired to do a little research of my own. I’m not replicating this study, so I’m not sure what the data will show. I’ve heard some pretty remarkable (undocumented) observations though–so I just thought I’d see if I might be able to back it up with some hard data.

That’s where you come in.

I started this “research” in my class today (8th grade) but I’m realizing my data set is way too small to be confident about my results. I also have some suspicions that age may play a factor.

So if you’re willing sometime, I would love if you would play this game in your class and keep track of the results. Many of you have probably played this in the past.

Blanket Drop (estimated time: 5-10 minutes). Here’s how:

1. Divide your class into two teams–boys vs girls.
2. Have two people hold up a blanket and have the teams stand or sit (sitting worked better for 8th graders) on each side of it so that they can’t see the other team.
3. Have one person from each team sit in a chair in front of their side of the blanket.
4. The two people holding the blanket, drop it (I found on a count of 3 works well).
5. The first to say the other person’s name wins a point for their team.
6. Keep a tally and email me your results. First team to 10 works well, but run it however you like. I just want the tally.

I’ve heard that, at least at the elementary level, girls are much (again undocumented) better at this than boys. I’d like to prove that out.

My limited results today show girls are somewhat better in 8th grade. Girls won 36 times. Boys won 25.

I would greatly appreciate if you could find the time to play this game with your students and record your results sometime before the end of the year. Like I said, I am very curious to see if results change as students age, so I’m encouraging everyone to participate. This is NOT an official action research project, just something I’m curious about. Maybe now you are too.

One thing that might also be interesting (though it didn’t occur to me to record this until we were done) would be if you would also keep track of ties. My 8th graders had a lot of ties. I’m thinking the number of ties might also correlate with age. But again, I really have no idea.

I will share our collaborated results in a weekly email as I get additional data.

Thank you in advance for considering to take part in my little experiment!

Chris

P.S. I have a blanket you can borrow if you need one.

If you’re still reading, I’d love to hear from you. Please try this game in your own room and share your results in a comment below. Or maybe you’ve had some other interesting experiences that illustrate (perhaps unexpected) differences between the sexes.

Teacher loses job, believes he’s a victim of disability discrimination.

His Logic:

1. Students tease me for being bald, call me “baldy”
2. I feel bullied and fear for my safety
3. I have to avoid students so I don’t get harassed or beat up
4. I lose my job because I can’t interact with students
5. I’m obviously being discriminated against because I don’t have any hair
6. Woe is me

So it’s 9:00 and my 5-year-old is stalling her way through our nightly bedtime ritual of taking vitamins. This is how it goes:

Me: (filling the dishwasher) Take your vitamins.

Nora: Yes dad. (mumbles singsong nonsense but makes no move toward vitamins–of course I don’t notice this because it takes everything I’ve got to focus on filling the dishwasher)

Me: (5 minutes later) Nora. Are you taking your vitamins?

Nora: I just don’t like chewable calcium.

Me: Just chew ‘em up and let’s get this over with.

Nora: Yes dad (mumbles singsong nonsense)

Me: (This time I’m on to her) Nora! Chew!

Nora: (Chewing, humming, she singsongs), Cumbersome, cumbersome cumbersome . . . Dad, do you know what “Cumbersome” means?

Me: (curious, I tear myself away from the Tetris game of trying to fit bowls into the top rack) What does “Cumbersome” mean?

Nora: (casually breaking off a humming tune) It means “heavy.”

Me: (trying like hell not to look astonished . . . and then wondering if she knows what “astonished” means) Where did you learn that?

Nora: Word Girl . . . Do you know what “Vicious” means?

Me: (now totally distracted from the tasks at hand) What?

Nora: “Mean.”

Me: Yep. That’s cool. (But thinking–Holy crap!)

I’d seen her up at the computer, playing around with the Word Girl site–watching the flash videos, playing the games, clicking here, clicking there. Her big sister taught her the ins and outs a few days ago.

But I didn’t think she was actually LEARNING anything!

Apparently, I was wrong. We spent the next fifteen minutes talking about the adventures of Word Girl. It took me that long to realize she’d stopped taking her vitamins and just prolonged her bedtime.

Curses! Foiled again by that meddling Word Girl.

Scientists (and travelers) have discovered an island of garbage the size of Texas floating between California and Hawaii.

Check out this video, or this article outlining the phenomenon that is “Garbage Island.”

This story out of Denver warms my heart.

Mom’s a Crip, Dad’s a Westside Baller.

“They have different ideas on how the baby should be raised. Basically . . . they cannot agree on which gang the baby would ‘claim,’” Sgt. Joe Sandoval said.

Hmm. That would be a tough decision.

Sheesh.

“A smile is often the most essential thing. One is repaid by a smile. One is rewarded by a smile. One is animated by a smile.”

Antoine de Saint-Exupry

I’m sure everybody, at one time or another, has wondered what would happen if you combined the geek-like qualities of a psychology professor with the computer nerdiness of a video game creator.

Well wonder no more. Introducing MindHabits: Great Games from Serious Science.

You can read all the juicy details about how the games work at their website, MindHabits.com, but their basic premise is this:

You can read all the juicy details about how the games work at their website, but their basic premise is this:

• Find and click on the friendly smiling face as quickly as you can racking up points as you go.
• Ignore all the frowning faces.
• Reprogram your mind to ignore negativity throughout your day.

The game was developed by psychology professor Mark Baldwin in an effort to determine whether or not a video game can actually change the way you see and even think about the world around you.

“We started with the idea that just as playing the game Tetris over and over for hours can start to shape the way you look at the world (even in your dreams!), playing a specially-designed computer game might also help to improve your thoughts and feelings about yourself.”

And if you think about it, from a brain-based perspective, it makes sense. Everybody’s brain comes equipped with a filter called the Reticular Activating System Reticular Activating System (RAS for short), responsible for filtering significant information from the glut of sensory input we are constantly bombarded with. Without the RAS, every little distraction, noise, tactile stimuli, scent and motion would get through to our conscious awareness and we’d go berserk. Every tick of the clock, every car that passed by, the feeling of every elastic band.

Anyway, my point is that the RAS filters stuff, and for many of us, it is allowing way too much negative information to get through. We get a short response from our boss and we think, “Is she mad at me? Did I do something wrong?” We notice a colleague with a serious face and we worry, “I wonder what he’s upset about. Hope it wasn’t something I did.”

All this because we first noticed, and considered significant, someone’s body language. Obviously, this is stressful. On the other hand, how much better do you feel when you’re greeted with a friendly smile and hello? Tons! Wouldn’t it be nice if we could simply ignore the negative and sanction only the positive? But alas, for many of us these are habits entrenched and reinforced by unending cycles of fear and supported by feedback loops of insecurity.

These are exactly the brain-ruts MindHabits video games claim to break. The following is taken from MindHabits explanation of how the games work.

Not surprisingly, such habits of mind can play a huge role in how we deal with the stresses of modern life . . . Decades of research have shown that people who feel adequately supported by and connected to others, as opposed to being isolated or rejected, are actually physically healthier and cope better with stress.

Recent research . . . indicates that these mental habits can be learned. . . learning to function well and feel confident in the social world requires the development of an impressive collection of psychological abilities.

We all develop our own set of mental habits in the course of growing up . . .but almost everyone could benefit from additional training much as a professional golfer spends hours on the putting green refining an effective stroke. Computer games, with their unique form of interactivity, provide an excellent opportunity to practice helpful habits of mind.

Being developed by science geeks, they didn’t only base their game on theory. They went out and tested it.

“We needed to find a group that was very stressed and, you know, I always hang up on telemarketers frankly, personally, so they’re dealing with a lot of rejection all day long,” said Baldwin in a recent interview. “But after playing the game five minutes a day for a week, something incredible happened. The level of cortisol, or the stress hormone, in their bodies had dropped by 17 percent. Even more remarkable is the employees playing the game were rated as more self-confident and then moreover, they actually made more sales.”

So, what the heck. If you have a spare minute, go check it out. There are a number of different versions and a few different free games you can play even without downloading anything. I played the “click-the-face” game a bit, but I’m certainly not the guy you want to go to for a video game critique. I thought it was sort of fun in a mindless-can-I-beat-the-timer-or-my-best-score sort of way.

But don’t take my word for it. MindHabits recently beat out 69 other games in the Great Canadian Video Game Competition. So it can’t be all bad. Along with more credibility, that also meant an award of (I am not making this up) $1.3 million.

The way I figure–you don’t give 1.3 mill to a crappy game. If it boosts your self-esteem, and you were just going to blow that 10 minutes surfing the web anyway, I say you might as well give it a shot.

The one benefit you’ll have if you get caught playing at work is you can site some research to support the claim that at least playing this internet game can boost your productivity.

One moment, you’re snacking peacefully on toast with peanut butter, the next, all hell breaks loose when a wasp starts dive-bombing random targets around the room.

The toast? Fuggetaboutit. One eye’s on the wasp, the other, frantically scanning for potential weapons–a fly swatter, a magazine, a shoe, a flame-thrower.

For the briefest of moments, you consider that toxic bug spray in the closet. Then you spot it. Sitting on the coffee table, not three feet away, is Al Gore’s, An Inconvenient Truth. The weapon of choice for desperate wasp killers.

Perfect.

You grab it, crouch, and do your best “harmless furniture” imitation, trying your best to blend in to your environment so as not to arouse suspicion. For a moment, the wasp hovers near the blades of a ceiling fan. Next, it bobs and weaves toward the wall. For what seems an eternity, it darts around a window. Maybe it dives at an armchair.

Adrenalin laced thoughts bounce around your skull.

Why can’t it just land and make it easy for me.

If it lands on the curtains, will I be able to squish it between the book and the wall?

Do wasp guts stain?

Maybe I should take a swing at it in mid-air.

Maybe, though, I’d just make it mad.

If I make it mad, will it fly down the front of my shirt, sting me mercilessly, then crawl up my neck and into my ear?

I wonder how that teacher dude in Karate Kid picked off that fly with a pair of chopsticks.

I wish I was him right now.

Meanwhile, pretending not to see you, the wasp bounces nonchalantly against the ceiling.

Suddenly it dives right at you, causing you to flail your arms and make panicky grunting noises.

The wasp, chuckling with satisfaction, glides back up to the ceiling fan, lands on one of the lights, turns, and appears to give you an obscene gesture.

What are you going to do? Trash a perfectly good light fixture? Even if you did take a swing, the bugger’s protected by the other lights, fan blades, and curved nature of the glass around the bulb.

And now you begin to grasp the reality of the situation: You could be at this all night.

Curses. Bloody Red Barron.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. And today I make my revenge by revealing an ancient technique I learned while studying in the orient. The same one I used on that actual unsuspecting wasp in the picture above.

Warning: the following pictures are of a graphic and violent act perpetrated against a real wasp that actually flipped me the bird.

Follow these steps exactly–there is no room for error. Failure to do so could result in death by wasp sting to the inner ear.

1. Quickly find a scissors.
2. Sneak up behind the wasp.
3. Using one fluid motion, thrust the scissors forward, snip, and slice the son-of-a-(insert bad word here) in two.

Usually all that’s left after that is to pick up the pieces. The only tricky part is getting close enough with your opened scissors before it takes flight. As risky as this seems, most wasps are so blinded by arrogance they never suspect any trouble. It’s not their experience that men, sneaking around light fixtures with toast crumbs on their face, are actually highly trained killing machines.

While I’ve never actually been stung doing this, you should know, while very slick, this technique is not completely foolproof.

Take tonight for instance.

After the wasp landed in the ceiling fan, I looked around for a scissors–but the only one I could find was one of those plastic-child-not-really-sharp-ones. Still, I didn’t think it would make a difference.

Maybe it didn’t. Maybe I just missed my mark. But what happened next wasn’t exactly by the book. Instead of cutting it in two, I somehow managed to only pinch its antennae between the tip of the scissor blades.

Don’t ask me how. It’s never happened before. In fact, I later called the office of Strange But Totally Cool Ways to Kill Dangerous Insects and they told me that the odds of this happening are actually like a bazillion to one.

Anyway, after having my daughter take a picture. I found another scissors in an old Swiss Army Knife and took care of business.

So, domestic men of the world, rejoice. No longer are we at mercy of this dangerous menace.

Just remember to wipe the food off your face when you’re done.

Like many, when I was younger I thought the world was my oyster—probably because it was something my teachers or parents told me. Today I understand that the world is nothing like a slimy mollusk. In academic circles we call this type of thing an “idiom.”

Still, we all want our children to have confidence. So, as a member of civilized society, I think convincing kids that the world is an oyster is good practice. Nothing bolsters the courage of developing children as much as confusing them with obscure idioms. Plus it’s fun to do with a grand sweep of the arm. Like this:

Civilized Parent: (sweeping arms dramatically), “Kid, the world is your oyster.”
Child: “My oyster?”
Civilized Parent: “Yep.”
Child: “Don’t you eat oysters?”
Civilized Parent: “Um . . . sometimes.”

Hint to Parents: At this point I’ve found that if you keep flailing your arms in an enthusiastically encouraging manner, kids will normally just take your word for it and move away—especially when with playmates. Which brings me to my next point.

Parent competition, or My kid is smarter than your kid

When my youngest daughter, Nora, who is five, gets together with her cousins, they always have a good time. But as an unbiased-impartial-civilized-parent-observer, I’m often struck by how different the kids are. Though very close in age, one of them seems strikingly more intelligent. She listens better to instruction, speaks more clearly and has a much greater vocabulary.

And since (again from totally unbiased perspective) the smarter kid belongs to me, I am drawn to this logical conclusion: I am obviously the better parent.

Recent scientific research, however, suggests that all this has much less to do with my parenting skills (and use of oyster idioms) than I thought. Nora and her cousins are the same age, but what I failed to realize is that in order to make a fair comparison, they also must be the of same species, and since Nora’s cousins are from Mars, obviously, they are not.

Nora’s cousins are boys.

Sure their anatomies are different, but their brains? C’mon.

The science (and thus teaching and parenting) of brain based gender differences is a very new field of study, but the research is piling up. Obviously, we all know that boys and girls are different, but we have only recently begun to discover just how very different they are. For years, schools (and parents) have been teaching boys and girls the same things in the same way, partially because we fear that to do otherwise would give one an unfair advantage in the battle of the sexes. We’ve been fooling ourselves.

Study after study has shown now, beyond a doubt, that boys’ and girls’ brains are very different. They use different areas for different tasks (language is just one example). They receive and interpret sensory input differently (girls hear certain tones a staggering 10 times better than boys). They develop and mature at different rates (brain scans of 5-year-old-boys look similar to those of 3.5-year-old girls). Their brains float (as it were) in different hormonal and chemical soups.

For 16 years Dr. Jay Geidd has been using advanced MRI imaging processes to map the development of kids brains.

“In general,” Geidd says, “we think the girls’ brains are maturing a bit faster than the boys’ brains.”

But not in all areas.

“Certain parts of the brain involved in mechanical skills or projectile estimations actually mature somewhat faster in boys,” Geidd says.

But What does this mean?

Dr. Leonard Sax, a psychologist and author of several books on the topic of gender differences agrees.

“Both boys and girls are being shortchanged as a result of the neglect of hard-wired gender differences,” says Sax. “By the age of 12, the geometry area of a girl’s brain looks like an eight-year-old boy’s brain. They’re four years behind. But the language area of a boy’s brain is three-to-four years behind the language areas of a girl’s brain.”

“Girls and boys differ profoundly in how they hear, how they see, how they respond to stress –and those differences are present at birth.”

said the night wind to the little lamb, “do you hear what I hear?”

To illustrate this point, Sax points to a study by Janel Caine at Florida State University that documents the benefits of music therapy for premature babies. What she found was that preemies who were played soft music in their hospital cribs grew faster, had fewer complications, and were allowed to go home sooner than those that were not played music.

But the most interesting part of that study comes to light only after you break the data down by gender. Do this and you find that baby girls who received music therapy in their cribs went home an average of nine and a half days earlier than those that did not. Boy babies, however, left not a single day sooner. Music therapy was great for girls, but did nothing for boys.

Similar studies have confirmed and clarified this information by documenting that for a 1,500 Hz tone (the range of sounds critical for understanding speech), the average baby girl has an acoustic brain response about 80 percent greater than the average boy. It’s no wonder girls seem to learn language skills sooner than boys!

“Patience. you have much yet to learn young grasshopper, er, I mean oyster.”

Yes, yes, I can hear you saying, but what does any of this have to do with oysters or idioms?

The trick for parents and teachers is this: Resist the urge to compare. If we are to have half a chance of convincing our children that the world is their oyster, we have to understand that each child has his or her own unique strengths. These strengths will develop in their own time. Because we love our children and want the best for them, sometimes this schedule may not match up with our developmental expectations. This is often disturbing or irritating. The answer, I think is to remember what oysters do with irritants—they create pearls.