Stress and learning

I am sort of a “learning research junkie”—I’ll read pretty much anything about all the new research into how our brains learn—and don’t learn. When I was working on my book, my publisher sent me pretty much any book that they thought might be of interest to my audience. I read all of them. I don’t expect other people to have the time or interest to read them all, but I do think that all parents—especially homeschooling parents—should be aware of some of the most important aspects of how the brain learns. (I’ll suggest some resources at the end of this piece.)

It’s important to understand how brains do learn if you want to recognize a situation in which your child can’t learn. First of all, brains are bundles of connections. When we’re very small, our brains suck in everything we experience and set up a scaffolding that everything they learn later is built on. This is why they say that the first few years are so critical.

Our brains are very badly engineered to learn isolated facts. In fact, most people can only remember a string of random words up to about 7 words long. People who make a hobby out of entering memory competitions learn to memorize unconnected pieces of information by connecting them with things already in their memory (see my recommendation for Moonwalking with Einstein below). The result is that no matter what else is learned about how we learn, the most important aspect of learning is connections.

The second thing to realize is how interconnected the different parts of our brains are. We tend to compartmentalize the brain when we describe it: “this is the part where we feel emotion” and “this is the part where we use logic.” This implies a separation more definitive than is really the case. Researchers have scores of examples of people who have overcome losing an area of their brain due to disease or injury and rewiring other areas of the brain to do what the lost area used to do.

Also, and more importantly, everything you try to do with your brain is affected by the other parts of your brain. So we might try to assert that kids should be able to learn when they are physically or emotionally uncomfortable, because those things “don’t have anything to do with learning.” But in fact, they have everything to do with learning.

I read an excellent article by Judy Willis (author of Inspiring Middle School Minds) on the challenges faced by twice-exceptional learners. But whether or not your child is 2e, Willis offers some important information about stress and its effect on the learning brain. (The full article can be found in this month’s Gifted Education Communicator, which is by subscription only.)

When your child is learning, all input is first filtered through the amygdala, which is in the emotional response center of the brain. Wait: an algebra problem goes through the emotional response center first? Yes: algebra, the color of the water in a pool, the sound of you asking your child to come out of her room, the history of the late Roman Empire, and instructions for when to take out the garbage all get filtered through your child’s emotional center first.

When your child is relaxed and happy, here’s what happens next:

In the absence of high stress, fear, or perceived threat, the amygdala directs incoming information to the prefrontal cortex (PFC). There the information is further evaluated by the brain’s high-order thinking networks as to meaning and relationships to stored memories of previous experiences.

In other words, the information comes into your child’s brain and is connected within existing connections, where it can become part of permanent memory.

But what about when your child is upset and stressed out by what you’re trying to work on? When the amygdala senses stress, it sends all information—no matter what it is—directly into the flight-or-fight center of our brain instead of the areas of the brain that process meaning. According to Willis:

Unfortunately, the human amygdala cannot distinguish between real or imagined threats. Whenever the amygdala is highly activated by negative emotions, it sends incoming information to the lower, involuntary, quick-response brain, where the behavioral reactions are limited to the primitive fight/flight/freeze survival mechanisms. (Gifted Education Communicator, Winter 2012)

I think it’s pretty obvious what this means regarding stress and learning: When you are stressed out, it’s like trying to do a handstand in a straitjacket. You might seem like you’re learning, but the information that’s going in is hitting a wall.

This of course has huge implications for educational policy: no wonder kids in rough neighborhoods aren’t doing well in school. It won’t help to dock the teachers’ pay, fire all the staff, and make stiffer rules. Their friends are getting shot, their parents are AWOL, and their siblings are running with a bad crowd. How do you expect a brain to take in algebra in that situation?

For homeschoolers, the implications are a bit different: We have actual choices each day in what to do. We are not teachers who have to follow a protocol.

I know so many homeschoolers—and I include myself here as well—who forget that we can back off and choose a different way anytime we need to. If math is stressful for your child this week, skip it. If it takes a month before you sense willingness to try again, let that month happen. Watch silly videos about math instead of trying to do problems. Let your child dictate all the math while you write on a whiteboard. Do math while your child is on a swing. Chop your learning times into 15-minute energy windows.

If your child hates to write, don’t force her to write book reports. Dictate silly stories about her darkling beetle. Write limericks. Read, read, read, and read some more. Talk about everything. Ask questions. Answer questions. Take my advice about teaching writing. Take Patricia Zaballos’s advice about teaching writing. But whatever you do, remember that if writing causes your child stress, good writing will not happen.

The beauty of homeschooling is flexibility. In times of homeschooling stress, I hope we all remember that there is always another path to get where we are going. Like water going down a hillside, sometimes the easiest path is the best one to take.

Resources:

  • This book is specific to gifted middle schoolers, but I think its message is applicable to all kids in that age range: Inspiring Middle School Minds by Judy Willis. Willis’s website has further articles: http://www.radteach.com/ Check out her Parent Tips.
  • Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer: Foer explores memory, and destroys the illusion that some people are exceptionally “smart” because of their prodigious memories. As you read, you will really come to understand why “linked” memories are so important to your child’s learning.
  • KidLab: I heard Dr. Kalbfleisch speak at NAGC and was impressed with both the depth and breadth of her knowledge and also her ability to talk to an audience of non-scientists. The site has links to articles and interviews.
  • The Eide Neurolearning Blog is full of great ideas about learning.
  • Find more links on my Gifted Links page.

Highly inappropriate, then and now

“That song is definitely not appropriate for children,” my ten-year-old daughter said to me the other day, hearing a song being played in a store.

*

My husband and I have been talking about the books we read as kids. Brave New World. 1984. Of Mice and Men. Great books, all about sex, much of it deviant or definitely-out-of-wedlock sex.

And those were the books we were assigned in school. On our own time, we read anything we could get our hands on. My husband says he read his parents’ pulp novels that they left lying around. I read Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret in the third grade. I’d worked my way up from the “third grade shelf” in my school library, and no one thought to tell me that might not be a good idea. From there, I went to Wifey, Judy Blume’s highly inappropriate book…written for adults.

A book that I remember vividly—yet not at all—from my childhood.

As we talked about what we read, what occurred to us is what didn’t happen: Our parents (or any other adult) didn’t get involved. We read these books, and listened to those songs (rather less racy in our time) without parents hanging over our shoulders. Our parents didn’t ask what we were reading, and they certainly never considered reading out loud to kids who could read themselves.

In our family, however, books are for sharing. We only stopped reading out loud to our son last year, around the time he turned 13. And that has less to do with a parenting decision than with lack of time. But we still read books “together”—we suggest books for him, and talk to him about books we are reading. On top of that, I have recently started a literature discussion group for teens—including my son—that is exploring the canon of “must read before college” books—a list that includes those sex-filled books by Steinbeck, Orwell, Huxley, and more.

All of this has led me to a question: Are we more prudish than our parents, who “let” us read anything? Did they only pretend to not know what we were reading? Or did they really not care?

I don’t think it’s prudery: I don’t object to kids reading books out of some sort of “that sort of book shouldn’t be read” type of sensibility. I think it’s something else, something that my daughter hit upon when she declared a song “inappropriate” for herself and peers. Parents today are not separating themselves from kids as much as parents used to. When kids first got into rock-n-roll, parents were scandalized. These days, parents take their kids to concerts and buy albums that both they and their kids like. These days, parents are doing things like NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) with their kids, rather than hiding their writing from their kids. My husband and I were thrilled when our older child started to approach the maturity that we thought he needed to read some of our favorite books.

But I remember when—I think it was a year ago—I was looking for a good book to read out loud with my son and I grabbed 1984. Oh, I thought, he’ll love this. All the questions it brings up about freedom of thought, speech, government… and sex. That’s what I realized as I started to read it. I had pretty much forgotten everything in that book that made it, to put it mildly, “inappropriate” as a read-aloud. My husband had the same reaction when looking at Brave New World as a possible “read together” book.

Both of us realized that our pre-teen brains apparently skipped over everything that we would now deem “inappropriate.” When you are reading to yourself, in isolation, the parts that stick are the parts that resonate with you. And what resonates with a 12-year-old from Brave New World or 1984 is the incredible power that the words conveyed. The strong authorial hand that pulls us into the story. The parts that didn’t resonate with us were the parts that had nothing to do with our experience. My husband says that he didn’t even remember sex as part of Brave New World, though it turns out to figure pretty prominently in the story.

My daughter and I have been listening to an audiobook of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn in the car. This is another book that affected me deeply. I probably read it at about the same age as the protagonist as the book opens, 11. And much of it, I now realize, went right past me. I remember the tree, reading on the fire escape. I remember the pickle wrapped in paper, the stale bread, the many trips to the candy store. But when I was considering the book for our book club, I read a variety of opinions about it: “not appropriate” for younger children, so many people said, citing the alcoholic father, the lecherous store-keeper, the racism that the kids innocently take part in.

But none of this is impressing my daughter. She has been listening intently to the strange world of an early 20th century Irish-American girl, almost my daughter’s age. This girl lives to read; my daughter just today read three books. This girl just loves “Jew” pickles; my daughter loves to pull a sour pickle out of the jar and savor it. This girl adores her daddy, lives in Brooklyn, where my daughter’s daddy is from, and sees everything going on in her neighborhood.

My daughter doesn’t seem interested in the drunk father or the lecherous storekeeper. When I asked about the way the kids were talking about Jews, my daughter said, Well, they weren’t saying anything really mean.

Each age understands things in its own way. As adults, we filter what we read through the wider experiences of our lives. But kids look for the things that speak to them. Often, they ignore the things that we deem “inappropriate.”

But even more often, they simply notice them and go on.

“That song is definitely not appropriate for children,” my ten-year-old daughter said to me as we walked through a store, the song playing so quietly in the background I couldn’t pick out the words.

“Why?” I asked.

“Bad words,” my daughter said. She didn’t repeat the words or continue the conversation. She knows what our values are, and until she’s ready to question them, she’s content to know that a song is just not right for her yet. It reminds me of my childhood, when we would seek out “naughty” songs and feel so grown-up listening to them. It never would have occurred to me to talk to my mother about them. In fact, I remember a parallel situation from my teen years: My mother and I walking through the supermarket and my realizing that the Muzak playing on the speakers was “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.”

“Do you know that this song is about LSD?”

No, I didn’t not say that to my mother. That would have been, well, highly inappropriate.

Facebook thinks I speak Spanish, and other musings about modern life

Hola…

For months now I have been getting e-mails from Facebook, recommending I add as friends people I have never met. People whose first language is Spanish. People who don’t even live in the same country as me.

OK, I speak passable caveman Spanish. I can read and understand, but when I go to speak, all I can think is French. Or German. Or how to say “hello” in Thai. I think they call this tongue-tied.

Also, I do have some friends—as well as some “friends”—who speak Spanish. A few whose native language is Spanish. But when Facebook, a mindless machine made by men (and women, except they are not alliterative), keeps sending you recommendations for Spanish speakers you have no connection with, you’ve got to wonder.

What you wonder is up to you.

It’s HOMEschool…

I am just about to start my first online teaching experience. Two (or is it three?) professions ago, I was a college English teacher. I could never decide what to get a PhD in, so I could never get a tenured position, so I eventually gave it up for graphic design. But I never loved graphic design, which paid the bills, the way I loved teaching, which didn’t.

Luckily, I became a homeschooler. The cool thing about homeschooling is that you get to be many of the things that no one would ever pay you to be. Like, once I did dissections of frogs with my kids. Let me assure you, no one would pay me to be a biology teacher. We had fun, though.

So now, into the sixth year of homeschooling, I get to go back to my original love, teaching English. But the cool thing is, I don’t have to find a bunch of people in my same area, find a place for us to meet, and hope that we’ll all get there every week. Instead, I’m renting an online classroom and we’ll see how it goes.

I just had a piece accepted by the wonderful Life Learning Magazine about how homeschoolers can use the Internet with an emphasis more on the HOME than on the SCHOOL. In no way am I going to run my online class like a high school lit class. In fact, high school lit classes were why I decided never to take a literature class as an undergrad. But the cool thing is, we’re all going to be HOME. It’s hopefully going to integrate fun conversation and thoughtful interaction with our home environment. Oh, yes, we’ll probably get together physically if we can once during the year, but the rest of the time, we’ll be able to find each other online.

Internet Day…

OK, online class sounds great, but the other day my son had an experience that is completely new in this day and age. When we were kids, my husband and I had “snow days” when the snow hadn’t been plowed before it was time for the buses to go out. (Me more than him – I remember the thrill of listening to the radio station and hearing the name of my town in the list. Since it was a relatively wealthy town, we had a dismaying number of snow plows ready to get us to school.) Well, once in my son’s life there has been a snow day: when he was attending a school at the top of Mount Madonna in Santa Cruz County.

But now he’s got a claim his dad and I can’t match: He had an Internet Day yesterday! His algebra teacher’s Internet connection was down. Ten minutes after class should have started, I got a phone call (from “Wireless Caller”, doncha just love that caller I.D.?). His teacher asked if we could let all the students know what happened.

And I was brought back to the days of crowding around the radio at breakfast time.

“Yes!! Snow Day!” we’d all yell, and we’d put on our gear to go out sledding or grab a game to play with a sibling or grab that book we thought we were going to have to leave behind all day…

When I told my son, he didn’t react like that. Just a slow smile. “Bonus!” he was probably thinking. “Internet Day.”

Next time he’s waiting for his teacher and the phone rings, it’s going to be like when I was a kid and I woke to a newly quiet and snow-padded world. Fire up that radio. What’s a radio, Mom?

Dr. Who?…

My husband has been initiating our daughter into the world of Dr. Who. Now, between our two kids, you’d probably peg my son as the potential Dr. Who fan. But like his mother, he has too little patience with sitting in front of an image he can’t manipulate. But my daughter is loving it. She and her father are starting to make Dr. Who puns to each other and give each other knowing looks when her brother and I don’t know what they’re talking about.

When my son was younger, a family member of mine accused me of making him a social misfit.

“If he doesn’t watch bad TV, what’s he going to talk to his friends about?” he asked.

I’m proud now to know that at least one of my children will be able to have a conversation about a TV show. Even if it is a TV show that happened before she was even ovulated.

eAvoidance…

Right now, I’m supposed to be balancing our financial records. This is not a task I relish, though each year, it gets easier and easier. Pieces of paper are only occasionally involved in this task nowadays. Magically, I download my credit card charges and they match the ones on the PDF I see on my screen. Magically, money that doesn’t actually exist moves from one account to another, from our account to PG&E.

Being a modern home engineer qualifies one for all sorts of jobs that didn’t exist when we were kids. Perhaps if I need to, I’ll be able to sell my skills for avoiding household accounts while running an online class when the weather report threatens a Comcast outage of extreme proportions.

It’s all in a day in the life.

A life photographed

In 2002, my husband and I got our first digital camera.

After my activity of the last couple of weeks, I am looking at our lives before that year as an enormous slog through boxes of faded memories.

My mother and I hatched a plan a few months ago to scan all of our family photos. She ordered a handy little scanner that sucks the photo through and saves it directly on a memory card. It’s not the highest quality, but we knew that convenience was going to be a huge factor in whether we ever got the job done.

I unearthed this photo and wondered why a photo of me looked like it was taken in the 70’s. Then I read the handwriting on the back, my childish writing, “Mom doing strawberries.” Not me, but something like the person I was going to become.

The scanner arrived, she put it away, and that was that. Until we decided that this time, we wouldn’t put it off.

We have a long history of saying that we’re going to “do something with all those photos.” My mother depended on me for the impetus, as I am the only avid scrapbooker in the family. Or rather, was. Curiously, the further into the digital age we went, the less avid my scrapbooking became. Now I share photos online and occasionally send prints to my kids’ paternal grandmother, but otherwise, I don’t print unless I want it on the wall.

But back in the day of analog, not only did I print but I also got free doubles. I made many copies for family and friends. I kept any photo someone sent me, along with programs from concerts I’d been to, postcards I’d received, random scribbles on paper that have no meaning now.

So over the holidays, we started The Big Push to digitize our lives. At first, it seemed easy and was even pleasurable. I loved really looking at all the photos from my childhood, seeing our cats of yesteryear, remembering days at the lake. Sometimes I find that I have an actual remembrance of the day. Often, I find something in the background of a photo that sparks a memory.

The pleasure, however, only goes on so long before the pain hits: Another failed relationship. Ouch. That friend I haven’t called in years. Ouch. The crick in my neck and down my right shoulder from feeding the photos in endlessly, monotonously.

It is, however, overall a pleasurable experience. I laughed out loud when I pulled a photo of me out of the pile and wondered why it was so faded, then realized that it was my mother in the photo, not me. It’s fascinating to look at my mother’s boxes of old family photos and see the generations unfolding backwards: My mother as a teen, looking an awful lot like my older sister. My mother’s aunt as a girl, showing her Native American ancestry in a chance angle caught by the camera. My mother’s great-grandmother, a quarter Native American and probably rather unusual with her black hair and eyes amongst the blue-eyed Pennsylvania Dutch who were her people. (Her father was an orphan adopted by a Pennsylvania Dutch family.) And more and more people in swimming costumes, standing in front of my grandparents’ house, unidentified.

Fishing
This photo shows me looking amazingly like my daughter, even with short hair! This reminds me how much more rigid our gender expectations for kids have become – I don’t remember anyone commenting on my short hair in the 70’s, or saying I must be a boy they way they do to my daughter.

There are lots and lots of babies. My sister’s son wins the prize in our generation for most photos—he had the great luck of going to a family wedding at a few months old, and everyone took photos and sent them to my mom.

One of my favorite finds was a series of three prints, all of the same shot: an angry-looking baby in a hospital bassinet. On the back of one of the copies, my mother had written “Suki” in relatively recent-looking ink. But deep down in the box I found the same photo with faded ball-point ink on the back identifying the angry baby as my younger brother, with details that were clearly written at the time of birth.

“See?” I said to my mom. “I was right. There are NO baby pictures of me and you just wrote ‘Suki’ on that one to appease me!” Actually, I do appear as a baby in snapshots, but my formal hospital photo seems to be gone, probably because my baby self was red-faced and yelling, “It’s developmentally inappropriate to place a new-born baby in a cold bassinet!! Bring me to my mother and let her swaddle me this instant!”

Darn nurses probably didn’t want my mom to see that photo.

My mom’s coming over this afternoon with, she promises, more treasures. The application form my Italian great-grandparents filled out to become American citizens. More photos of babies, no doubt, and of friends, relatives, and passersby who have lost their names but left their images, yellowing and faded, for us to enjoy and try to preserve.

How we read now

My family is filled with big readers. Back when we were childless, my husband and I actually had a category in our Quicken account called “books.” The first time he quit his job to start a company and we were trimming expenses, that was one we targeted. Then we became huge consumers of the public library.

Once we had kids, our public library use and book purchasing went up again. Then we discovered audiobooks, and in the last few years have exhausted much of the library’s offerings on disk. Then came the smartphone revolution, and we started to have digital books, as well—both e-books and audiobooks.

Our various ways of accessing books have changed over the years, but here’s a list of how we’re reading now:

Buying books

We are part of the diminishing breed of people who not only believe that it’s important to keep print books in our lives, but we also support our local, independent bookstore. That’s not to say that we don’t succumb to the lure and ease of Amazon on occasion, but we think our local bookshop’s One Book Pledge is very reasonable. (Buy one book a month in your community rather than online.) It’s so important to have choice and variety, and local bookstores offer this. When we walk into our store, the books they display are tailored to the tastes of people in our community, and everyone who benefits from our purchase lives and works in our community.

Digital books

Smartphones have made a huge difference to my reading life. I have a crazy schedule, working in bits and pieces while I take my kids to classes or meet with friends for activities. (I’m typing this while my kids have their back-to-back piano lessons! Thank goodness for piano teachers with wi-fi.) Having both the Kindle and the Nook apps on my phone, as well as Google’s app Play Books, an Adobe Acrobat reader, and a Microsoft Office emulator, allows me to read books and documents anywhere. The Kindle, Nook and Google Play apps all sync automatically, and I can access documents in my Dropbox without even having to attach my phone to my computer.

This translates to a huge amount of new time freed up for reading. In the past, I had to remember to bring things with me, and usually didn’t. Now it’s all there. Reading novels in 5-minute pieces isn’t optimal, but it means that I am once more reading them rather than always forgetting them in their last-known location amidst the piles of books in my house. This is especially helpful with books that I’m reading for a professional purpose. For example, I just started a literature circle for teens, and I’ll be getting all the books we’re reading on my phone so that I have a chance of keeping up with the teens’ reading speed.

I haven’t had a lot of luck accessing free digital books. Of course, scanned copies of out-of-copyright books are freely available, but they are often translated with character recognition software and are sometimes close to unreadable. I’ve had better luck with getting ePub versions and reading them on my phone. However, I’m usually more willing to buy a cheap Nook version of an out-of-copyright book that’s been edited and prettied up. Our library has some e-books but the selection isn’t great, so this isn’t a great option for us yet.

One place that the library does offer a great e-book selection is in things like technical books and software manuals. This makes a lot of sense—why purchase the manual to software that will be out-of-date within a year? Now they just subscribe to a service that offers access to manuals and technical books, which makes a lot more sense.

Another e-book option worth mentioning is for emerging readers: Tumblebooks. This wonderful service has electronic books that have a recorded audio. As the audio progresses through the book, each word spoken lights up in red so that the child can “read” along with the book. It’s also good for second language learning—they have a good selection of Spanish and a smattering of other languages. (If you’re in Santa Cruz, click on “Internet Resources” then “Tumblebooks Library”—you have to sign in with your card number to get access.)

Audiobooks

We have come to love audiobooks. We have two major reasons for audiobooks: The first is that if we listen to them in the car, there is peace for long (and short) drives. My kids love listening and it stops them from trying to annoy each other! The other reason we listen to them is that sometimes it’s great to hear the “right voice” reading out loud. We listened to the entire Harry Potter series, and it wouldn’t have been the same with my Midwestern rendering.

Our first stop for audiobooks is the library, which has many on disk. The problems we’ve found with this are:

  • We often don’t finish a long book before it’s due back and someone else wants it (solution: rip it to a computer, play it back at our leisure, delete when done)
  • Our library inexplicably often doesn’t have the first book in a series
  • Our library has more and more “Playaways,” these horrible little listening devices that are so low-powered that we have to turn our car stereo up to 40 to get it to play at a reasonable volume, with an unreasonable amount of hiss

We eventually caved in and got a subscription to Audible. After the teaser rate runs out, you pay about $15/month to buy one “credit”. Many of the books we were interested in cost not much more than a credit. Then we exhausted most of the newer books we wanted, and I realized that it didn’t make sense to buy older children’s books with credits, because they almost all cost under $15. Finally, I realized we weren’t getting our money’s worth and went to cancel. I knew from reading on the Internet that I could either choose to “pause” my account for three months a year (resulting in a 25% discount), or cancel my account, leaving full access to already-purchased books. I finally decided to cancel, wishing that they had a third, very cheap option where you could pay a small yearly fee to keep the account active and just pay for the books you wanted to buy. After going through many screens that tried to convince me not to cancel, I finally arrived at a screen that asked me, “If we offered you the chance to keep your account live for $9.99/year, would you do it?” Of course! So now I am paying $10/year and can still access their free deals, credit sales, and books that I want to pay for.

This all happened while I knew that our library offered free access to oodles of great audiobooks—but I’d never gotten the software to work on my Mac or my Android phone. Just this week, having told that fact to someone, I thought, Hm, when did I check that last? And lo and behold, they have finally fixed Overdrive so that I can use it. I’m very excited: a great Android app, a new app for my Mac that actually works, and access to tons of free audiobooks. (Free except for the taxes that I happily vote for every time I can to support our wonderful local libraries, truly a great use of our tax money.)

Radio programs and podcasts

I know families that are avid consumers of podcasts, and in fact my husband is one. But my use of them with the kids has been spotty. I’ve always been annoyed at having to sync my phone with my computer, and remembering to download the podcasts, and having to renew my downloads because I’d forget to listen for so long they’d get canceled. But in theory (and in practice for families that get into the swing of them) podcasts can be great. We like Science Friday, Boomerang, and a few others but aren’t currently listening to anything except on occasion.

I have, however, found app might might change that—NPR Player allows you to download content directly onto your phone, bypassing the computer. All of a sudden, I’m starting to listen to podcasts again. So this might be a new addition to our reading/listening lives.

 

It’s amazing how many choices we have these days. My mother had the attitude that it was good for kids to be bored sometimes. When my kids say they’re bored, however, I just answer, “You have GOT to be kidding.” With this much to read? Who could ever run out of things to do?

Now available