A question of scale

This year my son and I decided to use a new and unusual history curriculum in our homeschool. The Big History Project is an attempt to reshape history to be meaningful to kids in the age of information. Rather than focusing just on the wars and conquests of the past, this curriculum attempts to help students understand a context for human history and make sense of their place in it.

One of the first concepts Big History covers is the question of scale. What does it mean to be human in an unfathomably huge and ancient universe? What is our role as a species? What is the importance of the individual and of our achievements?

Orion Nebula
The Orion Nebula as seen by the Hubble Telescope

I was thinking about how to represent this in a way that makes sense to me. I think a lot about what it means for a human consciousness to be trapped inside a biological body. Our consciousness is so vast—unlike (as far as we know) other animals, we can conceive of the universe. We can imagine a million years into the future or the past. We can study fossils and recreate the life they lived in words, static art, and film.

This vastness of our consciousness leads us, however, to have difficulty in placing our lives in context. Especially when we are children, what’s happening in our heads naturally feels as if it’s the center of things. One of the most fascinating parts of being a parent for me was watching my children define who they are within their own bodies.

First, you have a baby who has only recently separated from being part of someone else’s body. The baby has a desperate need to be touched, as if that little consciousness can’t yet conceive of being its own person. I remember with both of my babies the day they pulled their heads back from nursing and looked up at me with a new curiosity—Hello! Who are you? Who am I?

Then the baby starts to look and move around. Everything in the baby’s life revolves around the baby. Having siblings perhaps makes it a little easier to sense that you’re not the center of the universe, but your needs are still very selfish—throughout the toddler years and for some kids, well into childhood, there is a selfishness in fulfilling desires and satisfying needs. Babies don’t ask, “Is it right that my mother has to drop everything to feed me?” Toddlers don’t ask, “Is this a convenient time for me to throw a tantrum?”

I see the primary years as the time when kids are negotiating these questions: Where do I leave off and other people begin? What rights do other people have over me? What right do I have to influence and involve other people? They start to learn by trial and error (and sometimes with adult help!) how far their consciousness extends and how much they are able to influence the world around them. During this time, kids start to comprehend the true scale of things and realize that their consciousness, though vast, is just one of billions.

And then the teen years. So many parents have trouble dealing with this time when their kids seem to take antagonistic positions just to prove that they are separate, autonomous beings. I agree that it’s hard, but it’s also a thrill to watch a child fully separate and develop into his own person, to start to understand his own consciousness and what he wants to do in this frustratingly brief turn we all get. A successful end to the teen years, it seems to me, is one in which the new adult is prepared to harness the vast consciousness to pursue goals within the limits of her human life. I know that I didn’t end my teens this way, but I hope I can guide my children as well as I can toward that understanding as their eventual goal.

If you’re interested in exploring the topic of scale, here are some cool resources we’ve used:

From homeschool to school

A friend told me the other night that she was eagerly awaiting my next installment of our ongoing school saga. After homeschooling kindergarten through fifth grade, my daughter decided to try out public school this year.

Probably the most surprising news for most people is that there is so little news. Because it was her choice and she knew that it was her responsibility to follow through on it, we’ve had little trouble with the daily details that many homeschoolers find difficult. She sets her alarm and gets up each morning 10 minutes before we do. (This is to allow for the quiet reading time that she always had at the beginning of the day.) She is actually eating a [mostly] healthy breakfast each day. (As opposed to our less successful homeschool approach, which was to let her read until she was finally willing to eat, as breakfast is her least favorite meal.) And she doesn’t enjoy having to do homework after being at school all day, but it’s never a lot and she puts in a decent effort.

But the big question for her was never whether she would be able to deal with the daily grind. The big issue that comes up with any child like her, whether homeschooled or not, is fitting into an education approach that is at odds with her needs as a twice-exceptional learner.

We have been very lucky that her teacher is a caring and flexible educator, so we haven’t had to overcome the barriers that so many teachers set up in front of their unusual learners. But at its core, the American public education system is very unfriendly to kids like her in a variety of ways. Here are some of the major differences we’re noticing between school and homeschool education:

1. The focus on weakness
When my daughter was young, I found that contrary to what I’d learned during my education, she learned much more when we focused on her strengths rather than her weaknesses. For example, she has strengths in science, reading, and conceptual math, so we focused on those almost exclusively in the early years even though she was clearly behind in writing and math calculation skills. Rather than subject her to “drill and kill” methods of inserting math facts into her brain, and rather than making her write more and more because it was difficult for her, we either went easy in those areas or at times ignored them altogether. Using this approach, she eventually brought her weaker skills along because they were required to fulfill her goals in her areas of passion. Though she seldom wrote an essay the way she would have in school, she willingly wrote long reports for her science fair projects. And realizing herself that math facts would help her do other math more easily gave her the internal motivation to work on skills that were hard for her.

The public school approach is quite different. She is in a class of 32 students who have all been taught to expect a teacher-led classroom in which they largely do the same assignments in the same way. Inevitably, this means that my daughter is required to do assignments that focus on her areas of weakness, rather than doing them in the context of a strength. She’s been pretty game to try (again, the influence of a caring teacher), but I know (and I suspect that she does also) that this isn’t the best way for her to learn.

We’re early in the process, but we’re also looking at whether we want to pursue the public school fix for this focus on her weak areas: getting an official stamp of approval on letting her have accommodations to help her learn. In homeschool, this is just how you do things. In school, you need official permission to let a child learn in the way that works for her. Quite a change for us!

2. The focus on “school skills” vs. “real-world skills”
American schools have a long tradition of having kids learn things that seem to have little or no application in the real world. One of the reasons for this is just historical: It takes us a long time to take something out of the curriculum once it no longer has a practical application in modern lives.

Another reason is that we can’t predict which kids will need which skills, so we make them all attempt to attain all skills. That’s why we make our budding actresses and chefs pass math and science classes that are not geared toward their future careers, while we force our budding engineers to enrich themselves with “fuzzy” classes that are aimed at teaching them college-level skills in a discipline they’re not going to major in. (As an aside, I will say that I heartily approve of encouraging people to become well-rounded learners – my beef is not with the concept but rather the execution of this goal.)

So to look at this through the lens of my daughter’s homeschool science projects, in the past she learned all sorts of things – history, writing, letter-writing etiquette, scheduling, geography… – in the context of a project that had a real-world goal. In school, all of these subjects are split up and taught, often isolated from each other, in the same way to each student. So the student who is passionate about geography because she has the goal of traveling to different countries gets the same assignment as the student who goes home and takes apart her household appliances.

In school, therefore, my daughter gets an assignment to write a Venn diagram about two of the characters in the novel she is reading. In homeschool, either she would have just read the novel, enjoyed it, and moved on, or she would have been so inspired by the story that she would have decided to write a screenplay or another story based on it, in which case she would have needed to master the goal of the Venn diagram exercise as an integral part of reaching her goal. No child will need making Venn diagrams as a skill in the real world, but many will need to understand how to compare and contrast in order to fulfill other real world goals. In school, this translates to Venn diagrams. In homeschool, we would have learned the same skills through self-led projects in her areas of strength.

3. Following rules because they are rules, not because they are right
When our children were smaller, we had to deal with the inevitable result of the parenting choices we were making: If you raise your children to question authority, they will question your authority as well. In homeschooling, you deal with this by developing a “authoritative” rather than “authoritarian” relationship with your children. You welcome your children’s questioning of rules as part of their education.

In school, my daughter comes home daily with tales of school rules, how she likes them or doesn’t, how they make sense or don’t, how the children and adults follow them or not. One day I was waiting for her at the fence and she pointed out that I wasn’t standing in front of the area bearing the first letter of her last name. I protested that this was a rule for the children, not the adults, and then she cheerfully agreed that although it was a rule, she’d seen few children and fewer adults following it. She tells me about kids who don’t follow rules and don’t get called on it, and rules that she follows but she clearly thinks are unfair. The homeschooler/anti-authoritarian in me says that she should try to challenge illogical rules, but the practical me (the one who went to and dropped out of public school) tells me to advise her just to let most of it slide.

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So it does seem as if our year-long social science experiment is going swimmingly. Her learning has largely been centered around social and cultural learning, and the homeschooler in me says that’s just fine. As long as she isn’t concerned about how her grades reflect her weaknesses much more than her strengths, and as long as she doesn’t come home demanding to go to a Miley Cyrus concert, I’m pleased with how much her time in institutional learning is teaching her lessons that aren’t necessarily in the curriculum. When she returns to homeschooling, I hope she’ll have a new respect for how homeschooling allows her to follow her passions, shine in her strengths, and use her strengths to address her challenges.

Note: Today’s reading included this article on asynchronous development, which touches on some of the problems that kids who aren’t developing at a normal rate can have at school.

Women helping women

The other day I wrote about how I’m a bit of a skeptic about the exploding field of alternative health. It is so hard to separate the noise of the snake oil salesmen from the soft-spoken voices of reason. But here’s another example of how advances in modern healthcare don’t always happen in the laboratory.

One night I was at a choral rehearsal and overheard one woman asking another for advice about her, ahem, female troubles. I didn’t catch what her symptoms were, but the woman she was asking is knowledgeable about dietary health and answered that she should try supplementing with magnesium.

magnesium
I know nothing about this company, but I love the image they made to advertise their supplements!

My daughter is now 10. When she was born, I remember to the day how old she was the first time I got one of those headaches. She was six months old, and a few days before my cycle began again after childbirth, I was hit with an amazing headache. It was like nothing I’d ever felt before. I was unable to get out of bed (something extremely unusual for me), and soon began to feel nauseated as well.

Stuck in bed, what did I do? I asked my husband to bring me my laptop, of course. In short order, I figured out that I was having a migraine, the first of my life. Then I found out that some women have this problem associated with their menstrual cycle. The recommendations? Over-the-counter pain medications, and when that doesn’t work, Imitrex.

I dosed myself with enormous amounts of Aleve, and was eventually able to get back out of bed. But from that month onwards, I got my monthly headache.

Some women would have left it at that, I suppose. But I’m not willing to be sent to bed once a month for three days without a fight! So I asked my doctor, and she recommended, not surprisingly, Imitrex. I tried it, and sure enough, it worked. And sure enough, just like the package warned, the other side effects made it so that I was still incapacitated, though my headache was gone.

Step two was my doctor’s recommendation to try Zoloft. Regularly prescribed as an antidepressant, Zoloft is used off-label to cure all manner of hormone-related maladies, I learned. So I tried it. Once again, it got rid of the headaches. Once again, I wasn’t really willing to deal with the side-effects. In this case, I went from my usual highs and lows to some weird, gray version of my life. I was neither sad nor happy, and didn’t much care about what was going on around me. Again, the headaches were cured, but the side effects were not to my liking.

Against my doctor’s recommendations, I gave up taking the Zoloft every day and just dosed myself when I felt a headache coming on. It worked, but I worried about the possible side effects of playing with my hormones that way.

So back to that choral rehearsal. I thought, Hm, magnesium, what harm could it do to take the RDA and see if it helps? Amazingly, it didn’t just help. It wiped out the headaches. Years later, there is still a direct correlation: If I take magnesium, no headache. If I slack off, the headaches return.

There is a scientific basis for this. According to the National Institutes of Heath:

Magnesium deficiency is related to factors that promote headaches, including neurotransmitter release and vasoconstriction [51]. People who experience migraine headaches have lower levels of serum and tissue magnesium than those who do not.
However, research on the use of magnesium supplements to prevent or reduce symptoms of migraine headaches is limited. Three of four small, short-term, placebo-controlled trials found modest reductions in the frequency of migraines in patients given up to 600 mg/day magnesium [51]. The authors of a review on migraine prophylaxis suggested that taking 300 mg magnesium twice a day, either alone or in combination with medication, can prevent migraines [52].

So, you may be asking the same question that I ask every time I find out about these associations: Why didn’t my very capable physician have me try magnesium, an element necessary for human health and very difficult to overdose on, rather than two drugs with bad side effects and the potential to damage my health further?

The easy answer is just that she doesn’t know. I am placing great hope in the advent of connected computerized health to fix this problem. No single doctor can know everything about modern medicine at this point, so we need computer systems to help them out. My doctor’s office is equipped with a wonderful computer system, which could be enhanced to offer her suggestions. (She can already look things up, but I don’t remember if she bothered to look up migraines when I came in to see her.) A well-made computer system, when a doctor types in “migraine,” will pop up information that the doctor may not know, such as the relationship between magnesium intake and migraines.

The more complex answer is one of the reasons that so many people are turning away from science and toward the snake oil salesmen: our medical system is too much in the grips of large pharmaceutical companies who inundate our doctors with gifts and freebies. Want Zoloft? Your doctor probably has free samples lying around. Wonder what Imitrex is? Your doctor is much more likely to know the name of this brand name drug than the uses of a good old, homely element like magnesium.

Of course, as consumers flock to alternative medicine, large companies are taking over alternative medicine and steering patients to make just as irrational, and sometimes life-threatening, decisions as the patients of doctors who steer them to name-brand drugs.

But here is what I feel to be a wonderful coda to this story: Last year, a friend was having unusual and severe symptoms having to do with her menstrual cycle. Her symptoms had nothing to do with migraines and in fact were not located in her head. However, after she told me her tale of woe involving multiple tests and different drugs, I suggested that she try magnesium. Couldn’t hurt, right?

Recently, I asked her. It turns out that magnesium has completely solved the symptoms that modern drugs made no dent in. And besides that, she noticed that a co-worker posted that she was out sick because of similar problems, and she suggested magnesium which solved her co-worker’s problems as well.

One day, our doctors’ computers will tell us which dietary modifications to make before the doctors suggest treatment with drugs.

Until then, I guess it’s got to be women helping women, one headache at a time.

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