Lift Up Your Hearts!

The Brain that Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science by Norman Doidge (Penguin, New York, 2007)

Neuroplasticity.

The idea that our brains are fixed, hard-wired machines was (and in many cases still is) so deeply entrenched in the scientific establishment that evidence to the contrary was not only suppressed, but often not even seen because the minds of even respectable scientists could not absorb what they were certain was impossible.  Having been familiar since the 1960s with the work of Glenn Doman and the Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential, the idea that the human brain is continually changing itself and can recover from injury in astonishing ways did not surprise me. In fact, the only shock was that in a 400 page book on neuroplasticity and the persecution of its early pioneers I found not one mention of Doman's name. But the stories are none the less astonishing for that.

In Chapter 1 we meet woman whose vestibular system was destroyed by antibiotic side-effects.  She is freed by a sensor held on her tongue and a computerized helmet from the severely disabling feeling that she is falling all the time, even when lying flat.  That's the stuff of science fiction, but what's most astounding is that the effect lingers for a few minutes after she removes the apparatus the first time, and after several sessions she no longer needs the device.

Chapter 3, "Redesigning the Brain," on the work of Michael Merzenich, including the ground-breaking Fast ForWord learning program, is worth the cost of the book all by itself.

Sensitive readers may want to steer clear of Chapter 4, "Acquiring Tastes and Loves," or risk being left with unwanted, disturbing mental images.  But it is a must read for anyone who wants to believe that pornography is harmless, or that our personal, private mental fantasies do not adversely affect the very structure of our brains.

The book is less impressive when it gets away from hard science and into psychotherapy, as the ideas become more speculative, but the stories are still impressive.

Phantom pain, learning disabilities, autism, stroke recovery, obsessions and compulsions, age-related mental decline, and much more:  the discovery of neuroplasticity shatters misconceptions and offers hope.  The Brain that Changes Itself is an appetizer plate; bring on the main course!

For those who want a sampling of the appetizer itself, I'm including an extensive quotation section.  Even so, it doesn't come close to doing justice to the depth and especially the breadth of the book.  I've pulled quotes from all over, so understand that they are out of context, and don't expect them to move smoothly from one section to another.

Neuro is for "neuron," the nerve cells in our brains and nervous systems. Plastic is for "changeable, malleable, modifiable." At first many of the scientists didn't dare use the word "neuroplasticity" in their publications, and their peers belittled them for promoting a fanciful notions. Yet they persisted, slowly overturning the doctrine of the unchanging brain. They showed that children are not always stuck with the mental abilities they are born with; that the damaged brain can often reorganize itself so that when one part fails, another can often substitute; that if brain cells die, they can at times be replaced; that many "circuits" and even basic reflexes that we think are hardwired are not. One of these scientists even showed that thinking, learning, and acting can turn our genes on or off, thus shaping our brain anatomy and our behavior—surely one of the most extraordinary discoveries of the twentieth century.

In the course of my travels I met a scientist who enabled people who had been blind since birth to begin to see, another who enabled the deaf to hear; I spoke with people who had had strokes decades before and had been declared incurable, who were helped to recover with neuroplastic treatments; I met people whose learning disorders were cured and whose IQs were raised; I saw evidence that it is possible for eighty-year-olds to sharpen their memories to function the way they did when they were fifty-five. I saw people rewire their brains with their thoughts, to cure previously incurable obsessions and traumas. I spoke with Nobel laureates who were hotly debating how we must re-think our model of the brain now that we know it is ever changing. ... The idea that the brain can change its own structure and function through thought and activity is, I believe, the most important alteration in our view of the brain since we first sketched out its basic anatomy and the workings of its basic component, the neuron.

In Chapter 2, Building Herself a Better Brain, a woman with such a severe imbalance of brain function that she was labelled mentally retarded put her own experiences together with the work of other researchers to design brain exercises that fixed the weaknesses in her own brain ... and went on to develop similar diagnostic procedures and exercises for others.

The irony of this new discovery is that for hundreds of years educators did seem to sense that children's brains had to be built up through exercises of increasing difficulty that strengthened brain functions. Up through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries a classical education often included rote memorization of long poems in foreign languages, which strengthened the auditory memory (hence thinking in language) and an almost fanatical attention to handwriting, which probably helped strengthen motor capacities and thus not only helped handwriting but added speed and fluency to reading and speaking. Often a great deal of attention was paid to exact elocution and to perfecting the pronunciation of words. Then in the 1960s educators dropped such traditional exercises from the curriculum, because they were too rigid, boring, and "not relevant."   But the loss of these drills has been costly; they may have been the only opportunity that many students had to systematically exercise the brain function that gives us fluency and grace with symbols. For the rest of us, their disappearance may have contributed to the general decline of eloquence, which requires memory and a level of auditory brainpower unfamiliar to us now. In the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 the debaters would comfortably speak for an hour or more without notes, in extended memorized paragraphs; today many of the most learned among us, raised in our most elite schools since the 1960s, prefer the omnipresent PowerPoint presentation—the ultimate compensation for a weak premotor cortex.

Here are several (but not enough!) from my favorite chapter, "Redesigning the Brain."

[As] they trained an animal at a skill, not only did its neurons fire faster, but because they were faster their signals were clearer.  Faster neurons were more likely to fire in sync with each other—becoming better team players—wiring together more and forming groups of neurons that gave off clearer and more powerful signals.  This is a crucial point, because a powerful signal has greater impact on the brain.  When we want to remember something we have heard we must hear it clearly, because a memory can be only as clear as its original signal.

Paying close attention is essential to long-term plastic change. ...  When the animals performed tasks automatically, without paying attention, they changed their brain maps, but the changes did not last.  We often praise "the ability to multitask."  While you can learn when you divide your attention, divided attention doesn't lead to abiding change in your brain maps.

Somewhere between 5 and 10 percent of preschool children have a language disability that makes it difficult for them to read, write, or even follow instructions. ... [C]hildren with language disabilities have auditory processing problems with common consonant-vowel combinations that are spoken quickly and are called "the fast parts of speech."  The children have trouble hearing them accurately and, as a result, reproducing them accurately.  Merzenich believed that these children's auditory cortex neurons were firing too slowly, so they couldn't distinguish between two very similar sounds or be certain, if two sounds occurred close together, which was first and which was second.  Often they didn't hear the beginnings of syllables or the sound changes within syllables.  Normally neurons, after they have processed a sound, are ready to fire again after about a 30-millisecond rest.  Eighty percent of language-impaired children took at least three times that long, so that they lost large amounts of language information.  When their neuron-firing patterns were examined, the signals weren't clear. ... Improper hearing lead to weaknesses in all the language tasks, so they were weak in vocabulary, comprehension, speech, reading, and writing.  Because they spent so much energy decoding words, they tended to use shorter sentences and failed to exercise their memory for longer sentences.

[Five hundred children at 35 sites] were given standardized language tests before and after Fast ForWord training. The study showed that most children's ability to understand language normalized after Fast ForWord.  In many cases, their comprehension rose above normal.  The average child who took the program moved ahead 1.8 years of language development in six weeks. ... A Stanford group did brain scans of twenty dyslexic children, before and after Fast ForWord.  The opening scans showed that the children used different parts of their brains for reading than normal children do.  After Fast ForWord new scans showed that their brains had begun to normalize.

Merzenich's team started hearing that Fast ForWord was having a number of spillover effects.  Children's handwriting improved.  Parents reported that many of the students were starting to show sustained attention and focus.  Merzenich thought these surprising benefits were occurring because Fast ForWord led to some general improvements in mental processing.

"You know," [Merzenich] says, "IQ goes up.  We used the matrix test, which is a visual-based measurement of IQ—and IQ goes up."

The fact that a visual component of the IQ went up meant that the IQ improvements were not caused simply because Fast ForWord improved the children's ability to read verbal test questions.  Their mental processing was being improved in a general way.

This is just a sample of the benefits that made me want to rush right out and buy Fast ForWord, even if it were to cost as much as the insanely-expensive Rosetta Stone German software I'm also tempted to buy.  From the description, it sounds like something everyone could benefit from for mental tune-ups.  Unfortunately, the makers of Fast ForWord are even worse than the Rosetta Stone folks about keeping tight control over their product:  as far as I've been able to determine, you can only use it under the direction of a therapist (making it too expensive for ordinary use), and even then you don't own the software but are only licensed to use it for a short period of time.  :(  It works, though.  We know someone for whom it made all the difference in the world, even late in her school career.

Merzenich began wondering about the role of a new environmental risk factor that might affect everyone but have a more damaging effect on genetically predisposed children:  the continuous background noise from machines, sometimes called white noise.  White noise consists of many frequencies and is very stimulating to the auditory cortex.

"Infants are reared in continuously more noisy environments.  There is always a din," he says.  White noise is everywhere now, coming from fans in our electronics, air conditioners, heaters, and car engines.

To test this hypothesis, his group exposed rat pups to pulses of white noise throughout their critical period and found that the pups' cortices were devastated.

Psychologically, middle age is often an appealing time because, all else being equal, it can be a relatively placid period compared with what has come before. ... We still regard ourselves as active, but we have a tendency to deceive ourselves into thinking that we are learning as we were before.  We rarely engage in tasks in which we must focus our attention as closely as we did when we were younger.  Such activities as reading the newspaper, practicing a profession of many years, and speaking our own language are mostly the replay of mastered skills, not learning.  By the time we hit our seventies, we may not have systematically engaged the systems in the brain that regulate plasticity for fifty years.

That's why learning a new language in old age is so good for improving and maintaining the memory generally.  Because it requires intense focus, studying a new language turns on the control system for plasticity and keeps it in good shape for laying down sharp memories of all kinds.  No doubt Fast ForWord is responsible for so many general improvements in thinking, in part because it stimulates the control system for plasticity to keep up its production of acetylcholine and dopamine.  Anything that requires highly focused attention will help that system—learning new physical activities that require concentration, solving challenging puzzles, or making a career change that requires that you master new skills and material.  Merzenich himself is an advocate of learning a new language in old age.  "You will gradually sharpen everything up again and that will be very highly beneficial to you."

The same applies to mobility.  Just doing the dances you learned years ago won't help your brain's motor cortex stay in shape.  To keep the mind alive requires learning something truly new with intense focus.  That is what will allow you to both lay down new memories and have a system that can easily access and preserve the older ones.

This work opens up the possibility of high-speed learning later in life.  The nucleus basalis [always on for young children, but in adulthood only with sustained, close attention] could be turned on by an electrode, by microinjections of certain chemicals, or by drugs.  It is hard to imagine that people will not ... be drawn to a technology that would make it relatively effortless to master the facts of science, history, or a profession, merely by being exposed to them briefly. ... Such techniques would no doubt be used by high school and university students in their studies and in competitive entrance exams.  (Already many students who do not have attention deficit disorder use stimulants to study.)  Of course, such aggressive interventions might have unanticipated, adverse effects on the brain—not to mention our ability to discipline ourselves—but they would likely be pioneered in cases of dire medical need, where people are willing to take the risk.  Turning on the nucleus basalis might help brain-injured patients, so many of whom cannot relearn the lost functions of reading, writing, speaking, or walking because they can't pay close enough attention.

[Gross motor control is] a function that declines as we age, leading to loss of balance, the tendency to fall, and difficulties with mobility.  Aside from the failure of vestibular processing, this decline is caused by the decrease in sensory feedback from our feet.  According to Merzenich, shoes, worn for decades, limit the sensory feedback from our feet to our brain.  If we went barefoot, our brains would receive many different kinds of input as we went over uneven surfaces.  Shoes are a relatively flat platform that spreads out the stimuli, and the surfaces we walk on are increasingly artificial and perfectly flat.   This leads us to dedifferentiate the maps for the soles of our feet and limit how touch guides our foot control.  Then we may start to use canes, walkers, or crutches or rely on other senses to steady ourselves.  By resorting to these compensations instead of exercising our failing brain systems, we hasten their decline.

As we age, we want to look down at our feet while walking down stairs or on slightly challenging terrain, because we're not getting much information from our feet.  As Merzenich escorted his mother-in-law down the stairs of the villa, he urged her to stop looking down and start feeling her way, so that she would maintain, and develop, the sensory map for her foot, rather than letting it waste away.

Brain plasticity and psychological disorders:

Each time [people with obsessive-compulsive disorder] try to shift gears, they begin ... growing new circuits and altering the caudate.  By refocusing the patient is learning not to get sucked in by the content of an obsession but to work around it.  I suggest to my patients that they think of the use-it-or-lose-it principle.  Each moment they spend thinking of the symptom ... they deepen the obsessive circuit.  By bypassing it, they are on the road to losing it.  With obsessions and compulsions, the more you do it, the more you want to do it; the less you do it, the less you want to do it ... [I]t is not what you feel while applying the technique that counts, it is what you do.  "The struggle is not to make the feeling go away; the struggle is not to give in to the feeling"—by acting out a compulsion, or thinking about the obsession.  This technique won't give immediate relief because lasting neuroplastic change takes time, but it does lay the groundwork for change by exercising the brain in a new way. ... The goal is to "change the channel" to some new activity for fifteen to thirty minutes when one has an OCD symptom.  (If one can't resist that long, any time spent resisting is beneficial, even if it is only for a minute.  That resistance, that effort, is what appears to lay down new circuits.)

Mental practice with physical results:

Pascual-Leone taught two groups of people, who had never studied piano, a sequence of notes, showing them which fingers to move and letting them hear the notes as they were played.  Then members of one group, the "mental practice" group, sat in front of an electric piano keyboard, two hours a day, for five days, and imagined both playing the sequence and hearing it played.  A second "physical practice" group actually played the music two hours a day for five days.  Both groups had their brains mapped before the experiment, each day during it, and afterward.  Then both groups were asked to play the sequence, and a computer measured the accuracy of their performances.

Pascual-Leoone found that both groups learned to play the sequence, and both showed similar brain map changes.  Remarkably, mental practice alone produced the same physical changes in the motor system as actually playing the piece.  By the end of the fifth day, the changes in motor signals to the muscles were the same in both groups, and the imagining players were as accurate as the actual players were on their third day.

The level of improvement at five days in the mental practice group, however substantial, was not as great as in those who did physical practice.  But when the mental practice group finished its mental training and was given a single two-hour physical practice session, its overall performance improved to the level of the physical practice group's performance at five days.  Clearly mental practice is an effective way to prepare for learning a physical skill with minimal physical practice.

In an experiment that is as hard to believe as it is simple, Drs. Guang Yue and Kelly Cole showed that imagining one is using one's muscles actually strengthens them.  The study looked at two groups, one that did physical exercise and one that imagined doing exercise. ... At the end of the study the subjects who had done physical exercise increased their muscular strength by 30 percent, as one might expect.  Those who only imagined doing the exercise, for the same period, increased their muscle strength by 22 percent.  The explanation lies in the motor neurons of the brain that "program" movements.  During these imaginary contractions, the neurons responsible for stringing together sequences of instructions for movements are activated and strengthened, resulting in increased strength when the muscles are contracted.

Talk about unbelievable.

The Sea Gypsies are nomadic people who live in a cluster of tropical islands in the Burmese archipelago and off the west coast of Thailand.  A wandering water tribe, they learn to swim before they learn to walk and live over half their lives in boats on the open sea. ... Their children dive down, often thirty feet beneath the water's surface, and pluck up their food ... and have done so for centuries.  By learning to lower their heart rate, they can stay under water twice as long as most swimmers.  They do this without any diving equipment.

But what distinguishes these children, for our purposes, is that they can see clearly at these great depths, without goggles.  Most human beings cannot see clearly under water because as sunlight passes through water, it is bent ... so that light doesn't land where it should on the retina.

Anna Gislén, a Swedish researcher, studied the Sea Gypsies' ability to read placards under water and found that they were more than twice as skillful as European children.  The Gypsies learned to control the shape of their lenses and, more significantly, to control the size of their pupils, constricting them 22 percent.  This is a remarkable finding, because human pupils reflexively get larger under water, and pupil adjustment has been thought to be a fixed, innate reflex, controlled by the brain and nervous system.

This ability of the Sea Gypsies to see under water isn't the product of a unique genetic endowment.  Gislén has since taught Swedish children to constrict their pupils to see under water.

The fact that cultures differ in perception is not proof that one perceptual act is a good as the next, or that "everything is relative" when it comes to perception.  Clearly some contexts call for a more narrow angle of view, and some for more wide-angle, holistic perception.  The Sea Gypsies have survived using a combination of their experience of the sea and holistic perception.  So attuned are they to the moods of the sea that when the tsunami of December 26, 2004, hit the Indian Ocean, killing hundreds of thousands, they all survived.  They saw that the sea had begun to recede in a strange way, and this drawing back was followed by an unusually small wave; they saw dolphins begin to swim for deeper water, while the elephants started stampeding to higher ground, and they heard the cicadas fall silent. ... Long before modern science put this all together, they had either fled the sea to the shore, seeking the highest ground, or gone into very deep waters, where they also survived.

Music makes extraordinary demands on the brain.  A pianist performing the eleventh variation of the Sixth Paganini etude by Franz Liszt must play a staggering eighteen hundred notes per minute.  Studies by Taub and others of musicians who play stringed instruments have shown that the more these musicians practice, the larger the brain maps for their active left hands become, and the neurons and maps that respond to string timbres increase; in trumpeters the neurons and maps that respond to "brassy" sounds enlarge.  Brain imaging shows that musicians have several areas of their brains—the motor cortex and the cerebellum, among others—that differ from those of nonmusicians.  Imaging also shows that musicians who begin playing before the age of seven have larger brain areas connecting the two hemispheres.

It is not just "highly cultured" activities that rewire the brain.  Brain scans of London taxi drivers show that the more years a cabbie spends navigating London streets, the larger the volume of his hippocampus, that part of the brain that stores spatial representations.  Even leisure activities change our brain; meditators and meditation teachers have a thicker insula, a part of the cortex activated by paying close attention.

Here's something completely different, and frightening.

[T]otalitarian regimes seem to have an intuitive awareness that it becomes hard for people to change after a certain age, which is  why so much effort is made to indoctrinate the young from an early age.  For instance, North Korea, the most thoroughgoing totalitarian regime in existence, places children in school from ages two and a half to four years; they spend almost every waking hour being immersed in a cult of adoration for dictator Kim Jong Il and his father, Kim Il Sung.  They can see their parents only on weekends.  Practically every story read to them is about the leader.  Forty percent of the primary school textbooks are devoted wholly to describing the two Kims.  This continues all the way through school.  Hatred of the enemy is drilled in with massed practice as well, so that a brain circuit forms linking the perception of "the enemy" with negative emotions automatically.  A typical math quiz asks, "Three soldiers from the Korean People's Army killed thirty American soldiers.  How many American soldiers were killed by each of them, if they all killed an equal number of enemy soldiers?"  Such perceptual emotional networks, once established in an indoctrinated people, do not lead only to mere "differences of opinion" between them and their adversaries, but to plasticity-based anatomical differences, which are much harder to bridge or overcome than ordinary persuasion.

Think the North Koreans are the only ones whose brains are being re-programed?

"The Internet is just one of those things that contemporary humans can spend millions of 'practice' events at, that the average human a thousand years ago had absolutely no exposure to.  Our brains are massively remodeled by this exposure—but so, too, by reading, by television, by video games, by modern electronics, by contemporary music, by contemporary 'tools,' etc." — Michael Merzenich, 2005

Erica Michael and Marcel Just of Carnegie Mellon University did a brain scan study to test whether the medium is indeed the message.  They showed that different brain areas are involved in hearing speech and reading it, and different comprehension centers in hearing words and reading them.  As Just put it, "The brain constructs the message ... differently for reading and listening. ... Listening to an audio book leaves a different set of memories than reading does.  A newscast heard on the radio is processed differently from the same words read in a newspaper."  This finding refutes the conventional theory of comprehension, which argues that a single center in the brain understands words, and it doesn't really matter how ... information enters the brain.

Television, music videos, and video games, all of which use television techniques, unfold at a much faster pace than real life, and they are getting faster, which causes people to develop an increased appetite for high-speed transitions in those media.  It is the form of the television medium—cuts, edits, zooms, pans, and sudden noises—that alters the brain, by activating what Pavlov called the "orienting response," which occurs whenever we sense a sudden change in the world around us, especially a sudden movement.  We instinctively interrupt whatever we are doing to turn, pay attention, and get our bearings. ... Television triggers this response at a far more rapid rate than we experience it in life, which is why we can't keep our eyes off the TV screen, even in the middle of an intimate conversation, and why people watch TV a lot longer than they intend.  Because typical music videos, action sequences, and commercials trigger orientating responses at a rate of one per second, watching them puts us into continuous orienting response with no recovery.  No wonder people report feeling drained from watching TV.  Yet we acquire a taste for it and find slower changes boring.  The cost is that such activities as reading, complex conversation, and listening to lectures become more difficult.

All electronic devices rewire the brain.  People who write on a computer are often at a loss when they have to write by hand or dictate, because their brains are not wired to translate thoughts into cursive writing or speech at high speed.  When computers crash and people have mini-nervous breakdowns, there is more than a little truth in their cry, "I feel like I've lost my mind!"  As we use an electronic medium, our nervous system extends outward, and the medium extends inward.

Ouch!

"Use it or lose it" is a common refrain in The Brain that Changes Itself, whether talking about specific knowledge and abilities, or the capacity for learning and the very plasticity of the brain itself.  (There is some hope given, however, that knowledge apparently lost is recoverable, even if its brain "map" has subsequently been taken over for another use.)  Do you worry, as I did, that these new discoveries mean that it really is possible to learn too much, that we need to save our brains for that which is most important?  That learning German will drive away what little I know of French?  Relax; that doesn't need to happen, although I must be sure to keep the French fresh in my mind or it will get shelved.

As the scientist Gerald Edelman has pointed out, the human cortex alone has 30 billion neurons and is capable of making 1 million billion synaptic connections.  Edelman writes, "If we considered the number of possible neural circuits, we would be dealing with hyper-astronomical numbers:  10 followed by at least a million zeros.  (There are 10 followed by 79 zeros, give or take a few, of particles in the known universe.)"  These staggering numbers explain why the human brain can be described as the most complex known object in the universe, and why it is capable of ongoing, massive microstructural change, and capable of performing so many different mental functions and behaviors.

I'm tired of typing.  Get the book.

Mom knows best:  if you want to learn, you need to sleep.

A new study shows that dreaming is an important part of that process.

Robert Stickgold, the director of the Center for Sleep and Cognition at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, in Boston, Massachusetts ... and his colleagues asked 99 college students to memorize a complex maze on a computer. The researchers then placed the students inside a virtual, 3-D version of the maze and asked them to navigate to another spot within it. After doing this several times, half of the participants took a 90-minute nap while the other half stayed awake and watched videos.

When the students were given the maze test again five hours later, the nappers did better than the students who had stayed awake, even those who had reviewed the maze in their heads. However, the nappers who dreamed about the maze — one described being lost in a bat cave — performed 10 times better than the nappers who didn't.

The students who dreamed about the maze did poorly on the test the first time around — which may not be a coincidence, the researchers say. If a task is difficult for you, your brain seems to know it, and you may be more likely to dream about it than if the task were easier.

It doesn't even need to be a deep sleep, as the researchers found when they monitored the brain activity of the students while they slept. Although the deep slumber known as rapid eye movement (REM) is most closely associated with dreaming, the students' dreaming and learning occurred after as little as one minute of non-REM sleep.

Porter's immediate and excellent suggestion was that the researchers use as a control group, not students who watched videos, but students who stayed awake but otherwise were not allowed to do anything distracting.  The sleeper's minds were free to continue to work on the problem, whereas watching videos would not only divert attention from the task, but would actively drive out the newly-learned information.  Porter suggested the control group be required simply to sit and do nothing for that time, but you can't ask a chronically sleep-deprived college student to sit still for 90 minutes without falling asleep.  Perhaps they could go for a walk instead, or do some other activity that lets the brain free-wheel.

Since the nappers had better results than students who mentally reviewed the maze (apparently before or after the videos, though the article doesn't say), the free-wheeling part is probably important.  I know my own brain continues to work on problems if I set them aside for a while and do tasks that don't require much high-level brain power.

But what I was learning last night that involved secret agents, super powers, and shredded carrots?

Our greatest involvement in our children's public schools came during the heyday of the self-esteem movement, and I recall the frustrations of being a lone voice crying out that easy success is as much an inhibitor of learning as repeated failure.  Those who sail through their early educational encounters with too much ease are often surpassed by their supposedly less able compatriots later in life, because they've missed the important lessons taught by failure.

With a hat top to Free-Range Kids, here's a Wall Street Journal article on why that college rejection letter, that teacher's put-down, and even our own weaknesses can be agents that propel us to success.

Warren Buffett was devastated when Harvard Business School rejected his application.  Buoyed by his father's "unconditional love...an unconditional belief in me," he looked for Plan B, squeaked in under Columbia University's application deadline, and was accepted, later donating some twelve million dollars to the institution whose investment in Buffett turned out to be as savvy as Buffett himself.

"The truth is, everything that has happened in my life...that I thought was a crushing event at the time, has turned out for the better," Mr. Buffett says.

Columbia's current president, Lee Bollinger, grew up in a small town with limited educational opportunities.  He, too, was rejected by Harvard, and the shock taught him to take responsibility for his own education, to realize that "it was up to him alone to define his talents and potential."

His advice: Don't let rejections control your life. To "allow other people's assessment of you to determine your own self-assessment is a very big mistake," says Mr. Bollinger, a First Amendment author and scholar. "The question really is, who at the end of the day is going to make the determination about what your talents are, and what your interests are? That has to be you."

Success has many lessons to teach, too, and frankly I prefer that classroom.  But for grit, determination, perseverance, responsibility, and hard work, failure may be the better teacher.

The Gobblestone School: A Tale Inspired by the German Criminalization of Homeschooling, by Jacob Schriftman (aka Jokim Schnoebbe) (Moonrise/CreateSpace, Scotts Valley, California, 2009)

I wanted to like this book.

First, I wanted to read it, and for that I had to buy it, as it was not available in the library.  It languished in my Amazon "save for later" cart for a while, but I recently decided to indulge myself.  I'm glad I read it, but as indulgence goes, I'd rather have dark chocolate.

I don't remember where I first heard of The Gobblestone School; it was probably because of my deep concern (and daily prayers) for Germany, where homeschooling is sufficient grounds for forcibly removing children from their homes and placing them in governmental care.  Many homeschoolers have left their homes and jobs, families and friends to be able to give their children the education they believe is best, and the author of The Gobblestone School (now living in Ireland) is one of them.  So I really wanted to like his book.

But even extreme sympathy, identification, and concern won't make me say I like a book if I don't.

The Gobblestone School has three problems, as far as I am concerned.  First, it's aimed at modern adolescents, and I like very little that is focused on this narrow demographic.  I do give the author kudos for not filling his book with profanities and sexual themes, as many of that genre do.  It's also about school and magic, and let's be honest:  when it comes to modern adolescents, school, and magic, J. K. Rowling has set the bar rather high.

Second, I don't have to be able to write a better story to be qualified to say this one is not well written.  I can stand a poorly-written book if the story captivates me sufficiently, and I can stand a less interesting story if the craft is superlative.  But two strikes and I'm not happy.

Finally, I had hoped that the book would be a good introduction to the benefits of homeschooling and to the particular problems in Germany, an easily-read explanation I could lend to others. It turns out to be a book that the homeschooling cognoscenti and children who are miserable in school might appreciate, but I doubt it would contribute anything to a reasoned dialogue.  Even though the heavy-handed stereotyping is admittedly important to the plot, and the unhappy German school experience has clearly autobiographical elements (and therefore can't be entirely dismissed as false), the extreme negativity about school (and German school authorities) disqualifies the book from the outreach role I had hoped for it.  Not that the author doesn't have reason enough to feel strong negative emotions about the German school system!

My own hopes for it aside, The Gobblestone School was actually a fun, quick, and easy read, much better than most in its genre, though that's not exactly high praise.

Indoctrinate U (On the Fence Films, 2007)

Indoctrinate U has been on my "watch list" for a while, but I hadn't been able to make myself take the time. It's not available from Netflix, but I found it on YouTube, in nine parts of about 10 minutes each.  Today it came up on my "get this done today" list, so I thought I'd watch one or two of the segments. But they don't end in good places, and anyway I got hooked, so I watched the whole thing.

This documentary on discrimination, intolerance, and anti-diversity in American higher education is obviously not a high-budget film, though I'm sure it's better in the original format.  I agree with Janet's comment that "it only pointed out the problems and didn't discuss any causes or better yet, idea for fixing the problems," and fear she may be right that it might be more divisive than helpful.  Nonetheless, it's an important film to watch for anyone attending, planning to attend, or sending money to a college or university.  I am not advocating staying away from college; but do be aware of the larger picture.

Although the film looks with some nostalgia on university life in the 1960's, there was plenty of intolerance for diversity of thought even then, though it was not, as now, enshrined in the bureaucracy, and the hard sciences (where I was) were mostly free of that, at least as far as the students were concerned.  Our professors had a hard enough time teaching us math and physics, and didn't feel that taking time for political discussion would help us understand differential equations any better.  I'm told by math professor friends that that has now changed.  One, who has taught both in the United States and in Africa, expressed frustration that her American university required her to teach her not only calculus, but also the importance of African mathematics.  I'm not sure what "African mathematics" might be that is important for a university math major to learn (I missed it in my classes), but I wouldn't be surprised if in the future the important mathematicians are African—because her African students are eager to learn the content, not the politics, of math.

The investigator for Indoctrinate U has been criticized for his confrontational approach, but while I do think one cannot expect to see a university president without an appointment, as journalists go, he was about as mild and polite as you can get.

Yes, the film is one-sided, and not only because they couldn't get anyone from the university side to talk seriously with them.  It presents, however, a side that is not usually heard—indeed, is often censored, mocked, threatened, and attacked—and can be forgiven for being a little strident.

Here is the first segment; from there YouTube will provide links to the remaining eight.  Be patient with the first couple, as at least I found the emphasis on affirmative action less interesting than the general topic of free speech on campus, which is more clearly presented in later parts.  (There is a small number of profanities—quoting from a threat to a student and from the title of a play—that are bleeped out if you get the "clean" version, but the download versions are unaltered.)

I wish they had made more of a distinction between public and private colleges.  To me, there's a huge difference between what a private school chooses to allow or forbid, and what a taxpayer-funded school does.  But in either case, if the school is presenting itself as a bastion of diversity, tolerance, and academic freedom, evidence to the contrary needs to be heard.  Caveat emptor.

Is there a solution?  Confronting the universities with their own stated diversity policies is a start:  Janet had some success at her school that way.  In the long run, I think the biggest difference will be made by India and the Internet.  American universities have long enjoyed near-monopolistic dominance in their field.  However, as it did for their manufacturing and information technology counterparts, that privilege is coming to an end.  When people have choices, change happens.

It's not a topic I'd intended to blog about, even though I'd read the AP article, Top home-school texts dismiss Darwin, evolution.   But I wrote so much in a comment to a friend's Facebook post (thanks, Liz!), I figure it's a shame not to make a second use of the effort.

Our own homeschooling experience left me not particularly impressed with the efforts of specifically Christian publishers, beginning with the discovery that the A Beka kindergarten book I'd bought taught that winter is a time of snow, with no mention of the large part of the world where that isn't true.  I suspect most books at the kindergarten level are about as bad, but A Beka is based in Pensacola, Florida, and should have known better.

Nonetheless, I can't get very excited about the evolutionary shortcomings of some homeschooling textbooks.  I'm more upset that mainstream publishers often won't sell to homeschoolers.  Standard textbooks have plenty of problems as well, whether in science or history or literature, and the only hope of getting a reasonably clear story is to have plenty of resources, along with some training in logic.  I well remember the astonishment I felt in college upon discovering that most of my (public) high school classes had lied to me.  Not on purpose, perhaps, but by vast simplification they had left out most of the complexity, uncertainty, and beauty of the subjects.

Textbooks can sometimes be helpful, especially at the higher level, and most especially in subjects like math, but at best they are an introduction, or a supplement, and should be accompanied by other resources and experience as much as possible.  Whatever your source of materials, if you don't include some dissenting voices, you're doing your students a disfavor.  So why the fuss about these particular books?

I'm also one to cheer the underdog, because, having seen from inside how scientific publishing works, I know that Truth is pretty far down on the list when it comes to deciding what goes into the much-vaunted "peer-reviewed journals."  There's a long history of  established opinion being wrong, too.

But most of all, I'm in favor of the choice of what to teach and what materials to use being left up to the PARENTS and at some point the STUDENTS.  If the kids grow up not knowing anything about evolution, that's bad—but in my mind no worse than if they grow up not knowing that there are serious disagreements and questions even among evolutionists, or not reading Shakespeare, or reading Judy Blume, or watching Saturday morning cartoons on television, or not learning to play the piano, or eating junk food, or a thousand other areas in which parents don't want ME making their childrearing decisions for them.

It's risky to leave the nurture and education of the next generation in the hands of their parents, but it's the safest risk we'll ever run, and necessary.  If civilization is to survive, we need diversity—as every good evolutionist should agree.

Homeschooling for the Rest of Us:  How Your One-of-a-Kind Family Can Make Homeschooling and Real Life Work, by Sonya Haskins (Bethany House, Minneapolis, 2010)

Sonya Haskins is a calm and reasonable voice speaking to the homeschooler—and potential homeschooler—who is overwhelmed and intimidated by the image of the "perfect" homeschooling experience:  "Matching outfits, polite toddlers, award-winning students, fifteen-passenger vans, and family Web sites."   (Raymond and Dorothy Moore did the same thing in the 1980s with Homeschool Burnout, which was updated and revised in the 1990s as The Successful Homeschool Family Handbook.)  There's a lot of hype, confusion, and contradictory information out there, and Haskins' practical, back-to-basics approach and helpful suggestions will reassure timid beginners that they can, indeed, safely navigate the homeschooling waters.

It's a pity, then, that she "narrowcasts" her message to a small branch of Christian homeschoolers.  Most of her suggestions are excellent and appropriate for anyone, but the evangelistic message and the assumptions of a young-earth Creationism are bound to make the general audience uneasy about the rest of the book.  If its focus were broadened, this could become a classic introduction to homeschooling.  But perhaps the author (or publisher) is not looking for "classic":  the annoying sidebars and references to websites give it the feel of a magazine or "disposable book."  As I said, a pity, because there's much good here.

A book of under 200 pages cannot hope to be both broad and detailed; Haskins elects for broad—one reason why it's good introductory material—but still manages to provide helpful lists and examples.

Rather than propounding one method of homeschooling, Homeschooling for the Rest of Us generally presents suggestions appropriate for many approaches.  If she has an overarching philosophy, it is that character building is of primary importance.

Several years ago a mom came to me and asked how she should start homeschooling her children, then ages six and four.  I suggested three things:  reading to them frequently, training them to obey, and spending the first year or two focusing on relationships.  In my opinion, it is that third step that isn't emphasized enough in homeschool households.  We forget how important it is to teach our children how to get along, respect one another, and love others.  Parents have plenty of time to introduce academics, field trips, and outside activities, but if children don't learn how to develop positive relationships while they are young, it is difficult for them to attain this ability later.

I meet parents all the time who are so proud that their two-year-old can recite the alphabet, but when the parent tells the child not to do something, she does it anyway.  You can teach an obedient child new things, but it is very difficult to teach a disobedient child anything!

She is quite right, and I always say that the most important factor in determining the potential success of a homeschool situation is how well the parent and child get along.  Emphasizing academic excellence while allowing character to slide is setting a child up for ultimate failure.  Unfortunately, Haskins swings the pendulum too far the other way.  Her lackadaisical approach to academics is likely to be taken by those who are already too lax academically as an excuse to do even less.  Young children can learn obedience and the alphabet as well.

A basic belief among Christian homeschoolers is that the education of children is at heart a parental responsibility, not a governmental responsibility.  Homeschooling for the Rest of Us goes an important step further, making the critical point that, ultimately, education is the responsibility of the student.  (Unschoolers and secular writers such as John Holt and John Taylor Gatto would agree.)  

Before the mid-1800s, the burden of education was not on the government.  Nor was it on the parents....  Students knew that the burden of education was on their shoulders.  If they wanted to learn something, they borrowed books or found someone who could teach them what they wanted to know.  Education was considered a privilege.

When your child takes control of his or her education, this doesn't mean you throw discipline, structure, and guidance out the window.  It simply means that you allow your child to be the one responsible for his education....  You may choose to continue with a schedule....  You might even choose to have a structured curriculum.  But do not waste time every day arguing with a child about doing his schoolwork.

Here are a few more of my favorite quotes:

Over the years, I've discovered that the problem usually is not that [naysayers] disagree with the concept of homeschooling, but they think you disapprove of their choice to send their child to public or private school.  Each of you surely loves your child, and opinions differ on many parenting issues, including discipline, eating habits, and clothing choices.  But strangely, while friends can politely disagree on many things, it's often education choices that cause relationship problems.

[W]e parents should treat our children fairly, but there is a huge difference between fair and equal.

If you're still feeling pressure because experts or others tell you to "do it this way" or "if you'd only follow my plan, your life will be perfect, your children will obey, and they will love learning" or any other "just do it my way" kinds of statements, my advice is simple:  Find different experts!

This article about the mathematics department at the University of Rochester credits much of their recent success to an online homework system developed by two U of R professors.

Any system that results in 80 percent of undergraduates taking calculus, without any requirement to do so, bears looking into.

The program, called WeBWorK, was developed by Professors Michael Gage and Arnold Pizer in 1995 to help them give better and more timely feedback to students on calculus homework. Instead of handing out hundreds of identical homework assignments, professors assign homework via WeBWorK and the software customizes the problems for each student. No two students receive the same problems, so copying answers is not an issue, but more importantly, the program gives students real-time feedback on whether their solutions are correct. Gage and Pizer found that with such instant feedback, students try again and again at a problem, seeking the help of fellow students to understand the concepts that will lead to the correct solution.

The program has proven such a success that it has been adopted by more than 100 schools and universities around the country, with more than 100,000 mathematics students checking their homework every week, says Ravenel. A study at Rutgers University in 2002 showed that students who used WeBWorK fared far better on tests and in the mathematics course overall when they used WeBWorK for their homework.

The National Science Foundation has invested more than $2.5 million to help support the development and implementation of WeBWorK, and recently the Mathematics Association of America took over administration of WeBWorK to help spread it to more institutions and students.

I wish they'd had WeBWork when I was at the University of Rochester!  However, since it was developed in 1995, and yet Janet never experienced it when she was there several years later, I'm guessing that they must not have it for the more advanced classes where I could really have used it.  I don't see it working well for analyzing proofs.  Nonetheless, there is great potential there for introductory classes in many fields, and I hope the open courseware movement will quickly adopt the WeBWork system.

Weapons of Mass Instruction:  A Schoolteacher's Journey through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling, by John Taylor Gatto (New Society Publishers, Gabriola Island, BC, Canada, 2009)

A pastor I know was fond of quoting Martin Luther, who, when asked why he preached on justification by faith every week, responded, "Because you forget it every week."  John Taylor Gatto has no love for Martin Luther, but I can imagine him giving a similar response when asked why his books, articles, and lectures include so much that he has said before.  He has a critically important message to deliver, and is clearly compelled to repeat it as many times and in as many ways as he can.

In his desperation to make people understand what he has learned, from his research and 30 years on the front lines of teaching, Gatto has become more pointed, strident and radical as time goes on.  It's an understandable reaction—I remember noting the same effect in John Holt's writings, and I fall prey to it all too often myself—but for this reason I hesitate a little to recommend Weapons of Mass Instruction to anyone who is not already convinced of the dangers inherent in our pubic school system.  And yet...I do recommend it, highly.  Why?  Let me digress.

Back in the 1980's, we attended a Christian Educators Association conference at which one of the speakers warned of the horrors being perpetrated against children in the public schools, largely under the guise of "affective education," "values clarification," "guidance classes," and the like.  I was appalled, not at the reported abuses, but at the nature of the presentation, which was inflammatory, not particularly helpful, and seemingly intended to induce panic in susceptible parents.  What was being reported was so much at odds with our own experiences—as public-schooled children ourselves, and as the parents of children in public elementary school at the time—to be believable.

But here's the thing:  It was true.  Even though I reacted badly to the presentation, the information stayed in the back of my mind and kept me alert to the problem.  Coming across information from my brother's elementary school days, I learned that he had been involved in some of the harmful programs.  (One notorious discussion was of the form, "You are in a lifeboat with seven other people:  a teacher, a doctor, a priest, etc....there isn't enough food for everyone to survive...whom do you throw overboard?")  I waded through pages of transcripts of U. S. Department of Education hearings, and heard parents testify over and over again about the abusive nature of the discussions their children were forced to participate in, and the intrusive questions they were asked.  Then I knew enough to examine the materials used in our children's school, and found one of the by now well-familiar programs.  Why hadn't I noticed the problems before?  Two reasons:  one, I didn't know to look, and two, their intelligent guidance counsellor had modified the program to eliminate the worse of the offenses.  I had been right:  what they had experienced was (thanks to that particular guidance counsellor) not all that bad.  But being alerted to the potential risk enabled me to forestall future problems.

This particular issue is not mentioned as part of Gatto's "dark world of compulsory schooling."  I present it as a cautionary tale, hoping that even the most enthusiastic supporter of modern American education will read, contemplate, and remember the information in Weapons of Mass Instruction.  Not to change your mind, but to raise your awareness, to forewarn and forearm you.  If you read this, or any of his other books, such as Dumbing Us Down, A Different Kind of Teacher, or The Underground History of American Education, you will be better prepared to navigate the course of your children's education, and may find some light shed on your own.

Weapons of Mass Instruction contains much of the shocking story of how we got our present educational system, in a shorter and more easily readable form than The Underground History of American Education, though the latter (available online in its entirety) has more details, examples, and references.  Follow the twisted path of compulsory education from militaristic Prussia to the industrial United States; check out its dark relationship with the eugenics movement; face the question of whether great philanthropists like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller were helping people or preparing an easily-exploitable labor force; and wonder why a self-described lapsed Catholic, libertarian New York State Teacher of the Year (Gatto, born 1935, writing about education), tells much the same story of that era as a distributist, English, Catholic convert journalist (G. K. Chesterton, 1874-1936, writing about eugenics), and a conservative, Evangelical Protestant theologian living in Switzerland (Francis Schaeffer, 1912-1984, writing about philosophy).  When people that diverse agree on something, I say it's worth listening.

If you have a couple of hours to spare, you can listen to many of the ideas and stories from Weapons of Mass Instruction on this C-Span program from last March.

Shakespeare:  The Word and the Action, by Peter Saccio; a Teaching Company lecture

For accessible, serious, high-quality, adult-level educational materials (DVD, tape, mp3 downloads) it's hard to beat The Teaching Company.  Tonight we finished the last lecture of Shakespeare:  The Word and the Action, a course which easily ranks as one of my favorites.

Here are the titles of the 16 lectures:

1. Shakespeare's Wavelengths
2. The Multiple Actions of A Midsummer Night's Dream
3. The Form of Shakespeare's Sonnets
4. Love in Shakespeare's Sonnets
5. Love and Artifice in Love's Labor's Lost and Much Ado About Nothing
6. As You Like It
7. The Battles of Henry VI
8. Richard III and the Renaissance
9. History and Family in Henry IV
10. Action in Hamlet
11. Coriolanus—The Hero Alone
12. Change in Antony and Cleopatra
13. The Plot of Cymbeline
14. Nature and Art in The Winter's Tale
15. Three Kinds of Tempest
16. History and Henry VIII

I find it easy to be intimidated by Shakespeare; despite the efforts of my high school teachers, the glories of the Bard didn't begin to open to me until a few months after my 50^th birthday, when I saw Kenneth Branagh's version of Henry V.

Saccio's lectures aren't this inspiring, I will admit.  But most of the plays he teaches I have never seen nor read, and every single lecture left both of us eager to experience the play, which is no small accomplishment.  I highly recommend this course.

Blame me, my parents, or my schools as you see fit, but after half a century as an American citizen, 13 years of public education, and a college degree, I couldn't name all of the presidents of the United States, much less in order.  The mystery is why no one ever tried to teach me, given how easily I learned them when I put my mind to it, and how handy it has been (and would have been in history class!) to have even a rough idea of who fits in where.

Actually, I did not even have to put my mind to the problem, only my ears.  I bought a copy of Sue Dickson's "Song of the U.S. Presidents," and after a few hearings it stuck.  It's not a great song, but as with many not-so-great songs, that seems to make it stick all the better.  (The link takes you to an updated version that I haven't tried yet (mine ends with Clinton), but the sample suggests it is basically the same.)  Of all the U.S. President songs, that one is my favorite, because it is short, simple, and easy to rattle off mentally when needed—such as when I'm playing the "put the pictures of the presidents in chronological order" game with my nephews.  However, it teaches only the order (no numbers) and gives last names but not first, so you have to know which Adams is which, and which Harrison, and that both Clevelands are the same person.

There are other songs designed to teach the presidents, most of which I find more obnoxious than helpful, but I recently discovered one I like a lot for the other information it presents.  Along with each president's name (sometimes full, sometimes unfortunately only the surname), you hear his number and a clue to something special about him or that happened during his presidency.  For this reason, it's not as good for quick recall as Dickson's song, but I expect it to be a valuable tool for sorting and organizing our country's history.

The song was written by Genevieve Madeline Ryan in response to a challenge by her father to memorize the presidents for Father's Day.  You can see a Flash presentation with pictures at the White House Historical Association website ("The American Presidents," about 2/3 of the way down on the right-hand side of the page).  You can also obtain a version for yourself.  I found their system for downloading somewhat confusing (the "Download" button actually takes me to a podcast feed), but you can download the video, audio, and lyrics by right clicking on the links I've provided and saving the files to your computer.

Where were you 20 years ago today?

My own journal entry is remarkably filled with the mundane details of life with two young children.  There is one exclamatory sentence, "Would that every day could be like this!" but it was referring to Heather's having awakened with her alarm clock, showered, dressed, made her bed, cleaned her room and finished all her chores before school.  Not as momentous as events on the other side of the world, but a personal triumph.

I chronicled the minutia of my own work: volunteering at the local middle school, sewing patches on our Indian Princess vests, making Bay Punch, and writing letters.  I mentioned Porter and Janet's Indian Princess meeting in the evening.  There was even the recurring whine about school, in this case my frustration with Heather's fifth-grade teacher, who, I thought, was putting undue restrictions on the books the children were allowed to read in class.

Mrs. C. responded to my letter, and the response was not at all what I had hoped.  She praised the required books as “Sunshine State Young Readers Award” winners (which means little more than that a lot of kids voted that they liked the books) and defended restricting the kids to those books during English reading time, “because I then can control what books the students are reading, feeling confident they are reading from an approved list.”  I don’t object to her wanting to have some control over the reading the kids do in school, but I do object to her using an “approved list” without exercising good judgement.  Even Newberry Award winners are not necessarily all good, and there are plenty of good books excluded from each list.  The Sunshine State awards are heavily biased toward modern books; I don’t believe a deceased author has a change of winning.  Perhaps Mrs. C. really does think that astral projection and high school romances are good topics for fifth graders to read about, but I’d rather hope it isn’t so.  She could at least admit that Little Women, Robin Hood, and similar books are also good reading, but she will not include those in her “approved” reading.  Even Heather is frustrated by this; she is beginning to be able to tell a junk-food book when she reads one.  We talked about it a bit; perhaps she will become frustrated enough to be willing to “play the game.”  She can pick out an “approved” book to read for the restricted 10 minutes, then set it aside until the next day and spend the other reading times with a more appropriate book.  It’s silly to have to do that, not to mention frustrating to leave a book in the middle, but it may be the only way.

Only at the end of my entry did I mention the momentous occasion of the day, and my reaction was characteristically subdued.  When something almost too horrible to think about has been a given for most of your life, it is hard to believe that change is really happening.  Unlike Porter, I had not been through Checkpoint Charlie with all its horrors, but I remembered well the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and feared that Eastern Europe's new freedoms would be short-lived.

Today the East German government announced that its citizens were free to travel to any country, whenever they want to.  This is the most remarkable news I ever expected to hear.  It is in the government’s best interest; the only way they can reasonably slow the exodus of East Germans through the recently more relaxed borders of other East European countries is to give some assurance that things may be getting better at home.  But the East German government has not been known for being reasonable, and they could have started building walls between their country and the others.  Let us hope that “hardliners” in the USSR and other Communist countries don’t get so fed up with reforms that they take over to “save” their countries.  Except for Albania, I expected East Germany to be the last country to reform.

The next day I wrote, "I wish I knew what K. and G. are thinking.  How exciting to be in Germany (and within sight of the border) in these times.  People are dancing on top of the Berlin Wall."   There were friends of ours who were on sabbatical in Germany.  For Christmas that year, they gave each girl a piece of the Berlin Wall.  They were, and maybe still are, too young to fully appreciate the significance of those gifts, more precious in their own way than moon rocks.

It is the gift, and curse, of each younger generation, not to appreciate the horrors that have gone before.  CNN's report on today's upcoming festivities was clearly written by someone for whom the events remembered are mere history.  The human face of what East Germany was like with the wall in place is completely missing in the report.

[German Chancellor Angela] Merkel, the first former East German to lead the reunified country, will join former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in a symbolic walk through the point where the first people crossed the Wall on the night of November 9, 1989.

It's a shame Ronald Reagan can't join them: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"

Studies showing that teachers will form expectations of a student's character and ability based on nothing more than his or her name are unfortunately nothing new.  Students with "traditional," common names are more likely to receive higher ratings on both academic performance and behavior than those with names perceived as odd.  What makes this article worth commenting on is not the results of the study, but the names themselves.

The study reveals that . . . traditional names such as Charlotte, Sophie, Marie, Hannah, Alexander, Maximilian, Simon, Lukas and Jakob are consistently linked to strong performance and good behaviour. Non-traditional names such as Chantal, Mandy, Angelina, Kevin, Justin and Maurice, on the other hand, are associated with weak performance and bad behaviour.

That's when I ceased skimming the article and paid attention.  Traditional names?  Maximilian?  Sophie?  Ah, the ".de" in the url explains everything.  It's nice to see another perspective on the same problem.

But why do the Germans have such a prejudice against Kevins?  All the Kevins I know are really nice people and far brighter than average.

The name Kevin was perceived as being linked to especially poor behaviour and performance, with one study participant even writing that, “Kevin is not a name—it’s a diagnosis!”

Bizarre.

Fortunately, the person I know who would be most likely to use this information against his brother is unlikely to read my blog.

School at the Daley household could hardly have been called normal, since Grandma was there as a distraction and Mommy was sick for the first part of my visit.  Nonetheless, I enjoyed my glimpse into the official, sit-at-the-table side of their 24/7 educational process.

Jonathan is not at the moment as excited about math as he is about reading—unlike his Aunt Janet at that age, for whom reading was all right but math was a bowl full of candy.  He's doing well, though, with basic addition and subtraction (and even some simple multiplication and division), and enjoys the "math paths" that Grandma sends him in the mail, problems like this one:

Both boys also like using their Cuisenaire rods, base-10 blocks, and bucket balance.  The Cuisenaire rods are from our own homeschooling days.  We also had a set of base-10 blocks that I had made out of cardboard.  They disappeared somehow, probably in one of our moves, and trust me, buying a commercial set is well worth the $16 investment.  I can't get over the resources available to homeschoolers these days!

The fun is the same, though.  There are few thrills more sublime than observing the "ah ha!" moment in your child's (or grandchild's) eyes.

Our own homeschooling experiences were far shorter than I would have liked, so it has been fun watching other family members in their adventures.  (It has also been nothing short of astonishing to see what resources are now available, rather like the difference between a gas station convenience store and a Super-Wegmans grocery store.)

It is especially fun to watch the grandkids' schooling, since our own children were in public school at this stage.  On the one hand, school time is very short, even for kindergarten, when measured by organized, sit-at-the-table time, and Heather's still working on the best way to balance everyone's needs.  On the other hand, education, if not school, is clearly going on 24/7, and one cannot argue with the results.

Jonathan can read.  It is still laborious enough that he tires easily, but he has reached the stage where what he needs most is simply to read, which he is happy to do, whether to himself or to others. And not only books, but signs, maps, computer screens, anything and everything.

I think more reading goes on here than anything else.  Noah asks to be read to at any spare moment (or not so spare), usually the same books over and over and over again, until he knows the story well enough to "read" it himself.  It's a hoot to hear him tell The Three Billy Goats Gruff:  You wouldn't understand much if you didn't already know the story, but he has all the nuances and tones of voice down pat, from "It only I, the little billy goat," to "I coming to GOBBLE YOU UP!"

This post clearly isn't going to cover all I had planned, so I'll cut it short and post it anyway.  Being part of the adventure doesn't leave much time to write about it.