When is 0, not 0?

Years ago, Adria Steinberg described math at the Met as doing simpler problems in complex ways rather than more complex problems in simpler ways. Last week in the New Yorker, an article about a small town druggist, Dr. Don, discussed how living in a small town has many assets. One section I really liked went like this: “Maybe I can describe it this way,” he says. “I like to play chess. I moved to a small town, and nobody played chess there, but one guy challenged me to checkers. I always thought it was kind of a simple game, but I accepted. And he beat me nine or ten games in a row. That’s sort of like living in a small town. It’s a simpler game, but it’s played to a higher level.” I feel this is an appropriate metaphor for our school design and schools. In the school reform arena, we are a simpler way of doing school played to a higher level.

A few weeks ago I attended a food lifestyle conference at the Dr. McDougall’s Health and Medical Center in Santa Rosa. Here are my notes. In many ways, my lens is through what we do at BPL.

“You are what you eat and you are what you eat, eats” – Wild deer eat in cornfields with genetically modified corn. This is not organic. - the Bigger Picture

How do you make a mouse live longer? Methuselah Study points out that mice that ate fewer calories lived longer. – We should have students count calories in advisory and discuss.

“Walk more watch less TV ”TV kills” – I’m glad we do walk and talks.

“We weigh the salad but not the dressing” – The calories listed on the salad are without adding the dressing, and the calories are in the dressing. Duh! We feel good because we think we are eating healthy but in reality we are being fooled by companies using data to trick us. As a society we insist on data, but we actually pay little attention to why the data maybe wrong and even less attention to changing how we behave once we discover the date is wrong. Once we have the data, how do we really use it to make changes? 

Seventh day Adventists live longer than anyone. Life expectancy is mid-80’s. They are vegetarian. They have their own schools and colleges.

When is 0, not 0? Answer: When we count grams of fat.

“We are allowed to lie.” The front of the PAM spray bottle states, PAM is fat-free but PAM is nothing but fat.  FDA allows companies to lie in writing. Here’s the reason:

“PAM and other oil sprays claim that each serving has 0 grams of fat. But the fact is: the only ingredient in the can is oil, which is 100% fat.

So how could manufacturers say this product is free of fat? They're sneaky. They posted a ridiculously small serving size of .25 grams. That's 120th of an ounce – or one teensy one-quarter-of-a-second squirt.

There isn't much of anything, oil or otherwise, in 120th of an ounce, which manufacturers love because the FDA states they can "round down" ingredients that are less than half a gram to 0. Hence, the food label says 0 grams of fat. But if you eat multiple servings – if you coat an entire skillet with oil spray – you're tallying up multiple calories, all 100% fat.” 

What the data shows you need for a healthy lifestyle:

Time for yourself

Regular exercise

Mindfulness

A healthy way of eating

Renewal back in the groove

Walking an hour for yourself – connects to creativity

Children changing the world:

Dr Rosati, a speaker at the conference from Duke told a story about his grandchild asking about a lobster they were about to eat. He did not want his grandfather to eat it. He said, “I won’t eat it but this won’t change anything about the world eating lobsters.” His grandson looked at him and said, “I just changed you.” This is exactly how children changed their parents smoking habits.



Encouraging the Hand-Mind Connection in the Classroom

By Margaret Honey & Eric Siegel
February 1, 2011

Imagine math and science from the perspective of a middle or high school student. That student’s first image is more than likely that of a textbook—dense, daunting, and dry—accompanied by his or her sigh, “Please, anything but this!” Only the rare student, who already is passionate about the topic, would consider navigating the textbook alone or for pleasure. Truthfully, a theoretical book of formulas and facts has never been the way people have learned science, technology, engineering, and math—what we now refer to as the STEM disciplines. Long before the rules were codified in textbooks, people engaged with these disciplines to exercise one of the defining characteristics of our species: Our ability to construct the things we need to understand and function in our lives. How did we manage to get so far off course, to take something that is so quintessentially human and make it so alien?

Fortunately, there is a quiet revolution—called the Maker Movement—that is deeply rooted in these natural instincts and is unfolding in communities across the country. With the potential to transform STEM learning, the movement has been spurred largely by the success of Make magazine and its creation, Maker Faires.

Who are these makers? In the words of Dale Dougherty, the general manager of Make’s parent company, O’Reilly Media, and the founder of the Maker Faire festivals, they are the people who “look at things a little differently and who just might spark the next generation of scientists, engineers, and makers.” Makers share in the common delight of tinkering, hacking, creating, and reusing materials and technology. They organize themselves into thriving communities to create objects that they are passionate about and to engage others. Maker-spaces are springing up in cities and communities across the country. People can drop in and learn from friends, mentors, and peers. They learn about using 21st-century tools such as computer-controlled table saws, laser cutters, and 3-D printers to create prototypes and fabricate physical objects.

According to Thomas Kalil, the deputy director for policy for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the Maker Movement “begins with the makers themselves—who find making, tinkering, inventing, problem-solving, discovering, and sharing intrinsically rewarding.”

Make magazine started Maker Faire five years ago in San Mateo, Calif. By 2010, the Bay Area Maker Faire—the first of its kind—attracted more than 80,000 people and featured 1,000 makers. The same year, two new venues were added to the roster in New York City and Detroit. World Maker Faire at the New York Hall of Science, or NYSCI, in Queens, drew more than 25,000 visitors and 500 makers, and Maker Faire Detroit at the Henry Ford Museum attracted a crowd of 20,000 visitors.

Innovation, particularly in the STEM fields, has emerged as a rallying cry of the Obama administration. In his April 2009 address to the National Academy of Sciences, the president urged, “I want all of us to think about new and creative ways to engage young people in science and engineering, whether it’s science festivals, robotics competitions, fairs that encourage young people to create and build and invent—to be makers of things, not just consumers of things.” A recently released report, “Designing a Digital Future: Federally Funded Research and Development Networking and Information Technology,” from the President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology, or PCAST, states that “the problem is not just a lack of proficiency among American students; there is also a lack of interest in STEM fields among many students.” PCAST acknowledges that education is most successful when students and teachers develop personal connections with the ideas and excitement of STEM fields. The maker movement is able to stir this kind of passion and personal motivation that is often lacking in traditional education.

This past fall, in conjunction with World Maker Faire at NYSCI, the National Science Foundation funded a workshop to consider how the maker movement could inform and improve STEM education. Working in collaboration with Tom Kalil and Dale Dougherty, NYSCI convened leaders from foundations and federal agencies; educators; innovators from schools of engineering, architecture, computer science, and multimedia design; entrepreneurs; research scientists; and directors of leading science centers, museums, and arts institutions. This seasoned group reached an important conclusion: The maker movement is not a shiny new toy to be appropriated by education reformers as the next disruptive wave. Rather, it is defined by the characteristics of the maker sensibility: deep engagement with content, experimentation, exploration, problem-solving, collaboration, and learning to learn—the ingredients of effective learning communities. From John Dewey to Theodore R. Sizer, progressive educators have championed these very conditions, urging schools to value depth over breadth, exploration over efficiency, and patience and persistence over acceleration. By creating spaces where individuals can dig deeply into their passions and take time to explore, tinker, and invent with like-minded others, the maker movement affirms the kind of deep learning that matters.

Classroom Support

Providence, R.I.-based Big Picture Learning supports a network of 140 schools that focus on students who have been alienated by traditional schooling—the “dropouts” or the “leavers.” Big Picture uses a methodology known as pops—people, objects, places, and situations—to encourage students to find their interests with a process of "thinkering" to help engage their hands and minds. Boasting a 92 percent graduation rate, Big Picture schools have been recognized by the Obama administration as a successful school model that reduces the dropout rate and prepares students for 21st-century careers.

If we want to teach students how to become makers, we need to consider how to engage teachers. Because there is little in the K-12 culture that fosters the connection between “making” and formal education—from the design of undergraduate teacher-preparation programs to how schools are structured—encouraging a maker mentality presents a major challenge.

Resource Area for Teaching, or RAFT, founded in 1994 and based in San Jose, Calif., is a thriving nonprofit organization whose mission is to help educators transform the learning experience through hands-on education, collaborative activities, and an emphasis on 21st-century learning skills. RAFT currently works with more than 10,000 teachers in classrooms, home-school environments, and after-school or community-based programs. These teachers create compelling classroom approaches through relevant, practical, and concrete investigations.

Community Access

In the months leading up to the 2010 World Maker Faire, NYSCI staged a series of Maker Days. These weekend family programs were collaborations between NYSCI, which helped facilitate the effort, and local maker organizations (including Vision and RePlayground), which provided activities. Together we guided visitors through open-ended tabletop challenges, such as building robotic vehicles, designing buildings, and creating miniature boats. Makers inspired visitors of all ages to innovate, create, and solve problems together. Watching the intergenerational play, family collaboration, and positive feedback from visitors, we were encouraged by the potential of making activities to keep visitors deeply engaged.

Marrying the passion, creativity, and engagement of the maker movement to educational opportunities that exist in formal and informal settings is the injection that stem learning needs. It is working effectively in many places throughout the country. And each one reminds us of the fundamental connection between hand and mind, and doing and reflecting. It is our natural inclination to create as we learn and to learn as we create that is at the heart of this movement.

____________________________________________________________________________

Margaret Honey is the president and chief executive officer of the New York Hall of Science, in the Queens borough of New York City. Eric Siegel is NYSCI’s director and chief content officer.

Please feel free to send me your thoughts, comments, reactions, or suggestions.

The Rules of Play

There’s something about the winter that allows me to work differently. I had lots of time over the last two weeks to write and pull things together. Over the holidays, the phone stops ringing around work and emails slow down. I get a different kind of creative energy. It’s the type that allows you to chew on some things, play with them, and see if they work. Here’s some strands about play and school that I noodled with that was inspired by talks with some of my colleagues and in reading a few books and an article in the New Yorker on video gaming - Master of Play The many worlds of a video-game artist. by Nick Paumgarten

“The tug is the drug.” Fisherman

“Learn from the pan.” Cooks

The Pull –“ the mysterious ability that good games have of making you want to play them.” 

What on-line learning is hoping to accomplish is what video games have done. Through play, gamers have figured out the right combinations of challenge and repetition; sharing and feeling; narrative and improvisation; mystery and surprise; motivation and ownership. Thus far schools have consistently failed to do these combinations with high percentages of students.

Can on-line learning develop the platforms that would get students to do things they may not normally do and practice academics through repetition and challenge?

When players play the game they are in-charge of making decisions and dealing with the consequences in an in the moment environment. So much of school has either too much repetition without challenge or too much challenge without repetition. The result is boredom and low self-esteem for many students. 

It is fairly apparent that the difference is games are play and the ways traditional academics are taught in school violate all of the rules of play. Play is voluntary, not part of ordinary life, unserious, unproductive and uncertain. The French intellectual Roger Caillois called play “an occasion of pure waste: waste of time, energy, ingenuity, skill, and often of money. Therein lies its utility, as a simulation that exists outside regular life.” Precisely because school bills itself as serious and certain, it becomes the foil. In the hearts, hands and minds of students, it is academics that become a pure waste of time and energy because school lacks what video gamers refer to as the pull of the game. Also, it lacks the game environment where players share an emotional connection that allows the participants to go deeper and practice longer. 

A good example of a game that introduced the element of play to a task that people might not normally do is the Wii Fit fitness game. It has sold over 37 million copies. The game’s inventor Miyamoto is the best and most famous video game inventor. When I read about him, I was happy to hear that the narrative and environment for all of his games comes from his childhood experience of exploring caves and getting “pulled” deeper, further and for longer periods of time into those caves.

The best example I saw of an academic game was the welding simulator. It followed most the rules Miyamoto puts out there. Here the combination of all of the elements of play were mixed in with the practical skills of literacy and numeracy and it was happening all at once where you had to think with your senses and feel with your mind. Yes, it is possible to get better at this combination of practical and academic and assess it by going deeper and practicing longer. This simulator was proof. 

Please feel free to send me your thoughts, comments, reactions, or suggestions.

We still have to choose what to believe

“It’s as if our facts are losing their truth: claims that have been enshrined in textbooks are suddenly unprovable.” The Truth Wears Off

 In the last year, I spent a great deal of time pondering how to get reliable data and evaluations on our schools. It seems like everywhere I turned foundations wanted us to have randomized control studies to prove that our schools and practices were working. The Gates Foundation went as far as to tell us that no one will get funding unless they have evaluations that are the gold standard. Last night, I went out to dinner with a childhood friend of mine who is a very eminent scientist at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. I talked with him about what kind of data the departments of education and the foundations want from us but also talked about a discrepancy that is being reported in the scientific community re: how evaluations and scientific experiments are being conducted and replicated where the results are not holding up overtime and causing some catastrophic results in the fields of medicine and ecology. He assured me that real science is replicable and that the errors are in how experiments and tests are being conducted. Yes, he said there are perception biases. In the latest New Yorker, an article by Jonah Lehrer, The Truth Wears Off, summarizes some of the research I’ve been following and calls into question just what we should believe that is being touted as truth through scientific study.

In one memory experiment subjects were shown a face and then told to verbally describe it. Other subjects just viewed the face and didn’t have to verbally talk about what they saw. The subjects that did not verbally describe the face actually recognized the face way more often. This is called verbal overshadowing. Of course a guy like me loves it when the words get in the way of the sensory motor, but over many years of replicating this landmark study, very surprisingly, the results have gotten weaker and weaker…”There was a decline in the effect of the original research.” Schooler, the scientist who became famous for this finding, stated “It was as if nature gave me this great result and then tried to take it back.” Given our work with students and schools and all of the emphasis put on measurement using randomized control scientific studies as the gold standard I became quite confused and unnerved. There is tens of millions of dollars of funding being handed out because of these studies and according to many of the scientists interviewed in the article our beliefs blind us to the point where the results are wrong. Similarly, studies sanctioned in education have been based more on decision based evidence-making (our beliefs) rather than evidence based decision-making. Even if the latter is put into practice according to this article, the results get skewed overtime. Shish! So what do we do in the face of all of this evidence? Should we keep an open-mind and perhaps believe the studies that we don’t agree with? Maybe, we should just believe only what we want to believe. How much is nature playing a trick on us? I don’t want to get too existential here so I won’t, but we should really sit around and talk about this phenomena perhaps with some of our own evaluators and scientists. There is something floating around here that I’ve been sensing for quite a while. The article ends:

“Just because an idea is true doesn’t mean it can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn’t mean it’s true. When the experiments are done, we still have to choose what to believe.”

Please feel free to send me your thoughts, comments, reactions, or suggestions.



Making to the Disciplines vs. Disciplines to the Making

“I went back to school to try and understand what I’d been doing all these years.”

 Jay McShann – making to the disciplines vs. disciplines to the making

Jay McShann is classified as a self-taught jazz pianist. But like with most things put to words that’s only a little part of the story. Self-taught is a funny term since he had master mentors and a group of jazz musicians who were constantly learning from one another. I’ve been listening to him for decades. The other day I listened to an interview of Jay McShann conducted by Nancy Wilson. Here are some of the things that came out of that interview.

In order to learn you needed to hang around the other musicians. You needed to persist. You had to be in the right places and keep your eyes wide open. And you had to develop your own style that translates to personalizing standards. His style was in tight on the keyboard instead of stride. As a band leader Jay never imposed a vision. He allowed the musicians to develop a democratic approach to playing with one another. The band was always on the beat but loose. He described swing as pushing and coasting. You can literally here the pushing and coasting. It was his signature, his maker’s mark. He was known for his blues, swing and being one of the last of the whorehouse piano players. Jay never had a manager and always insisted on doing the business himself. He never became monetarily wealthy but was widely known and loved. That’s style and wealth. That’s quality of life vs. standard of living.

This week I was with Kari at a meeting that is the beginning of a network of networks around deeper learning. The meeting was funded by the Hewlett Foundation and organized by a school developer, Envision. I’m finally getting my shovel in deep enough to get what people are hinting at. Deeper Learning has yet to be defined by anyone in the group, but basically it is about going intellectually deeper and persisting.  To this group, this is the preferred style of learning and will prepare young people for the 21xt century. I have many questions about always talking about deeper learning as the proper solution and always pushing students to think more deeply about everything. Sometimes simple and surface is better than deeper. Just like sometimes choking is better than panicking. Should you think deeply all the time? What happens when you think deeply and still can’t solve the problem? What happens when you think deeply and spend too much time on second guessing yourself? Man, did I feel that we spent too much time on lots of things at this meeting. We spent way too much time on some things and spent little time sticking to the agenda. There is a crazy rhythm to life that leaves out many other strategies for learning if it is just deeper learning that you are after. The use of the hand and heart and instincts that are native to all of us that have been developed over a few million years of evolution are discounted here. Words like gut and grit should have their old connotations as well as applications new more abstract situations. This Socratic process only works some of the time to solve problems. Students need to develop a wide range of strategies to assess in the moment which to choose and make good choices. There is something odd to me about choosing deeper over all of the others and make school all about just one. Let’s see where all of this goes. Right now, there isn’t any room in the room.

Please feel free to send me your thoughts, comments, reactions, or suggestions.