Weekly Book Post (The Shallows, How Children Succeed)

This week I've read two books about our malleable brains.

The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr came out a couple years ago, so I'm behind the curve on talking about it, but I enjoyed this story of how the intellectual technologies we use change the way our brains are 'wired'.  Part defense of old-fashioned book reading, part natural history of the human brain, and part warning and social analysis of our new digital selves, this is a well-written and engaging book.  My take-away was the notion that our brains are always malleable, and that we expose ourselves to and habitually do will have neurological consequences for us.  So while I'm not ready to ditch the internet altogether, I am noticing how and when I use it, and I'm trying to stop mindlessly surfing just because I'm bored, and stop multitasking such as surfing the internet while also watching a TV show.

How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character by Paul Tough is a more recent book.  The author sets out to look at what makes children succeed (success seems to mean graduating from college and earning more money as an adult, with some other markers being health and avoiding jail and early pregnancy) and how we can influence this success.  Character traits, rather than cognitive scores, are identified as the largest influence on success, and those character traits are revealed to be both malleable and teachable.  Tough tells the story of the KIPP programs, a successful chess program in a low-income public school, and the efforts in an exclusive and expensive private school to address character issues in kids who never get to experience failure.  He also tells us about the latest research in Adverse Childhood Experiences, stress-management, and long-term health and mental consequences.  It's a well-told story, and one I think parents and educators should read.

The pairing of these two books, along with The Power of Habit, which I read a month ago, has me cogitating about our malleable, changeable brains and the notion that in many ways we become what we habitually do and are habitually exposed to.

New Arrivals

A 6:30 am wake-up call from the Post Office was the start to my day today.  Our long-awaited shipment of baby turkeys had arrived!  The addition of 15 more mouths to feed and creatures to care for has us busy for a bit.  But aren't they cute right now?  The kids sure think so.

In My Kitchen

My kitchen has become the primary bird watching station in our house.  Bird guides belong on the bread machine, right?

Memorial Day

Rather than just take a day off, I wanted to mark the day as a day of remembering.




It took a bit of coaxing to get my family out in the rain to go look at war memorials, but they did it.



We read the signs, discussed each of the wars and their memorials, talked about those in our own family and those we have known who have died in war, and saw the others marking the day in some way - like this fellow in WWII get-up at the WWII memorial.

My husband thanked me for getting the family out to do this.  He was thinking of his own fallen comrades in our latest, long and ongoing wars - which do not yet have a memorial for us to visit.



There was a moderately large gathering, of mostly motorcycle club members, at the Vietnam Memorial.  We could hear their speeches and music across the campus, and then they played taps while we were in the WWII memorial.  I found it haunting.




I think we might do it again next year, but bring flowers for the kids to put out.

We Remember.

Things I've Found Interesting This Week

A few links to some stuff I've enjoyed this week:

Birds of North America done in Legos are very fun.

In the realm of educational interventions that seem totally unnecessary, Texas passed a bill to fight the War on Christmas.

A new study says that teens are tired of Facebook, which has lots of folks in youth ministry talking about how to reach them.  I don't think it will do any good to chase teens from one social media platform to the next, but the article is interesting anyway.

And in the wake of another tragedy, this post at For the Someday Book on Help That's Helpful: Do's and Don'ts After Disaster is a good reminder for us all.

Project-Based Homeschooling had a great post about The Sliver: How To Stop Fighting About Screentime

And Doug Muder wrote on UU World about "My Bloody Closet", a very thoughtful and thought-provoking essay about how to respond to the tragedy of the Bangladeshi factory collapse.

The Value of Game Play

As we are settling into a routine with our two days a week of "Block Schedule", we are scheduling "Game Time" onto those days.  Sometimes it's a 30 minute block, sometimes it's an hour.  At first, because this was for school, I limited the game selection to our collection of explicitly "educational" games.  Gradually, however, the time has come to mean that the kids can pick any of our games or puzzles.  We are still not allowing computer or video games during this time, however, because those happen so much without any time dedicated to them.  This is special time for board games and puzzles.

Is this really "school"?  By my definition, yes.  There are so many things we learn from games, and not just those that have been elevated to the status of an intellectual pursuit, such as chess.  It's not just the cognitive or academic lessons, either, but also the social:

• communication skills
• strategy
• perseverance
• winning/losing gracefully and resiliency 
• hand-eye coordination
• creativity
• fairness

These are the sorts of things I want us to be doing, and the best way I have found to make sure they happen is by putting a special time on our schedule.  Something we'll keep doing for sure!

Weekly Book Post (Casual Vacancy, Talking Back to Facebook)

My TBR pile got a little out of control!  Sometimes all my holds from the library come in at once and I get .... this!

This week I read The Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling.  I wouldn't have read it, based on reviews and the jacket description, if I wasn't curious because of the author.  It has to be hard to shift genres after you become so famous in one, and overall it's a fine piece of literature.  I don't really like this realistic "if you only knew what was going on behind all the closed doors and in everyone's heads" sorts of novels, in fact I find them sad and depressing in the way they point to all the misunderstandings and small human cruelties/tragedies, but I still found myself drawn to finish the book.  I know people who really like the book, and others who really dislike it, and now I'm saying "meh, it was OK" - mixed reviews all around.

I also read Talking Back to Facebook: the Common Sense Guide to Raising Kids in a Digital Age.  This is a very current book, so it will probably be out-of-date soon as the technology and culture develop further, but for now it is a good overview for parents who are wondering if they should let their kids have facebook accounts or cellphones, surf YouTube videos or have computers in their bedrooms. The first part of the book is an overview of the "RAP" on digital media (relationships, addiction, privacy) and then the second half has specific recommendations by age of your child.

Now I need to get onto reading the rest of that big pile!