Pat’s Polemics

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Remember the movies that would show a young boy planting a tree with his grandfather? (insert your own relationship, sex, age, etc.) Then the scene would come back to that tree later to show a sense of connectedness.

When I was in college I got a book called Man Alone which consisted of a series of articles on alienation. I had trouble understanding that at the time, but over the years I've seen alienated and unalienated people and all those in between and do now have a sense of that. A good deal of the writing on this topic discusses the cause of alienation as if we all understand its opposite, what I have called connectedness. The groundedness of the natural life is taken for granted, whether that life be peasant life or hunter-gatherer life or some other way of being connected to the soil.

And it is usually the soil or some other aspect of nature that we supposedly connect to.

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An article on npr concerning brain (or mind) functioning mentions not only the usual mental challenges like talking people you disagree with and pushing yourself to learn new things but exercise as beneficial to the brain. This was from Barbara Strauch who wrote The Secret Life of the Grown-Up Brain.

In an interview with Terry Gross, she mentions that picturing something you are going to do seems to increase the likelihood you will remember it.

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There do seem to be some real misunderstandings about how our country has come through 400 years from the settlement of English-speaking people on the east coast and Spanish-speaking people even earlier in the southeast and southwest.

Interactions with Native Americans are cast in stereotypes from cowboy movies and African-Americans are kept out of sight. In fact, continuing the movie theme, you might say that the main actors are White men and everyone else are extras. And in fact, many people label it political correctness to acknowledge the role women and non-White persons have played in our history.

American exceptionalism is simply arrogance with a dash of religious bigotry thrown in. However, there are elements of our society, nation, culture and government which we can call special, even though we are not the only possessors of these elements. The major trait spread through all the just mentioned dimensions of the U.S. is the way our political culture handles conflict and change.

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When I worked as a therapist in a Child & Family area of a large mental health center, a client and I put together a karate program for kids. He had come in for his kids' problems and it turned out I knew his sensei and we discussed the benefits of martial arts for people. That led to us starting a program for kids. One of our psychologists had been a champion karate-ka, so he was highly supportive. By the time I left the center to go into teaching, the class had around 30-40 students rather than "patients" in it.

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Three of us spent four hours yesterday trying to adjust a basketball hoop to 10 feet. It wouldn't go past 9. No problem before b/c it was for a 6 y.o. girl, but now we have 14 y.o. guys on league teams wanting to come down and practice. Among the three of us were four college degrees. To no avail.

So today my yard man came over and, in addition to putting the Christmas lights on the second storey, he looked at the hoop and with a little jiggling and checking here and there had it up to ten feet in about ten minutes. He has solved various problems for us in this same manner numerous times. In addition, his knowledge of plants, soil, weather, and so forth are remarkable.

The question is...........

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I'm finishing the third Malcolm Gladwell book, The Tipping Point. He's talking about Sesame Street and what makes it "sticky", i.e. makes it stick with kids. The answer: MEANING. That's exactly what I’ve been preaching on the Listservs: if something has no meaning, it's not retained and it cannot find purchase in the mind of the learner.

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I am torn as to what category to put this item in, but Basics seems to be the best place, although Pat's Worldview would be appropriate since it displays my belief that whether people earn a living determines a great deal. The example I use involves African-Americans, so the African Diaspora would be suitable as well.

But here goes.

What would have happened to the African-American community if the jobs in the upper Midwest and the Northeast had not dried up in the 50s and 60s? Would that have had any effect on race relations? On crime? On the spread of drugs? On illegal immigration?

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I will have to integrate this entry into other entries on the same topic, but it does have a different focus than the others. Most of the time, I'm writing about the fact that I do not see the kids other teachers complain about in my classrooms. This horrible change of our stalwart, Boy Scout type kid of decade X (depends on the age of the teacher but corresponds basically to when they and their friends were in school where they ignored kids who weren't in their social circle and so don't remember anyone who failed algebra) into the feckless, lassitudinal, aimless, irresponsible and disrespectful little twerps filling our classrooms.

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I have always..... always, always, always, wondered wherever anyone gets the idea that learning is done for rewards. I survived the ASU anthropology dept (as a student) when it went entirely Behavioral in the early 60s. (5 of the top behavioral psychologists in the U.S. were there at the same time) I balked at the idea that we learn b/c we are reinforced for it. Something else was operating (I try to look at these issues on my Blog under the category Basics).

Recently, authors like Alfie Kohn have shown how ridiculous it is to believe learners are automatons, but it does seem like many textbooks are set up that way doesn't it? "Learn this rule, apply it 20 times, and now you know it. Next!" Kind of like that horrible TV commercial Head On! repeated ad nauseam: GERUNDIVE ON! GERUNDIVE ON! GERUNDIVE ON! GERUNDIVE ON!

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