Congratulations to Julia!

Julia Altabef has been accepted for Fall 2008 to the University of the Arts, her first choice.

Visiting Music Instructor: Vic Rawlings...

Vic Rawlings is a guitarist, experimenter, cellist, and banjo-picker from Boston who is deeply involved in an array of different musics. He is an accomplished music teacher who visits TAS to teach three times a year.

For the second time this year Vic is spending two full days (Feb 28-29) instructing some of our students in both the basics and finer points of banjo, guitar, ukelele , and bass.

He begins with how to listen and how to think in musical terms. While doing this, he introduces basic, effective technique on the instrument. He believes simple, straightforward habits lead to good playing.

Vic has been a integral part of Boston's avant-garde/improvisation scene for years. His specialty in the improv scene is a elaborate, non-linear series of circuits and tone generators that he can nudge and constrain, but not necessarily predict. The results are often strikingly beautiful and surprising. He has a great feel for playing with non-traditional musicians.

Stay tuned for details on our sunrise to sunset noise and tone improvisation session this June.

Classes This Spring

Spring Term begins March 24th, after our week long break. We have a variety of classes in both traditional academics and in mind and body training:

Mind and Body: Phys. Ed, Yoga, Kettle Bell weight training, Meditation,
and Planned Parenthood

Arts: Graphic Design, Mask Making, Public Speaking, Metal Work, Watercolor, Singing,
Singing, Intro to Film, Film Making

Academics (Science): Biology, Physics, Science Topics, Anatomy

Academics (Math): Algebra I & II, Calculus, Trigonometry

Academics (English): The American Novel, Poetry and Painting of William Blake,
Comparative Lit, The Novels of Henry James, Writing a Research Paper, Reading and
Writing Poetry

Academics (History): European History, the Renaissance

Languages: American Sign Language, Italian, French, German, Japanese



We have had a lot of interest in the handful of open seats we have for next year...apply now!

Let's Start Talking...

from Ron Miller's blog Paths of Learning:


Is the pendulum swinging back?

Some historians have pointed out that modern social and political movements seem to follow a rhythm of ebb and flow. A period of innovation and revision is followed by a conservative reaction, which eventually produces a hunger for renewed change. These cycles seem to take twenty or thirty years to play themselves out.

Well, the last period of radical change in education came in the late 1960s and early 1970s--about 35 years ago. Since then, the right wing counter-revolution has effectively forced progressive, humanistic, and holistic approaches to the margins of educational policy and practice. A Nation at Risk, Goals 2000, and now the policy of No Child Left Untested (sorry, I mean "Behind") have turned schools into a mechanical arm of the corporate state. Education becomes ever more controlled, narrowed, and standardized.

Yet there are signs that this reactionary cycle is reaching its zenith and may be heading into decline. Opposition to the No Child Left Untested (excuse me, "Behind") agenda is growing across the nation. Parents and educators are discovering that children who are denied freedom and self-expression, artistic experiences, and even recess in an obsessive quest to meet ironclad standards are truly unhappy in their learning. There is a growing rebellion against the cult of homework. And hundreds of thousands of families are turning to homeschooling and diverse alternative schools to provide their children with an educational experience that honors their dignity and the fullness of their humanity.

I have watched the alternative education movements struggle in isolation against the corporate juggernaut for my entire 25-year career. But something new has been happening in the last few months. They are talking to each other. They are showing interest in collaborating. They are sensing the possibility of reaching the mainstream public with their ideas for the first time. A few of us have begun an email and now a phone conference discussion to consider a "think tank" or some sort of center that could speak on behalf of progressive/democratic/holistic education to journalists, parents and policymakers who are beginning to realize that educational fascism is unsustainable (and just plain wrong) but don't know what educational freedom might look like. What might happen if we relax "standards" and eliminate ruthless testing? Alternative educators have many important stories to tell, and data to back up their stories, and we're going to go public with them in the coming months.

It's time to come together and get involved. This year, consider attending the conferences being hosted by the Alternative Education Resource Organization and International Association of Learning Alternatives. (See the Resources section of this website -- www.pathsoflearning.net -- under useful websites.) Read about the new collaboration in the magazine Education Revolution, of which I am editor. A new cycle has begun--and you ought to join in.

Feb 21, 2008

More on the SSRI study...

again from the sensible Kevin Drum:

MORE ON ANTIDEPRESSANTS....This is obviously not the biggest deal in the world, but yesterday I noticed that a new study suggesting that certain antipressants weren't very effective had gotten big play in Britain and zero play in the U.S. Today I checked back, and the story had spread not only to more British sites, but also to news outlets in France, Germany, India, New Zealand, Canada, Thailand, and elsewhere. Mysteriously, though, the U.S. was still almost completely AWOL. There were short pieces on MSNBC and Fox, and longer pieces at the Washington Post and Time. That was pretty much it. It's really very strange that this story is being almost completely ignored here.

For what it's worth, the Time piece does a good job of explaining why the study is important:

Under the Freedom of Information Act, the researchers writing in PLoS Medicine were recently able to obtain [...] data, they believe, that lets them avoid a bias that often plagues reviews of previous research: the tendency for conclusive positive results to be published, sometimes more than once, and thus over-represented, while mediocre results can be ignored or even swept under the rug.

Drug companies claim the review is still flawed, however. One massive problem: there are many more recent studies than those surveyed in the article, which looked only at pre-approval trials conducted before 1999.

....The companies are correct in claiming there is far more data available on SSRI drugs now than there was 10 or 20 years ago. But Kirsch maintains that the results he and colleagues reviewed make up "the only data set we have that is not biased." He points out that currently, researchers are not compelled to produce all results to an independent body once the drugs have been approved; but until they are, they must hand over all data. For that reason, while the PLoS Medicine paper data may not be perfect, it may still be among the best we've got.

In other words, there might be a lot more data now, but it's hard to trust it because drug companies systematically suppress negative findings after they get FDA approval and no longer have to follow FDA rules. A few weeks ago the New York Times reported on a study that looked at precisely this question:

The new analysis, reviewing data from 74 trials involving 12 drugs, is the most thorough to date. And it documents a large difference: while 94 percent of the positive studies found their way into print, just 14 percent of those with disappointing or uncertain results did.

Now, for what it's worth, I find the results of the PLoS study a little hard to believe. Like a lot of commenters on last night's post, I've just heard too much anecdotal evidence from friends who have (eventually) been helped by various antidepressants. Maybe they were all kidding themselves, but that's a little hard to swallow.

But that aside, the PLoS study is still an important one. It's not the first one to question the efficacy of antidepressants, but are we already so jaded by this stuff that a confirming study isn't even worth reporting in the U.S.? If only for the insight it gives us into drug company testing practices, it seems like it's at least worth letting people know about.

(italics added for emphasis)

Upcoming Ski Trip, March 6

A ski trip is being planned for Thurs March 6th to Blue Mountain. There is a possibility of some students heading over Wednesday afternoon and staying over that evening. Details soon.

Prozac Does Not Work, Says Scientists

First, a cross post from Kevin Drum over at Washington Monthly:

A new meta-study conducted by Irving Kirsch of Hull University and five American and Canadian researchers has concluded that Prozac and other antidepressants in the SSRI family are essentially worthless. Compared to a placebo, they improved patients' scores on the most widely used depression scale by only 1.8 points:

The review breaks new ground because Kirsch and his colleagues have obtained for the first time what they believe is a full set of trial data for four antidepressants.

They requested the full data under freedom of information rules from the Food and Drug Administration, which licenses medicines in the US and requires all data when it makes a decision.

The pattern they saw from the trial results of fluoxetine (Prozac), paroxetine (Seroxat), venlafaxine (Effexor) and nefazodone (Serzone) was consistent. "Using complete data sets (including unpublished data) and a substantially larger data set of this type than has been previously reported, we find the overall effect of new-generation antidepressant medication is below recommended criteria for clinical significance," they write.

Here is a link to the article from the UK. I'm not surprised that the US papers aren't all over this.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/feb/26/mentalhealth.medicalresearch

Check out our links to Dan Carlat's blog and his article in the New York Times Magazine a few weeks back...you'll find them under "drug industry critiques".

A Trip to Italy

Two students will be traveling to Italy April 21 to May 1. Details will be announced later on. A couple of fundraisers are in the works, including a pasta dinner at school.