Light Posting Friday.

We will see.

There are answers to poverty...

and part of the answer lays in understanding child development:

(from Mother Jones):

Geoffrey Canada believes that many poor parents aren't doing enough to prepare their kids for school—not because they don't care, but because they simply don't know the importance of early childhood stimulation. So [Harlem's Children's Zone] starts with Baby College, nine weeks of parenting classes that focus on discipline and brain development. It continues with language-intensive prekindergarten, which feeds into a rigorous K-12 charter school with an extended day and an extended year. That academic "conveyor belt," as Canada calls it, is supplemented by social programs: family counseling, a free health clinic, after-school tutoring, and a drop-in arts center for teenagers.

Canada's early childhood programs are in many ways a response to research showing that the vocabularies of poor children usually lag significantly behind those of middle-class children. At the Harlem Gems prekindergarten, I watched as the four-year-olds were bombarded with books, stories, and flash cards—including some in French. The parents were enlisted, too; one morning, I went with a few families on a field trip to a local supermarket organized by the Harlem Children's Zone. The point wasn't to learn about nutrition, but rather about language—how to fill an everyday shopping trip with the kind of nonstop chatter that has become second nature to most upper-middle-class parents, full of questions about numbers and colors and letters and names. That chatter, social scientists have shown, has a huge effect on vocabulary and reading ability. And as we walked through the aisles, those conversations were going on everywhere: Is the carrot bumpy or smooth? What color is that apple? How many should we buy?

So far, Canada's vision has yielded impressive results. Last year, the first conveyor-belt students reached the third grade and took their first statewide standardized tests. In reading, they scored above the New York City average, and in math they scored well above the state average.

Can Toddlers Learn from TV: Short answer...No

(from Cognitive Daily)

There's lots of evidence that most TV isn't beneficial to toddlers, and it may even be harmful. But can't kids learn from TV too? Isn't that supposed to be what shows like Teletubbies, Barney, and Sesame street are all about? For older children, three and above, it does seem to be true that some learning can occur, but for two-year-olds and younger, the evidence tells a different story.

Few studies have shown any evidence that two-year-olds can learn from TV anywhere near as well as they learn from real-world experiences. While they clearly can distinguish between nonsense programming and real shows, they don't do much at all with the information presented in the shows. One study found they can't imitate actions shown on TV as well as live actions, and another showed they don't learn labels for objects from TV shows.

Perhaps most intriguing are two studies, one by G.L. Troseth and J.S. DeLoache, and another by K.L. Schmitt and Daniel Anderson. In these experiments, two-year-olds were shown videos of experimenters hiding objects in a room. Then the toddlers were allowed into the room and told to find the object. Accuracy ranged from 44 percent to 25 percent, despite the fact that there were only from four to six possible hiding places in the room. Their performance was no better than if they had simply searched the room at random, with no video to help them.

Many toddlers did seem to look in the right spot after watching the first video, but if the task was repeated with a different hiding place, they simply returned to the original spot, ignoring the new video evidence.

Do toddlers just have difficulty translating from a small screen to full-sized reality? When Jim and Nora were toddlers, they loved Barney the Dinosaur, but cowered in fear when they saw a life-sized human in a Barney suit. Or maybe toddlers struggle with converting a two-dimensional television image into a three-dimensional physical space. Or perhaps they believe that the things on the TV inhabit their own tiny world inside the box, unrelated to the larger, outside world.

Marie Evans Shmidt, Alisha Crawley-Davis, and Anderson developed a new experiment that promised to answer some of these questions by simplifying the problem. Instead of hiding objects in a room, they hid stickers behind larger objects on a felt board. The felt board was the same size as a TV screen that the toddlers watched. Some of the two-year-olds watched an experimenter hide the objects on TV. Some of them watched the objects as they hidden on the actual felt board. And some them saw objects being hidden on a sample felt board. In each case they had to locate the objects on the original felt board. This graph shows the results:

As you can see, the toddlers who watched the objects being hidden on the actual felt board did significantly better than the others. In this experiment, there were only four hiding places, so a 25 percent accuracy rate is equivalent to chance performance. As in the earlier studies, toddlers who watched on TV were significantly better on their first attempt compared to later attempts to find the object, while there was no significant difference in the other conditions. Not only does watching TV help very little, but performance gets worse over time!

In a second experiment, the researcher hid a stuffed toy Snoopy in a separate room from the toddler, then either told the child where the toy was hidden in person, or on TV, before letting him or her into the room to search for the toy. Again, there were four possible hiding places. Here are the results:

Once again, being told in person resulted in significantly better performance. As before, the TV-watchers got worse over time. Clearly the toddlers can understand the verbal descriptions of the objects, but somehow they don't get the message on TV.

Schmidt's team says that these experiments show that toddlers don't have true mental representations of scenes. Instead, they rely on direct experience -- their own interactions with the felt board or the room with the hidden Snoopy doll. The reason they do somewhat better on the first TV-watching trial is that they form a "fragile memory" of the hidden object. When this is confirmed by experience, most toddlers assume the object is always going to be located in the same place, regardless of whether they see it hidden someplace else on TV later.

So while toddlers can understand what's going on on TV, they don't think about what they see on TV the same way older kids and adults do. They don't connect it back to the real things they encounter in their world, so they can't learn from TV. Whatever it is your toddler gets from watching TV, these researchers say, it's not learning.

Schmidt, M.E., Crawley-Davis, A.M., Anderson, D.R. (2007). Two-year-olds' object retrieval based on television: Testing a perceptual account Media Psychology, 9 (2), 389-409

Follow this link...

Some diagnoses are more useful than others. That of Borderline Personality, in the hands of a great researcher and clinician like Marsha Linehan, becomes very useful. Read the article.

Here's a teaser:

Linehan, who grew up in Tulsa, Okla., and spent several years as a nun before becoming a psychologist, embodies several dialectical contradictions: a nun who has never lived in a convent; a careful scientist whose most engaging feature is her wry irreverence; a 65-year-old who has a maternal steeliness but was never a mother. It doesn't pay to underestimate Marsha Linehan. In Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy for Borderline Personality Disorder, she writes, "If the patient says, 'I am going to kill myself,' the therapist might reply, 'I thought you agreed not to drop out of therapy.' "

Good Morning!

We began putting together the school in mid-1997. There is some history to discuss (and some thanks to give out), but my point for the moment is that there was a very large data base of research, as well as frequent circulars and fliers, that concerned young people and was readily available to us all.
This dried up in January of 2001. In the last seven years there has been almost no attention paid to justice issues concerning youth. The drug war goes on unabated, the imprisonment rate of youth (along the concomitant traumatization) remains alarming, if not increasing. Schools, in a very general sense, may have improved slightly. Maybe.

But the message was clear: the Bush Justice Department had no interest in justice for young people.

I look forward to seeing how policies affecting children will change. It will be interesting.

A few days off make for a busy school day...

Some quick hits on relationships:

In two studies, one recent (2008) and one older (2000), researchers looked into whether or not there was a correlation between being romantically involved with someone and one's grades going down, and in the earlier study, whether social isolation and depression is related to internet use.

The answer? Not much. The 2008 study doesn't surprise me, as their is plenty of reason to think that a little romance gives more than it takes away. The 200o study does surprise me, a little, though I think so much has changed in the intervening years that it is probably irrelevant.

My guess is that social networking online is rapidly becoming an imago of more traditional ones, with plenty of modern fluidity thrown in for good measure. They are changing each other. I wonder which will be the dominant force in, say, workplaces, and to what degree has it changed family life.

That will likely be it for today. Too much to do.

We're back to school. Some comments.

The interesting question for me in psychology and education is "what is the degree to which particular techniques influence success?". The flipside of this question is "what makes up the rest of the influence?".
Of course biology is a factor, but I tend to think that biology can't actually be disentangled from social and mental life. What remains is relationships. In therapy, study after study indicates that, for the most part, the subjective experience of the client correlates highly with symptom relief. This is true in medicine as well, but very much so in psychology. There is something in just having a genuine, mutual, helping relationship that helps.
There are some techniques that work for some troubles. There are some medications that relieve some symptoms. But none of seems very clear.

But to my mind this muddle is nothing like the one we have in our schools. You would think that education would have improved after all these years. But is it true that the problem is that we shift our emphasis constantly, one faddish technique to the next?
In our school, the basis of all success is the relationship between teacher and student. Not techniques, not content, not theory. Not zen. Just the relationship. Over this school year and the last, Stephanie Kenney, our Assistant Principal, our Dean, our Academic Whip, has pushed all of our teaching onto firmer pedagogical ground. There is more accountability and more clarity.

Still, the fundamental unit of TAS experience is that teacher-student relationship. Perhaps, what seems to be true in psychology is also true in education: without the relationship, the technique does not matter. "Back to basics" means organizing a school in such a way that relationships are cultivated. More teachers. Less teaching and meeting time. More time with small groups. Less time spent with adults. And identify those kids who don't have much adult presence in their life and get them some.

This was a late starting post today...my apologies. Big day yesterday.

A Question for you...

I think I will begin to informally post bits of school history. Does anybody want anything else?

Speaking of disappointment- No School!

We are sending the kids home. The biggest of our two furnaces went down. Damn. I was really looking forward to Inauguration day with them all. It seems that one should be with lots of people. So I am going to find some.

On this day, strike up the band for sadness...

Sadness. Ah, sadness. The New Scientist (my favorite online science mag) has a good article on the dimensions of the debate about Sadness. How much is just enough? On this happy day, when a person who seems genuinely self-aware takes the reins (and provokes, not "begs", the question "How much narcissism is enough?") and the nation seems genuinely pleased, let us look at the downside of every upside.

Where does sadness end and depression (or its spectrum-mate, dysthymia) begin? Like most of nature it cannot be crisply defined. That murkiness has been amply exploited by our self-help and psychopharm industries. On the other hand, genuine depression is dark and paralyzing. It stops life. If one is not grieving a loss, and life has a tar-like consistancy, then one needs some serious, professional help.

In high school age kids, sadness is a laboratory for introspection. How do any of us push ourselves harder, or dig deeper, or look closer, if not for the goad of disappointment and seeming despair?

The article traces out some very interesting points: for instance, some depression (or sadness) might be a crucial step down from extended stress, which can kill an organism. There is also a strong link to creativity in that, by provoking introspection, energetic problem solving and holistic expression can step up and meet the situation.

But the link to creativity I think is only half-drawn. A strongly creative person (be it in the arts, among people, in business, in academics, etc) experiences a great range of emotion, not just a strongly marked melancholy aspect. There is transporting joy and connection, there is tremendous frustration, there is hobbling doubt. Creativity is diminished when this range is dampened.

On of the insights I have gained in my zen studies and practice is that if I head straight into my moods (rather than fighting them off) they are more vivid and pass much more quickly. They are transient. From this perspective, emotional distress is more a function of resistance and fear, or clinging to a narrow view of what one should be experiencing, than of pathology per se.

This is not enough, of course. For whatever reason, contemporary depression is a tough nut to crack. If it endures it seems to cause significant, long term changes in brain function. And, of course, it can wreak havoc on very vulnerable family systems. But there is more to the problem than just "I'm depressed, fix me". It is part of the range of human experience, of which no part should be cast away lightly.

New Classes Offered, plus a book on BACKACHES...

NICABM, which offers online professional development in psychology and social work, has its new schedule out. Of particular interest is Ron Siegel's "Advanced Mindfulness and Psychotherapy". I took the first part of this one; it was excellent, really excellent. Not a whole lot of work: meditation exercises, weekly readings, two phone conferences, and bi-weekly postings, support one or two online lectures each week (which you can listen to at any time). He also provides guided meditations online, prerecorded.

I strongly recommend looking into it.

Ron is a member of the Harvard Medical School faculty. He is also the author of an excellent book on back problems, and did quite a lot of work looking into how unnecessary much back surgery is. Very convincing. The muscles of the back are particularly vulnerable to the feedback loop of stress. He provides context and mindfulness techniques that should help your hurtin'.

Day One, a comment

This is a pretty good take on what the new president has in store, powerwise. A true conservative- one who is always against the accumulation of power in one branch of government- might be really worried about this "perfect storm" of executive power: multiple crises, a failed presidency, a strong and assertive new executive, control of congress, and very high public support.
Ironically, the only thing that might check this aggrandizment is Obama's own conservative temperament...

Enjoy the big day. At school we are watching the ceremony on the big screen. Hopefully some guests will be joining us.

MLK on a first black president

This is one of those "only in the internet age" things.

The Test, and a little history

A number of years ago, a friend and I began discussing what worked with teenagers and what did not. His idea was to have a small group of kids, a small farm, a place to train them in martial arts, and a small staff to support them in mindfulness, self-care, and good health practices.
We talked off and on about this for several years. We both had backgrounds in social work, psychology, education, and such things. He had studied a particular martial art, Shim Gum Do ("mind sword path"), for a number of years and had become quite accomplished.

Most importantly, the art sprang from the experience of one Chang Sik Kim, a Zen master and brilliant swordsman from Korea who followed his teacher, the famous Seung Sahn, founder of the Kwan Um School of Zen. It would take a person far more knowedgable than myself to illustrate what differences and similarities there are between Kwan Um and Shim Gum Do. They are both Zen, both Korean. So they must have some things in common.

The significant difference is the highly extended and complex system of forms that each Shim Gum Do student begins to study. One form may take about 2 minutes to execute- be it sword, karate, long stick, short stick, or self defense- and each is a very syntactical sequence of blocks, flourishes, attacks, turns, and leaps that meet all points north, south, east, and west. A form takes at least 2 months to learn well enough to be tested on, but much, much longer to understand well.

Each is an effective defense. Each is a tai-chi like arrangment of energy. Each is a mantra, an object of meditation. This last part is called "mind-training". During meditation each student observes themselves practicing each form, usually in sequence. For advanced students, this is the only practical way to keep the dozens of forms in a state of clarity. It is also productive of significant cognitive and emotional benefits.

There are 15 forms in the first black belt. This is what my oldest son (age 12) tested on this weekend. It takes about 2-3 years to get that far. There are 33 levels of black belt in both sword and karate (known as shin boep).

The purpose of the test is two fold. One, of course, is to demonstrate a level of mastery. But this is clearly evaluated in the days before the test. It is highly unusual for anyone to fail a test. The reason being that no one who is unready is allowed to test in the first place. The second is to call up one of the great frustrations of mental life: why, for instance, am I sedate as an oyster while I practice at home, and edgy as hell when I am about to test?

The answer? My mind. There is no real difference, only the difference that I bring into it. One of the great contrasts that this sort of study calls up is between "test-mind" and "practice-mind". And of course, the test is itself an expression of a large, supportive, and diverse community, young and old, male and female.

(Let me make clear the limits of my understanding: I am a junior student, having studied Zen Sword for about 10 years. My experience in Buddhism is limited to my meditation practice, my martial art study, my private readings, my retreats, and the extraordinary intimacy of the teacher-student relationship in the Zen tradition.)

My son tested and did very well. The snow was piled up outside, and the air bitterly cold. Winter light was warmed by the great stained glass windows in the practice hall of the old church where Shim Gum Do has it main center and the furnace rattled through the big iron radiators. Afterwards we celebrated at a fine Korean BBQ place nearby.

We started our school because we felt that the experience of being a student is far more profound then most young people ever recognize and that a place that emphasizes Zen techniques of self-awareness, good food, community, agriculture, and the liberal arts would slowly get the strugglers and stragglers to take a long and gentle look at themselves while teaching them valuable skills.

Eventually, it evolved into a high school. There is more to write. Later for that.

There are still some strange places in this world...

What do you make of this?

This is for real but could have been the setting for a really bad movie: the Republic of Kalmykia is a tiny and extremely poor republic part of the Russian Federation. Its head is the rich, dictatorial Kirsan Nikolayevich Ilyumzhinov who is also the head of FIDE, the world's Chess organization. In a mixture of commercial, personal and nationalistic interests Ilyumzhinov erected Chess City a brand-new complex dedicated to chess, tourism and nation-building that the country cannot actually at the present afford. Apparently the population of Kalmykia is Tibetan Buddhist (!) and Orthodox Christian, with a significant number of atheists, Ilyumzhinov is attempting to force what is essentially his own personal passion onto his people as a kind of social glue for the nation. And as the seed for its economy to prosper. Truly bizarre. Nice picture yeah? (from Social Fiction)

or this?

Tourists have started to visit Kalmykia, most travelling from Volgograd to Elista. Some accounts of their travels have been logged on YouTube and other internet sites. Kalmykia is regarded as a safe destination for foreign tourists with the country getting much publicity after holding the 1998 Chess Olympiad in Elista. Several visitors have commented on the number of camels in the countryside — indeed Kalmykia is the home to Europe's only indigenous camel. In the capital there is little traffic.

or this?

The Kalmyks have also established communities in the United States, primarily in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. The majority are descended from those Kalmyks who fled from Russia in late 1920 to France, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia, and, later, Germany. Many of those Kalmyks living in Germany at the end of World War II were eventually granted passage to the United States.

As a consequence of their decades-long migration through Europe, many older Kalmyks are fluent in French, German, and Serbo-Croation, in addition to Russian and their native Kalmyk. There are several Kalmyk Buddhist temples in Monmouth County, NJ, where the vast majority of American Kalmyks reside, as well as a Tibetan Buddhist Learning Center and monastery in Washington Township, NJ.

The above is from Wikipedia. You might want to read into it. They were heavily repressed by Stalin, and then understandably sided with the Germans when they invaded Russia. As a result, the end of the war brought vast destruction down on their heads and perhaps a third of the population was killed while being pressed into exile to Siberia. The rest dispersed. Kruschev restored them to their country, and after the fall of the USSR, they became an autonomous republic in the Russian Federation.

Chess and Tibetan Buddhism. In the Caucasus- which some consider to be Europe. I couldn't figure out how to get this picture up. Boy, do I wish I could.
Curiously, the recognized Lama for the Kalmyks was born in Philly. I have been hearing about the learning center and monastery in NJ for a while now. Now I get the orgins.

The story of Buddhism in America is as complex as any other story. One subject of enduring interest to me is the huge split between Euro-American and ethnic practioners. Another is the troubling (to me) rather economically elite profile of your average American Buddhist. Perhaps using this blog to highlight the curiousness of all this is occasionally a good idea.

Oh, yeah. Google the dictator. It is all there: Rolls Royces, massive state building projects, UFO abduction, murder, and a fabulous autobiography called "The President's Crown of Thorns". According to Wikipedia, chapters have titles such as "Without Me the People are Incomplete" and "It Only Takes Two Weeks to Have a Man Killed".

A goldmine.

Right Action. Justice.

an excerpt from the Dhammapada, chapter 4:

Pay no attention to harsh words uttered by others.
Do not be concerned with what others have or have not done.
Observe your own actions and inactions.

Like a beautiful, brightly colored flower without fragrance
is the well-spoken word without action.
Like a beautiful, brightly colored flower full of fragrance
is the well-spoken word and the deed that matches the word.

The scent of flowers is carried
No farther than the wind allows,
Neither the sandalwood, tagar, nor jasmine.
But the fragrance of the deeds of good people spreads
to the ends of the earth, in all directions,
Regardless of the wind...

trans. Ananda Maitreya

Good Morning and Happy Monday...

Welcome back, everyone. No school, but plenty to post. And have a day of fighting for what is right and just- a superhero day. We probably shouldn't have it off; as we all like the trend towards a day of service. Oh well.

Being 43, I have vivid and unpleasant memories of Ronald Reagan. One of my favorites is the calumny he and others heaped on Dr. King and the struggle for civil rights. Reagan actively supported apartheid in South Africa. He defended Sen. Jesse Helms' attacks on MLK. He intervened to protect Bob Jones University's ban on interracial dating. He began his presidential campaign uncomfortably close to the site where three civil rights workers were tortured and murdered 16 years earlier.

Maybe the man did some good for the country. Most historical figures are pretty mixed. But keep the record straight: when Reagan signed the bill making this a holiday it was after years of working fiercely against everything King stood for.

That's the politics for the day.