Thursday, April 10, 2008
Wednesday, April 9, 2008
Workshops!!!
Today the faculty began wrestling with the role of mindfulness in education. How do we define "mindfulness"? Rather than work up a definition right away, let us just start with "intention". A high-school student must have some intention to learn and some awareness of their own mind. Whatever gets in the way of intention and awareness can be considered a problem. Mindfulness is, in this highly limited definition, a clarity of intention and awareness.
Mindfulness is being studied with quite a lot of rigor these days. Our hope is to bring a developmental awareness of mindfulness into every aspect of school life. If the students are given the knowledge and skills to grow into this awareness, and if our school process is transparent and has a great deal of student input, a feedback loop could be created that supports student learning, focuses the teaching, and encourages an ever widening awareness of learning and the learning environment. Granted, this is a little vague. Over the next months, this will come into focus.
Next Wednesday morning students will be attending six very brief seminars on the act and the neurology of learning. The students will divide into three groups and rotate through three seminars. After a break the same groups will rotate through three more. Each will be fifteen to twenty minutes long, with the goal of providing some knowledge to deepen each student's perspective on her own learning.
Here is the schedule:
Part One: The Brain; Teenage Neurological Development; Ideal Learning Environments
Part Two: Strategies in Reading; Strategies in Math; The Role of Nutrition, Health, and Sleep
If our students can understand how they learn and how they are affected by their environments and habits, then they can learn to modify these factors.
Much of our understanding of the developing brain in the teenage years focuses on the pre-frontal cortex. This is where the direction of our focus originates, this is where we check our impulses, and develop and apply abstractions. This is probably a gross simplification, like most assertions about the brain have proven to be. Nevertheless, there is research behind it. The pre-frontal cortex continues to develop well into the twenties. It can be damaged, or its full development delayed. It can be exercised and it can grow. Meditation exercises the PFC and causes structural changes within it. We know that much of the poor judgment, loss of context, and impulsivity of the average teenager is phenomena arising from an as yet underdeveloped PFC.
A couple of weeks after these seminars, students will have a series of facilitated meetings to help them identify what they want and need from our school. All this will be posted on this blog and the bulletin boards at school. Teachers will then, in an open meeting, begin to develop ways of meeting these needs and wants.
So we begin. Hopefully it will be a productive, open, and relatively fun process. In the end, we'll have a school that is more coherent in its educational practice and more encouraging of students asserting their educational needs.
Mindfulness is being studied with quite a lot of rigor these days. Our hope is to bring a developmental awareness of mindfulness into every aspect of school life. If the students are given the knowledge and skills to grow into this awareness, and if our school process is transparent and has a great deal of student input, a feedback loop could be created that supports student learning, focuses the teaching, and encourages an ever widening awareness of learning and the learning environment. Granted, this is a little vague. Over the next months, this will come into focus.
Next Wednesday morning students will be attending six very brief seminars on the act and the neurology of learning. The students will divide into three groups and rotate through three seminars. After a break the same groups will rotate through three more. Each will be fifteen to twenty minutes long, with the goal of providing some knowledge to deepen each student's perspective on her own learning.
Here is the schedule:
Part One: The Brain; Teenage Neurological Development; Ideal Learning Environments
Part Two: Strategies in Reading; Strategies in Math; The Role of Nutrition, Health, and Sleep
If our students can understand how they learn and how they are affected by their environments and habits, then they can learn to modify these factors.
Much of our understanding of the developing brain in the teenage years focuses on the pre-frontal cortex. This is where the direction of our focus originates, this is where we check our impulses, and develop and apply abstractions. This is probably a gross simplification, like most assertions about the brain have proven to be. Nevertheless, there is research behind it. The pre-frontal cortex continues to develop well into the twenties. It can be damaged, or its full development delayed. It can be exercised and it can grow. Meditation exercises the PFC and causes structural changes within it. We know that much of the poor judgment, loss of context, and impulsivity of the average teenager is phenomena arising from an as yet underdeveloped PFC.
A couple of weeks after these seminars, students will have a series of facilitated meetings to help them identify what they want and need from our school. All this will be posted on this blog and the bulletin boards at school. Teachers will then, in an open meeting, begin to develop ways of meeting these needs and wants.
So we begin. Hopefully it will be a productive, open, and relatively fun process. In the end, we'll have a school that is more coherent in its educational practice and more encouraging of students asserting their educational needs.
Monday, March 31, 2008
Mr. Drug Rep
from Dan Carlat's psychiatry blog:
Shahram Ahari, former Eli Lilly drug rep, recently spoke to the Tufts Progressive Medical Students Organization. It was a fascinating talk, because Ahari told us about how he and his colleagues used every trick of salesmanship in the book to increase prescriptions of Prozac and Zyprexa and therefore to maximize their bonuses.
The key criteria of employment as a drug rep, he said, are being good looking and mastering the art of small talk. No huge surprise here, but it’s helpful to remember that drug reps do not come to doctors to educate, but rather to persuade.
"Gift giving is the key," he said. "You are programmed as a human to reciprocate. You feel obliged to return the favor. As a matter of fact, the smaller the gift, the greater the sense of obligation."
Do you consider samples to be a part of the company’s civic duty? Think again. "Samples are a marketing tool. They always have strings attached. Typically, we would provide two weeks worth of samples, which worked out wonderfully. Just like a drug dealer, the first one is free, and then you’re hooked."
A member of the audience who had once been a consultant to industry made an interesting comment about samples. His job was to track doctors’ prescribing behavior in response to sampling practices, and to provide physician-specific "response curves" to companies. Using these curves, reps determined how to maximize their "return" on sampling. If you "hit" Doctor Smith 10 times per year with samples, he might prescribe more product than Doctor Jones, who might require less sampling. To drug companies, doctors are pawns in a game of cost-benefit analysis.
Ahari recalls well that food makes doctors more receptive to the message. "We took painstaking efforts to determine what you like. We had a $60,000 budget for food, and we used this to make ourselves seem a necessity to clinics who wanted to make their staff happy."
But food pales compared to what Ahari called "the most sinister tool in our armamentarium: our computer." He was referring, of course, to prescription data-mining. "We knew all your prescribing data, and we used it fine-tune our pitch."
Do you think drug reps are there to provide you with crucial medical information? Fuggedabout it! "I was in your office in order to influence you to prescribe Prozac or Zyprexa. We focussed on providing information to manipulate your prescribing, not to teach you how to treat your patients. Mostly, we wanted to build a good relationship, so that you’d like us. We are the one spot of sunshine in your day, a person who steps in the door and is actually interested in how you’re doing. We’re fun, witty, attractive, and we come bearing gifts. No wonder we’re accepted into your offices."
Shahram Ahari, former Eli Lilly drug rep, recently spoke to the Tufts Progressive Medical Students Organization. It was a fascinating talk, because Ahari told us about how he and his colleagues used every trick of salesmanship in the book to increase prescriptions of Prozac and Zyprexa and therefore to maximize their bonuses.
The key criteria of employment as a drug rep, he said, are being good looking and mastering the art of small talk. No huge surprise here, but it’s helpful to remember that drug reps do not come to doctors to educate, but rather to persuade.
"Gift giving is the key," he said. "You are programmed as a human to reciprocate. You feel obliged to return the favor. As a matter of fact, the smaller the gift, the greater the sense of obligation."
Do you consider samples to be a part of the company’s civic duty? Think again. "Samples are a marketing tool. They always have strings attached. Typically, we would provide two weeks worth of samples, which worked out wonderfully. Just like a drug dealer, the first one is free, and then you’re hooked."
A member of the audience who had once been a consultant to industry made an interesting comment about samples. His job was to track doctors’ prescribing behavior in response to sampling practices, and to provide physician-specific "response curves" to companies. Using these curves, reps determined how to maximize their "return" on sampling. If you "hit" Doctor Smith 10 times per year with samples, he might prescribe more product than Doctor Jones, who might require less sampling. To drug companies, doctors are pawns in a game of cost-benefit analysis.
Ahari recalls well that food makes doctors more receptive to the message. "We took painstaking efforts to determine what you like. We had a $60,000 budget for food, and we used this to make ourselves seem a necessity to clinics who wanted to make their staff happy."
But food pales compared to what Ahari called "the most sinister tool in our armamentarium: our computer." He was referring, of course, to prescription data-mining. "We knew all your prescribing data, and we used it fine-tune our pitch."
Do you think drug reps are there to provide you with crucial medical information? Fuggedabout it! "I was in your office in order to influence you to prescribe Prozac or Zyprexa. We focussed on providing information to manipulate your prescribing, not to teach you how to treat your patients. Mostly, we wanted to build a good relationship, so that you’d like us. We are the one spot of sunshine in your day, a person who steps in the door and is actually interested in how you’re doing. We’re fun, witty, attractive, and we come bearing gifts. No wonder we’re accepted into your offices."
Sunday, March 30, 2008
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