Are Prodigies Autistic? Prodigies dazzle us with their virtuoso violin concertos, seemingly prescient chess moves, and vivid paintings. While their work would be enough to impress us if they were 40, prodigies typically reach adult levels of performance in non-verbal, rule-based domains such as chess, art, and music . Their performances are hard to explain from a purely deliberate practice perspective. While it's true that many prodigies receive support, resources, and encouragement from parents and coaches early on, such support is typically the result of a demonstrated " rage to learn", as the prodigy expert Martha J. Morelock refers to the phenomenon. Researchers who have spent years working with prodigies and witnessing their development firsthand have come to a different conclusion . Unfortunately, there really aren't that many systematic studies of prodigies, at least in comparison to the study of adult experts. The third child prodigy was 18 years old at the time of testing.
The PTA arrives in Mexicos schools When Karina Saldaña enrolled her first child in elementary school, she hoped for the kind of parent participation that didn't exist when she was growing up. Her own school director was “untouchable” to both teachers and students alike, Ms. Saldaña says. Skip to next paragraph Karina Saldaña, a parent-representative on the local PTA, says she is pleased with the level of communication between parents, teachers, and the director at the Fray Matias de Cordova school in Tuxtla Gutierrez, the capital of Chiapas, Mexico, April 26. Sara Miller Llana/The Christian Science Monitor Subscribe Today to the Monitor Click Here for your FREE 30 DAYS ofThe Christian Science MonitorWeekly Digital Edition But what she found was the same impenetrable wall that has long kept parents locked out of the public education system in Mexico – where in some schools teachers don't show up to class or are woefully underqualified, and where students drop out at high rates. For decades, parents in Mexico were disregarded.
Red-Green & Blue-Yellow: The Stunning Colors You Can't See| On Seeing Reddish Green and Yellowish Blue | Color Opponency Theory Try to imagine reddish green — not the dull brown you get when you mix the two pigments together, but rather a color that is somewhat like red and somewhat like green. Or, instead, try to picture yellowish blue — not green, but a hue similar to both yellow and blue. Is your mind drawing a blank? That's because, even though those colors exist, you've probably never seen them. The limitation results from the way we perceive color in the first place. Almost never, that is. Colors without a name The color revolution started in 1983, when a startling paper by Hewitt Crane, a leading visual scientist, and his colleague Thomas Piantanida appeared in the journal Science. Images similar to those used in a famous 1983 experiment in which so-called "forbidden colors" were perceived for the first time.Credit: Life's Little Mysteries The observers of this unusual visual stimulus reported seeing the borders between the stripes gradually disappear, and the colors seem to flood into each other.
Grobstein, not just MY problem (610) 526-5098 pgrobste@cc.brynmawr.edu 21 August 1991 Sometimes it pays to let off steam a little bit. Even in public. Sometimes it turns out that everyone is bothered by something, and no one is exactly sure what it is, and everyone thinks it must be something wrong with themselves. Then someone says something about it, and it turns out its sort of the same something that has been bothering everybody else, and everybody feels a little better, and maybe even something gets done about it. I teach biology in a college, a pretty good one that costs students a lot of money and that lots of people have heard of. Well, anyway, I like people who think, and its my job to help them learn to think. So we tried it out, and you can probably guess what our biggest problem was. What's funny about the whole thing is that lots of people know about the problem, and lots of people complain about it, and practically nobody does anything about it, and by not doing anything about it they make it worse.
The 5 Smartest Non-Primates on the Planet Katharine Gammon, Life's Little Mysteries Contributor | July 29, 2011 05:56pm ET Credit: Walter Siegmund We humans tend to think we're pretty smart. We've got descriptive language. We've got art and can build museums in which to showcase it. The flip side, of course, is that we've also learned to build bombs. Will the New Online Standardized Tests Be Different? Digital Tools Sarah Garland Fifth graders at Townsend Elementary in the Appoquinimink district waiting to begin the state standardized reading test. By Sarah Garland New high-tech standardized tests are coming soon to schools across the country, but will these new tests really revolutionize how we measure whether children are learning? The designers of the new tests, which a majority of states plan to adopt in two years, are allowing a sneak peek at sample questions. Two competing state coalitions have taken on the job of designing the new tests, the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) and the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, and both have posted examples of what’s coming on their websites. In some questions, which the test designers have called “computer enhanced,” students will be asked to drag words or numbers across the screen, or to highlight phrases or sentences in a reading passage. This post originally appeared on The Hechinger Report.
Whoa, scientists just reversed autism symptoms in mice For those that have kids that are non-verbal and mostly in their own world, my son was the same way. He would cry if someone touched him, he never looked at anyone and he wasn't potty trained until he was six. My husband and I refused to accept that state as the best he could achieve, so we worked with him constantly (I'm lucky enough to have been able to stay home with him from birth) to get even the smallest of improvements. We taught him sign language for his needs, physically moving his hands into the signs when he was reaching for something he wanted, etc. As we did this, we would say the word clearly, starting with "want" and "more". Before I knew he had autism, I noticed that he didn't like being touched, so I started doing baby massage to try to desensitize him. I know even with the hardest work, some kids won't respond, and that we have been VERY lucky. My son is now ten and in mostly mainstream classes, he has also skipped a grade. /end tl;dr
What’s Worth Investing In? How to Decide What Technology You Need Lenny Gonzalez The promise of technology in the pursuit of learning is vast — and so are the profits. The SIIA valued the ed-tech market at $7.5 billion. With daily launches of new products promising to solve all manner of problems — from managing classrooms to engaging bored students with interactive content to capturing and organizing data, to serving as a one-stop-shop for every necessary service, choosing from the dizzying number of products on the market can be confusing. But when it comes to the specific task of helping students, what’s the best app in education? “A web browser,” said Chris Lehmann, Principal of Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, a school that’s embraced technology for years. “If all we’re doing is valuing test scores, then we’re just using technology to deliver the same traditional curriculum.” Lehmann is famous in progressive education circles for his quote: “Technology must be like oxygen: ubiquitous, necessary, and invisible.” Related
Physicians in China treat addictions by destroying the brain's pleasure center "Many Chinese scientists conduct shoddy and unethical research where 'rewards for publication in international journals are high.'" I'm am so fed up with China & all their stupid antics, it's one thing after another & it's all negative, shortcuts to shortcuts, fast & cheap, screw originality, screw safety, screw the environment, & yet we are to play nice or else. They're like the big crazy person in the mall's food court that's acting out, but no one is willing to say or do anything because they're afraid if what might happen.
What Works in Tech Tools: Spotlight on ClassDojo Digital Tools Teaching Strategies ClassDojo With the thousands of ed-tech tools available to teachers, it can be difficult to find those that work well and complement teaching strategies. Sam Chaudhary and Liam Don, the co-founders of ClassDojo, had the tech limitations of many public schools in mind when they designed the free service, a behavior management tool meant to reduce the amount of time teachers spend trying to get students’ attention. ClassDojo works on three principles: Build positive behaviors through positive reinforcement — basically “catch kids being good” and use specific praise to call out good behavior.Real-time feedback is the most effective at improving and changing behavior over a period of time.Any tool focused on behavior must engage parents as well. Each student gets an avatar and either receives or loses points. “What I saw teachers struggle with is how to get the value out of a tool without changing the structure of what they were doing.” Related
THE NORMAL WELL-TEMPERED MIND I'm trying to undo a mistake I made some years ago, and rethink the idea that the way to understand the mind is to take it apart into simpler minds and then take those apart into still simpler minds until you get down to minds that can be replaced by a machine. This is called homuncular functionalism, because you take the whole person. You break the whole person down into two or three or four or seven sub persons that are basically agents. They're homunculi, and this looks like a regress, but it's only a finite regress, because you take each of those in turn and you break it down into a group of stupider, more specialized homunculi, and you keep going until you arrive at parts that you can replace with a machine, and that's a great way of thinking about cognitive science. The idea is basically right, but when I first conceived of it, I made a big mistake. The vision of the brain as a computer, which I still champion, is changing so fast. It's going to be a connectionist network.