Story Plus Play

Life is relationship. There is me, my authentic nature with its needs and curiosities and the cosmos expanding infinitely beyond me. What happens in the gap defines my life.

Children are sponges. Their rapidly changing brains and bodies compulsively seek new and different relationships that match the nova of neural connections exploding inside. We adulterated adults are in the Stone Age compared to the exponential brain growth found from the moment of conception to age eleven. Indeed the brain continues its expansive reach beyond eleven, but not as radically. The earlier in life the more profound and pronounced the changes, which means the greater the need for ever-changing appropriate things and relationships to engage.

Themes: 
bonding
learning
parenting
play
storytelling

BPA Impairs Social Relations

BPA

James W. Prescott, PhD sent news that research documents that BPA, an endocrine disrupter, impairs social relations until the fourth generation. The reproductive damage of BPA has been well documented. See Peat Myers interview below. The social consequences of endocrine disruption are new. The importance of this finding and its impact on the socialization of humanity is staggering.

We all know that the environment controls and regulates gene expression even damages gene structure and function. Some 80,000 chemicals dumped into our environment most of them toxic. BPA is just one, and alone represents 7 billion pounds annually.

Themes: 
birth
brain
culture
learning
prenatal learning

Standardized Skooling

lynn stodard education

Lynn has been working with a group of committed educators to get the standardized monkey off our kid's backs.

Also see https://ttfuture.org/whats-new/events/featured_interview

How to Increase Graduation Rates
Lynn Stoddard

If School District Superintendents want to increase graduation rates, they should not tighten the screws on teachers to standardize students. A recent study found that teacher’s job satisfaction is at an all-time low. Nearly a third of new teachers say they are very, or fairly likely, to leave the profession. This confirms my perception that teacher morale has never been lower than it is now. I lay the blame on federal government intrusion into education, which the 10th amendment says is a state responsibility. Ever since the “Nation at Risk Report” in 1983, the U.S. Office of Education has applied several “reforms” all based on the idea that it is possible to make students alike in knowledge and skills – and that teachers should try harder to do. Standardized achievement tests are used as a whip to make sure all students know and can do the same things at grade-level check points.

No wonder teachers are demoralized! They know they can’t standardize students like cars or washing machines! The Common Core State Standards are the latest attempt to sell the idea of standardization to teachers and the general public. It is setting teachers and students up for failure on a grand scale. There will be an increase in good teachers leaving the profession, more students dropping out and fewer students graduating than ever before, all because students refuse to be standardized.

Themes: 
education
freedom
learning

More on Technology in the Classroom - NOT

reading on a desk top

A friend sent a link to a New York Times article about technology in the classroom – NOT.

The chief technology officer of eBay sends his children to a nine-classroom school here. So do employees of Silicon Valley giants like Google, Apple, Yahoo and Hewlett-Packard. But the school’s chief teaching tools are anything but high-tech: pens and paper, knitting needles and, occasionally, mud. Not a computer to be found. No screens at all. They are not allowed in the classroom, and the school even frowns on their use at home.

Themes: 
childhood
creativity
education
learning