What's been on my mind - November 2013

Wow - It has been a busy start to the school year.  I ended the summer with great intentions to keep blogging through the busyness but it has been harder than I thought.  I have several partially written posts that I chip away at whenever I get a chance, but they still need a lot of work.  In the mean time, here a few things that have been on my mind:

1. Families Made Us Human - In this Aeon magazine article, Columbia College philosophy professor Stephen T. Asma argues that it is families and feelings, rather than our large brains, that are responsible for the creation of human culture.  This builds on the idea, argued by Simon Fisher and Matt Ridley in Science magazine, that momentous changes in our genome may sometimes be a consequence of cultural innovation, rather than the cause of it.  As a parent and a teacher, I find this message reassuring in the face of the more common biological determinism which is so prevalent in the literature today.
2. I have always enjoyed Malcolm Gladwell's books and talks and the way he weaves counter-intuitive narratives out of scientific findings and issues from popular culture.  In his new book, David and Goliath, he suggests that many of the things which seem to be disadvantages can actually be "Desirable Difficulties" in certain circumstances.  One way that he illustrates this point is by making reference to the much greater than expected number of dyslexics among the ranks of highly successful professionals and entrepreneurs.  This is an example which I have previously used with students, parents, and colleagues, and it was interesting for me to see it utilized as part of a broader examination of the strategies used by underdogs.  His other main example is that of the extraordinarily high number of world political leaders who have lost a parent during childhood.  In neither of these examples does he downplay or deny the suffering that these challenges can cause, but he does focus on powerful positive effects that can come from having overcome adversity.  It is a hopeful message that I will try to remember when dealing with students who face often heartbreaking adversity.
3. In this book, Gladwell also enters the class size debate.  This topic is also very timely and relevant for me, as Alberta is very much in the midst of a debate on this issue.  Throughout the book Gladwell makes reference to an "inverted U" effect in which the input of resources into a problem initially makes things better, but where throwing more resources at the problem often results in diminishing returns or even to a worsening situation.  With respect to class sizes, Gladwell claims that there are benefits for students to reducing very large class sizes, but that those effects diminish and disappear as classes get smaller.  At some point, he argues, smaller class sizes can even lead to worse results.
   Having already spent considerable time on researching this issue, I was skeptical about both his thesis and his methodology (referencing a few studies by others and calling up a couple hundred teachers and asking them what their perfect class size would be).  He seemed to be oversimplifying the issue and drawing conclusions that went well beyond the available data.
   One aspect of his argument that really got me thinking, however, was his point that students with learning challenges often feel isolated and exposed in small classes, but that these same students tend to do better in larger classes where they can find others "like them."  Interestingly, a couple of days ago I had a conversation with a parent who made that exact same point about her son who had recently moved from a very small class to a very large one.  I know that this data is anecdotal, but I could clearly see how others might have the same experience.  It challenged me to refine my views on this issue and allow for greater nuance and complexity.
4. Over the last few years, I have been doing a lot of reading on the topic of consciousness, trying to understand the views of folks from Paul Churchland to Thomas Nagel to Ed Feser to Douglas Hoffstader to Walter J. Freeman III..  At times the scientific and philosophical discourse was a bit over my head, but I've learned enough to sketch out the main arguments of these differing views.  Recently, I came across an article by Princeton neuroscientist Michael Graziano in Aeon magazine which gave me a whole new perspective to consider.  Graziano proposes an "attention schema theory" in which consciousness is described as the schematic model of one’s state of attention.  While aspects of this model seem problematic to me, I will say that it did help me to come to appreciate the central role that attention plays in consciousness.  I may need to do a little more research develop this idea further in a future post.