Joseph LeDoux's webpage: http://www.cns.nyu.edu/home/ledoux

Recognizing fear: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4102981.stm

Recognizing fear by a person who is blind: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/4090155.stm

A neuro-scientist said recently that 45 minutes straight is just too long to sustain attention. How did he know? Aside from his research? Because he went back to school and just couldn't believe the long lectures and tried hard not to fall asleep. So...

Do you have any tricks or methods for allowing your students to concentrate better? To break up the time? What are they?

It is becoming more and more a political issue to have more tests.
Pupils sit down and test. If they test correctly, they have learned what we have wanted them to learn.

Maybe there are other ways to teach that are harder to explain to the people we need to report to, because the results are harder to see. Are there? Are we neglecting basic fundamental ways of teaching?

And secondly, on the larger scale, are we moving forward or going back to the middle-ages in the way we teach these days? Give an example from the classroom of where you stand on this issue.

The Brain needs oxygen!
Students need to get up from their desks.
How do you make your teaching FUN?
Maybe you don't have your students dance mathematics (or do you?)
but HOW do you involve the physical body more in your teaching?

TEACHING WITHOUT TEACHERS

Can we really manage to teach without teachers, of course we can, natural evolution has endowed as with the ability to both teach and learn sometime around 50,000 years ago, we can communicate, and with that communication we naturally teach each other through question and answers virtually every minute of every day.

Our imagination and response to the spoken word is the most vital part of being human, it is now over 10 years since I discovered the abacus, I realised within 10 minutes of watching it, that nothing in the world could beat the abacus or any abacus as a foolproof method of teaching mathematics, but I have beaten any abacus, I have created an abacus that is written in words, an abacus that can be written in any language, an abacus if necessary that can be printed on the back of the page of waste paper an abacus that would cost less than a penny to produce all it needs are seven stones and a few hours teaching time for anyone to be able to use it.

But even better than an abacus for a penny I have produced an abacus which we are making in China to be sold in every country around the world, it will be produced and marketed at the cheapest possible price, in order to spread the basic abilities, which the abacus endows in its users, it is the ability to understand the meaning of numbers, a child teaches itself to speak by copying the sounds that he or she in its daily life it imitates those sounds and associates the meaning of the sounds with the articles and language that surround it.

It is not natural for us to read, but it is perfectly natural for us to be able to read, yesterday I sat with my brothers granddaughter, she is only four years and six months old, when her brother who was a year and half older was being taught the alphabet in rhythm she was able to sing the alphabet almost as quickly and as well as he was able to, after showing me how well she was able to read, which was extremely well for her age, I took her through the abacus one, she has done some work on it but very little, because of her ability to read she was able to read and manipulate the abacus to illustrate her counting to over 500 before she became bored.

With good teaching and more abacus before she is six years old, the rest of her education will be a mere walk-through.. As I see it we need to spend more time working thoroughly with symbols, my own granddaughter who is 3 1/2 can recognise every letter of the alphabet and make all the associated sounds with every letter of the alphabet, I was able to set out simple three letter words which she was able to read, if her progress is as good as that of a half-cousin then I shall be most pleased.

Teaching very young children how to use the abacus has convinced me that we are generally underestimating the abilities of the child and that it is that every healthy child in learning to do mathematics quickly adapts what the child is learning into perfect understanding of numbers, I also feel that the part of the brain the child is using to work with numbers is being exercised allowing it to understand all visual symbols and groups of symbols and associating those symbols with the sounds they represent.

My belief is that nursery and primary schools should develop fully integrated teaching programmes which throughout the day concentrate on symbol recognition sight and sound.

Over writing and copying symbols along with working within groups of different ages establishes and reinforces the sounds of symbols as well as the meaning of those sounds and their associated combination within language. Most of my observations are contained somewhere within my websites.
Geoff has illustrated far better than I could have done the principles and suggestions that I have been trying to incorporate within my observations on this website.

Obviously the principles that I am advocating need to be practised researched and trialled properly, there is only one day that we can use to start this program, and that is tomorrow, don't we all will naturally use the information we gather today to improve our own and everyone else's tomorrow. If the information that I have researched and proven to myself had been of an agricultural nature, farmers would have been using it, from the very first day they heard about it, but the teaching profession is extremely slow, at taking up new concepts and developing them.

The television and the computer is to where we must look for secondary and ongoing education put to practical teaching of everything that we humans need to know and do only showing and doing is ever liable to provide the ongoing lifelong education we virtually all realise is possible.

Geoff. i doubt wether i shall live to see a better day for me thankyou.

April 10, 2006
Good Morning

We know that myelin covers the neuron's axons and other vital areas of nerve cells. Myelin is made by the oligodendrocytes which rap around the axons in the CNS and the Schwann Cells in the PNS. Good read retrieved from the internet directed to the site at http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob...8a71df1ebe and url: http://www.mssociety.org.uk/what_is_ms/index.html
Url: http://www.myelin.org/

Best,
Rob

Triple Code Model

Dehaene proposes three different codes for representing number: a verbal code that is used to manipulate number words and perform mental numerical operations (e.g., multiplication); a visual code that is used to decode frequently used visual number forms (e.g., Arabic digits); and an abstract analog code that may be used to represent numerical quantities. Each of these codes is associated with a different neural substrate.

Do you see implications of this for teaching mathematics?

Thanks,
Christina

Dehaene, S. (1992). Varieties of numerical abilities. Cognition 44, 1-42.
Dehaene, S. (1996). J. Cogn. Neurosci. 8, 47-68.
Pinel, P., Dehaene, S., Riviere, D., and LeBihan, D. (2001). Neuroimage 14, 1013-1026.

April 1, 2006

Good Afternoon,

The immune system helps to protect us from viruses and other foreign bodies....The autoimmune sytem can turn on the good cells and destroy them....what makes this happen is one of the objectives of this thread. First first we need to review the immune system. Remember the brain and body are a system and one thing tends to affect the other.
Retrieve from the internet today...good read.
Best,
Rob URL: http://www.niaid.nih.gov/final/immds/immdeff.htm

How does learning on the web differ from learning in classrooms? One advantage of technology is that it can easily accommodate individual differences by, for example, offering multiple means of representation. However, an interpersonal relationship with a teacher can provide an “affective hook” into learning. Dr. Richard Mollica of Harvard Medical School raised the question as to whether web-based learning can provide this type of affective hook. From my experience on this form, I would venture to say that it can.

Thoughts on this or other issues related to web-based learning?

All the best,
Christina

To read more about the work of Dr. Richard Mollica, see: http://www.hprt-cambridge.org/