I get a happy little alert-puff every time I hear about a suspect getting a “Miranda” warning: “You have the right to remain silent…”

You know why? Because I wrote a paper about the Miranda Supreme Court case in high school. And without any conscious decision, I became someone who is forever personally invested in a 41-year old Supreme Court decision. I’m that way about pretty much every project I ever did for school or work. Transcendentalism, Chartres Cathedral, Antarctica. It’s not just that I remember what I learned. It’s that the topic stuck like a tatoo: one of my enduring personality traits is an interest in the Miranda decision.

That’s the trick of teaching, isn’t it? To make what you’re teaching a part of who your students are. If you can do it for now, that’s great. If you can do it forever, so much the better.

Krystyna Plut is teaches elementary science teacher at Holy Trinity School in Grapevine, Texas. According to the Dallas Morning News, she just won an award for her unit “What Should I do with My Land.”

The two-month-long unit called What Should I Do with My Land? positions students so they have to decide whether to tap into the minerals located on their hypothetical piece of land.

The project is relevant for her students because of local controversy surrounding the drilling in the Barnett Shale.

“I was surprised because they really got into it,” she said. “They would bring me newspaper clippings about it [natural gas drilling], and they would just have these discussions about whether they should lease their mineral rights or not.”

They brought in newspaper clippings. That’s because they got that same alert-puff when they saw headlines about drilling. You can almost hear them thinking, “That applies to ME!”

When educational policy people draft those long lists of content knowledge requirements on which tests will be based, they never think of this. Sure, you can get kids to know stuff, and kids should learn real content. But that, by itself, won’t turn kids into people who care about that content.

And it’s the caring, not the knowledge, that makes education matter.

I’m not being figurative here (this isn’t about how we should learn some of this but also some of that). I just finished reading a fascinating book called Balance: In Search of the Lost Sense by Scott McCredie.  McCredie argues that balance, our “sixth sense” is every bit as vital to human functioning as our other senses, yet is usually neglected - by doctors in treating disorders of various kinds, and by everyone else in exercise and self-care regimens.

McCredie’s lively, wide-ranging exploration of balance issues veers from highly significant (why older people fall so much) to just darned interesting (why young children don’t get dizzy when they spin but older kids get carsick at the drop of a hat).

Anyway, about learning. There’s a whole chapter about the strong connection between balance and thinking - and some intriguing evidence that balance disorders may be behind many cases of ADHD and dyslexia. Apparently, vestibular (balance) therapy has made a big difference for some kids.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/usatoday/reportputsapacifieronsmarterbabydebate
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040402715.html

Well, we consumers eventually get our just rewards for accepting teeny little research results as if they were truth revealed from on high. We pay good money for quick fixes, and then we feel betrayed when the results are later revealed to be inaccurate or oversimplified..

So it is with learning and intelligence. Refusing to believe that learning is a multi-facetted, complex process and that intelligence gets built over a lifetime, we look for the quick fix. This week brought news of two quick fixes that didn’t pan out: it turns out toys that are supposed to make smarter babies don’t work, and educational software doesn’t even raise test scores (the article doesn’t seem to mind equating that with improving education).

Have we learned our lessons? Well, the same day I read about the educational software, I read some big news: that playing music has been shown to make kids smarter.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20070319/sc_livescience/playingmusicmakesyousmart

I guess I ought to market a product called “Baby Plays” that teaches babies to play concertos - make a quick buck while I can.

But think about it. Our minds have evolved over millions of years to learn from meaningful, varied activities over a long period of time. So we really ought to be very skeptical that one kind of activity, one piece of technology, one toy could make the difference between life success and failure, or between intelligence and stupidity.

Sometimes truth flies in the face of common sense, but I don’t think this is one of those times. And research seems to bear me out in the long run. So save your money and do Big Learning. It may be old-fashioned, but it works.

http://biz.yahoo.com/weekend/great_1.html

Ha! If people say your child just doesn’t have what it takes, mush this article in their faces. No, just kidding, but read it and remember.

The article describes a long history of research about early talent and later success. Guess what - they conclude it’s all about hard work. If talent is anything, it’s willingness to put in the hard work to get really good at something.

It turns out it takes at least 10 years to get really good, and even if the first stages come easily, pretty much everyone has to put in hours of learning, consistently, over a period of many years, to reach world-class mastery. That goes for chess, sports, music, and any other accomplishment you care to examine.

Why am I jumping up and down over this? Because the talent-based theory of accomplishment is the most hopeless, sad, and unproductive outlook imaginable. If it turns out that nature is everything, and nurture is nothing, well, I guess we have no choice but to live out our dreary little lives being just exactly as we were yesterday. But, ooh la la, if hard work MATTERS, then every day we might do something we thought we never could. That’s a reason to get up in the morning, and that’s an outlook to teach your kids.

I know hard work isn’t all that matters. It’s the real world, and money, connections, and dumb luck have a lot to do with who is successful. But even if hard work isn’t always sufficient, it’s nice to know it’s necessary.

“After The Bell Curve“

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/23/magazine/23wwln_idealab.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

What makes a person smart? Is intelligence something you are just born with, or does your life experience change your intelligence? This is the nature-nurture debate about intelligence.

This article in the New York Times magazine proposes a compromise. The author, David L. Kirp, writes,

“If heredity defines the limits of intelligence, the research shows, experience largely determines whether those limits will be reached. And if this is so, the prospects for remedying social inequalities may be better than we thought.”

Then, the article retells some fascinating research about twins and adopted children reared in wealth or poverty. Kids who were reared in poverty tended to do worse on IQ tests than one would expect from their genetic background, and kids who were raised in wealth tended to do better. So economic environment matters a lot. In fact, one group of kids jumped 20 points after moving to wealthier settings.

In one way, I think this is important research - showing that bad circumstances can make people look less smart than they could in better circumstances, and that in better circumstances they can look smart again. It may seem obvious, but believe me it’s not obvious to everyone.

But in another way, IQ research is such a big “so what.” I don’t care what measure you use of potential - IQ score or a teacher’s assessment. Low assessments of potential will never completely predict what’s possible with support, motivation, and hard work. High assessments will never completely predict who will live up to those expectations. Why are we so interested in a theoretical ceiling that cannot, in the end, predict what an individual will or won’t achieve?

The famous psychologist Benjamin Bloom said,

“After forty years of intensive research, on school learning in the United States as well as abroad, my major conclusion is: What any person in the world can learn, almost all persons can learn, if they are provided with the appropriate prior and current conditions of learning”

And psychologist Carol Dweck comments on Bloom, “He’s not counting the 2 to 3 percent of children who have severe impairments, and he’s not counting the top 1 to 2 percent of children at the other extreme. He is counting everyone else.”

Americans like to believe that intelligence means effortless achievement, and Dweck thinks that belief is toxic for kids. It belies the hard work and dedication that are behind almost any success you care to examine. It also sends kids the message that if they don’t achieve on the first try, they ought to give up, because if they had true ability they wouldn’t need to work.

In fact, instead of reading up on IQ, check out Dweck’s book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. Great stories and a really fun read.