A fresh start for a new academic year

Whether the new academic year has started for you already, will soon or is already half way through, I wish all students, teachers and educators a successful  'new year'!

Everyday we can learn new things and make new experiences. And as teachers, most importantly, we can also learn from our students, as well as the good and the bad days! Explore something new each day! 

And on and on...

You get to know new students, become a good group, with all its ups and downs in between. Then, before you realize it, the time with those students comes to an end.
Next, you get new students, and the 'fight' starts all over again, as a teacher or educator, you grow to love your students, and eventually you have to say 'goodbye'. And on and on.
And yet, it is not only the students that learn something during the time! You yourself do as well, and it's always a joy to see the little kids growing and ready for their next steps of life.
In the end, all those goodbyes don't matter so much, cause you know you have helped built their lives, in one way or other...and eventually you might learn what became of them. And instead of just one or two kids, you can be proud of so many more, more and more!

(Just a little motivational thought for the summer holidays)

Daily rituals - development and meaning

A translation of one of the essays that i wrote for my oral exam of my Masters degree:

In science, at first rituals have only been connected with the religious area. But by now there is a number of theories and definitions on what a "ritual" is supposed to be, how they are developed and what usage they might have. David J. Krieger collected some of them in his handbook "Ritualtheorien (ritual theories), written in 1998. The amount of essays ranges from theories of the construction of rituals to visualizing the rituals by means of cultural and social events, for example, soccer play. Still, even today rituals are mainly asssosiated with big events, and less with our daily lives. But even here rituals can surely be found.

To further discuss this, there first has to be shown how rituals can be developed and how theoretical constructions of them are understood. Durkheims theory, that has been shown in the handbook, tells that rituals are ways, to socially appropriate and condition individual perception and behaviour. Rituals are supposed to construct common ideals and therefore to confirm and validate society. Thus,  they are used as a mediation device between individuals, to connect them as a group and society. In this, there is a differentiation between three levels: Micro, meso and makrolevel, which all have different functions.

While the macrolevel indeed is connected with "big ceremonies", the mesolevel is directed to the behaviour and conduction and the microlevel is relatead to speech. In daily life, the last two are of meaning, behaviour as well as speech. To conclude, daily rituals can be put into the micro- as well as mesolevel.

But still, through this levels alone, rituals still cannot be defined completely. Before it has been noted that rituals can help to confirm society. But for this confirmation to happen, rituals need to have a symbolic meaning. If rituals are overstepped, be it on purpose or unknowingly, the society and its order is questioned. But whether there is also a practical usage behind rituals, is another matter. This is more likely in daily life than in big events. 

Most rituals develop through habit, as well as the opposite, rituals can develop habits. Routiniued daily activities are not neccessarly rituals. But they will be transformed to ritual acts, if they are followed with a certain ritual attitude. Surely in daily life these boundaries are interchangeable, and for a surveillours point of view it will always be hard to determine whether someone is making a ritual or simply a routinized task. It cannot be seen purely on the practical benefit.

If rituals in daily life are developed through socialisation and habitualisation, it is not possible to withdraw from them, be it with interhuman communications or when using objects. Even making coffee in the morning, or the way of greeting when arriving at work already can be rituals. Even if the original meaning behind an action has been lost, it still is possible to continue to conduct a ritual. It is not only the action itself that makes the ritual, but the routinized and ritualised partial steps of a task.

When rituals are developed, they can determine unwritten roules in interhuman behaviours and relationships. Through the internalized knowledge of these rituals the living together between people is made easier. The conduction of rituals does not need to be done consciously, but still rituals can give security and confidence. The breaking of rituals can also disrupt old structures and give possibilities to see new points of views. Therefore rituals are purposeful, but it can be just as important to consciously divert from them.

Rituals are strongly connected with their related cultures. As example, there are different daily rituals in Japan, Germany or America. The rituals of the own culture usually are so internalized that they can be done without thinking, and this is an even stronger impression when being in a different culture. This breaking of habits and knowledge is not only negative: it gives possibility to see and reflect on ones own culture and its daily ritual habits.

Therefore, the knowledge about rituals in day to day life can indeed have a practical usage in (inter)cultural education and the mediation and exchange between cultures.

The original one is in German language, so please bear with writing or grammar mistakes.

Scientifical news..

I've not been able to write much this past month, so what should be a habit turned out to be impossible for a while, but I will try to keep you posted for at least the monthly news about education, psychology, sociology and so on...

How we form habits, change existing ones

"Studies show that about 40 percent of people's daily activities are performed each day in almost the same situations. Habits emerge through associative learning. "We find patterns of behavior that allow us to reach goals. We repeat what works, and when actions are repeated in a stable context, we form associations between cues and response," Wendy Wood explains in her session at the American Psychological Association's 122nd Annual Convention."

This short essay by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology explaines how habits are formed in our minds, why we need them, and how we might be able to change or get new ones.

Stronger early reading skills predict higher intelligence later

"A new study of identical twins has found that early reading skill might positively affect later intellectual abilities. The study, in the journal Child Development, was conducted by researchers at the University of Edinburgh and King's College London."

In this study they have tested reading skills and intelligence of twins repeatedly in different ages. With this, they've seen a link between good early reading skills and later higher intelligence.

New insights into how young and developing readers make sense of words

This news is about a study made by the University of Leicester.

"The study found that while developing young readers and skilled adult readers had similar difficulty correctly recognising anagrams that can form another word by switching the order of only the inside letters, both age groups found it equally easy to recognise anagrams when the outside letters also had to be switched around to form another word.
This is because the brain has difficulty keeping track of the position of inside letters when recognising words but assigns special importance to the outside letters."

"The findings are important for understanding the role of letter position in children’s word recognition, including in dyslexia."

Part of brain stays as active in old age as it was in youth

"At least one part of the human brain may be able to process information the same way in older age as it does in the prime of life, according to new research conducted at the University of Adelaide."

"Both younger (aged 18-38 years) and older (55-95 years) adults had the same responses for spatial attention tasks involving touch, sight or sound."

This study shows, that while some cognitive and reaction times are slowed down during the aging process, other types of awareness, e.g. spatial attention tasks are staying more agile even in an old age.

Stress during pregnancy can be passed down through generations, rat study shows

"To better understand problems during pregnancies today, we should look to the experiences of our ancestors, research published in the open access journal BMC Medicine suggests. Scientists investigating pregnancies in four generations of rats show that inherited epigenetic effects of stress could affect pregnancies for generations."

"Gerlinde Metz, senior author of the article, says: "We show that stress across generations becomes powerful enough to shorten pregnancy length in rats and induce hallmark features of human preterm birth. A surprising finding was that mild to moderate stress during pregnancy had a compounding effect across generations. Thus, the effects of stress grew larger with each generation.""

MACH: My Automated Conversation coacH

MACH is a new software developed by M.I.T, that is supposed to helf social anxious people to "perform" better in social interactions, like, for example, job interviews. It recordes the amount of smiles, the tone and levels of the voice, the words said, eye contact and so on, and also responds to your expressions. Therefore, it can provide feedback that you are rather unlikely to get in a face to face conversation with a real person. Certainly it can need a bit more developing, like making the voice sound more natural, but it's a good idea! Certainly "normally developed" people don't really need such a program, aside from evaluating their way of talking, but for those with low social interaction or for example Aspergers, it could be an engaging way to practice their skills without having to be afraid on the effects on another person.

"But MACH takes a more instructive approach. The idea sprung from a workshop held by the Asperger’s Association of New England, where Hoque and fellow researchers were approached by people seeking a technological solution to their social hardships. “Once I start talking I don’t know when to stop, and people lose interest, and I don’t know why,” one person told Hoque. People asked for a tool with which they could practice human interaction privately—insulated from the insecurities created in social situations.
The software was built over two years, using more than half a million lines of code. As a matter of convenience, Hoque’s team used their immediate surroundings to develop a proof of concept: they tested out the interaction-training system by conducting trial job interviews with ninety M.I.T. undergraduates seeking to improve their self-presentation in front of prospective employers. “In a technical university—where people are really, really technical—it’s possible that many people would have social difficulty,” Hoque explained. For on-campus career prep, “The best thing to do is interact with a human, but that’s limited.”
[...]
While the prototype runs locally on computers, Hoque, who recently completed his Ph.D. and is now at the University of Rochester, would like to make it widely available online, which he says would take between six months and a year for two or three engineers to develop. He’s now seeking funding, and he said there has been interest from organizations that support autism research, as well as from private companies.
Hoque, who has spent more time than anyone interacting with MACH, told me, “I have a love-hate relationship with it. There have been so many conversations at three A.M. when I’m writing code.” He doesn’t consider this to be genuine communication, though. “Human communication is so rich and the technology is not there yet,” he said. “I don’t even look at it as a person. It’s just software asking me questions. I know it’s a bunch of lines of code. I might as well just do this with a blank screen.”"

Betsy Morais: Machine that teaches people how to talk 

Soft drinks linked to behavioral problems in young children

Just like the title says, I came upon a news today about a study that connected the amount of soft drinks being drunk, with the behavior problems of the children. To make things short, here is a quote about the study:








"Shakira Suglia, ScD, and colleagues from Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, University of Vermont, and Harvard School of Public Health assessed approximately 3,000 5-year-old children enrolled in the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a prospective birth cohort that follows mother-child pairs from 20 large U.S. cities. Mothers reported their child’s soft drink consumption and completed the Child Behavior Checklist based on their child’s behavior during the previous two months. The researchers found that 43% of the children consumed at least 1 serving of soft drinks per day, and 4% consumed 4 or more.
Aggression, withdrawal, and attention problems were associated with soda consumption. Even after adjusting for sociodemographic factors, maternal depression, intimate partner violence, and paternal incarceration, any soft drink consumption was associated with increased aggressive behavior. Children who drank 4 or more soft drinks per day were more than twice as likely to destroy things belonging to others, get into fights, and physically attack people. They also had increased attention problems and withdrawal behavior compared with those who did not consume soft drinks.
According to Dr. Suglia, “We found that the child’s aggressive behavior score increased with every increase in soft drinks servings per day.” Although this study cannot identify the exact nature of the association between soft drink consumption and problem behaviors, limiting or eliminating a child’s soft drink consumption may reduce behavioral problems."

“Soft Drinks Consumption Is Associated with Behavior Problems in 5-Year-Olds,” by Shakira F. Suglia, ScD, Sara Solnick, PhD, and David Hemenway, PhD, appears in The Journal of Pediatrics (www.jpeds.com), DOI 10.1016/j.jpeds.2013.06.023, published by Elsevier.

I found that news there: Soft Drinks and Behavioral Problems in Young Children 

Well, if you imagine the large amount of sugar, and in some cases coffein, giving it to a five year old just doesn't seem to be a well idea. Their brains are still developing, and when getting so much sugar at that time already, they quickly adapt and get used to it. So naturally, it can lead to withdrawal symptoms, which again, can cause them to be more aggressive. Also, with soft drinks there can be quite some chemistry involved, and who knows what those do, maybe in the end it's not the sugar, but the other chemical additives in those beverages.

For example, certain artificial colors have been connected to stronger ADHD symptoms.
You can read about this here: http://www.webmd.com/add-adhd/childhood-adhd/food-dye-adhd
and here: http://www.rd.com/health/conditions/artificial-food-coloring-and-adhd-2/

 But to give a bit "food for thought" (don't worry, no soft drink included), I will end here with a quote that I once came across when I had to write my first paper ever:

"For example, the desire for sweets can be instinctively a way out of emotional lonliness, lack of love, or intellectual overload. With the help of the sugar, the organism can create a temporarily strengthening of the self-confidence, but in the end, this only means a weakening, because it has been made without using the powers of ones own self. This weakening can show a strong desire for isolated sugars, even going into addiction, and the actual cause stays untouched. We can easily see, that in these cases we can only raise the misery with the "logical" explanations or even prohibitions." 

A. Strauß; R. von Kries; B. Koletzko: Adipositasprävention im Kindes- und Jugendalter. In: Praxis der Naturwissenschaften vereinigt mit Biologie in der Schule. 11 (2005) 8 p. 23

The infamous triangle

While I have plenty of topics that I still want to write about, one simple one is actually already displayed in the background image! Notice the triangle? Well, actually there is also a triangle as a symbolic representation of a teaching process.

I think it's not so well known around the world, but at the university that I studied at it was used....almost everywhere for a basic of didactic methods. The reason for this is simple indeed: the main person who developed that "triangle", had been a professor there: Wolfgang Sünkel, who showed in his book (Phänomenologie des Unterrichts) in 1996 the thought process to create this triangle as well as giving several different variations.



If there are other ones who also made such kind of theory or similar concepts, let me know, since I don't know!

Anyway, while I wouldn't say that kind of theoretical construction is the best, and neither good for real practical usage, it can give a general idea about the complexities and relationships during learning processes.

What this triangle wants to show, is that for every learning process, there are three "edges" that are always there, no matter what the learning is about. The edges of the triangle are the following:

The teacher: Like the name says this is a person, or several, that teaches someone about something. (And unlike the term, this doesn't mean just school teachers, but a role that is applied in a learning process. I just don't know a better English term for that) He, the teacher, is the one who asks "what can I do for the student to successfully learn about the object?" "How can i make my kid remember the way to school?" "'How can i teach my kitten about the value of life?" Those questions already leads to the second edge.

The object: Unlike the name implies, this doesn't need to be a physical object. It can as well be a method of doing something in a specific order, the understanding of a theory, how to make ice cream, or whatever. The object however, usually doesn't ask any questions (would be odd if it did, I guess). It is simply what the student wants to learn. And this already shows the most important point, the top of the triangle.

The student: No matter if one or more students, this is the entity that needs to be interested into the object, to actually trigger the learning process. So the student is the one who says: "wow, soccer is cool, teach me the rules!" "Show me how you've built that house, I want to be able to built one too!" It should be clear now, that the students wants to "assimilate" the object, making it a part of himself that he can later use by himself without the need of help.

So now that you know the basic parts of the triangle, let's show some more how they are related:
Basically, an object can be just anything. But on the other hand, there are still limits. Can you learn a cat, for example? Sure you can watch the cute kitten hiding in a box, but that doesn't mean that now the kitten is a part of you. That's something that's impossible, because, well, how do you want a living kitten to be a part of yourself? Unless maybe if you eat the poor kitten (....oh my, please please, no!). A cat is another living being, in this case with fur and claws and fluffiness. So what you can learn or assimilate is not the cat (unless you are a borg or know fusion like Son Goku, maybe), but the knowledge ABOUT the cat, or about the cats behavior, so you can use that knowledge when going along with other cats. Shortly said, in this case, the cat is the medium for the knowledge about the cat, which is the object.

But how can the student learn about the object he wants to assimilate? While some objects, like study books can be object and teacher at the same time, usually the teacher steps in, completing that triangle.

- At this point I already had a long and tiresome discussion with a teacher, because, the necessity of a teacher in some way or other somehow disagrees with the idea of autodidacts, at least in my opinion. After all, there are learning processes that happen with trial and error, with no one telling you on what to do. But I guess the trial and error would be the teacher then. Or, you are teacher and student combined, which also would make the triangle somehow crumble. -

So let's just assume that there actually is another person that is your teacher on, let's say, how to cook. How can the teacher present the object "cooking", so that you easily put it into your own pool of "yeah I can do that, now and forever"? For this, the teacher has to connect with the initial trigger, the interest of the student for the object. Because of that, there are new lines inside the triangle, which in the end, can create the lesson.


Now, the student is mainly interested in the object, and secondary the teachings that the teacher can give, to be able to assimilate the object. The teacher is interested mainly in the lesson, which means the teaching about the object for the student to learn it, and preferably, also in the object. The object however is lazy again, and shouldn't have any interests, unless it's a precious companion cube. If it is the case and the object is in fact a companion cube, I would urge you to disregard its advice.

The process is completed, when the student successfully learned all there is to learn, and, at least theoretically, could turn into a teacher for that topic too. So if a young person shows an old one how to use a smartphone, that old person can later show and teach it to his friends.

There are many varieties of the triangle depending of the student, teacher, object, as well as their quantities and qualities and relationships, but I hope I gave you a good insight on the basic idea. Which sadly, still is rather useless if you actually have to teach something to someone. Even if it's just teaching someone how to get up in the morning in order to get to work on time. The problem that this concept leaves out, is what to do  to actually give the lesson successfully, and what to do


if you have to teach someone who's not interested, because without that interest, the triangle won't even be created, at least that's the way how i see it.

But hey, with that triangle, you can at least try and make plans for the learning processes! I think the most important thing this triangle can teach is the following: You don't teach someone for the sake of teaching, but because you want the student to reach his or her goal of learning, and to be able to successfully take use of the gained knowledge. It should be all about the student, not the teacher. But in a sense, the teacher is a student too, learning with the experience about teaching. But this would already be another triangle, with the "teaching the student" as an object.

So, maybe, in the end, it's more like a circle in which the object is passed around, giving everyone the chance to learn what they wish to learn?