The Elephant (Foot) In The Room

    I currently hold a bachelor's degree in Biology, and have taken three physiology courses, two anatomy courses, and one neuroscience class.  I still know next to nothing about the brain.  I think even hardened neuroscientists would say that there are many mysteries yet to solve in the field, entire fields of neurons with no known function.  Be that as it may, when I read about the learning process at the cellular level, and about the structures and pathways of the brain that promote "learning", I feel comforted in a way.  I relate the feeling to living in a home that has doors that you have just barely cracked open, and stairs to entire floors that you've never climbed.  You don't know anything about what's behind those doors or on those other floors, but you know it's your home and that you're safe. 

    My latest reading brought about some of those feelings.  Eric Jensen's book, Teaching with the Brain in Mind, uses fundamental anatomy and physiology of the nervous system to inform best teaching practices.  Like others who speak and write well about the brain, he draws the reader in wondrous facts about the brain and comforts them with easy-to-understand language while still applying technical vocabulary.  This kind of digestible science is what I want to emulate as a teacher.

    Another crucial part of making science digestible and relatable for students is allowing for humor.  Jensen is able to get in some jokes in his chapters while still maintaining respect for the content.  I think that this aspect can be easier for an educator than for an author of scientific literature.  For one thing, our audience is younger and probably wont take science as seriously as industry professionals.  But even in graduate school and beyond, adults continue to learn, and I'm a firm believer that humor bolsters learning.  When we can laugh, we become less stressed about content.  More importantly, if we are able to laugh at a joke that connects a complex subject with something we've seen before, it indicates an understanding of that subject.  

    For example, as a way of venting about prior work experience with my co-workers in that field, I became quite enamored with memes.  Combining a pun or a quick few words of a joke with a photograph that served as context for the joke, really hits the right way sometimes, and I can go through a string of relatable memes and bust multiple proverbial "guts".  One that I made for our class, after being reminded of synapses and their structure in Chapter 2, I'm quite personally fond of.  It serves to help students visualize two vastly different things, and laugh at their similarities (at least I laugh):

    One issue that came up in class with Jensen was his assessment of differences in critical thinking skills between classes of people, specifically "male" and "female".  This is something that I didn't gather from the reading because of the edition that I read.  The second edition has this chapter on critical thinking that is absent from the first edition, so knowing little else about what he talks about, I find it strange that he includes this controversial and debatable viewpoint in a more recent edition.  Why was this chapter added, and what purpose does it serve?  How did he come to believe that it was critically important to claim that boys and girls have different critical thinking capabilities, when all of the literature that I read from the first edition stuck only with humans as a species, not categorizing (much) into different classes of people. 

Still, I learned a lot from the material, and I think much of what he encourages in practice, based on the research discusses, align with my own.  I will dig into his reasoning more and try to take it all into perspective.  

I bid you happy trails, smooth sails, and myelinated axons.