What's Wrong with Expert Advice?

The latest Discover Magazine (June 2009) has an interesting little snippet on pg 16, under their Good News/Bad News column. Under The Bad News:

Expert advice inhibited parts of the brain [emphasis theirs] important for decision-making in a financial game as participants shifted responsibility to the expert, a brain imaging study by economists and psychiatrists found at Emory University found.

This has interesting real-world implications in so many parts of our daily lives, including the education of our children. You stop thinking so much for yourself when you know there's an "expert" around to tell you what to do.

And in dealing with our own children, if we don't act as the "expert," but rather assistants in their learning and discovering, it seems they would participate more and make their own thoughtful decisions. Am I reaching here? I don't think so. What do you think?

If you keep tying your child's shoes, when he obviously is trying to do it himself, you take over, you're the expert, and he'll stop thinking about it. And he'll just give up when he sees you, knowing you can do it better, and faster, and more "expertly." There are so many. If your child isn't ready to make the attempt, or shows no interest, that's a different story, of course. Just an example.

But it seems as though this Emory University study would apply just about everywhere. So if you want to master a subject, skill, hobby, or even a game, don't go to the experts! Sure, they're great for getting you started, for helping you along a bit, but when it comes down to it, you'll probably do a lot better in the long run if you try to figure things out for yourself.

Calvin and Hobbes at schooool's out for-evaaa...come on everybody, let all ya hairs hang out!!!

One of my favorite people posted one of the greatest Calvin and Hobbes comic strips on her blog:
schooool's out for-evaaa...come on everybody, let all ya hairs hang out!!!: calvin & hobbes and unschooling

Who doesn't love Calvin and Hobbes?

This particular strip was published first on July 16, 1995, then later in It's a Magical World on page 69. This site lets you search for a specific strip.

Sugar Cookie Tarts Recipe

Sugar Cookie Tarts

makes about 2 ½ dozen cookies

Emily baked these cookies--my only assistance was in helping pick the black raspberries from our sprawling, out-of-control raspberry patch.

This picture was just taken 4 days earlier--we've been picking ever since and most are turning black now. They ripen really quickly.

To prevent fresh fruit from browning, toss fruit in a little lemon juice before placing on tarts.

2 cups sugar
1 cup shortening (sorry about the shortening! LOL)
¾ cup (1 ½ sticks) margarine (ick!) or butter (yeah!)
2 tsp vanilla
1 egg (ours came from one of our hens, naturally!)

3 ½ cups all-purpose flour (in our case, we were almost out of all-purpose, so Emily substituted
cake flour for probably 2 cups of the flour--I couldn't tell the difference)
1 tsp baking powder
¼ tsp salt
Cream Cheese Spread—see recipe below
Toppings—sliced fresh fruit, mini chocolate chips, chopped pecans or jam and toasted sliced almonds


Heat oven to 375 deg F. Mix sugar, shortening, butter, vanilla and egg in large bowl. Stir in flour, baking powder and salt.

Roll half of dough at a time ¼ inch thick on lightly floured surface. Cut into 3-inch rounds. Place 2 inches apart on ungreased cookie sheet. Bate 10-12 min or until light brown.

Cool slightly; remove from cookie sheet. Cool completely.

Prepare Cream Cheese Spread. Spread about 2 tsp over each cookie. Arrange toppings on spread. Refrigerate any remaining cookies (who ever has remaining cookies?? Oh, I get it: if you "sampled" some of the cream cheese spread and didn't have enough for all the cookies . . .).



Cream Cheese Spread
½ cup sugar
1 tsp vanilla
1 package (8 oz) cream cheese, softened (Emily used the kind in the tub, not the block, which starts out a lot softer, I think)

Mix ingredients until smooth.

Serving size (go ahead, laugh): 1 cookie (who ever ate one cookie???)
270 calories, 16g fat, 15 mg cholesterol, 115 mg sodium, 30g carbohydrates, 2g protein


They give advice on rolling if you’ve never done this kind of cookie—
Start with properly chilled dough. Avoid re-rolling dough more than twice; aim to roll it out once then assemble and “scraps” and roll them out together (once, or at most twice). Dust dough, rolling pin and work surface with just enough flour to keep dough from sticking, because excess flour makes cookies tough. Dough that is very sticky can be rolled between sheets of waxed paper.



This recipe is from Betty Crocker's Creative Cookies cookbook, pg. 26, copyright 1995 by General mills, Inc. The ISBN is 0-02-860366-4 if you want to try to find a copy.

Bill Nye Videos

Thomas and Emily love to watch the Bill Nye the Science Guy dvds from the library. Just in the last two weeks, they've seen:

• Deserts
  
• Biodiversity
  
• Lakes & ponds
  
• Earth's crust
  
• Insects
  
• Inventions

Right now we have checked out:

• Earthquakes
• Do-it-yourself science
  
• Balance
• Brain
• Electrical current
• Human transportation
  

Each episode is only about 24 minutes long, and I'm pretty sure we've checked out every single one from the library before (some, more than a few times)--they're just so entertaining, we keep going back!

Clean the Bay Day Acitivities

Last Saturday, Thomas and I went to our area's first annual Clean the Bay Day event, sponsored by the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. Thomas has wanted to do something to help save sea turtles for about a year or so now, and this event was the first thing I've found that we could do without traveling for hours.

From the organizer:

I think it was a very productive day and everyone that participated seemed to really enjoy the time they dedicated and take pride in the overall accomplishments of our group.

Here are the stats:
1. Area Cleared: McIntire Park - Meadowbrook Creek, Charlottesville, VA
2. Total Volunteers: 33
3. Active Military: N/A
4. Total Miles Cleaned: +/- 1.0 mile
5. Total Weight: 750 lbs.
6. Trash by category:

• Cigarette Butts: 10
  
• Plastic: 630
  
• Glass: 217
• Styrofoam/Polystyrene: 146
  
• Aluminum & Metal Containers: 221
  
• Paper: 322
  
• Appliances, Furniture, Machinery, Auto Parts, etc: 6
  
• Fishing Debris: 0
  
• Construction/Structural Debris: 30
  
• Tires: 5
  
• Other: 65 7.
  
• Most Unusual Item Collected: Human Skull (plastic)
  

For the first ever Charlottesville area Clean the Bay Day we had:
- 3 cleanup sites
- 50 volunteers
- 1,625 pounds of trash collected ... WOW!

Here are photos from the three sites: http://www.flickr.com/photos/chesapeakebayfoundation/sets/72157619362272043/

Thomas really had fun collecting trash, getting into the creek, and soaking his boots and pant legs. :) We were split up into teams. My main focus was avoiding poison ivy--which I was successful at! I also was the person who carried the trash bag for the most part. We also had someone who kept track of every piece of trash collected.

This was our group, but we had probably left by the time they took the shot. Most of the members of our group (there were three locations in Charlottesville) were involved in the Rivanna Master Naturalists program in some way, and/or with the co-operative extension.

Are You Raising Free-Range Kids?

This article from The Star, in Toronto, is a great read. It's titled Why free-range kids are on the rise: Amid recession, there are signs the status-obsessed helicopter parent is under threat, by Andrea Gordon

From the beginning of the article:

Elizabeth Sloss and Kari Svenneby live at opposite ends of Toronto. They are mothers at different stages of childrearing. One has sons, the other a daughter.

What they have in common is attitude. Call them the anti-helicopter parents. They're less about hovering, more about laissez-faire. In their opinion, boredom is not bad for children. And they steadfastly refuse to join the legions of mothers and fathers chauffeuring kids from piano lessons to soccer to tutoring centres aimed at earning them a spot on the honour role.

As Sloss describes it, she is "among the avant-garde of benign neglect." Her sons, 19 and 14, walked to school without grownups from a young age, always played freely outside, and – horrors! – even on the road. But then again, isn't that why they call it road hockey?

Svenneby isn't averse to organized activity, "but it's a question of balance." Her four-year-old daughter plays outside everyday, rain or snow. She climbs trees and makes dandelion crowns.

Until recently, these two mothers might have been lonely voices in the playground, but their calls for slower, freer childhoods are catching on.

Links to books and articles referenced:

• Why I Let My 9-Year-Old Ride the Subway Alone by Lenore Skenazy
• Free-Range Kids: Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts with Worry by Lenore Skenazy
• Too Safe for Their Own Good: How Risk and Responsibility Help Teens Thrive by Michael Ungar
• Scientific American's article The Serious Need for Play: Free, imaginative play is crucial for normal social, emotional and cognitive development. It makes us better adjusted, smarter and less stressed--By Melinda Wenner
  

  From the article, I liked this part: How do these seemingly pointless activities benefit kids? Perhaps most crucially, play appears to help us develop strong social skills. “You don’t become socially competent via teachers telling you how to behave,” Pellegrini says. “You learn those skills by interacting with your peers, learning what’s acceptable, what’s not acceptable.” Children learn to be fair and take turns—they cannot always demand to be the fairy queen, or soon they have no playmates. “They want this thing to keep going, so they’re willing to go the extra mile” to accommodate others’ desires, he explains. Because kids enjoy the activity, they do not give up as easily in the face of frustration as they might on, say, a math problem—which helps them develop persistence and negotiating abilities.

• The Hurried Child by David Elkind
• And then there is the website for The Active Kids Club, founded by Kari Svenneby

Seems to me that unschoolers have been doing this for a long time now!

New Photos of the Scorpions

The babies are over a month old now. We're finding molted exoskeletons, so that means they're growing! This is probably the second molting--the first one happens pretty soon after they are born. They will molt between 5 and 7 times before they reach maturity, and for these guys, that will probably take up to 8 months or longer. I really wish we had realized that the mother was pregnant when we saw her so huge-looking, though I'm not sure what we could have done. Disturbing her while she's giving birth can really mess things up, as in, she might just eat the babies. Ick!

QOTD--Nietzsche

There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness. -- Friedrich Nietzsche

This is the photo of the day at National Geographic. It really looks like a painting to me. I don't know why I included it in this post, but this is possibly a long-married couple. Let's hope they are a bit mad as well. :)

Ok, here's another Nietzsche quote:

The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself. --Friedrich Nietzsche

This one speaks to me on several levels. I haven't read much Nietzsche, and what I did read was in high school or college, so I don't know the context of that quote. But it seems to me that the tribe he speaks of could be as large as your country, culture, or even the "tribe of man." But it could also be your friends and family, too. I think that homeschoolers, and even more, radical unschoolers, feel this quite a bit.

The Quotations Page has, obviously, a lot of quotes to choose from. :) Here are two more:

Digressions, objections, delight in mockery, carefree mistrust are signs of health; everything unconditional belongs in pathology. --Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently. --Friedrich Nietzsche, The Dawn, Sec. 297

Appreciate the Wondrous

This came across an email list I'm on and I wanted to pass it on. Maybe you've seen it before, but I hadn't.

The 7 Wonders of the World...

A group of Geography students studied the Seven Wonders of the World. At the end of that section, the students were asked to list that they considered to be Seven Wonders of the Modern World.

Though there was some disagreement, the following got the most votes:
1. Egypt's Great Pyramids
2. Taj Mahal
3. Grand Canyon
4. Panama Canal
5. Empire State Building
6. St. Peter's Basilica
7. China's Great Wall

Gathering the votes, the teacher noted that one student, a quiet girl, hadn't turned in her paper yet. So she asked the girl if she was having trouble with her list. The girl replied, "Yes, a little. I couldn't quite make up my mind because there were so many." The teacher said, "Well, tell us what you have, and maybe we can help."

The girl hesitated, then read, "I think the Seven Wonders of the World are:"
1. to touch
2. to taste
3. to see
4. to hear

She hesitated a little, and then added:
5. to run
6. to laugh
7. and to love

May you be reminded today of those things which are truly wondrous.