Ellen J. Langer
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By: Perseus Books
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Total reviews: 14
Average rating: 4.0 of 5
The Onslaught will Follow 4 out of 5 stars.
21 of 25 people found this review helpful.
From the mass of information that has come out of brain research and neuropsychiatry, the field of education has managed to get hold of some of the profits. That spotlight is aimed at Mindful Learning, where author Ellen Langer, delivers a worthy introduction into the nature of study and memorization. Her work has balance and her perspective is research-based and largely positive.
The book identifies things students do and believe whose value and worth are nothing but myths. These include cramming, assuming there is always a right and a wrong, equating attention to staying awake and the dissembling of rote memorization as an inevitable and necessary practice. She even refutes the standard that it is a bad thing to forget.The material in Mindful Learning is not a prescriptive nor does the author promise miraculous classrooms with skyrocketing test scores. She is an Ivy League academic, a psychology professor and her purpose is to inform and to pique interest into further research and applications.
As science will do, the massive attention to find an answer for Alzheimers and other age-related memory loss have overlapped with the public debate over ADHD and in particular, psycho-stimulant therapy. These discrete areas of medicine and neurology have spawned a spillover revolution in education; specifically the field of learning theory. The unheard of premise that a reduced amount of energy and time could result in greater memory and lasting results- has already earned some critics. The ball keeps rolling however as the primacy of sleep as it relates to depression, substance abuse and ability to maximize classroom instruction has found itself aligned with the basic study practices. These, like cramming, waking up early to finish studying and any effort done at the expense of sleep have been indicted and found more negative than positive. Instead, taking frequent breaks, exercise, nutrition and chunking parts of the whole are refashioning how we think about working hard as the way to do your best.
The correct amount and type of sleep has greater weight upon how we drive and how we perform than had heretofore been recognized. Sleepy teens have as many and as deadly accidents as drunk teens. Sleep and its relationship to mood, depression, substance abuse and anti-social behaviors is powerfully shown to have a one to one relationship. Adolescence as a time of developmental paradoxes and a circadian rhythm whereby early evening is their morning and morning their mid-night REM time- is presenting itself as a challenge to districts over America that start highschool at dawn. In a nation with evidence of an epidemic of despair and intermittent suicide and violence, we will not dismiss these claims as merely unique.
As a boost for special education and physically frail learners, whereby energy levels and consequences of medication and attention do so conspire to reduce outcomes, the implications are impressive. Langer offers a strong argument and justification of techniques that work and ones that are over priced gas guzzlers. If you have not been following this subject, or if you want to get a non-self-help viewpoint- and get it before the the marketplace and airways are flooded with hype- this is a good enough place to start. Science- not magic, not one person's brainchild- but smart brained.
Editorial Review:
This text explains how to create graphics programs using Release 1.1 of OpenGL. The book includes coverage of the extensions new to this release and covers GLUT, the OpenGl utility toolkit, which eases the learning curve for programmers wishing to explore OpenGL.
