Monthly Archives: October 2015

The Physical Child – History of the Brain Timeline

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20th Century –

1900 – Sigmund Freud

The interpretation of dreams – dreams are the unconscious mind where repressed                   wishes are played out. His theory is that the unconscious mind drives most of human behaviour even though society dictated that you must override such impulses with reason. There is tension created between the repressed drives and the expected social conventions and this tension is relived through dreams.

1906 – Santiago Ramón y Cajel

Research into the changes neurons undergo during the functioning of the nervous system won him a Nobel Prize.

1911 – Henry Head

Publishes Studies in Neurology where he disputes the theories regarding aphasia and argues that the function of speech is not localised.

1921 – Hermann Rorschach

Development of the ink blot test. The test gives useful clues to the patients ‘psyches’. Used to evaluate personality traits and disorders.

1929 – Hans Berger

EEG was invented.

1932 – Lord Edgar Adrian and Sir Charles Sherrington

Nobel prize won for research into neuron function specifically the mechanisms by which nerves transmit messages.

1934 – Egas Moniz

Research done into operation on the brain which cured depression as well as causing many other personality changes, similar to Phineas Gage’s “accidental leucotomy”

1936 – Walter Freeman and James W. Watts

First lobotomy performed in U.S.

1938 – Albert Hofmann

Research into ergot fungus containing natural hallucinating properties resulting in the production of LSD.

1949 – Walter Rudolph Hess

Nobel prize won for research into the interbrain being responsible for coordinating the body’s internal organs.

1950 – Karl Spencer Lashley

Experiment designed to look into the neural components of memory involving rats in mazes.

1953 – Nathaniel Klkeitman and Eugene Aserinsky

Development of Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep.

1963 – John Carew Eccles, Alan Lloyd Hodgkin and Andrew Fielding Huxly

Nobel prize for work on the mechanisms of neuron cell membranes.

1967 – Ragnar Granit, Haldan Keffer Hartline and George Wald

Research into how the eye passes images to the brain.

1970 – Julius Axelrod, Ulf von Euler and Sir Bernard Katz

Discoveries concerning storage, release and inactivation of neurotransmitters and how psychoactive drugs affect this.

1974 – M.E.Phelps, E.J.Hoffman and M.M.Ter Pogossian

Development of the first PET scanner which looks at the activity of the brain from a visual prospective.

1981 – Torsten Wiesel and David Hubel

Research on visual information send from retina to brain.

1990 – George Bush

Declares the decade starting in 1990 the “Decade of the Brain”

1997 – Stanley b. Prusiner

Research into prions as infectious agents in the brain which cause several diseases such a dementia.

2000 – Arvid Carlsson, Paul Greengard and Eric Kandel

Research into chemical transmitters and synapses.

Remembering, Forgetting and Getting Confused.

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Based upon lecture by John Baldacchino.

Greek philosophy on learning focuses on the soul and the body. The body in ‘contingent’ and the soul is ‘necessary’. The soul is said to be omniscient and knows the grand knowledge of the world. When we are born our soul holds this information. However the soul then comes limited by the body. So it can be said that the soul without the body would be an all-powerful entity. Socrates talks of this in Plato, Meno. Throughout our lives we are continually trying to remember what the soul already knows and unlock this information. Therefore making it unlimited. It is aid that if you move more towards bodily things then the soul becomes damaged but if you maintain spirituality and focus on spiritual ideas then the soul is revived. In order to not make the body forgetful we must employ ‘aporia’ which is simply letting people make mistakes so that they can learn from them.

In terms of education I think ancient Greek philosophy is telling us that we should never give up on children who are struggling to learn because they have the knowledge within them we just have to find the right way of unlocking it.

It is also encouraging us to allow children to make mistakes so that they learn from their experiences and therefore develop a better knowledge. This relates to the guest lecture from Brendan Knight on Plato’s Cave. If the world outside the cave had been bad and cruel they would have learned this through making the mistake of going outside and therefore would know not to do the same again. The same can be applied to a mathematics sum, if they did it wrong the first time they will not tackle it in the same way again.

Sometimes as teachers we may be wise to deliberately confuse children in order that they see even more clearly in the end. They would then have to look back through the steps in great detail to understand where they went wrong and then figure out how to do it right. They would then have more advanced knowledge of the specific steps involved in comparison to if they did it right the first time and never had to look at the steps again.

Plato’s Cave

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I thoroughly enjoyed the guest lecture by Brendan Knight on Plato’s Cave. The story of Plato’s cave is that there are men bound to the cave facing the back wall. The light coming in from the entrance causes shadows to be displayed on the wall. These shadows are caused by things in the outside world – ‘reality’. These shadows are all that the men have experienced and therefore they believe it to be reality and are entirely unaware of the real world. The point is that you can only know of things you have experienced. Then one day one of the men breaks free and goes outside the cave. He is then faced with the real world and becomes aware of many different things he did not know before, for example – form, texture, colour and size. He was only able to know of these things through experience. He then tried to get the others to break free and embrace what he had saw but they did not want to go and were afraid to leave what they thought was their reality.

I think this relates to education as a metaphor for learning in the sense that those who are sceptical about learning certain topics can’t fully engage with them unless they step outside of their comfort zone (out of the cave). They can’t fully understand what they are learning (the reality) until they are taught and are become engaged and involved in the topic (experiencing the world outside the cave).

This can be applied not just to topics but social learning also.

Children who don’t engage socially or take part in the classroom are unaware of the benefits of it. If children are encouraged by teachers and brought out of their shells they will see the classroom and education in an entirely different light. This could change their outlook on education but also develop their social skills within the classroom and allow their behaviour to improve as a result.

The idea of Plato’s cave allows teachers to realise they have to allow children to experience and engage with things before they will fully understand both the benefits and the downfalls. And that the best was of learning is to experience.

This relates to be earlier post on ‘why teaching’ – that learning must be fun and exciting and involve physical activity in order to consolidate the learning. They must experience what they are learning in order to fully understand it.

You don’t teach the rules of netball and then expect children to know how to play the game. You must allow them to play and experience the rules in action so that they will fully understand it.

Professionalism and the Online World

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Having integrity as a teacher is closely tied to our ‘fitness to teach’, we must have the public’s trust in order to maintain our ‘fitness to teach’ however this can be undermined by inappropriate use on social media. Integrity can be described as honesty but I think it is better described as ‘good character’ in the sense that we must uphold our ‘good character’ that should be perceived by the public. As teachers we must be seen as honest, well presented and sensible. However some things which we post on social media may seem harmless to us but to others who have a different view point can seem entirely different. When posting on social media we must take care to not perish our integrity and this can become detrimental to our careers. For a teacher when building their professional status this simply means pausing before posting and thinking whether or not what they have written can be construed in a different manner from which it was intended. If so then don’t post it. It’s rather simple.

Many people believe that marrying personal social media with professional social media is a good tool within the classroom. There are severe dangers with this. Even though it is a merge of personal and professional you still have to be aware of what you are posting. There are certain aspects of your personal life which would not be appropriate to share with your pupils. It can be easy to forget that you have a ‘merged’ social network site and to then post something which would compromise your professional integrity.

However this idea does have some benefits. Allowing your pupils to get to know the kind of person you are out with the classroom can help build a better relationship within. Seeing aspects of your personal life may allow them to relate to you in a way they hadn’t before, it could allow prompting of discussions to occur which otherwise would not have taken place.

I think the use of social media as a way of keeping the children engaged in lessons but also engaging with the children is a vital part of the modern classroom. However I think the use has to be controlled and used wisely. I think that using social media in a professional manner whilst incorporating some personal aspects is a good idea. But I would not use my current personal social media profile and then begin adding pupils to it then using it in a professional and personal manner as there are some ‘personal’ things which should not be shared with pupils. I think it is important to keep a distinct profile where personal but monitored posts are shared.

Gender – How did my gender affect me as a child?

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Well I am a girl, most boys would then say that I had an easier childhood than them when it came to discipline: girls didn’t receive the same punishments, we got away with the things boys didn’t and we were able to be so much more mischievous than them without having to worry about the consequences. Well I believe that was utter nonsense, well it was in my school and my home environment anyway. I remember getting in just as much trouble if not more than the boys in my school because the activities and things in which we were engaging with were not at all ‘lady-like’ and therefore we were shouted at for doing them. A boy was able to run around at lunchtime sliding around in the wet mud getting entirely covered without much fuss. But when my female friends and I did the same it was considered beneath us and therefore we got into so much more trouble because it was expected of the boys to ‘be boys and get dirty’ not of the girls. As girls we were less than impressed.

And the same in my home life I constantly was told “we would expect this kind of behaviour from your brother not you”.

I think people need to remember that there are two sides to every story. And while the boys always say that they were treated unfairly and had severer consequences than the girls, we too were not treated as equal to the boys.

Gender should not be viewed as being solely discriminative towards males, because it can be just as bad to the opposite sex.