Learning to Listen (Being Versus Doing)

I would like to provide my students a set of skills and concepts related to the psychology of being human.  The curriculum would include the following topics, each to be introduced, modeled, practiced and assessed on-going, in accord with a teaching for understanding framework:

The art of listening

What is listening?  What does it look like/taste like?  What are the range of distractions (internal and external) which interfere with listening?  How does the posture of the body enhance or obstruct one's state of active listening?

The internal and external:  Two worlds, two landscapes

We inhabit two worlds.  What are they?  What are the features of each?  Why live in both worlds?  What are the consequences of living more in one that the other?  We learn about the external world from school, study and experience?  How do we learn more about the internal?

Losing ourselves:  The physics of identification

What is identification?  What does it look/feel/taste like?  What are the ways in which I identify with elements of my life?  Is identification always directed outwardly?  How do I become less identified?  What are the steps?  Why should I care?

What I do today will determine what I do tomorrow:  Habit, conditioning and schemata

What is a habit?  How is it formed?  What are the habits which shape my life?  What's wrong with a habit?  How do I resist habits?  What are the implications for the processing of food?  What is a schema?  How do they operate our lives?  Why should we know about them?  A primer on observing habits? 

You are what you eat:  Forms of food & its digestion

What is food?  What does it do for us?  What are the varieties of food (gross food, air as food, the food of impressions)?  What are the consequences of changing what we eat, and how we eat it? 

Three forms of attention:  Active/focused, attracted/repulsed, meandering/wandering

What is attention?  What are different forms?  What do they look/feel/taste like?

A three-brained being:  Thinking, feeling, and moving

We have three brains which operate simultaneously:  one which thinks, one which feels, and one which moves.  What re the features of each?  Can I observe them/distinguish between them in action?

The aim here is provide a toolkit for understanding ourselves and our relations.  It is a primer on being a human being, and the foundation for the rest of the standard curriculum.  Clearly, it more than just about listening, though listening, and the observation of oneself, is a central feature.

At a time when children are increasingly plugged-in to and bombarded by digital media, a curriculum centering on the internal -- on listening, observing, the body, and habit -- is critical.

How the World Was Made: Kinders & 6ers Collaborate in Authoring Creation Stories

The sixth grade is currently transitioning between units, moving from a 6-week study of our human ancestry and the science of paleoanthropology, to Ancient Egypt and the first civilizations.  This bridge is entitled From Eve to Egypt, Eve here referring to Mitochondrial Eve, or the first modern human, estimated to be about 150,000 years old.  This mini-unit has focused on the development of agriculture, the domestication of plants and animals, permanent settlements, and the specialization of roles in an expanding population.  I found an exceptional resource for this unit, Stories from the Stone Age, a three-part series available for streaming at GUBA.

In parallel with our move toward the earliest civilizations, we've begun a major study of creation stories, myths and mythology, to include a reading of Gilgamesh, adapted from Looklex. 

Students have composed their own creation stories, based upon their personal beliefs;  we've read a selection of creation stories from around the world, looking for common themes and elements;  and, of course, they've solicited the input of our Kinders.  

See Kinder for the result of this fun collaboration.

Recognizing & Resisting Fixed Trajectories

Language reflects thought.  The personal pronoun I, given emphasis in its capitalization, implies an unchanging singularity, cause and will, as in  I pealed an orange.  Actually, it pealed the orange, spun out with a minimum of attention, as it has many, many times before.  I can imagine a form of brain damage resulting in the loss of this complex program, making the coordinated movement of pealing an orange very difficult, requiring active attention, like learning to tie your shoes. But it doesn't now;  it happens of it-self.

I pealed the orange, but what I are we referring to, particularly when I am able to observe the activity, separated, as if watching a movie on pealing oranges.   I might, with intent, peal the orange a new way, counterclockwise, as if against the moving habit, and the activity would require the active allocation of attention, and I might be a little more present.

It takes me a relatively short time to shower, five minutes perhaps.  The bar of soap glides in efficient, practiced motions.  I imagine a study of the bar's path revealing that it recurs precisely by the same course and timing everyday, over a lifetime, like a Swiss train.  

Complex behavior patterns of this type are called a schemata.  A schema is initiated when we walk into a restaurant, or into a grocery store, or turn on the shower:  it is the amalgam of behaviors and expectations associated with a context.  A schema is a complex software program, executed in response to a particular stimulus.  The schema is fired, automatically, immediately, without any need for the presence of I. 

I notice this about showering, which I think is generally true:  Just as the movement of the soap is executed according to a strict pattern, so too is the quality of mentation that accompanies the motion.  That is, I daydream, passive, drifting by association, and this quality of wandering mind is patterned, the intellectual side of the showering schema, programmed and fixed.  There is no I required.  It happens, by pattern, like executing a software routine.

Our use of language is deceiving, particularly in how we refer to ourselves, our state, using the present tense personal pronoun I.  It's not true.  We speak of a shower schema, or a restaurant schema, or a human life schema.  All are patterned, all reactive, all external.  Our trajectory is fixed.  

All of us experience moments of separation from the patterns of life, through glimmers of presence, as if something momentarily arises to the surface to feel something on the order of I-am-just-now.  Then it's gone.  

How do I increase the frequency and duration of these moments?  What might this work look like?  I take it very practically:  Am I able to walk from here to the kitchen while maintaining an unbroken sense of presence -- the setting of a small aim of attention.  

National Geographic Reports on Rescued Senegal Infant Chimpanzee

Primatologist, Dr. Jill Pruetz, a professor at Iowa State University, has been studying chimpanzees in the Ketagou region of southeastern Senegal for some years.  Her blog, SavannahChimp, today reports that a known infant chimpanzee, from her study area, had apparently been taken by hunters.  In response, Dr. Pruetz flew to Senegal, headed out to the field, and now reports that the infant has been recovered and reunited with its mother.  Good news, and an amazing demonstration of dedication on the part of this researcher.

You can read about the event, and learn more about Pruetz's work, at NationalGeographicBlog.

Prehistoric Senegal 3: Ouakam, N'Gor, Yoff, Almadies & Ile de Madeleine

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Dakar's largest university, Universite Cheikh Anta Diop, houses an exceptional collection of prehistoric artifacts, including stone tools and ceramics.  It's a classic collection, with many of the artifacts excavated in the forties and earlier.  Note IFAN for a history of the Institut Fondamental d'Afrique Noire, founded in 1938.

To help support their outreach efforts, Randi and I, with occasional assistance from my 6th grade students, have begun digitizing their collection.  The aim is to photograph a representative cross-section of the artifacts,  and integrate them into a larger collection of resources designed specifically for Senegalese teachers and classrooms.

We returned to the Archaeology Lab this morning, focusing on Dakar and the Cap Vert Peninsula, including Yoff, N'Gor, Almadies, Ile de Madeleine and Ouakam.  See BOT for the full set of images.  (Note Gallery 4.)  

We offer continuing thanks and appreciation to Mr. Saidou Camara, Archeology Lab Manager, and Dr. Ibrahima Thiaw, Archaeology Lab Director.

Anthea & the Boogie-Woogie Girlz

The ISD Middle School Student Council sponsored  a dance Friday evening, to the thrill of several dozen students.  I was honored to help chaperone the dance cough, and naturally chose to bring along my camera, much to the delight of the kids humming.

The 6th graders were well represented, and being their typically shy and demur selves sneeze, I had to coax them into gathering for group photos with their pals whistling.

Above you see Anthea and the Boogie-Woogie Girlz desperately trying to break out of their otherwise quiet, reserved, withdrawn, melancholy shells wink.

Suggestibility, Attribution Theory, & the Power of JuJu

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I've purchased a set of fetish objects from Congo.  They're carved figures of wood embedded with nails and strips of metal, stirring, provocative.  The ISD parent from whom I purchased them was storing the objects beneath a table, hidden from view.  They were just too scary.  She explained that a psychic friend had come over and determined that one in particular, the creepiest one, was radiating some big time juju.  Several friends and colleagues here, having seen the collection, have asked if I were just a little nervous having them around, the implication being that they might actually be radiating something with the potential of causing physical harm.

Now, I'm a fairly well-educated and traveled guy, with a critical mind, from the First-World, where such things as juju are generally considered nonsense, the stuff of superstition.  I was a science major, for goodness sake!  

Still, a part of me wondered.  A little part, but doesn't it only take a little part to leverage the snowball down the mountainside?  I wondered:  was that bit of cough connected to the fetish figures;  were they affecting my heath? And if they were, was it due to the emanation of physical juju, or the dynamic of suggestibility, which certainly has been demonstrated to have compelling physical consequences, indistinguishable from the external-material.

While some here would consider me cut-off from the direct experience of the world by my Western training, I consider myself fortunate to have a conceptual vocabulary, and a frame of reference, from which I may observe phenomena from a slightly displaced, less identified perspective, acting as a participant-observer.

To what do I attribute physical symptoms, and how does this vary among people and cultures?  I can imagine a Congolese villager entirely attributing that little cough to the presence of the fetish objects, identifying completely with their power and influence, reinforced through a lifetime of cultural training.

Still, I seemed to acquire this cough when . . .