I played sports as a kid, and always had to start my school year with a doctor’s physical exam. Apparently that doesn’t happen much anymore.
Doctors are physically examining their patients less and less, and relying more on technology. Some doctors are bucking this trend and trying to revitalize the practice of listening and actually touching their patients.
As a woman, I am still poked and prodded on a semi-regular basis (yuck!), but I’ve never had to go in for something serious, and I’ve heard others complain about this phenomenon. I’m interested what the experience of others has been.
For centuries, doctors diagnosed illness using their own senses, by poking, prodding, looking, listening. From these observations, a skilled doctor can make amazingly accurate inferences about what ails the patient.
Technology has changed that. “We’re now often doing expensive tests, where in the past a physical exam would have given you the same information,” says Jason Wasfy, a cardiologist-in-training at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
As a result, many doctors are abbreviating the time-honored physical exam — or even skipping it altogether.
Humans are social creatures, and need close bonds and feelings of belonging. (Image via Wikipedia)
As the new school year begins, I wanted to mention this article from the New York Times about how schools are discouraging kids from making best friends.
Ahem. Let me repeat that. Schools are discouraging children from having a best friend.
That is just stupid.
Or, put more professionally…
“…such an attitude worries some psychologists who fear that children will be denied the strong emotional support and security that comes with intimate friendships.
“Do we want to encourage kids to have all sorts of superficial relationships? Is that how we really want to rear our children?” asked Brett Laursen, a psychology professor at Florida Atlantic University whose specialty is peer relationships. “Imagine the implication for romantic relationships. We want children to get good at leading close relationships, not superficial ones.”
This is where political correctness and “fairness” go waaaaay too far and ignore human nature and the absolute NEED to have a confidante in life, someone you can rely on, particularly someone outside of your family of origin. Will those people hurt you from time to time? Absolutely. But it’s part of learning how to work within a society and be a social animal.
Studies keep showing how adults today have less and less close friends, and would LIKE to have more. Discouraging kids from learning how to make close bonds with people is just setting them up for this trend to get worse when they become adults.
Imagination Playground Park, South Street Seaport area of New York City
Several researchers, psychologists, and journalists are exploring the idea of creativity right now. Two in particular stood out to me recently.
One was author Po Bronson and his article for Newsweek about the Creativity Crisis he and co-author Ashley Merryman believe is taking place in the United States with our current education system:
Like intelligence tests, Torrance’s test—a 90-minute series of discrete tasks, administered by a psychologist—has been taken by millions worldwide in 50 languages. Yet there is one crucial difference between IQ and CQ scores. Enriched environments are making kids smarter. With creativity, a reverse trend has just been identified and is being reported for the first time here: American creativity scores are falling.
Kyung Hee Kim at the College of William & Mary discovered this in May, after analyzing almost 300,000 Torrance scores of children and adults. Kim found creativity scores had been steadily rising, just like IQ scores, until 1990. Since then, creativity scores have consistently inched downward. “It’s very clear, and the decrease is very significant,” Kim says. It is the scores of younger children in America—from kindergarten through sixth grade—for whom the decline is “most serious.”
The potential consequences are sweeping. The necessity of human ingenuity is undisputed. A recent IBM poll of 1,500 CEOs identified creativity as the No. 1 “leadership competency” of the future. Yet it’s not just about sustaining our nation’s economic growth. All around us are matters of national and international importance that are crying out for creative solutions, from saving the Gulf of Mexico to bringing peace to Afghanistan to delivering health care. Such solutions emerge from a healthy marketplace of ideas, sustained by a populace constantly contributing original ideas and receptive to the ideas of others.
In response to Bronson’s article, Darell Hammond, CEO of Kaboom, a non-profit working to get more parks installed around the U.S., agreed, and wrote a commentary supporting Bronson’s article in the Huffington Post, as well as offering solutions on what can be done about this drop in creativity:
With objects as simple as boxes, rubber bands, and Styrofoam peanuts, children can create their own narratives and games; build something and tear it down; or simply play to enjoy shapes and textures.
We need to let our kids spend more time roaming freely in forests, backyards, fields, parks, and beaches — all environments rife with opportunities for creative play. And we need to rethink our playgrounds as places that not only let children run around and let off steam, but that also challenge, stimulate, and inspire their imaginations.
The first Imagination Playground Park, which opens this week at Burling Slip in the South Street Seaport area of New York City, is one such example. The park includes a sandpit, cascading water channel, rope climbing structure, and loose parts — such as burlap bags, buckets, shovels, brooms, carts and fabric. It also includes Imagination Playground blocks — blue blocks made from biodegradable foam that come in a variety of shapes and sizes and provide endless possibilities for creative play.
This is something that people have been struggling with for awhile, but as this article from the New York Times says, the current economic crisis is putting it into sharp perspective: a lot of kids are being pushed to go to college when in fact it may not be the best choice for their future.
College degrees are simply not necessary for many jobs. Of the 30 jobs projected to grow at the fastest rate over the next decade in the United States, only seven typically require a bachelor’s degree, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Among the top 10 growing job categories, two require college degrees: accounting (a bachelor’s) and postsecondary teachers (a doctorate). But this growth is expected to be dwarfed by the need for registered nurses, home health aides, customer service representatives and store clerks. None of those jobs require a bachelor’s degree.
Professor Vedder likes to ask why 15 percent of mail carriers have bachelor’s degrees, according to a 1999 federal study.
“Some of them could have bought a house for what they spent on their education,” he said.
Even though I was someone who excelled in college, and even went to graduate school, I am in fact a strong proponent of the idea that college is unnecessary for a lot of people. I think this was brought home even more for me the year that I worked as a college teaching assistant. The push for four-year colleges is almost starting to feel like a racketeering job.
I think we in the U.S. need to move past the stigma of not having a college degree being equivalent to being a slacker or stupid or unmotivated. If anything, they are smarter for not automatically buying into the system, they are more motivated to start contributing to the workforce, and more goal-oriented than their college-bound counterparts who often view college as an extension of high school.
Lots of cool news came out recently about human development, from chimps to little humans:
Wild chimps have been shown to understand fire and how it moves, and don’t freak out like other animals do. This is exciting because humans so far had been the only animals documented as keeping their cool around fire…for the most part.
Since we’re in the jungle, it’s once again been show that it’s good for kids to go roll around in the dirt; for one thing it correlates with lower heart disease when they’re older.
But back to brain wiring, kids who get intensive language training when they’re young, like reading, actually have their brains re-wired, in a good way.
New education research is also showing that kids may understand Math at a much earlier age than previously though, and there are ways that they can learn the concepts just as early as we try to teach them language.
One of the skills kids can develop is compartmentalization, which it turns out cavemen could also do much earlier than previously thought; for example, they made different, compartmentalized work stations in their camps, rather than spread everything around and sleep right next to the meat-processing spot.
Speaking of stone-age types, a study has come out that counters the idea that hunter-gatherers didn’t eat any grains at all.
All this data almost makes me want to grab some popcorn and pop it over a fire while playing math games. But not before I go work in my garden patch.
What do you think about teaching about sexuality, homo or hetero, in school? Here’s one guy’s opinion (Actually a fairly knowledgeable guy who has his own blog “Primate Diaries” on Science Blogs):
By now everyone has heard of the high school English honors teacher, Dan DeLong, who was suspended for offering students the Seed magazine article “The Gay Animal Kingdom” by Jonah Lehrer as an optional extra credit assignment.
According to the Alton, IL based Telegraph newspaper, DeLong has now been reinstated at Southwestern High School after several hundred students and parents attended a six-hour long disciplinary hearing:
At Monday night’s meeting, more than 200 people lined the stairs, sidewalk and office space at the district’s small unit office at 884 Piasa Road in the Macoupin County village of Piasa. Many of DeLong’s supporters had handmade posters and banners stating: “Mr. DeLong Inspires Us,” and chanting, “Broadening minds is not a crime.”
Unfortunately, what it looks like is that DeLong entered a plea deal with the Board of Education where he would admit that the article was “inappropriate” in exchange for going back to work. In a statement that DeLong read, on behalf of both himself and the School Board, this agreement was that:
[T]he Board of Education and administrator’s concern was never about sexual preference or homophobic condemnation. Rather, the issue of concern was the age appropriateness of the material. . . I agree with the board that the material in my class was not age appropriate for my sophomores and for that I apologize. I understand the board has decided that I shall receive a Notice of Remedial Warning.
This is wrong on several levels. First off, this is absolutely about homophobic condemnation. No one would have had any problems with a science article that described the evolution of heterosexual monogamy in voles or gibbons. Such an article would have naturalized a belief that many people hold as the only legitimate kind of relationship for our society today. However, by showing that same-sex pairs exist in the natural world (and that gender is a much more fluid concept than people may have realized) it challenges people’s assumptions about what “natural” actually is. Because they were threatened by this idea, the Board is confessing that ANY discussion that homosexuality could be natural is therefore inappropriate. It’s homophobia, pure and simple.
Secondly, does the Southwestern Board of Education even know what teenagers are exposed to these days? This is the generation that invented sexting and half of whom have had oral sex (according to the National Center for Health Statistics). Students today are fascinated by sexuality and are ardent consumers of information. They know full well that homosexuality exists and that there is currently a “debate” about whether or not all people should be granted human rights. Not only is the discussion of how humans define themselves useful in this regard, it should be required. Across the country we’re asking that people vote on the civil rights of people with other sexual orientations. Isn’t it a good idea to know something about the issues involved? Plus, Lehrer’s article was completely tame and had no explicit content (that is, unless the word “ejaculate” causes you to get the vapors). What this overreaction does is say far more about what makes some parents and school board officials uncomfortable than any need to “protect the children.”
The whole situation is a farce. If I was still teaching high school students (which I did for about two years) I would use this opportunity to make Lehrer’s article required reading and ask students to discuss whether or not they thought a teacher should be suspended for making it available. It would be a terrific lesson in civics. And if not this article, I would certainly make the issues of gay marriage, gay adoption, and gay service in the military part of any discussion on current affairs.
What’s ironic about the conservative outrage over gay rights is that the “homosexual agenda” is revealing itself to be an inherently conservative movement. Think about it. What other group is advocating for the right to get married, adopt children, and serve in the military? And conservatives have a problem with this? Perhaps a high school teacher somewhere should offer an article to students seeking to explain that strange phenomenon.
This is EXACTLY what I’m talking about. In school, at work, yes, yes, yes!!! Go Keri Smith. I’m seriously thinking about writing her a thank you Christmas Card, or at least buying several copies of her book and giving it to all the parents I know.
I have been working on an article about activism in developing nations, namely bringing alternative energies to rural impoverished communities.
Barefoot College (see youtube video), works with women to teach them on a grassroots level how to be solar engineers and run and operate a household solar power system. The college also has a lot of other programs helping women with economic independence and with human rights
The group Portable Light just won an award for their work with the Huichol. Sheila Kennedy at MIT created portable, flexible solar panels, which the Huichol women sewed onto their bags so they had a portable power source.
A third group, Light up the World Foundation, develops and installs LED lights and solar power systems in individual households and businesses.
These are example of opportunities for any anthropologist interested in the politics and accessibility of technology, using alternative energy and skipping the whole “industrial revolution” phase while growing/developing/whatevering a nation, or mostly importantly working with different groups to help provide safe, affordable, less polluting alternatives to kerosene and wood fuel.
However, an interesting point to bring in: many of these types of groups come in with the idea that by providing light they are helping children receive an education (being able to study at night > children can finish homework > children receive good education). However, in many nations the rudimentary education provided to students is more detrimental than helpful. Children learn how to perform certain skills in an industrialized economy, and yet they don’t learn enough to pass their final exams, or there are no jobs for them when they graduate. During all of these years of education, they have also become isolated from their traditional ways of subsistence – farming, hunting, fishing, or whatever. They are stuck between two different economic and cultural systems and cannot function in either one.
So not only is it important to provide children with Internet access and computers and non-toxic light sources, it’s also important to make sure they are receiving an education that will serve them as adults.
Next is an article that by itself isn’t so wow-zowy, but the fact that they are addressing the issue of just how important movement is to children’s development is wonderful.
Finally, I stumbled upon this program whose soul purpose is to get teachers to use puppets more in their teaching arsenal. Too cool!
Mental Flowers 