Do Rats Suffer from ADD?

David Foster and his colleagues say that when rats take a break while exploring an unfamiliar area, their brains instantly replay the information they've just gathered.

As the rats run across a track, certain brain cells fire in a specific sequence. Each cell picks a "favorite place" on the track to go off, and a pattern emerges that is replicated every time the rat repeats the route. This "place cell" effect has been documented for more than 30 years.

These place cells lie in the hippocampus, which plays a key role in memory and navigation….When the rats took a break after running the track, the same place cells fired in reverse order. Replaying multiple times, these patterns were sped up, Foster says, almost 20 times faster.
------
"This immediately suggested some kind of learning mechanism occurring at times when the animal has just had an experience, but has in fact stopped," Foster says. This pattern has been observed in sleep and is often interpreted as consolidation of the memory, a process that reorganizes the information and stores it in other parts of the brain.

Foster: "Perhaps we don't take breaks seriously enough," Foster says. "Perhaps we're wrong to expect all learning to occur on the job. Perhaps an important part of learning in general, and in jobs and at school, is occurring during breaks."

The finding is consistent with long-established behavioral evidence (about humans) that practice is more effective if it is interspersed with other activity. It also seems to be consistent with the symptoms of ADD:

From another of my blogs (Spin of Attention): shifts from one uncompleted task to another.

I think the value of shifting attention and taking breaks is well recognized in psychology and elsewhere. Perhaps even in schools. At least until the discussion of ADD comes up. Then, because it inconveniences the school system, it is a disorder. Only a few days ago, I posted a blog about comments from John Taylor Gatto based on 30 tears of teaching experience.
How public education cripples our kids, and why
I interpreted his comments into a view from the students: “They pretend to teach us and we pretend to learn.”

Back in the days of Communism, opposition to the Communist government was sometimes treated as a mental illness. If students in the school system do not pretend to learn, we are being advised to treat this behavior as a disorder.

No similarity at all. Nobody would see a parallel here. Unless they were paying attention.

Schools as Fiction

Interesting article: Against School. John Taylor Gatto How public education cripples our kids, and why The comments from Gatto immediately reminded me of the old explanation of how the Polish people described communism: “They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work.”

Translation to the US school system as seen by Gatto: “They pretend to teach us and we pretend to learn.”

What Gatto describes, on the basis of 30 years of teaching experience sounds like a system that has become hopelessly dysfunctional. The teachers are bored. The students are bored. The parents and taxpayers are not bored. But they do seem to be quite unhappy.

Gatto speculates about the reasons for this situation. Without serious disagreement with his speculation, I prefer to cite a more general interpretation. For any organization, the Prime Directive is to preserve the organization. I think of an organization as the modern equivalent of the tribe or clan. What clan members used to do was to preserve the clan at all costs.

Educational institutions, of course, have goals assigned to them by the larger society (the taxpayers). It is essential to the clan (I mean the institution) to be seen as pursuing those goals. Notice that phrase: to be seen. Not necessarily to pursue. And certainly not necessarily to reach. But to be seen in pursuit.

Gatto asks whether we really need school. He means, of course, do we need the current schools system. I recently heard a valuable talk by Clayton Cristensen in which he spoke of customer “hiring products to do a job for them.” What is important, he said, is to know what that job is. If you understand the job, you can figure out how to satisfy the customers. If we apply that question to the school system, we first have to identify the customer. In the free market, the customer is the person who chooses to buy the product. In the school system, it is less clear who is choosing to buy the product. The parents are using the product, but they are hardly choosing. They are complying with the law. Unless they have substantial financial resources, the have no other viable option. The taxpayers are paying for the product, but they have only indirect control over the relevant choices. The school boards are making the actual choices, but they may not have the experience to make choices independent of the professionals running the school board.

Dysfunctional system under ineffective management. It is a situation asking to be destabilized by innovation. But to thin about how it would be destabilized, we need to go back to Christensen’s question and understand what job(s) the customers want done by the school system.

But I need a while to think about that. So I will leave that as a quest question for now.

The future is already here.

It’s just not evenly distributed. Quote from William Gibson, science fiction writer. And not widely reported, either. But here is a report. Are virtual worlds the future of the classroom?

I mention the report as a follow-up to some of my previous blogs such as: Learners without Classrooms. Here are things the report mentions:

>Whyville, an online virtual world whose population of kids has grown to about 1.6 million since its inception in 1999.

>multiuser virtual environment, or MUVE, a genre of software games created to inspire children to learn by giving them problems to solve.

Harvard University: "River City." Harvard's School of Education is in talks with several urban school districts to introduce the software to tens of thousands of schoolchildren this fall.

>Indiana University: Quest Atlantis will be introduced to 50 new classrooms, or between 10,000 to 20,000 students, in New Jersey next fall.

>Toyota Financial Services will host a Whyville loan center to help kids learn about FICO scores and interest rates. Kids can then borrow money to buy a virtual Toyota Scion.

>"Underperforming students come alive by learning in 'River City'"

>River City:. Funded with $4 million in grants from the National Science Foundation. Implemented in seven states.

>revamp the way science was taught in schools, shifting it to inquiry-based education. (Reminds me of State Statements and Quest Questions.)

>The University of Texas: WhyEat, to teach kids about nutrition. Kids who play must choose nutritious foods, or they could get ill.

>Wood's Hole Oceanographic Institute on Whyville: sponsored by the real Oceanographic Institute.

>a thriving business economy based on selling child-created virtual products.

>a virtual museum hosted by the real J. Paul Getty Museum.