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A Day in the Life

Mentally Scary Mommy Moment

I’m taking a break from all of this work stuff to watch a movie with my daughter. (Confession: I’m reading homework while she’s watching. Only half counts). It’s a quick-made Disney channel movie, but it’s still cute. In the movie, the princess must flee quickly. No big deal. Normal plot. And we’ve watched it before. Regular movie-watching, right? Then My daughter asks a question and I’m suddenly aware of how old she’s getting and how unprepared I am for the realization.

“Mom, where is her emergency kit? and shouldn’t she be taking it with her, like I would have to do?”

I should be thrilled she remembers such an important safety element. I am! But instead it suddenly occurs to me that she is aware of the concept that there could be a time when she would have to flee without me.

That is a scary thought. One I really don’t want to entertain. But I am beginning to realize that her Tinkerbell backpack is not going to cut it. Suddenly, I’m not thinking “what happens if my family had to leave quickly, what will WE need.” I’m thinking “what do I want my daughter to have if she were ever to get separated from me?” I think I’ll be re-vamping our emergency kits very soon.

Educational

Why Humans Need Repetition

As I’ve said earlier, I’m studying the brain in one of my classes and I find this stuff fascinating. It almost makes me want to study Neuroscience when I’m done. Almost. Okay, not really. But I do think it’s pretty cool and helpful stuff. Have you ever heard that humans learn best by repetition? Ever wondered why? Well, I’m no neuroscientist (duh), so my understanding is probably flawed, but here’s how it makes sense to me. First, some background: The brain is  full of nerve cells. The official name of a nerve cell is a neuron. Neurons don’t look like blood cells. They look more like the part of the tree where all the branches stick out. The branches are called axons or dendrites depending on whether they send or receive information. On the end of axons (the branches that send information) are terminal buttons. These terminal buttons let off chemical substances that act as signals to other neurons, called neurotransmitters. I had heard of neurotransmitters, but had no idea what they were. (in college-prep-speak, neurotransmitters : nerves as words : humans. If we’re following the same analogy, then terminal buttons would be mouths. They “speak” the information). The space between neurons where neurotransmitters are passed is called synapses. Neurons don’t really touch, (just think, it’s socially unacceptable to touch someone when you whisper in their ear). My definition of synapses was all wrong before I studied this stuff. Along the outside of the axon is a myelin sheath. Myelin sheaths are pretty cool. Not all axons have them. Myelin sheaths help “information” travel faster and clearer. It’s the brain’s way of saving cookies to a hard drive so that the internet page loads faster and better. The more the axon is used, the more myelin is created, the faster that information can be re-processed.

From Wiki Commons

So… the more we access certain nerves of our brain, the more efficient that information becomes. Therefore, we have lessons repeated and repeated and repeated in order for our brains to be able to access that data faster and faster. I think this would also explain why some information is only available to our memory until the day after the test (we – our brains – don’t think the information is important enough to build a super-highway). It also explains why, when we are trying to reprogram our brain for GOOD habits, it can’t be done overnight. And why it is so hard to break a bad habit (sometimes I feel like the myelin sheaths are pretty thick around those). Oooh, let’s look closer at that. I’ve got some more definitions for you! (I know, you’re thrilled). Our body makes new and thins out old synaptic connections all the time. It plows new pathways from  one neuron to the next. When our brains make new connections, that’s called synaptogenesis (makes sense. Synapto for synaptic. Genesis for creation). When our brains kill off old pathways, it’s called synaptic pruning. The thing is, it’s not as easy as just cutting off the pathway. The neuron still knows it’s there. First, we must re-direct traffic. We must convince our thought-cars to take a detour. With myelin speeding things up, it takes a while for our brain to even realize we’re trying to create a detour. Eventually, enough of those thought-cars have gotten the message to use alternate routes that our brain traffic in that area starts slowing down. From what I can tell, myelin sheaths don’t really disappear (except for in certain diseases), the whole road just gets “cut off.” And it doesn’t get cut off until it is mostly unused. How quickly that happens has a lot to do with age. Children grow tons of axons. Then their brains watch which ones get used and thin them out. There is lots of changing going on in a childhood brain. Most of the thinning-out seems to happen as a teenager, from what I can tell. It is still possible to thin out unused axons as an adult, but it is harder to do. Our habits are stuck harder. Why? because they’ve been used more (more myelination). Therefore, it’s much easier to break a habit as a kid or a teen than as an adult. I’m sure you already knew this, but now you know the science behind it.

How our brain works
Picture provided by Flickr user _DJ_

So… the more you do a task poorly, the more difficult it is to do the task correctly. For example, I hold my pencil “wrong.” I put wrong in quotation marks because obviously I am stubborn enough to think that I hold it right or I wouldn’t hold it that way. But because I hold it incorrectly, I have a permanent flat spot on my ring finger. The nail grows funny and everything. I was informed of my incorrect pencil-holding in third grade and seriously remember thinking “so what!?! I don’t care. I’m NOT going to change the way I write now. You guys (meaning all teachers. I was a little snarky) taught me how to hold a pencil, so perhaps you guys should have taught me correctly (see, snarky)!” So, I’ve continued all of these years to hold my pencil incorrectly. If I were to go back and change how I hold my pencil now, it would take AGES to re-learn how to write. At third grade, sure, it would have taken some work, and my handwriting would suffer a little bit, but what third-grader has ideal handwriting anyway? It would have required much less work at 8 than at 28. It also would have had less dire consequences. An 8-year-old that writes like a 7-year-old is less dramatic than a 28-year-old that writes like a seven-year-old. The moral of the story is pretty easy: stop a habit in its infancy. Pretty sure I didn’t have to give you all that information for you to figure that out. So why do we benefit from knowing how the brai

Educational, Life Lessons

Fascinating

How our brain works
provided by Flickr user _DJ_

My schedule has completely deviated from it’s outline today. I just have to deviate. It would be a shame to stick to the planned itinerary when this information is so fascinating and crucial and important. I don’t want to forget what I’m learning and I don’t want to miss a chance to tell you about it. The best opportunities are often seized and not plotted. Especially when it comes to learning and teaching. So instead of doing the baby quilt on my floor, the half-finished mending projects, and reading the rest of my homework without taking a break to jot down what I’m learning, I’m doing some major note-taking and blogging today I’ve also just spent about 3 hours staring at the same page on Flickr to try to add a picture to this new thread. I gave up. No picture. Sorry. Flickr’s back! Yea for less frustration!

Can I say this again: This stuff is FASCINATING!

FIrst off, let me just say I highly recommend Once Upon a Brain: How Neuroscience Can Be Your Colleague in the Classroom by Thomas Morley for any teachers, homeschoolers, PSR workers, or anyone involved in a relationship with any other human that wants to improve upon understanding . I’m finding it incredibly valuable. I think it links so many pieces I have gleaned from other sources, like Charlotte Mason teaching methods, Thomas Jefferson Education methods, Love and Logic, and even LDS principals of accountability and how we do the “weird” thinks we do. I’m only in chapter 4 and I’m pretty impressed. I’d like to share about a million things from its pages.

Educational

History

History is my favorite subject, I think. I love fitting the pieces together. I also love how it takes just a bit of faith to accept any history, as most of it is skewed biases. But I came accross these stories the other day and they both intrigued me. I thought I’d share:

 

[left]

Noah’s Ark Discovered — again.

They found a huge boat in the mountains, buried, but with animal bones found inside. It’s a pretty geeky history read if you’re interested.[/left]
[right]

Book of Mormon and DNA Studies.

This article talks about no matter how much people think they know by DNA, they can’t get conclusive results. It also is just kind of cool to hear the church’s perspective on what they think happened in the Americas, because I think we’d all just assume that the peoples of Lehi were the only one.  [/right]

Aren’t these just fascinating? Okay, I’m probably the only one to read them, but I think they’re pretty cool. I love making sense of what I know and what I KNOW. And how history is one story told many different ways.

A Day in the Life

Beauty During Sorrow

While I was up visiting for the funeral, Mom asked me to help her with a project. Before she died, My grandmother gave my mom a task and a bag of old jewelry. She asked mom to put the jewelry on mirrors, because my mom etched mirrors for all of her nieces and nephews when they got married. She wanted her granddaughters to look in the mirror, see a piece of her, and think of Grandma telling them how much she loved them.

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Ranger and I ran to the store later that day, and they had a cool snow-sculpture community event out front of the senior center (That my grandma helped get there). We took a few minutes just to walk around and enjoy something beautiful. It was refreshing.

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A Day in the Life, Life Lessons

One Life

[warning]This post is kind of scattered, because my thoughts are raw. Also, this post involves death, which might be a trigger.[/warning]

UntitledWritten at about 6: I just got word that my grandma might not survive the weekend. Probably not even until tomorrow night.

It’s silly that I’ve known that this could be coming for more than a month, now, and have felt absolutely no sorrow for it; she’s lived an amazing life, and she gets to be with her husband and daughter again. Her only daughter. And now, in her last hours, I’m so sad! Suddenly, I’m not thinking about how SHE feels about this, I’m suddenly realizing I have feelings, too!

This is the woman who held my hand through the delivery of my daughter. This is the woman who helped me out of so many scrapes, especially when everything hit the fan. She loved me and always had my back.  I guess, up until now, I’ve just been happy for her chance to move on to “the next great adventure.” When I went to visit her a few weeks ago, we talked about life. We talked about everything she was going to have to go through. She told me she wasn’t afraid of the other side, she was just afraid about how long it would take to get there.

I look back on the day my daughter was born differently, now. At the time, I called her because my ex was an hour and a half away and didn’t want to leave his meeting (at the time, I thought he couldn’t leave it. But my perspective has changed since then. No boss would expect a man to miss the birth of a child. Not in Small-town, Snowbank where we used to live). Grandma had told me that if I needed anything, all I had to do was call. Well, when it looked like I was about to have my very first baby all by myself, I called! It was a little awkward having your grandma there. But now… now I’m so glad I did. All of her other grandkids talk about all she did for them. But she never did that for any of them. Just me. Years later, she told me how much it meant for her to be there. She only had one daughter, as I said. She told me at that moment, I became her daughter, too. And she got to hold her daughter all over again, and help her daughter through life, all over again. Her daughter made a lot of hard choices in her life, picking men about like I picked them; some really dangerous and oppressive, and one really, really great guy. Grandma never judged me for my past, just helped me pick up the pieces. She never called my ex names, but helped me through all the problems he left me, even though he caused problems for her, too. Really expensive problems. She’s my hero.

Written at about 10: When I told my daughter about Grandma, she took it really hard. At bedtime, she prayed the sweetest, most inspired prayer. “And please bless Grandma, and let her have fun with Adella. And help her be happy up there. And help us be happy down here. ” It was said just about the time my grandmother actually slipped to the other side. Adella is my sister’s angel baby, she lost last spring.

Help us be happy down here…

Life Lessons

Hezekiah

I have been reading the Old Testament for about 4 years. I’m still in Kings. I’ve changed the direction of the goal, though. Instead of reading to a specific point each day, thereby getting exhausted, and not reading for a few days afterwards, I am just going to read every day. Get as far as I get, and embrace the change. I know, sort of a no-brainer solution, huh? That’s what I get for looking so close to the problem.

I do have to say, up until the last few chapters of 2 Kings, I was determined that I would never read through the books of Kings again! So depressing and dry. I’ll take Leviticus any day. And then I come across a humble king in all the history of Kings named Hezekiah. He’s my hero. He saves the whole book for me. Here’s a guy, knowing all is lost, and still fighting for restoring faith to his people. He already knows Judah is going to face the same fate as Israel in a few short years, and yet he gives it all he’s got to save the people. Isaiah even says that it’s too late, that their fate has already been sealed. But that doesn’t stop Hezekiah from going to and doing the work. If you need a hero that fights for lost causes, he’s it. Then, he’s informed by Isaiah of his imminent death, pleads with God for more time, and is granted 15 more years. He’s also granted the opportunity to die before he sees the cause be utterly lost.