Is the Professor Who is on Summer Break Happy?

On Saturday morning, while my husband and I waited for the first World Cup match of the day to begin, we sat with our coffee and watched the recently released documentary by Michel Gondry, the filmmaker who made the sweet and funny films Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Be Kind Rewind, and the action adventure movie The Green Hornet.

His new movie, Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy? isn't like any of these, however; it's an animated documentary (which sounds antithetical) about Noam Chomsky. Though it's not really about Chomsky, per se, but rather an 88-minute long interview of sorts where Gondry attempts to get at the heart of how Chomsky thinks and what he thinks about.



I'm writing about Gondry's movie here on this blog because not only is the film thought provoking--covering topics of education, linguistics, meta-cognition, philosophy, and scientific inquiry--and about a man, perhaps one of the greatest thinkers of our time, who wrote in his book Manufacturing Consent that "Education is a system of imposed ignorance," but also because Gondry, a whimsical thinker and filmmaker, represents us, the audience, in this dialogue with Chomsky: someone who respects the man, but doesn't always understand or agree with him.

It's the perfectly thoughtful kind of brain candy you all might want to chew on while you're on summer break.

The movie is available for instant streaming on Netflix (and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is available on DVD from the MCC Library)--let us know what you think!

Using Your Brain: Notes from NISOD

Julie Freelove, Jim Falco, and I were able to attend NISOD's 35th Annual International Conference on Teaching & Leadership Excellence (and Juletta Patrick was able to present at the conference! check out her blurb on page 38 of the conference program PDF).

The three of us scoured through thirty-one pages of breakout session listings to find some really terrific sessions, and today's post will give you a few tidbits from two of them.

On Monday, May 27, the first full day of the conference, I attended two back-to-back workshops led by Dr. Janet Zadina, an educational neuroscientist and adjunct associate professor at Tulane University's School of Medicine. I hadn't planned on attending Zadina's second session ("The Multiple Pathways Model: Using Brain Research to Orchestrate Teaching and Learning"), but during her first session ("Tapping Into the Brain's Reward Pathway to Energize Instruction") I quickly recognized that she was a presenter with great content and great style; so I decided to attend her second workshop.

Dr. Zadina and a brain (not her own)

One thing Zadina talked about that hit home was student success in the classroom. There are many reasons students don't succeed in any particular class, but one of the things that we, as instructors, can address specifically is a student's lack of prior knowledge.

Zadina gave tips for addressing this:

• Give students some background information (a YouTube video clip, a newspaper or magazine article that's slightly below reading level) on course content before they start a new reading or project; this will help them to create a meaningful context for the material and will help them dip their toes into water that may be very cold and very unfamiliar
• Use visuals whenever you can (we use emoticons and emojis in text messages and casual e-mails to signal meaning [especially sarcasm], so why not use images and pictures with students to help communicate the meaning behind the words and concepts?)

Cookies & photos by Bee In Our Bonnet--maybe a perfect project for a pastries class...?

During the second workshop, which focused on the brain's frontal lobe (a good frontal lobe = a good life!), Zadina gave some great tips for helping students learn those all important "executive" (higher level) brain functions:

• Teach students the process of doing the tasks by modeling them ahead of time during class
• Show students how to take good notes (on days one or two of the semester, show them your own notes from a seminar or workshop, and spend a minute talking about your own process)
• Show students how to study for tests and quizzes (use small groups or in-class study sessions to model good studying)
• Start with short-term, concrete projects before moving on to long-term higher-learning function projects
• Require meta-cognition (before an assignment or quiz/exam, ask students to answer questions like How much time do I plan to spend preparing for this assignment/quiz? and What techniques will I use to complete this assignment/study for this quiz? After assignments, students can answer questions like Am I satisfied with my final product? and What will I do differently to prepare for the next assignment/quiz?)

There was so much more great information, but hopefully this will get you started thinking about how to be more aware of students' brains and how we can use our own amazing brains when preparing for class.

Look forward to more notes from NISOD, coming soon!