The New iPad App You’ll Want Grandma to Download

By KJ DELL'ANTONIA

KJ Dell’Antonia

Ustyme is the kind of app the iPad was made for. Two users, connected online and by video, can read or play games together in an experience that is as close to really being together as I’ve yet found online. Particularly for a young child interacting with an adult at a distance, ustyme created a shared experience in a way Skype and FaceTime never could.
I bought my mother, who lives a plane ride away, an iPad in the hopes that she would use the FaceTime app to talk with my children. I envisioned her reading to them across the miles, or maybe virtually hanging out as they played. I bought myself a new iPad — one with a camera — at about the same time, and I had big plans for FaceTime. My children have some dear friends who live across the country, and their mother and I thought we could set up two iPads and watch children playing some advanced form of Lego together.
None of that happened. Although my children like FaceTiming with Grandma, the two youngest (7 and a very young-for-her-age 8) are more interested in making faces at their own image on the screen than in looking at my mother. The older two (9 and 12) talk in much the same way they do by phone. How are they? They’re fine. Yes, they went to school today. What did they do? Nothing. It didn’t become the ritual I had hoped. FaceTime calls to their distant friends petered out quickly.
Ustyme has the potential to help my iPad forge the distant connections I had hoped for. On our first try, I couldn’t tear my 7-year-old away, and he has been clamoring for another go ever since.
I downloaded the app and created a sign-in, and my mother did the same. We had to call one another to arrange to connect (ustyme representatives tell me that the next update will include a feature that allows an “ustyme” call to ring in the same way a FaceTime call does). I set the iPad up in front of my son, and he chose Go Fish from among a small collection of classic books and games. The fish-shaped cards appeared on his screen and my mother’s; on his screen, his cards were face up and hers were face down; on hers, it was the other way around. Her face appeared in the corner of his screen; his in the corner of hers.
They played three games before moving on to a version of the Memory card game and Four-in-a-Row (ConnectFour). They read a book together (“The Three Little Pigs”), alternating reading pages and laughing, because if one “turned” a page, both sets of pages changed, and if they didn’t coordinate, they would move two pages forward or backward at once. They played Rock Paper Scissors countless times, in a cleverly characterized but still simple game of choosing your weapon, then watching as your rock gleefully crushes your opponents’ scissors.
And they talked. The games were as simply animated as could be; turning cards, moving checkers. The book’s pages didn’t move, prod him to participate, or sing. There was nothing to distract my son from the game or the story they were sharing; but there was just enough to keep him focused on that shared experience. In between turns, he told my mother the news that comes out more easily for children when they are engaged in something else: He did like his new teacher, but she kept him in from recess last week; his sister had a black eye from falling on the coffee table; his friend Finn got a new kitten. He basked in his grandmother’s undivided attention (rare for the youngest of four), and he didn’t want to stop.
Linda Salesky, a ustyme co-founder, its chief executive and an grandmother, told me that was exactly the kind of experience she was hoping to create. “When our first grandson was born, my husband and I realized that we needed some way to create a connection with him,” she said. “My daughter lives far away — she’s busy, we’re busy — but we still wanted to be able to share some of the same things with him that we loved doing with our daughter, like reading and playing games.”
The ustyme app is available for a free download in the Apple App store (but so far, available only for iPad.) For now, all of the content I tried was free (I tried it out as a consumer, not in a “review” capacity, so what I saw should be the same thing you see). A banner reading “trial” across games like checkers and chess suggests that those will require a paid download later, and as of now, at least, there are no ads on the ustyme app.
I’m hoping our experience with ustyme is the first of many. My 12-year-old is planning to use it to play chess with friends, my 7-year-old asked me to alert his best friend’s mother, and every one of them wants to play with Grandma soon (we will have to loop their other grandmother in this weekend). When it comes to connecting us, the ustyme app promises to help our iPad do exactly what I hoped it would do: provide the technology to bring my children together with distant friends and family, and then get out of the way.

September 2013 | Volume 71 | Number 1
Resilience and Learning Pages 10-13

Handle with Care: A Conversation with Maya Angelou

Amy M. Azzam

How does resilience develop, and how can we instill it in others?

If there's someone who knows something about resilience, the theme of this month's issue of EL, it's Maya Angelou. When Dr. Angelou was three and her brother was five, their mother sent them alone by train from California to Arkansas, with tags on their arms that listed their destination. Overcoming a difficult childhood and extraordinary obstacles—poverty and racial prejudice among them—Dr. Angelou went on to make important contributions to literature, the arts, civil rights, and women's rights. She's best known for her autobiographies, the first of which—I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)—rocketed her into fame. Her most recent book, Mom & Me & Mom (Random House, 2013), delves into her relationship with her mother.
Can children learn resilience on their own?

I'm not sure if resilience is ever achieved alone. Experience allows us to learn from example. But if we have someone who loves us—I don't mean who indulges us, but who loves us enough to be on our side—then it's easier to grow resilience, to grow belief in self, to grow self-esteem. And it's self-esteem that allows a person to stand up.
One of the reasons I wrote Mom & Me & Mom is that I wanted parents to look at themselves—fathers as well as mothers—and see what can happen when a child is loved, when a child feels, "My parents are on my side," that they're not just with the authorities, not just with the teacher or the principal or the judge. When my parents really think I'm the bees' knees—that I'm the best!—when the parent gives those gifts to the child, the child develops resilience. So in the street, without the presence of the parent, the child says, "Yes, I am somebody! I deserve better treatment than this."
You've written much about your mother. What was her role in fostering your own capacity for resilience?
When I joined my mother at 13 after being away so long, I didn't really like her very much, I didn't understand her. She was nothing like my grandmother, my father's mother, who had been raising me, who spoke softly and wore long dresses. I liked my grandmother so much that I'd follow her around, and people would say, "You've got your shadow with you!" My grandmother would look at me and smile and say, "Yes, I guess I do, yes. Because if I sit down, she sits down, and if I stand up, she stands up." I really loved my grandmother and understood her.
When I went back to my mother's, she sang and danced and wore lipstick. She'd dance in the kitchen and sing along with the records, and that wasn't anything I was used to. However, I watched her. She told me I had to call her something, and I told her she didn't seem like a mother to me. She asked what I would like to call her. I said, "Lady." And she didn't argue.
She was the mother. She could have said, "I don't want that." Instead, she said, "All right, I'll introduce myself to everyone as Lady, and they'll all call me Lady." My mother always took my side.
In your books, resilience and dignity are inextricably entwined, as in your descriptions of your mother and grandmother.
Dignity—the word itself—has come to mean different things to different people, as many words do. It doesn't just mean always being stiff and composed. It means a belief in oneself, that one is worthy of the best. Dignity means that what I have to say is important, and I will say it when it's important for me to say it. Dignity really means that I deserve the best treatment I can receive. And that I have the responsibility to give the best treatment I can to other people.
Resilience is obviously a good thing to have. But some kids—impoverished kids, kids from minority groups—are repeatedly called on to have more of it than others.
That's the cruelty of poverty, the cruelty of ignorance. And by ignorance, I mean racial ignorance. People decide that because you don't look like them, you can't have the same value as they do.
The fallout of all those ignorances is that people are asked to give more than they get, more than they have in their coffers. So for a child from an impoverished home—I mean impoverished in terms of finances, food, clothes, education, information, and love, particularly of love—where would that child get resilience? Why would he think he's worth everything when he looks at television and sees that the home he lives in looks nothing like the homes he sees on television; and people are wearing clothes that are nothing like his raggedy, dirty clothes; and they're living in homes with furniture nothing like anything he sits on or sleeps on? So how can he even begin to think he's worth it? He's got to look at whites and say, "They're worthy." And even poor whites, "OK, they're poor, but they've been white all their lives," as though that gives them some right to receive better treatment.
Sometimes the church is a place where young people learn resilience. They do so from the sermons, from members' treatment of the young people, and from the lyrics in the gospel songs and the spiritual songs. Especially Southern children. They get to hear some of the African American poetry of the 19th and 20th centuries. They learn there's great beauty in those lyrics—and great resilience. They begin to hear this music and see how the quality of this art that people like them created affected—and still affects—the world. And that gives them some resilience.
I encourage parents and teachers to read Paul Laurence Dunbar, James Weldon Johnson, Countee Cullen. A number of people know "Lift Every Voice and Sing," but they don't realize it was written by one of America's great poets—James Weldon Johnson—and that the music was written by his brother. I'd bring these works into the schools. I'd start with Paul Laurence Dunbar and just continue on to today's poets.
You've lived in several places around the world. Do you think resilience is universal, or does it vary among cultures?
If children are given the chance to believe they're worth something—if they truly believe that—they will insist upon it. That is in Rome, Italy, or Rome, Arkansas; in Paris, France, or Paris, Texas. Children don't have to be born with a silver spoon in their mouths, but if they can be convinced they're the best, they become resilient. They themselves will resist any attempts to belittle them.
So resilience is always a bouncing back.
But it's also a bouncing forward, going beyond what the naysayers said, saying, "No, it's not true that I'm nobody. I know that not only is that not true, but I'm more than you can imagine!"
We hear about courage and power and self-awareness as being components of resilience. Is there something about resilience that would surprise us?
One of the things—one of the blessed components of resilience—is this: A person who resists being tied down and bound and made less than herself is able, by resisting, not only to be better than the naysayer would believe, but she's also able to lift up the naysayer.
If you could leave our readers with one thought about how schools can best support kids and foster resilience, what would it be?
I would ask the teacher to be sure that this is the program—this is the job—that he or she is called to do. Don't just teach because that's all you can do. Teach because it's your calling. And once you realize that, you have a responsibility to the young people. And it's not a responsibility to teach them by rote and by threat and even by promise. Your responsibility is to care about what you're saying to them, to care about what they're getting from what you're saying. If you care about the child and care about the information, you'll handle both with care, and maybe with prayer. Handle them both with prayer.

Board Book Roundup

Board Book Roundup

‘Barnyard Baby,’ by Elise Broach, and More

From "Barnyard Baby"

By SARAH HARRISON SMITH

Published: September 18, 2013

BARNYARD BABYBy Elise Broach
Illustrated by Cori Doerrfeld
14 pp. Little, Brown & Company. $7.99. (Board book; ages 3 months to 3 years)

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As sweet as fresh apple cider, “Barnyard Baby,” by Elise Broach, with illustrations by Cori Doerrfeld, follows an irrepressible toddler though a day’s adventures on a farm. Broach’s text is impressionistic, with a fun-to-read-aloud sing-song rhythm. “Hayride baby / Feed the sheep / Leaf-pile baby / Run and leap,” she writes. The book’s spreads are autumn-hued, with many cheerful details: a brown puppy wears a jaunty yellow scarf à la Rupert Bear; tiny mice hold hands as they play on a hay bale; and when leaves fall to the ground, they form the outline of a heart. There’s much to look at and discuss, and lift-the-flaps give little hands something to do.

KISS, KISS GOOD NIGHTBy Kenn Nesbitt
Illustrated by Rebecca Elliott
12 pp. Cartwheel Books/Scholastic. $8.99. (Picture book; ages 3 months to 3 years)

Kittens, lambs, bear cubs, bunnies and chicks all snuggle their way to sleep with the help of their mothers in “Kiss, Kiss Good Night.” Kenn Nesbitt gives this big-format board book, with its shiny padded cover and dusky nighttime vignettes, a narrative in jaunty couplets: “When cuddly cubs begin to doze, / their mothers stroke them on the nose, / then grumble softy in their ear. / In Bear, that means ‘Good night, my dear.’” Tiny children will love the comforting sentiments, and older ones may find themselves memorizing the ingenious rhymes.

GIGGLE
Written and illustrated by Caroline Jayne Church
10 pp. Cartwheel Books/Scholastic. $7.99. (Board book; ages 3 months to 3 years)

Parents and children are equally likely to enjoy Caroline Jayne Church’s adorable pictures of chubby-faced toddlers smiling, laughing and playing together in this very short book, and the text, only nine sentences long, is nicely written: “You may be small, / but you smile wide / when we play / side by side.” Opinions may differ, however, on the electronic button marked “Press here”: it emits a recording of giggling sounds that lasts about seven seconds. After a try or two, those seconds begin to feel — to an adult — a little long. Children, however, will probably want to press that button again and again. Caveat emptor.

YOU ARE MY LITTLE PUMPKIN PIE
By Amy E. Sklansky
Illustrated by Talitha Shipman
16 pp. Little, Brown & Company. $6.99. (Board book; ages 3 months to 3 years)

The cover of this delectable-looking book shows a bibbed baby tucking into what for many kids is the best treat on the Thanksgiving table. A pie tin shines with silvery corrugated paper, raised lettering glitters with pink sparkles, and Talitha Shipman’s palette of mango orange, bright purple and chocolate brown is good enough to eat. Inside, pumpkins hide in each seasonal scene of babies and their doting parents. On one page, they decorate a girl’s barrettes; on another they line a row-house stoop; children can have fun pointing them out. Those with a super-sweet tooth will find the text to their taste.

ALPHABLOCK
By Christopher Franceschelli
Illustrated by Peskimo
104 pp. Abrams Appleseed. $16.95. (Board book; ages 1 to 4)

Chunky dimensions make “Alphablock” easy for little hands to handle. From A to Z, each letter appears in a cut-out profile so kids can feel its shape. Though it is no surprise that “D is for dog,” Peskimo brings an element of humor to the familiar as a dachshund — whose elongated shape is already something of a punch line — is half hidden behind its signifying letter until the reader turns the page. While it’s graphically sophisticated enough to please adults, little children can happily flip through this book on their own.

SPOT THE DOT
By David A. Carter
14 pp. Ruckus Media Group/Scholastic. $12.99. (Novelty board book; ages 3 to 5)

Hold the phone! A book based on an app? Brilliantly colored, each page presents a seek-and-find game in a different format. Some pages have pop-up elements, others have wheels and flaps that move to reveal shapes and colors in a tantalizing way. On repeated readings, children can use “Spot the Dot” like a memory game. Don’t let anti-app sentiment put you off; this book is a deviously clever piece of paper craft, perfectly suited to its medium.

MUNCH!
Written and illustrated by Matthew Van Fleet
14 pp. A Paula Wiseman Book/Simon & Schuster. $9.99. (Board book; ages 2 to 6)

Matthew Van Fleet specializes in sturdy, bright books with pull tabs, textures and moving parts. In “Munch” (similar to its predecessors “Lick” and “Sniff”), animals of all sorts  —  with expressions ranging from grumpy to glad  —  homp, grind, swallow and gobble their way through their favorite foods. The book’s text does not trip off the tongue, but kids probably won’t notice; there’s fun enough to be had in making a beaver’s teeth judder across a log. Thick cardboard makes “Munch” more durable than some such books, though there’s nothing to stop human teethers from gnawing their way through it if they are so inspired.

COLORS
Written and illustrated by Xavier Deneux
20 pp. A Handprint Book/Chronicle Books. $14.99. (Board book; ages 3 and up)

OPPOSITES
Written and illustrated by Xavier Deneux
20 pp. A Handprint Book/Chronicle Books. $14.99. (Board book; ages 3 and up)

These two thick volumes by Xavier Deneux, part of a series called TouchThinkLearn, make wonderful companions. The pages have a visual and tactile elegance that will appeal to eyes and hands. In “Colors,” one side of each spread has a raised cardboard picture — of a green leaf, in one case, on a white ground, while on the opposite side, the leaf shape is carved out of the page, leaving a white negative shape on a glossy green page.  Some pages correspond less directly: to demonstrate “blue,” a whale is faced by a submarine of a similar shape. In “Opposites,” Deneux uses the same style of page design to illustrate “caged” and “free” and more common pairings, like heavy and light, and white and black. The luxurious feel and minimalist style of these books could make them welcome gifts at the holidays.

THE BOSS BABY
Written and illustrated by Marla Frazee
36 pp. Simon & Schuster. $7.99. (Board book; ages 3 to 7)

Not every board book is for babies. This one — originally published in 2010 as a picture book  —  seems best enjoyed by parents and their older children, who are ready to laugh (perhaps wearily) at the antics of one very bossy baby. He arrives wearing a suit-and-tie pajama ensemble, and he’s got an agenda that requires his parents’ constant attention. “He made demands. Many, many demands. And he was quite particular. If things weren’t done to his immediate satisfaction, he had a fit.” Marla Frazee (who illustrates the Clementine series and Mary Ann Hoberman’s “Seven Silly Eaters,” and is also a two-time Caldecott Honor winner) holds back on sentiment, for the most part, and maximizes the laughs. After an evening spent reading sweet bedtime books to sleepy children, “The Boss Baby” might be the tired parent’s perfect nightcap.

Animal Attributes

Children’s Books

Animal Attributes

‘If You Were a Panda Bear,’ by Florence Minor, and More

From "If You Were a Panda Bear"

By SARAH HARRISON SMITH

Published: June 26, 2013

Animals are useful in children’s books: they’re beautiful, colorful and both similar to and different enough from humans for children to view them with detached amusement — or sympathy. In three new books this month, writers structure their stories around the unusual characteristics of wombats, bears and sloths.

ONE VERY TIRED WOMBAT

Written and illustrated by Renée Treml

32 pp. Random House Australia. $16.99. (Picture book; ages 3 to 5)

IF YOU WERE A PANDA BEAR

By Florence Minor

Illustrated by Wendell Minor

32 pp. Katherine Tegen Books/HarperCollins Publishers. $17.99. (Picture book; ages 4 to 8)

LOST SLOTH

Written and illustrated by J. Otto Seibold

32 pp. McSweeney’s McMullens. $16.95. (Picture book; ages 6 to 8)

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From "One Very Tired Wombat"

Enlarge This Image

From "Lost Sloth"

Like little humans, Australian wombats need a lot of sleep. And as some babies seem to do, they sleep mostly during the day. In “One Very Tired Wombat,” Renée Treml, a Melbourne-based author and illustrator, tells the story of a very cute, very dozy wombat whose attempts to nap are continually interrupted by nine sets of birds, from kookaburras to fairy wrens, who want to use his sweetly rounded back as a perch, or in the case of a playful group of little blue penguins (did you know Australia had them?), as a slide.

In rhyming verse, Treml counts the wombat’s visitors as they coo, giggle, warble, chatter, squawk and sing. “Seven garish galahs — as noisy as a train! / Poor tired wombat, these birds are such a pain.” Finally the birds go a feather too far and the wombat sneezes, chasing them away, at least for the moment.

This is Treml’s first picture book. Her artwork is distinctive; she uses a penknife to scratch black ink off a clay-painted board or paper, then applies paint to the scratched surface. Her method renders feathers, and particularly fur, dense with detail and seemingly three-dimensional. Though the animals are shown in black and white, each page has a deep pastel background to add interest. The effect, combined with her funny narrative, is charming and instructive.

“If You Were a Panda Bear,” by the author Florence Minor and her husband, the illustrator Wendell Minor, isn’t all about pandas. In brilliant colored gouache, with soft, fuzzy, furry detail, the Minors, who live and work in rural Connecticut, depict 10 kinds of bears enjoying their natural environments. Seen with their cubs, hunting, napping or moongazing, these bears range from the familiar polar bears and black bears to sun bears, sloth bears and moon bears.

A simple narrative, again in rhyme, gives a few facts about each bear (“If you were a moon bear, / You’d stay out late at night, /And the mark on your chest / Would look just like a light”), supplemented by a list of more earnest “Bear Fun Facts” at the end of the story. All the bears, even the impressively tall grizzly, look friendly, and the 10th bear — shown in his home environment, among other toys in a cozy chair, is, like this beautiful book, clearly a good bedtime companion.

J. Otto Seibold uses the slow and sleepy ways of sloths to add fun to “Lost Sloth,” a wacky tale for young readers published by McMullens, the children’s book imprint from McSweeney’s. Seibold’s book has an animated, trendy feeling to it. His protagonist is first seen asleep in a lavender armchair, with a fuchsia guitar in his lap. Perhaps he is tired after a late-night set? The room’s striped wallpaper could have been designed by Paul Smith, and the carpet pattern is woven with the words “hotel carpet.”

When Sloth is woken by a call announcing that he’s got only a few hours to claim a shopping spree (“What’s a spree?” thinks the sloth) he manages to get an uncharacteristically speedy start by using a clothesline as a zip line. How the suburban backyard we see him flying through relates to that hotel carpet remains a mystery, but the reader begins to root for Sloth: “Hurry Sloth!” the text prompts, as he misses the bus, swings slowly through the trees and hitches a ride on an ice cream cart. Just as he seems to be hopelessly lost, “something extraordinary,” and again, inexplicable, happens, and he hang-glides safely off a bluff to the store where his spree awaits.

As with his earlier books, like “Olive, the Other Reindeer,” Seibold, who is from Oakland, Calif., has drawn the artwork in “Lost Sloth” with a stylus on a digital tablet, using Adobe Illustrator. His palette is remarkable: rich olives, storm-cloud blues, and slightly murky but appealing shades of raspberry and grape. The excitement of the colorful pages and the disjointed action of the narrative may not appeal to tradition-minded families, but for others, this book is certain to feel inventive and contemporary, an example, as in the animal kingdom, of the beauty that can be seen in adaptation to a changing environment.

Study Finds Spatial Skill Is Early Sign of Creativity

By DOUGLAS QUENQUA

Published: July 15, 2013

A gift for spatial reasoning — the kind that may inspire an imaginative child to dismantle a clock or the family refrigerator — may be a greater predictor of future creativity or innovation than math or verbal skills, particularly in math, science and related fields, according to a study published Monday in the journal Psychological Science.

The study looked at the professional success of people who, as 13-year-olds, had taken both the SAT, because they had been flagged as particularly gifted, as well as the Differential Aptitude Test. That exam measures spatial relations skills, the ability to visualize and manipulate two-and three-dimensional objects. While math and verbal scores proved to be an accurate predictor of the students’ later accomplishments, adding spatial ability scores significantly increased the accuracy.

The researchers, from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, said their findings make a strong case for rewriting standardized tests like the SAT and ACT to focus more on spatial ability, to help identify children who excel in this area and foster their talents.

“Evidence has been mounting over several decades that spatial ability gives us something that we don’t capture with traditional measures used in educational selection,” said David Lubinski, the lead author of the study and a psychologist at Vanderbilt. “We could be losing some modern-day Edisons and Fords.”

Following up on a study from the 1970s, Dr. Lubinski and his colleagues tracked the professional progress of 563 students who had scored in the top 0.5 percent on the SAT 30 years ago, when they were 13. At the time, the students had also taken the Differential Aptitude Test.

Years later, the children who had scored exceptionally high on the SAT also tended to be high achievers — not surprisingly — measured in terms of the scholarly papers they had published and patents that they held. But there was an even higher correlation with success among those who had also scored highest on the spatial relations test, which the researchers judged to be a critical diagnostic for achievement in technology, engineering, math and science.

Cognitive psychologists have long suspected that spatial ability — sometimes referred to as the “orphan ability” for its tendency to go undetected — is key to success in technical fields. Earlier studies have shown that students with a high spatial aptitude are not only overrepresented in those fields, but may receive little guidance in high school and underachieve as a result. (Note to parents: Legos and chemistry sets are considered good gifts for the spatial relations set.)

The correlation has “been suspected, but not as well researched” as the predictive power of math skills, said David Geary, a psychologist at the University of Missouri, who was not involved in the study, which was funded by the John Templeton Foundation. The new research is significant, he said, for showing that “high levels of performance in STEM fields” — science, technology, engineering and math — “are not simply related to math abilities.”

Testing spatial aptitude is not particularly difficult, Dr. Geary added, but is simply not part of standardized testing because it is considered a cognitive function — the realm of I.Q. and intelligence tests — and is not typically a skill taught in school.

“It’s not like math or English, it’s not part of an academic curriculum,” he said. “It’s more of a basic competence. For that reason it just wasn’t on people’s minds when developing these tests.”

It is also a competence more associated with men than women. In the current study, boys greatly outnumbered girls, 393 to 170, reflecting the original scores of the students in the ’70s. But the study found no difference in the levels of adult achievement, said Dr. Lubinski, though the women were more likely than the men to work in medicine and the social sciences.

Late nights 'sap children's brain power'

Comments (410)

By Michelle Roberts Health editor, BBC News online

 

Late nights and lax bedtime routines can blunt young children's minds, research suggests.

The findings on sleep patterns and brain power come from a UK study of more than 11,000 seven-year-olds.
Youngsters who had no regular bedtime or who went to bed later than 21:00 had lower scores for reading and maths.
Lack of sleep may disrupt natural body rhythms and impair how well the brain learns new information say the study authors.
They gathered data on the children at the ages of three, five and then seven to find out how well they were doing with their learning and whether this might be related to their sleeping habits.

“Start Quote

Establishing a good bedtime routine early in childhood is probably best, but it's never too late”

Study author Prof Sacker

Erratic bedtimes were most common at the age of three, when around one in five of the children went to bed at varying times.

By the age of seven, more than half the children had a regular bedtime of between 19:30 and 20:30.
Overall, children who had never had regular bedtimes tended to fare worse than their peers in terms of test scores for reading, maths and spatial awareness.
The impact was more obvious throughout early childhood in girls than in boys and appeared to be cumulative.
The researchers, led by Prof Amanda Sacker from University College London, said it was possible that inconsistent bedtimes were a reflection of chaotic family settings and it was this, rather than disrupted sleep, that had an impact on cognitive performance in children.
"We tried to take these things into account," said Prof Sacker.
The children with late and erratic bedtimes came from more socially disadvantaged backgrounds and were less likely to be read to each night and, generally, watched more TV - often on a set in their own bedroom.
After controlling for such factors, the link between poorer mental performance and lax bedtimes remained.
The findings are published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.
Prof Sacker said: "The take-home message is really that routines really do seem to be important for children.
"Establishing a good bedtime routine early in childhood is probably best, but it's never too late."
She said there was no evidence that putting children to bed much earlier than 19:30 added anything in terms of brain power.
Dr Robert Scott-Jupp of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health said: "At first glance, this research might seem to suggest that less sleep makes children less intelligent, however, it is clearly more complicated than that.
"While it's likely that social and biological brain development factors are inter-related in a complex way, in my opinion, for schoolchildren to perform their best, they should all, whatever their background, get a good night's sleep."

To Help a Shy Child, Listen

By PERRI KLASS, M.D.

Joyce Hesselberth

18 and Under

Dr. Perri Klass on family health.

Toward the end of the summer, I was seeing a middle-school girl for a physical. The notes from a clinic visit last spring said she was a good student but didn’t talk enough in class. So I asked her: Is this still a problem for you?
I’m shy, she said. I’m just shy.
Should I have turned to her mother and suggested — a counselor? An academic evaluation? Should I have probed further? How do you feel in school, do you have some friends, is anybody bullying you?
Or should I have said: Lots of people are shy. It’s one of the healthy, normal styles of being human.
All of these responses, together, would have been correct. A child who is being bullied or bothered may be anxious about drawing attention to herself; a child who doesn’t ever talk in class may be holding back because some learning problem is getting in the way, making her self-conscious. So you do need to listen — especially to a child who talks less rather than more — and find ways to ask questions. Are you happy, anxious, afraid?
But shyness is also part of the great and glorious range of the human normal. Two years ago, Kathleen Merikangas, a senior investigator at the National Institute of Mental Health, and her colleagues published a study of 10,000 older children, ranging from 13 to 18 years old. “We found that about half of kids in America describe themselves as shy,” she told me.
Common though it may be, our schools — and our broader culture — do not always celebrate the reserved and retiring. “Children who are shy, who don’t raise their hand, who don’t talk in class, are really penalized in this society,” Dr. Merikangas said.
I have heard it said that temperament was invented by the first parent to have a second child — that’s when parents realize that children come wired with many of the determinants of disposition and personality. What worked with Baby 1 doesn’t necessarily work with Baby 2. The analysis of temperament has been a topic of discussion in pediatrics and psychology for decades.
“Temperament is the largely inborn set of behaviors that are the style with which a person functions, not to be confused with their motivation or their developmental status and abilities,” said Dr. William B. Carey, a clinical professor of pediatrics at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the author of “Understanding Your Child’s Temperament.”
Shyness reflects a child’s place on the temperamental continuum, the part of it that involves dealing with new and unfamiliar circumstances. And starting a new school year may be hard on those who find new situations more difficult and more full of anxiety. What most children need is time to settle in, support from parents and teachers, and sometimes help making connections and participating in class.
If a child is not more comfortable after a month or so, parents should look at whether more help is needed, said Anne Marie Albano, director of the Columbia University Clinic for Anxiety and Related Disorders. Treatment usually involves cognitive behavioral strategies to help the child cope with anxiety.
All ranges of temperament have their uncomfortable, or even pathological, outer zones. Just as there are children whose rambunctious eagerness to participate makes trouble for them in school or signals the presence of other problems, there are children whose silence is a shout for help.
I’m struck by the parallels between the ways we discuss shyness and the ways we discuss impulsivity and hyperactivity. In both cases, there is concern about the risk of “pathologizing” children who are well within the range of normal and worry that we are too likely to medicate outliers. By this thinking, children who would once have been considered shy and quiet too often get antidepressants, just as children who would once have been considered lively and rambunctious too often get A.D.H.D. medications.
But the most important question is whether children are in distress. Dr. Merikangas’s study distinguished between the common trait of shyness and the psychiatric diagnosis of social phobia. Over all, about 5 percent of the adolescents in the study were severely restricted by social anxiety; they included some who described themselves as shy and some who did not. The authors questioned whether the debate about the “medicalization” of shyness might be obscuring the detection of the distinct signs of social phobia.
For parents who simply want to help a shy child cope with, for example, a brand new classroom full of brand new people, consider rehearsing, scripting encounters and interactions. “The best thing they can do is do a role play and behavioral rehearsal ahead of time,” said Steven Kurtz, a senior clinician at the Child Mind Institute in Manhattan. Parents should “plan on rewarding the bravery.”
But don’t take over. “The danger point is rescuing too soon, too often, too much, so the kids don’t develop coping mechanisms,” said Dr. Kurtz.
Cognitive behavioral therapy relies on “successive approximations,” in which children slowly close in on the behaviors they are hoping to achieve. In that spirit, a parent might arrange to meet another parent on the way to school, so a shy child can walk with another and bond. A teacher might look for the right partner to pair up with a shy child for cooperative activities in the classroom.
“Probably the worst thing to do is to say, ‘Don’t be shy. Don’t be quiet,’ ” Dr. Merikangas told me. This is not about trying to change the child’s temperament. It’s about respecting and honoring temperament and variation, and helping children navigate the world with their own instruments.

'Growth Mindset' Gaining Traction as School Improvement Strategy

By Sarah D. Sparks 

 

New Orleans

It's one thing to say all students can learn, but making them believe it—and do it—can require a 180-degree shift in students' and teachers' sense of themselves and of one another.
While expressions like the "soft bigotry of low expectations" underscore the effects of teachers' and students' mindsets on academic success, it has proved difficult to pin down whether and how it's possible to change those attitudes once established.
Nonetheless, attempts to change that dynamic, from targeted interventions to restructured schools, are gaining traction as many states overhaul their curricula to match the Common Core State Standards and incorporate student-growth measures into accountability systems.
Three decades have passed since the Stanford University psychologist Carol S. Dweck and others first linked students' motivation to the way they perceived intelligence. Students who believe intelligence or skill can be improved by effort and experimentation—what Ms. Dweck calls a "growth mindset"—seek challenges, learn from mistakes, and keep faith in themselves in the face of failure.
By contrast, those who believe intelligence and skill are traits you are born with—a "fixed mindset"—can be discouraged by failure and reluctant to challenge themselves.

Instead of calling on the first student to raise a hand, chemistry teacher Anthony McElligott waits for all his students to do so at SciAcademy in New Orleans. Such approaches put the focus on the process of learning rather than the race to the correct answer.

—Jennifer Zdon for Education Week

Those mindsets are self-reinforcing, and Ms. Dweck, her colleagues, and other researchers have found in dozens of studies that students with a growth mindset improve more in academics and other skills, and can even be less aggressive and more socially engaged.
"When we understand that we can build our intelligence, rather than it being fixed, we take risks; we are interested in learning from mistakes rather than focusing on how people see us and wanting to do things perfectly and quickly," said Eduardo Briceño, a co-founder and the CEO of Mindset Works, a company based on the research by Ms. Dweck and Lisa S. Blackwell, the program's co-founders.

'Brainology' Approach

Mindset Works, based in San Carlos, Calif., won a small-business-innovation grant from the federal Institute of Education Sciences to scale up its "Brainology" curriculum, which provides six to 12 hours of online and in-person instruction and activities over five to 12 weeks.
The software targets grades 5-9, though the program as a whole can be implemented schoolwide. Lessons include brain development and learning, fixed-vs.-growth mindsets, and different strategies students can use when they hit difficulty in a particular subject or problem.
The program is being used in about 600 schools nationwide, and the District of Columbia school system is rolling it out this fall in middle school advisory classes.

'It's Not a Right or Wrong Answer'

—Jennifer Zdon for Education Week

At SciAcademy in New Orleans, chemistry teacher Anthony McElligott talks his sophomore class through their first experiment of the year. As the students predict ink dispersion patterns, listen to the way Mr. McElligott frames his focus on the process of science, rather than chasing a "right" answer.

It's also been integrated into Scholastic Inc.'s Math 180 curriculum this fall, so that students in grades 6-12 begin math instruction with two weeks of lessons explaining mindsets and neuroplasticity—the concept that the brain changes with experience—followed by periodic refreshers during the year, according to Tyler Reed, the corporate-communications director for the New York City-based publisher.
"The thing is, kids don't mind failing," said David Dockterman, Scholastic's chief architect of learning sciences and an adjunct lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. "When kids play video games, they fail 80 percent of the time. They look at failure there as an opportunity to learn."
However, students can find school mistakes humiliating, he said.
"How you set it up for kids matters; they hear you. There's a lot of implicit meaning for kids," Mr. Dockterman told 600 middle and high school math teachers at a professional-development seminar in the Baltimore County, Md., school district last month.
For example, a teacher setting out a problem from a new unit might say, "Let's start with an easy one," which can discourage students who struggle or get the problem wrong; but a teacher might set students more at ease by introducing the same problem with, "This might take a few tries."

Focus in New Orleans

At the SciAcademy Charter School here in New Orleans, Anthony McElligott's sophomore chemistry class is learning to pose hypotheses about the dispersion patterns of two drops of identical ink in two identical beakers of water. Strolling around the class, the teacher points to one furiously scribbling student: "Chris' paper has 'because,' which shows he's supporting his answers with evidence. If you think you are done, add more evidence, give an example."
After demonstrating the experiment, Mr. McElligott finds about half the class correctly predicted the ink would have different dispersion patterns even though the water and beakers were the same and the ink was dropped in the center of each beaker. When those who answered incorrectly mutter in frustration, he smiles: "We're going to see in this class really great scientists who were wrong again and again."

The Stockdale Paradox

—Jennifer Zdon for Education Week

What can a Vietnam War prisoner teach sophomores about personal growth? Listen in as English teacher Katie Bubalo of SciAcademy in New Orleans launches a discussion in her sophomore class with a quote from former POW U.S. Admiral Jim Stockdale.

The three-school Collegiate Academies charter network, of which SciAcademy was the first, sees cultivating growth mindsets as its first and most important mission. Founder Ben A. Marcovitz launched SciAcademy six years ago as one of the first charter high schools to open after Hurricane Katrina.
SciAcademy, the neighboring George Washington Carver Collegiate Academy, and George Washington Carver Preparatory Academy high schools, hire teachers based on multiple classroom observations, not just interviews.
Typically, Mr. Marcovitz estimates, 60 percent of interviewees don't stick around for the classroom observations, in which they teach a lesson, receive feedback, and teach again a few weeks later.
"But the 40 percent who do have already made a commitment to growth," he said. "[The hiring process] allows us to weed out people evincing growth mindset who haven't internalized it."
That's common, Mr. Briceño of Mindset Works said. In professional-development sessions, he has found about a third of teachers have heard the terms "fixed" and "growth" mindsets, "but might not know exactly what it is."
Teachers often confuse "teaching a growth mindset and exhorting kids to try hard," Ms. Dweck said. "You can't just tell a child to try hard without giving them strategies and supporting their efforts."
As part of an ongoing series of studies of growth-mindset teaching practices, Ms. Dweck and other researchers tracked more than 250,000 students learning fractions via the online Khan Academy program. Minor changes to student feedback—such as providing improvement-related praise vs. general encouragement—improved student persistence and math achievement, they found.
Praising students' strategies, focus, effort, persistence, and improvement "takes the spotlight off fixed ability and puts it on the process of learning," Ms. Dweck said.
At SciAcademy, the approach means students' learning problems are discussed privately, after class, while improvements are always called out in public, and in detail—even for a student moving from a 62 percent on the last test to a 65 percent on the next.
"Students of the week" are not only recognized during Friday gatherings, but also are asked to describe the steps they used to reach the goal.

Taylor Hagans, a sophomore, listens to a lesson by chemistry teacher Anthony McElligott at SciAcademy in New Orleans, where teachers emphasize the importance of process, rather than speed, in learning.

—Jennifer Zdon for Education Week

It's important for teachers to go into detail when citing a student's correct answer, Mr. Dockterman said.
"If you talk about what the kid did [to get the right answer], other students can model it," he said. "If you just say, 'You're so smart,' they can't learn anything from that."
SciAcademy went so far as to ban the word "smart" on campus.
"That sounds like it has a weird 1984 connotation but it's really important," said Spencer Sherman, the 12th grade dean and environmental science teacher. "You get in the habit of saying 'smart,' and you find yourself saying it to kids, and you give kids the expectation that [intelligence] is fixed. We'll call each other out on it, because adult culture very quickly becomes scholar culture."

'Designed to Fail'

It can be particularly challenging to focus on effort with students who do excel easily. While teachers often notice struggling students who think they are "no good" in a subject, it's easier for high-achieving students to slip under the radar, Mr. Dockterman said.
"You think you are good at math and so it comes easy for you, but you stick to the things that are easy, and if you get to something hard, you shut down," he added.
SciAcademy found that out the hard way.
The school initially enrolled students in Advanced Placement classes on the basis of their having received top grades in similar subjects, Mr. Sherman explained. Many previously high-achieving students who "hit the wall" in the harder classes grew demoralized and reluctant to tackle other challenging work.
In response, the school opened Advanced Placement to anyone, but pitched the courses differently—"This will be the hardest class, with the most homework, but you'll learn more," Mr. Sherman said—and required an entry essay based on text difficult for even advanced students."It is a task you're designed to fail, because we want students to figure out how to respond to that," he said. "We're trying to weed out for fixed mindset. Now the students in AP don't think they got there by being smarter than everyone else, but because they worked really hard for it."

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Collegiate Academies staff see a growth mindset as a necessity for their campuses, which are made up of interlocking trailers, and located in a post-Katrina neighborhood still dotted with abandoned houses and shopping centers.
"We have to believe that a student who comes to us reading at a 2nd grade level can go to college in four years," said Margo Bouchie, Collegiate Academies' chief academic officer. "You can't come to work everyday if you don't believe that, and we have to be very honest with the scholars about where they are."
School leaders acknowledge there can be a fine line between realistic and pie-in-the-sky growth. But SciAcademy students like junior Eugene Thomas provide some support for optimism: He entered high school reading on a 5th grade level, and moved up to a 10th grade level by the end of the year.
Mr. Thomas said teachers noticed every time he read slightly better and pushed him harder, urging him to read 30 minutes every day on his own time. "It's not really difficult; you just have to work hard," he said.

Music Can Help You Remember

Music Can Help You Remember

Monday, September 16, 2013

The best way to remember facts might be to set them to music. Medical students, for example, have long used rhymes and songs to help them master vast quantities of information, and we’ve just gotten fresh evidence of how effective this strategy can be. A young British doctor, Tapas Mukherjee of Glenfield Hospital in Leicester, was distressed by a survey showing that 55 percent of nurses and doctors at Glenfield were not following hospital guidelines on the management of asthma; 38 percent were not even aware that the guidelines existed.
Using his cell phone, Mukherjee recorded a video of himself singing immortal lines like “Aim for 94 percent to 98 percent sats now” (that’s a reference to the asthma patient’s blood oxygen level). He posted the video to YouTube and it went viral among hospital staff. Two months after he released the video, Glenside conducted another survey, finding that 100 percent of doctors and nurses were now aware of the asthma treatment guidelines, and that compliance with the guidelines had increased markedly. Mukherjee reported the results at meeting of the European Respiratory Society last week.
Although Mukherjee’s methods are modern, his approach shares in a long tradition of oral storytelling—one that shaped itself over thousands of years to the particular proclivities of the human brain. Oral forms like ballads and epics exist in every culture, originating long before the advent of written language. In preliterate eras, tales had to be appealing to the ear and memorable to the mind or else they would simply disappear. After all, most messages we hear are forgotten, or if they’re passed on, they’re changed beyond recognition—as psychologists’ investigations of how rumors evolve have shown.
In his classic book Memory in Oral Traditions, cognitive scientist David Rubin notes, “Oral traditions depend on human memory for their preservation. If a tradition is to survive, it must be stored in one person’s memory and be passed on to another person who is also capable of storing and retelling it. All this must occur over many generations . . . Oral traditions must, therefore, have developed forms of organization and strategies to decrease the changes that human memory imposes on the more casual transmission of verbal material.”
What are these strategies? Tales that last for many generations tend to describe concrete actions rather than abstract concepts. They use powerful visual images. They are sung or chanted. And they employ patterns of sound: alliteration, assonance, repetition and, most of all, rhyme. One of Rubin’s own experiments showed that when two words in a ballad are linked by rhyme, contemporary college students remember them better than non-rhyming words. Such universal characteristics of oral narratives are, in effect, mnemonics—memory aids that people developed over time “to make use of the strengths and avoid the weaknesses of human memory,” as Rubin puts it.
Songs and rhymes can be used to remember all kinds of information. A study just published in the journal Memory and Cognition finds that adults learned a new language more effectively when they sang the words instead of spoke them. Even great literature is susceptible to this treatment. Book Tunes, a collaboration between educational entrepreneur Jonathan Sauer and hip-hop artist Andy Bernstein (he performs under the name Abdominal), turns long, wordy books into compact, catchy raps, spoken over an insistent beat.
The duo’s latest offering: a rap version of The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne. (“Hester’s story is set in the Puritan settlement/that was 17th century Boston where she’s being led/ from the town prison holding her baby daughter Pearl with an A on her chest/ for the world to see which we quickly learn stands for adulterer ‘cause turns out/ H is married . . . “). Book Tunes’s take on the tale of Hester Prynne is being offered jointly with SparkNotes, the study aid provider owned by Barnes & Noble, which is said to be interested in raps of other classics, such as the plays of William Shakespeare.
Purists aghast at the notion may need to be reminded that many of the world’s greatest works of literature, such as The Odyssey and The Iliad, began as oral chants. Humans have been remembering through rhyme and song for ages: how can you update the tradition?

How Physical Fitness May Promote School Success

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS

Librado Romero/The New York Times Students exercise during physical education class at P.S. 457 in the Bronx.

Phys Ed

Gretchen Reynolds on the science of fitness.

Children who are physically fit absorb and retain new information more effectively than children who are out of shape, a new study finds, raising timely questions about the wisdom of slashing physical education programs at schools.
Parents and exercise scientists (who, not infrequently, are the same people) have known for a long time that physical activity helps young people to settle and pay attention in school or at home, with salutary effects on academic performance. A representative study, presented in May at the American College of Sports Medicine, found that fourth- and fifth-grade students who ran around and otherwise exercised vigorously for at least 10 minutes before a math test scored higher than children who had sat quietly before the exam.
More generally, in a large-scale study of almost 12,000 Nebraska schoolchildren published in August in The Journal of Pediatrics, researchers compiled each child’s physical fitness, as measured by a timed run, body mass index and academic achievement in English and math, based on the state’s standardized test scores. Better fitness proved to be linked to significantly higher achievement scores, while, interestingly, body size had almost no role. Students who were overweight but relatively fit had higher test scores than lighter, less-fit children.
To date, however, no study specifically had examined whether and in what ways physical fitness might affect how children learn. So researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign recently stepped into that breach, recruiting a group of local 9- and 10-year-old boys and girls, testing their aerobic fitness on a treadmill, and then asking 24 of the most fit and 24 of the least fit to come into the exercise physiology lab and work on some difficult memorization tasks.
Learning is, of course, a complex process, involving not only the taking in and storing of new information in the form of memories, a process known as encoding, but also recalling that information later. Information that cannot be recalled has not really been learned.
Earlier studies of children’s learning styles have shown that most learn more readily if they are tested on material while they are in the process of learning it. In effect, if they are quizzed while memorizing, they remember more easily. Straight memorization, without intermittent reinforcement during the process, is tougher, although it is also how most children study.
In this case, the researchers opted to use both approaches to learning, by providing their young volunteers with iPads onto which several maps of imaginary lands had been loaded. The maps were demarcated into regions, each with a four-letter name. During one learning session, the children were shown these names in place for six seconds. The names then appeared on the map in their correct position six additional times while children stared at and tried to memorize them.
In a separate learning session, region names appeared on a different map in their proper location, then moved to the margins of the map. The children were asked to tap on a name and match it with the correct region, providing in-session testing as they memorized.
A day later, all of the children returned to the lab and were asked to correctly label the various maps’ regions.
The results, published last week in PLoS One, show that, over all, the children performed similarly when they were asked to recall names for the map when their memorization was reinforced by testing.
But when the recall involved the more difficult type of learning — memorizing without intermittent testing — the children who were in better aerobic condition significantly outperformed the less-fit group, remembering about 40 percent of the regions’ names accurately, compared with barely 25 percent accuracy for the out-of-shape kids.
This finding suggests that “higher levels of fitness have their greatest impact in the most challenging situations” that children face intellectually, the study’s authors write. The more difficult something is to learn, the more physical fitness may aid children in learning it.
Of course, this study did not focus specifically on the kind of active exercise typical of recess, but on longer-term, overall physical fitness in young children. But in doing so, it subtly reinforces the importance of recess and similar physical activity programs in schools, its authors believe.
If children are to develop and maintain the kind of aerobic fitness that amplifies their ability to learn, said co-author Charles Hillman, a professor of kinesiology at the University of Illinois and a fellow at the university’s Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, they should engage in “at least an hour a day” of vigorous physical activity. Schools, where children spend so many of their waking hours, provide the most logical and logistically plausible place for them to get such exercise, he said.
Or as he and his co-authors dryly note in the study: “Reducing or eliminating physical education in schools, as is often done in tight financial times, may not be the best way to ensure educational success among our young people.”

Op-Ed Contributor

How to Fall in Love With Math

By MANIL SURI

Published: September 15, 2013 360 Comments

BALTIMORE — EACH time I hear someone say, “Do the math,” I grit my teeth. Invariably a reference to something mundane like addition or multiplication, the phrase reinforces how little awareness there is about the breadth and scope of the subject, how so many people identify mathematics with just one element: arithmetic. Imagine, if you will, using, “Do the lit” as an exhortation to spell correctly.

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Adam Maida

As a mathematician, I can attest that my field is really about ideas above anything else. Ideas that inform our existence, that permeate our universe and beyond, that can surprise and enthrall. Perhaps the most intriguing of these is the way infinity is harnessed to deal with the finite, in everything from fractals to calculus. Just reflect on the infinite range of decimal numbers — a wonder product offered by mathematics to satisfy any measurement need, down to an arbitrary number of digits.

Despite what most people suppose, many profound mathematical ideas don’t require advanced skills to appreciate. One can develop a fairly good understanding of the power and elegance of calculus, say, without actually being able to use it to solve scientific or engineering problems.

Think of it this way: you can appreciate art without acquiring the ability to paint, or enjoy a symphony without being able to read music. Math also deserves to be enjoyed for its own sake, without being constantly subjected to the question, “When will I use this?”

Sadly, few avenues exist in our society to expose us to mathematical beauty. In schools, as I’ve heard several teachers lament, the opportunity to immerse students in interesting mathematical ideas is usually jettisoned to make more time for testing and arithmetic drills. The subject rarely appears in the news media or the cultural arena. Often, when math shows up in a novel or a movie, I am reminded of Chekhov’s proverbial gun: make sure the mathematician goes crazy if you put one in. Hanging thickly over everything is the gloom of math anxiety.

And yet, I keep encountering people who want to learn more about mathematics. Not only those who enjoyed it in school and have had no opportunity to pursue it once they began their careers, but also many who performed poorly in school and view it as a lingering challenge. As the Stanford mathematician Keith Devlin argues in his book “The Math Gene,” human beings are wired for mathematics. At some level, perhaps we all crave it.

So what math ideas can be appreciated without calculation or formulas? One candidate that I’ve found intrigues people is the origin of numbers. Think of it as a magic trick: harnessing emptiness to create the number zero, then demonstrating how from any whole number, one can create its successor. One from zero, two from one, three from two — a chain reaction of numbers erupting into existence. I still remember when I first experienced this Big Bang of numbers. The walls of my Bombay classroom seemed to blow away, as nascent cardinals streaked through space. Creatio ex nihilo, as compelling as any offered by physics or religion.

For a more contemplative example, gaze at a sequence of regular polygons: a hexagon, an octagon, a decagon and so on. I can almost imagine a yoga instructor asking a class to meditate on what would happen if the number of sides kept increasing indefinitely. Eventually, the sides shrink so much that the kinks start flattening out and the perimeter begins to appear curved. And then you see it: what will emerge is a circle, while at the same time the polygon can never actually become one. The realization is exhilarating — it lights up pleasure centers in your brain. This underlying concept of a limit is one upon which all of calculus is built.

The more deeply you engage with such ideas, the more rewarding the experience is. For instance, enjoying the eye candy of fractal images — those black, amoebalike splotches surrounded by bands of psychedelic colors — hardly qualifies as making a math connection. But suppose you knew that such an image (for example, the Julia Set) depicts a mathematical rule that plucks every point from its spot in the plane and moves it to another location. Imagine this rule applied over and over again, so that every point hops from location to location. Then the “amoeba” comprises those well-behaved points that remain hopping around within this black region, while the colored points are more adventurous and all lope off toward infinity. Not only does the picture acquire more richness and meaning with this knowledge, it suddenly churns with drama, with activity.

Would you be intrigued enough to find out more — for instance, what the different shades of color signified? Would the Big Bang example make you wonder where negative numbers came from, or fractions or irrationals? Could the thrill of recognizing the circle as a limit of polygons lure you into visualizing the sphere as a stack of its circular cross sections, as Archimedes did over 2,000 years ago to calculate its volume?

If the answer is yes, then math appreciation may provide more than just casual enjoyment: it could also help change negative attitudes toward the subject that are passed on from generation to generation. Students have a better chance of succeeding in a subject perceived as playful and stimulating, rather than one with a disastrous P.R. image.

Fortunately, today’s online world, with its advances in video and animation, offers several underused opportunities for the informal dissemination of mathematical ideas. Perhaps the most essential message to get across is that with math you can reach not just for the sky or the stars or the edges of the universe, but for timeless constellations of ideas that lie beyond.

Manil Suri is a mathematics professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and the author, most recently, of the novel “The City of Devi.”

Disruptions: Minecraft, an Obsession and an Educational Tool

By NICK BILTON

Michael Citrone Luca Citrone, 8, and his sister Willow play Minecraft before they go to bed.

If you were to walk into my sister’s house in Los Angeles, you’d hear a bit of yelling from time to time. “Luca! Get off Minecraft! Luca, are you on Minecraft again? Luca! Enough with the Minecraft!”
Luca is my 8-year-old nephew. Like millions of other children his age, Luca is obsessed with the video game Minecraft. Actually, obsessed might be an understated way to explain a child’s idée fixe with the game. And my sister, whom you’ve probably guessed is the person doing all that yelling, is a typical parent of a typical Minecraft-playing child: she’s worried it might be rotting his brain.
For those who have never played Minecraft, it’s relatively simple. The game looks a bit crude because it doesn’t have realistic graphics. Instead, it’s built in 16-bit, a computer term that means the graphics look blocky, like giant, digital Lego pieces.
Unlike other video games, there are few if any instructions in Minecraft. Instead, like the name suggests, the goal of the game is to craft, or build, structures in these 16-bit worlds, and figuring things out on your own is a big part of it. And parents, it’s not terribly violent. Sure, you can kill a few zombies while playing in the game’s “survival mode.” But in its “creative mode,” Minecraft is about building, exploration, creativity and even collaboration.
The game was first demonstrated by Markus Persson, a Swedish video game programmer and designer known as Notch, in 2009 and released to the public in November 2011. Today, the game runs on various devices, including desktop computers, Google Android smartphones, Apple iOS and the Microsoft Xbox. There are thousands of mods, or modifications, for the game, that allow people to play in prebuilt worlds, like a replica of Paris (Eiffel Tower included) or an ancient Mayan civilization.
While parents — my sister included — might worry that all these pixels and the occasional zombie might be bad for children, a lot of experts say they shouldn’t fret.
Earlier this year, for example, a school in Stockholm made Minecraft compulsory for 13-year-old students. “They learn about city planning, environmental issues, getting things done, and even how to plan for the future,” said Monica Ekman, a teacher at the Viktor Rydberg school.
Around the world, Minecraft is being used to educate children on everything from science to city planning to speaking a new language, said Joel Levin, co-founder and education director at the company TeacherGaming. TeacherGaming runs MinecraftEdu, which is intended to help teachers use the game with students.
A history teacher in Australia set up “quest missions” where students can wander through and explore ancient worlds. An English-language teacher in Denmark told children they could play Minecraft collectively in the classroom but with one caveat: they were allowed to communicate both orally and through text only in English. A science teacher in California has set up experiments in Minecraft to teach students about gravity.
Mr. Levin said that in addition to classroom exercises, children were learning the digital skills they would need as they got older.
“Kids are getting into middle school and high school and having some ugly experiences on Facebook and other social networks without an understanding of how to interact with people online,” he said. “With Minecraft, they are developing that understanding at a very early age.”
While there are no known neuroscience studies of Minecraft’s effect on children’s brains, research has shown video games can have a positive impact on children.
A study by S.R.I. International, a Silicon Valley research group that specializes in technology, found that game-based play could raise cognitive learning for students by as much as 12 percent and improve hand-eye coordination, problem-solving ability and memory.
Games like Minecraft also encourage what researchers call “parallel play,” where children are engrossed in their game but are still connected through a server or are sharing the same screen. And children who play games could even become better doctors. No joke. Neuroscientists performed a study at Iowa State University that found that surgeons performed better, and were more accurate on the operating table, when they regularly played video games.
“Minecraft extends kids’ spatial reasoning skills, construction skills and understanding of planning,” said Eric Klopfer, a professor and the director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Scheller Teacher Education Program. “In many ways, it’s like a digital version of Lego.”
Professor Klopfer suggested that if parents were worried about the game, they should simply play it with their children. He said he set up a server in his house so his children’s friends could play together and he could monitor their behavior and then explain that some actions, even in virtual worlds, are unethical — like destroying someone’s Minecraft house, or calling them a bad name.
But Professor Klopfer warned that, as with anything, there was — probably to my nephew’s chagrin — such as thing as too much Minecraft.
“While the game is clearly good for kids, it doesn’t mean there should be no limits,” he said. “As with anything, I don’t want my kids to do any one thing for overly extended periods of time. Whether Legos or Minecraft; having limits is an important part their learning.”
Many children would happily ignore that little warning if their parents let them.
Last weekend, my sister saw Luca on his computer with what appeared to be Minecraft on the screen. “Luca, I told you, you can’t play Minecraft anymore,” she said.
“I’m not playing Minecraft, mama,” he replied. “I’m watching videos on YouTube of other people playing Minecraft.”

A Sense of Place

A Sense of Place

‘This Is Our House’ and ‘Once Upon a Northern Night’

From "This Is Our House"

By SARAH HARRISON SMITH

Published: July 31, 2013

“What would it be like to stay in one place — to have your own bed, to ride your own bicycle?” a little girl named Anna wonders in Maxine Trottier’s 2011 picture book, “Migrant.” “Now that would be something.” Anna’s parents, who are migrant workers, move from one temporary home to another, and Anna imagines herself as a rabbit, living in abandoned burrows, or a bee, flitting from flower to flower. She is effectively homeless, and longs to live a settled life, “like a tree with roots sunk deeply into the earth.”

THIS IS OUR HOUSE

Written and illustrated by Hyewon Yum

40 pp. Frances Foster Books/Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $16.99. (Picture book; ages 3 to 8)

ONCE UPON A NORTHERN NIGHT

By Jean E. Pendziwol

Illustrated by Isabelle Arsenault

32 pp. Groundwood Books. $17.95. (Picture book; ages 4 to 7)

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• Times Topic: Children's Books Reviews

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From "Once Upon a Northern Night"

Home is also at the heart of two new picture books, “This Is Our House,” written and illustrated by Hyewon Yum, and “Once Upon a Northern Night,” written by Jean E. Pendziwol and illustrated by Isabelle Arsenault (whose artwork for Trottier’s “Migrant” earned a New York Times Best Illustrated award). Yum, originally from South Korea but now living in Brooklyn, sets her story in a city that could very well be New York, among a family of recent immigrants whose country of origin is never specified; Pendziwol and Arsenault, both Canadian, describe a cozy home in a wintry rural landscape.

On the title page of “This Is Our House,” a watercolor illustration shows a photograph of a little girl peeking her head around a front door, as if to welcome the reader inside. On the next, a framed black and white photograph — again painted in watercolor — shows the house as it looked when her grandparents “arrived from far away with just two suitcases in hand.” In a pattern Yum continues throughout the book, the photo of the house is faced by a full-page scene. Here, the girl’s grandparents talk to each other as they stand outside their new home for the first time. The grandmother looks as if she is either shyly pleased, or hesitant. What is certain is her husband’s encouraging smile.

The photos reveal the public story, Yum seems to suggest, but there’s more to be told. And sure enough, the full-page scenes are intimate rather than posed: moments of action, and sometimes of crossness and tears; a little quarrel over the painting of the baby’s room on one side of the spread, a photo of the delighted expectant mother posing in a fully decorated room on the other. Mostly, the three generations who come to live in the house together display smiles and kind concern for one another.

Yum uses a springlike palette of yellow, pinks and greens, even when there’s snow on the sidewalk, and the little girl’s dark braids perfectly set off the fresh, happy colors. With time, the once-bare facade of the house comes to life with window boxes, flowering hedges and potted plants of the front stoop. The seasons cycle though the pictures as the family grows, including, at the end, a baby brother for the little narrator. She gives a slight twist to the book’s title in her final summary: “This is our home where my family lives.”

If family is central to Yum’s sense of home, Pendziwol and Arsenault enlarge that sense of a precious place to encompass a natural setting. “Once Upon a Northern Night” is spoken in a voice that could be that of an artist, a parent or even a deity. While a fair-haired boy sleeps “wrapped in a downy blanket,” the voice describes a scene in which wild animals roam across snowy fields as the northern lights play across the sky. Of the lights, the narrator says, “I tried to capture them but they were much too nimble, and only their rhythm reached you, deep in slumber, rising and falling with each sweet peaceful breath.”

Arsenault’s nighttime landscapes, created with gouache, ink, pencil and watercolor, add dramatic emphasis to the text; the wings of an owl with bright yellow and black eyes can scarcely fit on two pages; the russet tail and hind legs of a fox are lit by the moon while the rest of his body can be seen only faintly, in the shadows. Black and white dominate with occasional flashes of color — red apples on the bare branches of a tree, spiky green pine needles. The boy’s house appears only twice, but the overwhelming sense of the home is as a secure haven from which to view, or imagine, a mysterious and beautiful world. Older children may resist the slight sentimentality of Pendziwol’s text, but on a dark night a younger child is likely to revel in this book’s mixture of magic, wildlife and deep comfort.