Fancy free food?

 

My son likes to rummage in bins. He is a connoisseur of rubbish in all its variety. He can tell you what time central London convenience stores put their binbags out on to the streets and hazard a good guess as to what will be in them. He can tell you about how the waste policies of major supermarkets differ: how much of their rubbish is diverted to landfill and how much is recycled or incinerated; which ones lock up their bins, and which leave them open. S. is a “freegan” – someone who subsists largely on food discarded by others. Through this practice, he has become thoroughly acquainted him with the ins and outs of rubbish and he long ago got over any squeamishness about handling it. For him, a bin full of chucked-out food is not an object of physical revulsion. Rather, it’s an opportunity.

And today a group of people is drawing attention to the iniquities in the system that allows between 30 and 50% of its food to be thrown away. Food waste campaigners have rallied together to give free food to 5000 strangers in order to get their voices heard.

Free lunch will be offered to passers-by in Trafalgar Square this afternoon between 12 and 2 as part of the Feeding the 5000 campaign to prepare for the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. The campaign hopes to raise awareness about food waste in wealthy nations. According to ‘This is Rubbish’,  families in the UK alone waste 25% of the food they buy.

Volunteers will offer a range of food including hot soup, smoothies and sandwiches made from salvaged produce that would be otherwise wasted. Odd shaped carrots, wonky onions – all are grist to the mill.

S. is also a squatter.

And despite 1.8 million Britons being on the waiting list for social housing, one million homes are expected to be empty in the UK this year, (according to Inside Housing magazine’s Empty Promises campaign).

Property left unattended can develop serious structural problems, attract crime, detract business, demoralise the local community and devalue neighbouring property prices. Squatters like my son inhabit houses that would otherwise fall to rack and ruin.

So-called “posh squats” have hit the headlines on numerous occasions this year. It is estimated that there are 1million empty homes in the UK. The value of the empty properties is staggering: some Mayfair mansions are worth as much as £50m, even in their dilapidated state. Many of the biggest and most expensive houses are owned not by ‘dusty old dowagers down on their luck but by mystery investors hiding their identities behind offshore companies’.

The owners leave them empty sometimes because they lose track of their properties. Often they have a place in New York, a place in Monte Carlo, one in the south of France and so on. Many elusive owners don’t have the slightest intention of bringing them back to life: it is merely an asset to be traded as they see fit.

Two companies incorporated in the British Virgin Islands (BVI), a tax haven in the Caribbean, were threatened with a compulsory purchase order – until a gang of squatters, plus their dogs, moved in and were pictured on the front page of The Sun in January.

Builders appeared after the squatters were evicted, but they were on site for only a few days and have never returned. It’s just the same situation nine months on, only now they’ve left the lights on.

We have come to expect cynical profiteering from the big international companies. However, according to my son, the vast majority of the empty properties in London at least are council-owned. The grand 3-storey Victorian mansion he occupied in a leafy street in Peckham was one such. The garden was huge and provided much of their sustenance, including lovely home-made jam. When the former occupier had died a decade before it was left to rot. Eventually it had deteriorated to such an extent that the council decided it was no longer worth shoring up. After 18 months of neighbourliness, responsible behaviour and bills paid, my son and his friends were evicted and now the house is the haunt of drug users. The house is delapidated and eroding the good will of others – moslty families – in the street. The council still leaves it to rack and ruin.

This story is repeated a thousand-fold every day.

Let’s think of the homeless and hungry this holiday season.

Thanks to the good old Guardian  for much of this information.

Neuroscience in Education: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

 

Professor Sergio Della Sala  will be speaking about  Neuroscience in Education: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly at the Playfair Library Hall, Old College, Edinburgh EH8 9YL on Tuesday 23rd February 2010 at 6.00pm.

This is part of The Edinburgh Lectures 2009/10 Making Scotland.

Anyone who combines Venice, scepticism and learning gets my vote. I heard Sergio Della Scala a few years ago at SETT, as it was then. Here he is on the Learning and Teaching Scotland site talking on the theme of learning about learning. I think this talk in February will be as interesting. I’ve ordered my tickets. Tickets are only £3 each and you can buy them here. Perhaps I’ll see you there?

Reading and Writing Chinese and Dyslexia

In a comment on a recent post about auditory processing Alan Coady remarks on the differences inherent in learning Chinese. I have just read a bit around the subjexct but cannot claim to grasp all the implications. Here goes:

There are very real differences in how dyslexia manifests itself in different languages, says Maryanne Wolf whose important book I have mentioned before.

Depending on what is emphasised in any given language (fluency in German, visual spatial memory in Chinese, phonological skills in English), there will be somewhat different faces of dyslexia, as well as different predictors of reading failure. Different writing systems make somewhat different uses of the major structures involved in the reading circuit.

There is a suggestion from researchers at the University of Hong Kong that dyslexia may be more even complex in children speaking Chinese than English. In Chinese dyslexia, disordered phonological processing may coexist with abnormal visual spatial processing. In the study, scans showed that activation in a portion of the brain known to mediate visual spatial processing was weaker in those with dyslexia than in those who do not find reading a challenge.

The fact that Chinese and Western dyslexics show structural abnormalities in different brain regions suggests that dyslexia may even be two different brain disorders in the two streams of culture.

While alphabetic languages like English were learnt using letter-to-sound conversion rules, pronunciations in a non-alphabetic, logographic language like written Chinese must be memorised by rote.

The part of the brain affected in western learners with dyslexia is responsible for letter – sound conversion, However, the region for Chinese is close to the region for motor skills. So, learning to read and write Chinese puts even greater demands on learners with dyslexia who have an auditory processing difficulty – generally accepted as the most significant characteristic in the majority of learners with dyslexia.

I think this means that for those in the west with visual and auditory processing difficulties the challenges are not dissimilar to the problems encountered by Chinese students with this specific difficulties.

Wolf concludes that learning to read Chinese requires a strong right hemisphere (present in many learners with dyslexia) because of the numerous, visually demanding logographic characters.  

The remarkable rapidity and efficiency achieved by (non-dyslexic) Chinese is on display in brain images of modern Chinese readers. These images show the brain’s vast capacity for visual specialisation when both hemispheres are recruited in reading all of the many characters. The Chinese readers’ fluency is one proof that efficiency is not reserved for alphabet readers alone.

Wolf refers to a fascinating early bilingual case study showing clear differential use of hemispheres.

A bilingual businessman, proficient in English and Chinese, suffered a severe stroke. He lost his ability to read Chinese, but could still read English. This is because the brain can be differentially organised for different writing systems.

Not only are different pathways utilised by readers of Chinese and English, but different routes can be used within the same brain for reading different types of script. And because of the brain’s prodigious ability to adapt its design, the reader can become efficient in 2 very different languages.

There are multiple pathways to fluent comprehension and reading in any language.

But do Chinese readers develop visual skills because of their alphabet? We know that practice means neurological pathways grow and extend exponentially. Do we, with our left hemisphere dominant education system disproportionately reward learners with strengths in responding to auditory stimuli (a teacher’s chalk and talk, stress on phonics in the early stages of acquiring literacy) and rapid information processing (the Hare rather than the Tortoise)? 

My brain hurts. I’d welcome comments to help me clarify this.

Indicators of dyslexia across different languages

Once more I have been dipping into Maryanne Wolf’s magnificent book, Proust and the Squid, for enlightenment on the differences inherent in identifying dyslexia in speakers of different languages.

The specific phonological skills used in reading depend on the reader’s expertise, the word to be read, and the writing system, involved. A highly regular, highly frequent word like ‘carpet’ (or words in more regular languages) will take far less phonological processing than, for example, ‘phonological ’.

Wolf writes:

Readers of, say, German or Italian quickly learn the far more consistent letter-sound rules and bypass almost a year of laborious decoding that English requires. English and French readers appear to employ more of the regions of the brain devoted to identifying words in the area in which visualisation of words is thought to occur.

Presumably the greater emphasis on morphemes and irregular words (such as ‘yacht’) requires more visual and orthographic representational knowledge during processing.

The shorter time needed for decoding in regular languages allows more time for comprehension than in English.

When phonological skills play a more significant role in reading acquisition, as they do in less regular languages like English and French, phoneme awareness and decoding accuracy are often very deficient – and are good indicators of dyslexia. When these skills play a less dominant role (in transparent languages like German, and the more logographic writing systems), processing speed becomes the stronger diagnostic predictor of reading performance, and reading fluency and comprehension issues dominate the profile of dyslexia.

In these more transparent languages – Spanish, German, Finnish, Dutch, Greek and Italian – the child with dyslexia exhibits fewer problems with decoding words and more problems reading connected text fluently and with good comprehension.

So much for those international comparisons of reading levels: useful perhaps as a snapshot of where children are in the acquisition of literacy but certainly no help in determining whether the population as a whole is more or less literate or whether teachers are failing in their efforts.

Dyslexia and modern foreign languages

In a previous post I wrote about the difficulties inherent in learning a foreign language for some people with dyslexia.

It seems that children who learning more regular alphabets, such as Greek and Spanish, gain fluency and efficiency faster than children who have to tackle less regular languages such as English. No surprises there.

This does not mean, of course, that dyslexia doesn’t exist in these countries whose tongue is more consistent than ours. Rather that the difficulties are less likely to appear so early and are not always about late development in acquiring literacy. Differences in organisational skills, working memory and information processing may all be evident and be compatible with an identification of dyslexia even if reading and writing is fluent.

A useful resource is Hilary McColl’s site devoted to modern foreign language learning and inclusion.

A loose sally of the mind; an irregular undigested piece; not a regularly and orderly composition

In an interesting review of a book by David Shields, Zadie Smith discusses definitions of the term ‘essay’ and why novelists write them. It set me thinking about the whole blogging process, and the resonances between blogging and essay writing.

Smith calls Shield’s book of essays ‘an engaging form of bricolage without obvious authorial structure … we remain unsure whether the entire manifesto is “built” rather than written,, the sum of many broken pieces of the real simply shored up and left to vibrate against each other in significant arrangement … Conventional structure be damned’.

Smith refers to Virginia Woolf’s contention that the essay is ‘a form of thinking, consciousness, wisdom-seeking’ which nevertheless takes as much art as fiction.  She describes the choice facing writers between ‘the comforts of limit’ (as in a conventional novel) or ‘the freedom of irregularity’ promised by the essay form. David Shields’ argument is for ‘the superiority of the messy real – of what we might call “truthfulness” – over the careful creation of novelists’. For Shields it is exactly what is ‘tentative, unmade and unpolished’ in the essay that is important. This sounds remarkably like many posts I read and write.

So, why do I blog? Samuel Jahnson’s quote above rather describes my style. I would not dream of ennobling any of my posts with the term ‘essay’. But my writing is an attempt to strive to make sense (if only to myself), to try to explore ideas in a little depth for greater understanding to emerge. Apparently in the 16^th century an essay was ‘the action or process of trying or testing; a sample, a rehearsal’. I think this describes my writing better than the 19^th century version: ‘a composition more or less elaborate in style, though limited in range’.

The intention when I started blogging was to compile short articles about my area of professional interest with a view to developing my thinking. The overarching theme is education, specifically dyslexia, but I frequently wander off. I interject information sharing with ruminations on the wider picture relating to learning and teaching. Occasionally I meander into the realms of holidays, my family, and personal experiences. There may come a time when I might actually organise these random thoughts into some sort of coherent form.

I plan to publish a series of posts about, say, dyslexia, with some sort of structure but then I get distracted by events. These can be everyday activities intruding on the writing process, reading a fascinating article or book that fills my mind so that I need to put it on paper to work through the ideas, or seeing a news item that I feel requires an immediate response. Thus I have evolved a scattergun approach rather than the beautifully ordered sequence of erudite discussions I had in mind when I started. As Stephen Downes writes in ‘How to be Heard’:

… all writing – even fiction writing – is to a large degree reactive. It has its origins in the prompts and stimuli that inform a person’s everyday life.

He goes on to say that:

Readers that want to be writers recognize this, and organize and cultivate these supports.

It is only recently that I have begun to participate in the wider community by commenting on a range of other blogs. I even join in discussions now with people to whom I have never been introduced. As in many areas, I have a reasonable grasp of the abstract notions surrounding the use of digital technologies but I take much longer to acquaint myself with the real world.

I have become somewhat addicted to the process of blogging and find that my mindfulness is sharpened, as Seth Godin and Tom Peters remark in this clip:

Clicker 5

I have long promoted the use of Clicker 5 to support independence in reading and especially writing. But I have reluctantly decided to abandon advising its use. Crick Software claims that,

Clicker is the proven reading and writing tool that helps pupils of all abilities to achieve success in reading and writing. Clicker is used on over half a million school computers and in over 90% of UK primary schools.

 

It is a fantastic resource, although the talking word processor aspect has now been superseded by WordTalk. However, in my experience Clicker is rarely utilised very much at all in classrooms.

Why is this? Well, either teachers are uninterested in supporting their reluctant readers and writers or the software is not user friendly. I don’t think it’s hard to choose which of these options is the most likely.

I have taught many children to access Clicker 5. Sometimes this has been relatively successful. Children can produce pieces of work that are largely coherent, well presented and illustrated without having to spell. It is unusual, though, for the use of Clicker 5 to become a central component of classroom activity independently.

I have been working this term with a group of 6 P3s (7 year olds) on The Ancient Egyptians. (Don’t ask my why this topic was chosen; seems daft to me but there we are.)

I located a ‘Find Out and Write About’ disc that I thought would solve all my planning problems. And, indeed, it is a lovely resource with 3 levels of difficulty, interesting information and clear illustrations.

Unfortunately, there is only one copy. So I did what all of us do, improvised. I borrowed the information – why re-invent the wheel? – to create grids for the children to work on in pairs. I have made many grids over the years but each time I have to re-learn the process. As I, like all teachers, have little time to prepare resources the grids turned out to be less user-friendly than I’d hoped.

I spent most of the first session sorting out the blips. That is, once we had managed to open the software. Just the admin involved took most of the initial lesson: turning the laptops on once they had been located; searching for someone who knew the logins after refreshment; helping little ones type passwords.

Following sessions were a whirlwind of activity with both myself and the support for learning teacher (who gave up her precious preparation time to help me) running between 3 pairs of children helping them to produce at most 8 lines of text. Yes, you read that correctly: 2 very experienced teachers working with 6 7 year olds became frazzled and frantic in five 45 minute sessions!

This is just not practicable in a busy classroom. Differentiating work is essential of course, but when the energy required in providing support far outstrips the end result we have to question whether it’s worthwhile.

I shall still use Clicker 5. The ‘Find Out and Write About’ and Talking Books software are terrific and can be used with small groups to enable them to access stories and produce a considerable amount of writing without having the drawback of poor secretarial skills hindering the process. I will also continue to recommend accessing extant grids available on learninggrids.com. Many teachers contribute their work to this site and they can be incredibly useful.

But I shall be much charier about recommending its use as a resource for class teachers to implement alone. It’s just not possible.

I’d welcome comments on this, colleagues.

Children’s Book Tree

Following the success of last year’s initiative customers at Blackwell’s book shop on South Bridge can once again support Edinburgh’s most vulnerable children through an exciting initiative, The Children’s Book Tree.
Blackwell’s are working with City of Edinburgh Council, Edinburgh Women’s Aid and Edinburgh Young Carers to help make Christmas a little better for disadvantaged local children. The scheme means that children who will be living in difficult circumstances at Christmas, who have caring responsibilities beyond their years or those who won’t be at home for Christmas and will have few personal possessions, will each receive a book to treasure.

The scheme is coordinated by volunteer Lizzie Poulton who explains: “The Children’s Book Tree is different from other charity donation schemes as each child has had the opportunity to say what their interests are and what kind of books appeal to them. Customers can then choose a book for that child, knowing that it will not only be a present they’ll really appreciate, but that books and stories can inspire, reassure and provide escape for children in difficult personal circumstances.”

The children have each put their Christmas wishes for a book on a gift tag which is then hung on a Christmas tree in store. All customers need to do is choose a book they think that child will really appreciate, from dinosaurs to fairies, Jacqueline Wilson to James and the Giant Peach. Staff in the children’s department will be more than happy to help people with their selections if they are unsure. The customer than pays for that book and leaves it with staff in store who will ensure that it gets wrapped, before being distributed to the right child for Christmas day.

The Children’s Book Tree is now in store and will be until Sunday the 20th of December. Please pop by, select a tag and buy a book for a child. If you are in a rush ready-selected books with labels are placed beneath the tree or if you are unable to drop in the shop you can call Blackwell where a member of staff will be happy to select and take payment for a book over the telephone.

The tree has only been in store since 25th November and is already a success as customers shopping for Christmas presents are taking a moment to buy an extra present for a child who will be spending Christmas away from their family, in a refuge or caring for others. One child who requested a book by popular teen author Louise Rennison, will be in for an extra treat as the author herself purchased the book for that child and added a personal note, when visiting Blackwell’s this week. 

Spelling in the Stone Age

Aye, it takes me back.

Enjoy.

What Causes Dyslexia

A couple of years ago I attended the Dyslexia Scotland annual conference at which Dr Alex Richardson spoke about the causes of difficulties such as dyslexia, dyspraxia, ADHD and specific language impairment. Her research focuses on the genetic background to dyslexia and how nutrition and the immune system contribute to auditory and visual attention difficulties.

 She showed an incredible video clip which demonstrated very clearly the effect of feeding fish oils to rats.

 We see a large paddling pool containing a rock in the centre emerging from the water. A rat is placed in the water. It swims directly to the rock, climbs up and helps itself to the food placed thereon.

 Now; the same pool, the same rock, a different rat. This one has had identical attention, genes, almost identical environmental conditions, as the first animal. The only difference is that it has not had fish oils added to its diet.

 Rat number 2 endlessly circles and criss-crosses the pool, bumping into the sides, cruising aimlessly around until it becomes so weary and distressed that the researcher rescues it. It finds neither the safety of the rock, nor the comfort of the food.

 Here is a video clip in which Professor John Stein (brother of Rick, the cook who promoted fish, funnily enough), talking about the cause of dyslexia and referring to research in fish oils amongst other things.  John Stein is a professor of neuroscience in Oxford University Medical School. He is particularly interested in the auditory and visual perceptual impairments suffered by dyslexic children.

Key Points Covered in This Talk:

The Impairment of Magnocells: 

• The Genetic Cause: People inherit genes (we think there are at least nine genes) that give you a vulnerability to problems with reading. Those genes cause a problem with the development of a particular kind of nerve cell in the brain that is important for reading. These nerve cells are called magnocells. They are important for timing visual events and timing auditory events (for instance the sounds in speech). The cells are impaired in people with dyslexia, ADHD, developmental dyspraxia, developmental dysphasia (otherwise known as specific language impairment), autism spectrum disorders and recently have been shown in schizophrenia and possibly manic depressive psychosis. What this is saying is that there is a system of nerve cells in the brain that, if they are impaired in their development, give you a vulnerability to any one of these conditions. Most common of these is dyslexia. The impaired magnocells are not the only cause of dyslexia, there has to be other problems as well.
• Nutrition of The Brain: Contributing to dyslexic problems are problems with the nutrition of the brain. Essential fatty acids (derived from fish oils) constitute around 20% of the makeup of the brain. Unfortunately, nowadays, we eat very little fish. This creates a problem because the essential fatty acids that come from fish oils and are incorporated in the brain are moved in and out of the membranes and other places in the brain, and if you don’t replace them then the workings of the brain are impaired and be part of the cause of dyslexia. This is why it is often suggested that people with dyslexic or ADHD problems are actually given supplements of these essential fatty acids.
• The Immune System: This is another contributing factor that causes dyslexia. We know that all these conditions are associated with what are called auto-immune problems, such as allergies, eczema, hay fever. It is probable that a related system to the one that controls your immune system is the one that controls the development of this particular kind of nerve cell. For instance we know that mothers produce anti-bodies to these magnocells and if you inject these antibodies into pregnant mice, the offspring of the mother will develop incoordintation and the symptoms that are related to what happens to people with dyslexia.

Why These Magnocells Are important:

Magnocells are very important for the focusing of attention. Not only visual attention, but also auditory attention.

• Auditory Attention: If you are listening to someone speaking and you want to understand them, what you have to do is hear the sounds that they are producing and order them in your mind. That means focusing your attention on each of the sounds as they come out and that enables you to understand it. People with developmental dysphasia or specific language impairment often have a problem picking up the order of sounds. This leads to a problem with auditory memory, so they have problems with hearing the order of the sounds. If you read non-words (e.g. flagistafwop) to children with these problems they simply would not be able to repeat it back. Non-word repetition is a good sign of this particular problem. This is also found in many people with dyslexia. Therefore you need to be able to focus your auditory attention in order to sequence sounds properly and many dyslexic and dysphasic children have a problem with their auditory magnocellular system.

Visual Attention: This relates very much to reading. Here what you have is a problem with focusing your attention and hence your eye control on the letters you are reading. If you want to read the word “dog” you have got to be able to focus on the “d” then the “o” and then the “g” in the right order. If your attention and eye movements are less steady than they should be, you might not know that when you are looking at the “d” you’re looking at the “d” or you might think the “g” is where the “d” is. You therefore might make the mistake of misreading “god” for “dog” or “was” for “saw” and make letter transpositions. This is very characteristic of beginning readers but goes on a lot longer in dyslexics. This is because the visual magnocellular system is impaired in dyslexics.

Fascinating stuff.