Creative Schools: The Grassroots Revolution That's Transforming Education, by Ken Robinson

Introduction:

“I want to set out how the standards culture is harming students and schools and to present a different way of thinking about education . . . you do have the power to make the system change”

“If you run an education system based on standardization and conformity that suppresses individuality, imagination, and creativity, don’t be surprised if that’s what it does . . . the old systems of education were not designed with this world in mind”

Back to the Basics:

“Education is one of the main ways that communities pass on their values and traditions from one generation to the next” (pg 8).

“One of the declared priorities is to prepare young people for work. And yet, youth unemployment around the world is at record levels” (pg 14).

Changing Metaphors:

Conformity, “the institutional tendency in education to judge students by a single standards of ability and to treat those who don’t meet it as ‘less able’ or ‘disabled’ - as deviations from the norm. In this sense, the alternative to conformity is not condoning disruption; it is celebrating diversity” (pg 36).

Compliance is about “whether and how students are encouraged to ask questions . . . struct compliance is essential in manufacturing products, but people are different (pg 36, 37).

Cultural: Education should enable students to understand and appreciate their own cultures and to respect the diversity of others

“When people live in regular contact, they deeply influence each other’s ways of thinking and behaving . . . Cultural diversity is one of the glories of human existence. The lives of all communities can be hugely enriched by celebrating their own cultures and the practices and traditions of other cultures” (pg 49).

Personal:

“What people contribute to the world around them has everything to do with how they engage with the world within them” (pg 53).

Natural Born Leaders:

Enabling students to pursue their own interests and strengths:

“We all have a wide range of natural aptitudes, and we all have them differently. Personalization means teachers taking account of these differences in how they teach different students. It also means allowing for flexibility within the curriculum so that in addition to what all students need to learn in common, there are opportunities for them to pursue their individual interests and strengths as well” (pg 88).

“Being in your element is not only about finding your talents. Some people are good at things they don’t really care for. To be in your element, you have to love it” (pg 89).

The Art of Teaching:

Engage
”Great teachers understand that it’s not enough to know their disciplines. Their job is not to teach subjects; it is to teach students. They need to engage, inspire, and enthuse students by creating conditions in which those students will want to learn. When they do that, their students will most certainly exceed their own expectations and everyone else’s too. Great teachers achieve results by bringing the best out in their students” (pg 104).

“Rafe Esquith has no teacher’s desk in his classroom. If the desk were there, he might sit behind it, and he thinks that his role is to be moving among his students all the time” (pg 107).

Expect
”Teachers’ expectations have radical implications for the achievements of their students. If teachers convey to students that they expect them to do well, it’s much more likely that they will. If they expect them to do badly, that’s more likely too” (pg 108).

Creative Teaching
”Creativity is the process of having original ideas that have value” (pg 118).

Learning to Teach
”Great teachers are the heart of a great school. In their various roles, they can fulfill three essential purposes for students:

• Inspiration: They inspire their students with their own passion for their disciplines and to achieve at their highest levels within them.

• Confidence: They help their students to acquire the skills and knowledge they need to become confident, independent learners who can continue to develop their understanding and expertise.

• Creativity: They enable their students to experiment, inquire, ask questions, and develop the skills and disposition of original thinking (pg 127).
  

What’s Worth Knowing:

Curiosity - the ability to ask questions and explore how the world works
“Human achievement in every field is driven by the desire to explore, to test and prod, to see what happens, to question how things work, and to wonder why and ask, what if?" (pg 135).

Collaboration - the ability to work constructively with others

Compassion - the ability to empathize with others and to act accordingly
“Practicing compassion is the truest expression of our common humanity and a deep source of happiness in ourselves and others. In schools, as elsewhere, compassion has to be practiced, not preached” (pg 139).

Composure - the ability to connect with the inner life of feeling and develop a sense of personal harmony and balance
”We live in two worlds: the world within us and the world around us. The standards-driven curriculum is full of the outer world. It does little to help young people fathom the world within them. Yet how we act in the world around us is deeply affected by how we see and feel about ourselves” (pg 140).

Grade: B

Some great stuff here for sure. But also, perhaps a bit long. Reduce it by, say, 70 pages, and it would be solid. Still, its worth the read for sure.

For more on . . .

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When: the Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing, by Daniel Pink

“We simply don’t take issues of when as seriously as we take questions of what” (pg. 92).

“mental keeness, as shown by rationally evaluating evidence, was greater early in the day. And mental squishiness, as evidenced by resorting to stereotypes, increased as the day wore on” (pg 21).

The most unproductive moment of the day is 2:55 (pg 55).

Breaks:

“hourly five-minute walking breaks boosted energy levels, sharpened focus, and “improved mood throughout the day and reduced feelings of fatigue in the late afternoon. These ‘microbursts of activity,’ as researchers call them, were also more effective than a single thirty-minute walking break - so much so that the researchers suggest that organizations ‘introduce physical active breaks during the workday routine.’ Regular short walking breaks in the workplace also increase motivation and concentration and enhance creativity” (pg 61) . . . So if you’re looking for the Platonic ideal of a restorative break, the perfect combination of scarf, hat, and gloves to insulate yourself from the cold breath of the afternoon, consider a short walk outside with a friend during which you discuss something other than work” (pg 63).

Lunch:

The most powerful lunch breaks have two key ingredients - autonomy and detachment. Autonomy - exercising some control over what you do, how you do it, when you do it, and whom you do it with - is critical for high performance, especially on complex tasks. But it’s equally crucial when we take breaks from complex tasks. ‘The extent to which employees can determine how they utilize their lunch breaks may be just as important as what employees do during their lunch’” (pg 65).

Adolescents who get less sleep than they need are at higher risk for depression, suicide, substance abuse, and car crashes . . . ‘Evidence also links short sleep duration with obesity and a weakened immune system’” (pg. 90).

Landmarkers:

“Temporal landmarks interrupt attention to day-to-day minutiae, causing people to take a big picture view of their lives and thus focus on achieving their goals . . . The implications of the fresh start effect, like the forces that propel it, are also personal and social. Individuals who get off to a stumbling start - at a new job, on an important project, or in trying to improve their health - can alter their course by using a temporal landmark to start again. People can strategically create turning points in their personal histories” (pg 96).

Midpoints:

This made me think of FedEx days that Mr. Pink talks about in Drive. “Groups didn’t march toward their goals at a steady, even pace. Instead, they spent considerable time accomplishing almost nothing - until they experienced a surge of activity that always came at the temporal midpoint of a project” (pg 126).

Endings:

“People are willing to override a relatively long period of one kind of behavior with a relatively short period of another just because it occurred at the end of one’s life. This ‘end of life bias’ suggests that we believe people’s true selves are revealed at the end” (pg 155).

“Every Pixar movie has its protagonist achieving the goal he wants only to realize it is not what the protagonist needs. Typically, this leads the protagonist to let go of what he wants (a house, the Piston Cup, Andy) to get what he needs (a true yet unlikely companion; real friends; a lifetime together with friends)” (pg 163).

“The best endings don’t leave us happy. Instead, they produce something richer - a rush of unexpected insight, a fleeting moment of transcendence, the possibility that by discarding what we wanted we’ve gotten what we need” (pg 164).

Synching Fast and Slow:

“Groups must synchronize on three levels - to the boss, to the tribe, and to the heart” (pg 181) . . . after individuals synch to the boss, the external standard that sets the pace of their work, they must sync to the tribe - to one another. That requires a deep sense of belonging” (pg 189) . . . which “boosts job satisfaction and perfomance” (pg 191).

Thinking in Tenses:

Nostalgia is a “bittersweet but predominantly positive and fundamentally social emotion. Thinking in the past tense offers a window into the intrinsic self, a portal to who we really are. It makes the present meaningful” (pg 214).

Grade: A+

On the Better Leaders Better Schools podcast, Daniel Pink claims that out of all his works, this book is the most influential on his day-to-day life. I would have to agree.

For more on . . .

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Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence, by Daniel Goleman

The Subtle Faculty

“How we deploy our attention determines what we see” (pg 4).

A great discussion piece for students and or staff:

What information consumes is “the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention” (pg 9).

Basics:

“There are two main varieties of distractions: sensory and emotional. The sensory distractors are easy: as you read these words you’re tuning out the blank margins surrounding this text.” The emotional distractions are those that keep intruding into our thoughts, creating turmoil in our daily lives - (think recent breakups or arguments with a close relationship), (pg 14).

“All of us are smarter than any one of us” (pg 21).

“Good work” : “a potent mix of what people are excellent at, what engages them, and their ethics - what they believe matters” (pg 22).

Attention Top and Bottom:

“Life immersed in digital distractions creates a near-constant cognitive overload. And that overload wears out self-control” (pg. 31).

The Value of Mind Adrift:

“Every variety of attention has its uses. The very fact that about half of our thoughts are daydreams suggest there may well be some advantages to a mind that can entertain the fanciful” (pg 39).

“A mind adrift lets our creative juices flow. While our minds wander we become better at anything that depends on a flash of insight, from coming up with imaginative wordplay to inventions and original thinking” (pg 40) . . . other positive functions of mind wandering are generating scenarios for the future, self-refection, navigating a complex social world, incubation of creative ideas, flexibility in focus, pondering what we’re learning, organizing our memories, just mulling life - and giving our circuitry for more intensive focusing a refreshing break” (pg 41).

“In a complex world where almost everyone has access to the same information, new value arises from the original synthesis, from putting ideas together in novel ways, and from smart questions that open up untapped potential. Creative insights entail joining elements in a useful, fresh way” (pg 43).

“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant,” Albert Einstein once said. “We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift” (pg. 45).

“Creative insights flowed best when people had clear goals but also freedom in how they reached them. And, most crucial, they had protected time - enough to really think freely. A creative cocoon.” (pg 46).

Seeing Ourselves as Others See Us

“I am what I think you think I am” (pg. 70).

“We don’t know who we are until we hear ourselves speak the story of our lives to someone we trust” (pg. 70).

“The journal Surgery reports a study where surgeons’ tone of voice was evaluated, based on ten-second snippets recorded during sessions with their patients. Half the surgeons whose voices were rated had been sued for malpractice; half had not. The voices of those who had been sued were far more often rated as domineering and uncaring . . . research has found that when people receive negative performance feedback in a warm, supportive tone of voice, they leave feeling positive - despite the negative feedback. When they get positive performance reviews in a cold and distant tone of voice, they end up feeling bad despite the good news” (pg 71) . . .

A Recipe for Self-Control:

“Attention regulates emotion” (pg 76).

“Attention . . . has a limited capacity: working memory creates a bottleneck that lets us hold just so much in mind at any given moment. As our worries intrude on the limited capacity of our attention, these irrevelent thoughts shrink the bandwidth left for, say, math” (pg 85).

The Empathy Triad:

“Cognitive empathy . . . lets us take other people’s perspective, comprehend their mental state, and at the same time manage our own emotions while we take stock of theirs. In contrast, with emotional empathy we join the other person in feeling along with him or her; our bodies resonate in whatever key of joy or sorrow that person may be going through . . . empathic concern lead us to care about them, mobilizing us to help if need be” (pg 98).

“When people listen to someone telling , the brain of the listeners become intimately coupled with that of the storyteller” (pg 103).

“Empathy depends on a muscle of attention: to tune in to others’ feelings requires we pick up the facial, vocal, and other signals of their emotion” (pg 104).

“If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me” VS “If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him? . . . compassion build on empathy, which in turn requires a focus on others” (pg 106).

System Blindness:

“Wayfinding embodies systems awareness . . . detecting and mapping the patterns and order that lie hidden within the chaos of the natural world . . . how to read the signs of seasonal change” (pg 137).

“One of the worse results of system blindness occurs when leaders implement a strategy to solve a problem - but ignore the pertinent system dynamics” (pg 142).

“the ‘illusion of explanatory depth,’ is where we feel confidence in our understanding of a complex system, but in reality have just superficial knowledge” (pg. 143)

The Myth of 10,000 Hours:

“Smart practice always includes a feedback loop that lets you recognize errors and correct them - which is why dancers use mirrors. Ideally that feedback comes from someone with and expert - and so every world-class sport champion has a coach. If you practice without such feedback, you don’t get to the top ranks” (pg 164).

“when you’re feeling good our awareness expands from our usual self-centered focus on ‘me’ to a more inclusive and warm focus on ‘we’ (pg. 170) . . . “cynicism, breeds pessimism: not just a focus on the cloud, but the conviction that there are even darker ones lurking behind. It all depends on where we focus: the mean fan, or the fifty thousand cheering ones” (pg. 171).

Grade: A

Any difficulty I had with this books was completely my own. I read it after during a time where my mind needed rest, not deep and impactful thinking. I would comfortably recommend this to any and everyone interested in being a better person.

Real Talk for Real Teachers, by Rafe Esquith

“Most of the teachers you meet are the best sort of people. They are caring and sensitive. Their value cannot be measured by a series of test scores. But there are some teachers you need to avoid. Sadly, they are in practically every school I have observed. They usually hang out in the lunchroom or parking lot nursing a bad attitude toward teaching, the principal, their students, and often one another. These negative folks do not thrive in solitary confinement, and they invite discouraged young teachers to join their circle of misery. I urge you to stay away from them. These teachers are of no good to you and certainly of no benefit to the students” (pg 14).

“Being tough does not mean being intimidating” (pg 34).

Because I didn’t feel like typing . . .

“But often - more often than most teachers care to debate - students misbehave in school because they are bored . . . the most effective way to keep a class in order is with an interesting lesson. When activities are fascinating and exciting, you have a more reasonable punishment for bad behavior. The punishment is the missing of the lesson, and very few students want to be left out when they actually believe they are going to miss something fun and stimulating” (pg 64)

“Try to set up your lesson as part of a grand scheme . . . to work toward a bigger picture in your own head and in the minds of your students'“ (pg 65).

Students make mistakes, “but if a door is not left open for possible redemption, there is no motivation for a student to try to do better” (pg 71).

“When people are disagreeable might be the most important time of all to be civilized . . . remember that children are watching” (pg 77).

“This job should be fun. Don’t let anyone cause you to forget that” (pg 96).

“Good students help other people. They are aware of the world around them. Real scholars know that the recitation of facts is a beginning, and not and end, of knowledge” (pg 107).

“The best teachers choose character over reputation. It does not matter what misinformed people think about our performance. It matters who we really are” (pg 111).

“Jealousy is an ugly emotion that often leads to unprofessional and cruel behavior” (pg 127).

“Every hour of every day we teachers make sure the kids see the relevance in what they are doing” (pg 139).

Burn brighter, not out (pg 215)

“When pain comes, it is an opportunity to reflect and grow” (pg 215).

And because he’s this kind of teacher, he gets his students to perform - and understand - this type of work:

For more on . . .

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Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling, by John Taylor Gatto

“The logic of the school-mind is that it is better to leave school with a toolkit of superficial jargon derived from economics, sociology, natural science, and so on than with one genuine enthusiasm. But quality education entails learning about something in depth. Confusion is thrust upon kids by too many strange adults, each working alone with only the thinnest relationship with each other, pretending, for the most part, to an expertise they do not posses.
Meaning, not disconnected facts, is what sane human beings seek, and education is a set of codes for processing raw data into meaning” (pg 3).

I was recommended this book by a mother of one of my students. I’m glad I read it, but mainly because I found myself disagreeing with it - vehemently. Which, at times, I like.

I will, however, have to buy her a new book. I forgot it wasn’t mine and wrote too many curse words in the margins.

Here’s a few examples why:

"Good students wait for a teacher to tell them what to do . . . this power to control what children will think lets me separate successful students from failures very easily (pg 7), but bad teachers require this, foster this, and do little about it when it happens. F U John Taylor Gatto.

“Don’t be too quick to vote for radical school reform if you want to continue getting a paycheck” (pg 9), and don’t expect to change the world if your chief concern is getting a paycheck. F U John Taylor Gatto.

“School is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing it. I should know” (pg 19). F U John Taylor Gatto. The fact that you “win awards” and think this way IS the problem - YOU are the problem. F U.

“The truth is schools don’t really teach anything except how to obey orders” (pg 21). F U John Taylor Gatto.

“At the core of this elite system of education is the belief that self-knowledge is the only basis of true knowledge” and that is why it fails. Why anything fails, if it believe self to be the one, true determiner of truth and happiness and purpose. F U John Taylor Gatto.

“I’m confident that as they gain self-knowledge they’ll also become self-teachers - and only self-teaching has any lasting value” (pg 31). Nope. Ever been inspired by someone? Their words? Their life? Their teachings? Nope, never? Interesting.

“I can honestly say I have never once heard an extended conversation about children or about teaching theory in any teachers’ room I’ve been in” (pg 40). The problem isn’t them. It’s you. Because I can honestly say that I have never NOT been in an extended conversation about children or about teaching theory because THAT’S WHAT GOOD TEACHERS DO!!!! F U John Taylor Gatto.

“The United States has become a nation of institutions, whereas it used to be a nation of communities” (pg 56). Seems a bit unfair, and largely untrue. Salem anyone? How was that for a community?

“Parent, for the most part, are lied to or told half-truths, as they are usually considered adversaries. At least that’s been true in every school I ever worked in” (pg 64). Again, the issue is you.

“Perhaps it is time to try something different. ‘Good fences make good neighbors,’ said Robert Frost. The natural solution to learning to live together in a community is first to learn to live apart as individuals and as families. Only when you feel good about yourself can you feel good about others” (pg 71). This IS the problem of education - and our culture at large. IT ISN’T ABOUT YOU!!! We find our purpose and “feel good” not by serving ourselves AND THEN others, but by serving others! Then we find ourselves. F U John Taylor Gatto.

Here are some good ones:

“Sometimes the problem is the problem of mastering solitude” (pg 30). That’s pretty good.

“Aristotle saw, a long time ago, that fully participating in a complex range of human affairs was the only way to become fully human” (pg 47). Good on you, Aristotle. Good on you.

“What’s gotten in the way of education in the United States is a theory of social engineering that says there is one right way to proceed with growing up” (pg 68). Agreed. Whole heartedly. This, to me, points to purpose rather than a system. Change the purpose, change the system. But yes, Mr. Gatto, I agree.

A quote from Christopher Lasch: “The people who think globally do so by abstractly and statistically reducing the globe to quantities . . . If you want to do good and preserving acts you must think and act locally” (pg 80). Perhaps, Mr. Gatto, you should stick to quoting others.

To help compensate, I suggest reading:

• End of Education, by Neil Postman

• There Are No Short Cuts, by Rafe Esquith

• Walking on Water, by Derick Jensen

• Teacher Man, by Frank McCourt

These are my kind of teachers.

For more one . . .

Education : Reading Log

Creativity, INC. Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration, by Ed Catmull

“What makes Pixar special is that we acknowledge we will always have problems, many of them hidden from view; that we work hard to uncover these problems, even if doing so means making ourselves uncomfortable; and that, when we come across a problems, we marshal all of our energies to solve it” (pg x).

“If we made something that we wanted to see, others would want to see it, too” (pg xi).

“We start from the presumption that our people are talented and want to contribute. We accept that, without meaning to, our company is stifling that talent in myriad unseen ways. Finally, we try to identify those impediments and fix them” (pg xv).

“The obvious payback of exceptional people are that they innovate, excel, and generally make your company - and, by extension, you - look good” (pg 23).

“The responsibility for finding and fixing problems should be assigned to every employee, from the most senior manager to the lowliest person on the production line” (pg 50).

“When downsides coexist with upsides, as they oftedn do, people are reluctant to explore what’s bugging them, for fear of being labeled complainers.” But, “if left unaddressed, {it} could fester and destroy Pixar”. Or anything (pg 63).

“Our purpose was not merely to build a studio that made hit films but to foster a creative culture that would continually ask questions” (pg 64).

“It would be a mistake to think that merely gathering a bunch of people in a room for a candid discussion every couple of months will automatically cure your company’s ills” (pg 104).

“If you aren’t experiencing failure, then you are making a far worse mistake: You are being driven by the desire to avoid it. And, for leaders especially, this strategy - trying to avoid failure by out-thinking it - dooms you to fail” (pg 109).

“How do you make failure into something people can face without fear? . . . If leaders can talk about our mistakes and our part in them, then we make it safe for others . . . Being open about problems is the first step toward learning from them” (pg 111).

“When experimentation is seen as necessary and productive, not as a frustrating waste of time, people will enjoy their work - even when it is confounding them” (pg 113).

“One of the most crucial responsibilities of leadership is creating a culture that rewards those who lift not just our stock prices but our aspirations as well” (pg 123).

“Originality is fragile” (pg 131).

“Fear makes people reach for certainty and stability, neither of which guarantee the safety they imply” (pg 148).

“If you don’t try to uncover what is unseen and understand its nature, you will be ill prepared to lead” (pg 169).

“Confirmation Bias: the tendency of people to favor information true or not, that confirms their preexisting beliefs . . . If our mental models are mere approximations of reality, then, the conclusions we draw cannot help but be prone to error. A few words uttered by someone close to us can carry enormous weight, for example, whereas the same words uttered by a stranger won’t resonate at all. At our jobs, we may interpret not being invited to a meeting as a threat to us or to our projects, even when no threat is intended. But because we often don’ see the flaws in our reasoning - or our biases - it’s easy to be deluded while being quite convinced that we are the only sane ones around . . . once a model of how we should work gets in our head, it is difficult to change” (pg 181, 182).

“There are limits to data, and some people rely on it too heavily. Analyzing it correctly is difficult, and it is dangerous to assume that you always know what it means. It is very easy to find false patters” because, “a large portion of what we manage can’t be measured, and not realizing this has unintended consequences” (pg 219).

“People want decisivenss, but they also want honesty about when you’ve effed up. It’s a huge lesson: include people in your problems, not just your solutions” (pg 228).

“If you’re sailing across the ocean and your goal is to avoid weather and waves, then why the hell are you sailing? You have to embrace that sailing means that you can’t control the elements and that there will be good days and bad days and that, whatever comes, you will deal with it because your goal is to eventually get to the other side. You will not be able to control exactly how you get across. That’s the game you’ve decided to be in. If your goal is to make it easier and simpler, then don’t get in the boat” (pg 228).

“While everyone appreciates cash bonuses, they value something else almost as much: being looked in the eye by someone they respect and told, ‘Thank you"‘“ (pg 272).

Personal Project Days:
The allowance “to work on anything they wanted, using Pixar’s resources to engage with whatever problem or question they found interesting . . . any idea that sparked their curiosity, they were free to pursue.”
”Just give people time, and they come up with the ideas . . . that’s the beauty of it: It comes from them” (pg 281).

Thoughts for Managing a Creative Culture:

• There is nothing quite as effective, when it comes to shutting down alternative viewpoints, as being convinced you are right.

• Be wary of making too many rules. Rules can simplify life for managers, but they can be demeaning to the 95 percent who behave well. Don’t create rules to rein in the other 5 percent - address abuses of common sense individuality. this is more work but ultimately healthier.

• Don’t confuse the process with the goal. Working on our process to make them better, easier, and more efficient is an indispensable activity and something we should continually work on - but it is not the goal. Making the product great is the goal.

Disconnected: How to Reconnect our Digitally Distracted Kids, by Thomas Kersting

Our devices have become such a part of who we are that we may be losing sight of who we are.
- Thomas Kersting

“We and our children do not have control over electronic devices and screens; electronic devices and screens have control over us” (pg ii).

“In 2007 Small began researching technology’s impact on the brain and discovered that when research subjects spent as little as an hour a day online, the activity patters in their brains changed dramatically. According to Small, ‘the human brain is malleable, always changing in response to its environment.’ Dr. Small explains that the brain is very sensitive. Every stimulation the brain receives causes a complex cascade of neurochemical electrical consequences. With repeated stimuli the neural circuits in the brain become excited and if other neural circuits are neglected they will be weakened. A young person’s brain, which is still developing, is particularly sensitive and is also the kind of brain that is most exposed to modern technology” (pg 4).

“the more we become used to just sound bites and tweets, the less patient we will become with more complex, more meaningful information. And I do think we might lose the ability to analyze things with any depth and nuance” (pg 4).

“This lack of face-to-face interaction, particularly for children, is evident in their reduced social and communication skills, making it difficult for them to handle the everyday bumps in the road of life. The end result: a substantial increase in stress, anxiety, and self-esteem issues” and “if young folks spend most of their time communicating through text messaging rather than face-to-face, the brain will weed out the neural pathways that are necessary for becoming a good face-to-face communicator” (pg 7, 9).

Chapter 2: Cyberspace Children : A Full-Time Job

“In 2005, the Kaiser Family Foundation released the findings from a 2004 study” that “revealed that the average eight to eighteen year old spent six and a half hours per day using electronic media” (pg 15). In 2008, that number “had risen by over an hour, to seven hours and thirty-eight minutes per day, seven days a week” meaning “the average kid in America was spending more time per week plugged in to electronic devices than the average full-time worker was spending at work.”

Between 2004 and 2008, YouTube and Facebook had been introduced to the world.

What’s even more alarming “is that the Kaiser study did not include smartphone or tablet use because they weren’t relevant in 2008 . . . In October of 2015, Common Sense Media conducted the most up-to-date, large-scale, probability-based survey to explore young people’s media diets. The findings were that the average American teenager now spends nine hours per day, or sixty-three hours per week, immersed in electronic media, not including school-related technology” (pg 18).

Chapter 13: Social Media and the Development of Self -Esteem

“Our children are on the receiving end of hundreds, even thousands, of narcissistic photographs from their peers, which can cause them to start questioning the quality of their own life when compared to everyone else’s” (pg 26).

“Children need to experience rejection at times in order to develop a sense of “self” by overcoming adversity and learning from it“ (pg 18).

The word ‘self’ is the crucial part of self-esteem, it is not ‘others’-esteem. But that is what is happening” because they’ve lost their sense of purpose. A sense of purpose can be defined “as ongoing motivation that is self-directed, oriented toward the future, and beneficial to others” (pg 28).

Chapter 4: The Multitasking Brains of Kids

“High multitaskers fail miserably at counting the correct number of passes btween the girls wearing white tee shirts because their brains can’t help but be distracted by the girls in black along with other distractions happening in the video. Low multitaskers have no problem counting the correct number of passes between the girls wearing white” because high multitaskers use “twenty times more of their brain . . . than low multitaskers.” But they’re using the wrong part of their brain, “the part known as the visual cortex. Low multitaskers needed only a small amount of brainpower to complete the task, and it was the area of the brain they were supposed to be using, the pre-frontal cortex. In other words, the high multitasking students were actually worse at multitasking than the low multitasking students” (pg 36, 37).

Chapter 8: Raising our Children to be Leaders Instead of Followers

“It is our job as parents {and educators} to do what is right for our children, not to allow outside influences to decide that for us. When I have these conversations with parents they sometimes become defensive because, let’s face it, no adult wants to admit that they were peer pressured into anything” (pg 73).

What is the right age to get your child a smartphone? When you feel comfortable with your child watching pornography (pg 73).

“A leader is someone [who] leads by example and has the integrity to do the right thing even when it is not popular. A good leader has positive influence over others, inspiring them to become a better person and example for others to model their life against” (pg 74).

Chapter 10: Using Mindfulness and Meditation to Reconnect Our Disconnected Kids

Five rules every parent should follow:

1. Keep your child’s room clean of screens

2. Your child’s phone is your phone

3. No electronics during dinner

4. Limit screen time for entertainment purposes (including TV) to two hours per day

5. Be a role model

Grade: A+

Sure. At times, he’s extreme, because that’s what sells books, but he’s also right. Not perfect, but right in that he raises the question, sounds the alarm, and looks to the adults to act and parent/teach like adults, and that in and of itself is what makes this short book worth the read.

He got my attention, that’s for sure.

For more one . . .

Education : Reading Log : On Parenting