Synapses ready? Fire!

I'm reading a book called Teaching with the Brain in Mind by Eric Jensen. Stale as the raisin-bran that struggles to stay fresh in our Hawaiian heat, this book is still worth my time just because it is so applicable to teaching. I'm clearly not lapping it up since the bookmark lies a meager 43 pages in, nor do I grok much of the neurology described (why can't they make a layout and choose images based on the research they have done about how brains digest information? Arg.) However, the book has affected some change in my classroom.

First, I started playing music in the classroom between breaks that sets the desired tone for the lesson. This is really easy using Pandora.com, an online radio-station that plays any genre of music you invent. In the morning when I want them awake and focused, I play an upbeat latin-music station. During the first break before we do a close-reading of a text, a Mozart-centered station pops on. They seem to appreciate the added stimuli--when I forget to hit play they say "why don't we have music today?". In theory, it is priming neural pathways to increase the speed, sequence, and strength of the connections they will make about poetry.

I change what is on the walls about once a week because change is stimuli for the brain.
I am careful to eliminate threat (verbal abuse, mockery etc.) because a scared brain is not absorbing anything.

According to the brain book, enrichment is all about challenge and feedback. Allowing students to choose their own books for class should insure that they read at the level challenging for them. Right now we are in the process of choosing free-choice books that students will read individually and write about on their blogs. This is instead of reading the Odyssey as a class (the debate is still open as to the validity of this, but lets just wait and see). Today we visited a junior-filled composition class to hear about their book recommendations. These students are reading such interesting books! just a few of the suggestions were Faster than the Speed of Light by Joao Magueijo, Eragon by Christopher Paolini and 1984 by George Orwell, This Boy's Life by Tobias Wolff, and The Atonement Child by Francine Rivers. Just hearing these students do a Reading-Rainbow-style plug for books raised my confidence in students today.

So in an ideal world, challenge comes via the free-choice book, and feedback comes via blog when they write about what they are reading.

Finally, one last change regarding feedback. In college, I recall slipping away excitedly to read the feedback on my papers (dork!) as soon as I got them. But not everyone does that, and not all comments make sense, even if you do manage to read the teacher's terrible handwriting. Lots of students make similar mistakes, and having them corrected in relation to work they have recently done apparently makes a different. So lately when I return a batch of papers I choose 2 issues that came up for almost everyone. Perhaps it was weak verb usage. Perhaps they mis-punctuated dialogue. I do a mini-lesson the day I return their papers and it seems to sink in.