Maps — Some tools seem to be able to take you anywhere — to support the development of almost every intelligence. Maybe anything can, approached with enough creativity, but it’s easy with maps. Of course they’re about Visual-Spatial intelligence. When you learn to look at a map and picture the place it represents, your brain has developed an astonishingly complex symbolizing power. But maps go far beyond their visual-spatial core. They’re a gateway to geography, geology, history, anthropology, economics, politics — to so many branches of Knowledge-Based Intelligence. They’re an introduction to all the forms in which we represent data visually and to the different data that can be represented in the same form, as when we compare a map of land forms to one of agricultural products. They are tools for creativity, for imagined or imaginary voyages. They are a tool for the Director when we plan a trip from here to there on the map. If your child really gets into maps, check out the stunning work of Edwin Raisz. And thanks, Mom, for papering my bedroom with old National Geographic maps. The voyages I made looking at those as I fell asleep!

Grow With the Flow p 176

Concerning maps as a gateway to history, i just found a delightful resource: the Library of Congress searchable online collection of historical maps.

Here’s where I grew up. (It’s the second house down from the Episcopal church ("B"), on S. Pearl St. Those National Geographic maps papered the room inside the leftmost second-story window.

Here’s where I live now. Our house wasn’t built for another 40 years, and even my street is off in the distance from the downtown of 1899, but I can see where my office will be, once they build it.

Do they have a map of your hometown?

Have you been following the Winter Olympic Games in Torino?
Were you inspired by the remarkable act of speed skater Joey Cheek?

After winning the 500-meters at the 2006 Olympic Winter Games, Joey Cheek said he would donate his $25,000 bonus from the U.S. Olympic Committee to Right To Play, an organization of former Olympic, Paralympic and professional athletes worldwide who support using sport for development, health and peace. Right To Play is operated by Johann Olav Koss, the Norwegian who won three golds at the 1994 Lillehammer Games and inspired Cheek to take up speedskating.

Here’s a quick look at what Right To Play does:

Right To Play is an athlete-driven international humanitarian organization that uses sport and play as a tool for the development of children and youth in the most disadvantaged areas of the world.

Mission: To improve the lives of children in the most disadvantaged areas of the world by using the power of sport and play for development, health and peace.

Healthier, Happier Children: Well designed sport and play programs help guide children on a positive path to healthy development. In addition to the physical benefits, sport and play programs enhance holistic development, help foster resilience, and create a meaningful connection to adults. Sport and play also teach important values and life skills including leadership, self-confidence, teamwork, conflict resolution, discipline, respect and fair play.

Stronger Communities and Sustained Impact: Right To Play works closely with communities to help set up the networks and infrastructure necessary to support sustainable local ownership of our sport and play programs. Right To Play also trains local youth to be coaches to expand the reach of our programs and to impart valuable leadership skills to the next generation.

So here’s the deal: Carol and I think this is a really worthy organization, one whose goals fit deeply with the philosophy of Grow With the Flow. We want to support them. Hoping to make our contribution amount to more, we’ll add $20 to our own contribution for each contribution we hear about from readers of this site. Just drop us an email, and we’ll keep count of how many Grow With the Flow readers contribute.

Your gift will help Right To Play:

• Save lives by using the power of sport to communicate HIV education and prevention messages, as well as immunization education.
• Build stronger communities by empowering and training local youth as Coaches role models. This creates the transfer of job and leadership skills to local individuals, and helps to set up community networks, councils and infrastructure.
• Create more peaceful communities through the normalization and social re-integration of former child soldiers and refugees, and also through peace-building efforts in areas of conflict (e.g. the Middle East, Liberia).
• Develop healthier, happier children through physical, social and emotional development. We can introduce joy and fun into their lives while teaching them key life skills and values.

Click here to
Donate to Right to Play

Then drop me an email, so we’ll be able to chip in our share.

Treating and Preventing
Adolescent Mental Health Disorders:
What We Know and What We Don’t Know
A Research Agenda for Improving the Mental Health of Our Youth

and

If Your Adolescent has…

Oxford University Press

In my private practice I focus on the themes of Grow With the Flow – issues of learning and cognition: helping people learn, think, plan, organize, and problem solve. If that sounds like I don’t need to be concerned with emotions, forget it – all learning is intimately tied to emotions, and when learning fails, emotions are more likely to be at the base than cognitive factors.

Students who are dealing with a mental health disorder are unlikely to focus effectively on studies, no matter how hard they try. It’s critical to deal with those emotional issues, and not to be sidetracked by the obvious learning issue. A junior high student is failing all her classes because she’s too depressed to do school. To push her to get her grades back up will be to miss the point. This is the more true because there’s a double whammy involved: Not only does her depression block learning directly, but the consequences of failing to perform to expectations is very likely to cycle back into the emotions and start a feedback loop – a nosedive.

The Annenberg Foundation Trust at Sunnylands, recognizing that adolescent mental health disorders have become a major public health issue, has launched The Adolescent Mental Health Initiative to find out what we know and what we need to know in order to diagnose and treat adolescents who suffer major mental-health disorders, and to help bring them to successful adult lives.

One product of the initiative is a series of parent resource guides to specific disorders, backed by a weighty handbook for professionals. (Yes! I had to know. It weighs in at 1.954 kg.) The parent resources are distilled from the reference work, which in turn was developed with the assistance of over 100 well-respected psychologists and psychiatrists.

The reference work for mental health professionals, Treating and Preventing Adolescent Mental Health Disorders: What We Know and What We Don’t Know carries the additional subtitle “A Research Agenda for Improving the Mental Health of Our Youth.”

I’m going to tackle the big book, which looks like a benchmark resource for mental health professionals. But I’m not sure I should post about it here, on a site that’s mostly about learning. Please let me know what you think: Should I post on mental health as it relates to learning, or is that too far from the focus of Grow With the Flow?

The project also has a web site for teens, copecaredeal.

Do kids still say that? At this point, I don’t even remember for sure whether we said it when I was a kid, back when dinosaurs roamed and I believed all adults were always truthful.

But I know that parents say it a lot: Call their kid a liar. Do it in ways that humiliate. Accuse casually, quite certain that they have a straight line of sight into their child’s psyche. Assume the very worst motives. Punish.

it sometimes turns out that there was no lie at all, at least from the child’s point of view: a confusion, a misunderstanding, forgetfulness. Opportunities to work on communications.

If there was a lie, I ask parents to look at its nature and context. Was it a manipulative lie, one designed to get someone else in trouble? Once in a while it is. It’s important to understand what prompted it. Often, there were felt pressures or injustices. Once in a great while – I see it maybe once or twice a decade – it’s a purely manipulative, hateful, Machiavellian lie, with no goal but to hurt – no source, no “reason,” no remorse, however carefully I dig for it. Then I worry.

Somewhere above 99% of the time, it’s a defensive lie – a CYA lie. “The dog ate my homework.”

CYA Lie : What’s important :: Barometer : Weather

You don’t punish the barometer when it says a storm is coming, you change your picnic plans. The lie is a symptom, an indicator, a pointer. To even think of it as a lie takes you in the wrong direction. It’s an invitation to problem solving. The relevant questions may be ones like:
“Why is there so much heat about homework my child can’t deal with it straight up?”
“Where’s the fear?”
“What are the emotions behind the lie?”
“What are the misconceptions behind the lie? Am I certain they really are misconceptions?”
“How can I help him talk about what’s going on?”
“What’s my most important goal right now?

I search my memory, and I can’t think of a single time that focusing on the lie – the fact of the prevarication –has helped. Ask yourself: “Am I a criminal investigator or a parent?”
Ask yourself: “How can I help my child?”
When the lies stop, you’ve solved a problem. Lucky the lie was there to let you know you had a problem – the smell of gas that headed off a nasty explosion.

The impetus for this post came from a New York Times Magazine feature , “Looking for the Lie,” February 5, 2006, by Robin Marantz Henig.

It seems possible that music may turn out to be more central, more pervasive in its influence, more fundamental to us as humans than we now realize. I wonder whether the music of our own body and our mother’s body — the first sounds we hear — may resonate within us in profound and still-unknown ways. I wonder why so many mathematically capable people also have a deep relation to music. I still wonder, thanks to Hank Cross, my much-valued mentor, why rats apparently perceive octaves. I wonder why the need to tap our feet is so strong. I wonder why music soothes the savage beast.

Grow With the Flow page 70

Community Choruses: Singing and Happiness
Singing loud with others makes us happy.

Blast from the past
It may be because of leftover fish-ear parts.

Sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll: Or on the evolutionary neurobiology of hearing and hedonism
So if you thought there was something fishy about Country Joe…