Blogs

Improving education in the United States is no small task; articulating its importance and convincing the masses that the classroom is owed a much-needed makeover are chores no less great.  We owe it to our children to better the environment in which they grow and learn, squeezing themselves into tiny plastic chairs until they graduate to “big kid” desks and the wealth of knowledge that arrives magically with them.  Whether or not American education can squeeze out of its predicament (sinking test scores, a lack of dedicated teachers, students that are anything but inspired or encouraged) while maintaining a positive attitude about the future is up for debate—must we acknowledge the current status of education as a “problem,” or just something that can simply be improved?&#160

I am elated to have the opportunity to work with fantastic faculty members and peers each day. When I began this fellowship I was a bit unclear as to what exactly we would be doing for ten weeks. I had browsed the Serendip website and read blogs from past years to try to obtain a little more of a sense of what exactly I would be doing, but they too only seemed like a conglomeration of ideas and thoughts which at first glance appeared to be un-related. Therefore although I was excited to begin working I honestly had the slightest clue of what I would be doing.

Working Our Way to Our Toes

Yoga is supposed to help provide balance and inner peace, contentment and mindfulness, and improve flexibility. This is important since none of us, Jenna, Jessica, or I, can touch our toes, hold a plank pose for more than a few seconds, or maintain focus for a very long time.

This is our yoga journey and we will update every day, doing 15 minutes of yoga in the morning and the afternoon, rating our flexibility on a scale from one to ten.

Yoga routines we use will be posted here so feel free to join us.

Morning routines:

Wake-Up Yoga

Afternoon routines:

Getting here late...

So I got here a week later than Jenna and Jessica because of jury duty and living 3000 miles away from school. That said, I've caught up (I hope, anyway), and I can't wait to push farther into our research concerning the brain, education, and science.

What I knew/ expected...

The Good, Elementary School:

My first few years of school were, as far as I remember, filled with curiosity and encouragement to explore and observe things I did not yet understand. My parents, during the summer especially, gave me and my younger sister extra assignments, reading lists and projects like spelling lists and sets of math and logic problems, model building, arts and crafts, nature hikes, and field trips to the Children's Museum of Boston, the Boston Aquarium, the Museum of Fine Arts and the Worcester Art Museum, Old Sturbridge Village, and more.

My experience working with Professor Grobstein, Wil Franklin and my two Bryn Mawr colleagues, Kate Gould and Jenna Pfeiffer, has been nothing short of unique and satisfying.  It's a delightfully strange feeling to be sitting a mere floor above where my biology class met three times a week last semester; it's even stranger that I'm sitting here learning at my own pace, deciding what I find interesting and making connections between topics that I've never thought about before.

(work in progress) 

Brought to you by The Slippery Brain Sodality

Virtual Reality and Dissociative Personalities

This final examination of dissociation will be looking at the projection of the self in daydreams and other fictional states and will suggest the incorporation of a fluid scale of dissociation…

The article that inspired this investigation is written by a woman in the forefront of the examination of the idea of “plural selves” and dissociation, especially in relation to technology and virtual reality. In the article “Who Am We?” professor and clinical psychologist Sherry Turkle writes about herself and her research in the 3rd person, a quirky self-reflexive approach that goes hand-in-hand with the concept of self-pluralism:

Below is an article I wrote for my college newspaper, The Bi-College News, about religion/spirituality and its impact on professors in a liberal arts college environment.  The article was part of a larger pullout section on religion and spirituality in general on Bryn Mawr and Haverford College's campuses. I cannot link to the article because the newspaper's website is being renovated, so I will copy and paste it from a word document. This is the pre-editing version, so it has changed slightly, but the vast majority of it is the same.

“Outside the Classroom: A Look at Professors and Religion”