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Every person on this planet has a personality that hasdeveloped over the course of his or her life. There have been a numerous numberof explanations as to why people behave in the way they do. The majorreasoning’s given for the development of personalities is either genetics orenvironment. Why do we have the personalities we do? Is it because of theparents that we have, or is it because of the environment we grow up in?

The Storyteller’s Reconstruction:
Over My Head, by Claudia Osborn  

 

            Claudia Osborn’s Over My Head is a riveting journey of coping, rehabilitating and learning before and after brain trauma.  The story shines a new light on the behavioral consequences of such an injury.  Through the lens of biology 202, we are able to understand that a reconstruction of the storyteller occurs in Claudia’s case.  This reconstruction leads to novel confabulations of the same stimuli that she received before her accident.

 

As someone with a passion for creative writing and a future career in medicine, I have always been interested in how others manage to intertwine these two disciplines. Oliver Sacks, author of several books including The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales, is one of the most prominent physician-writers. Sacks’s writing validates my belief that these two fields are not mutually exclusive but actually complement each other quite effectively. Sacks makes storytelling science and science storytelling. His book is divided into four sections—losses, excesses, transports, and the world of the simple—each of which contains a series of clinical tales focusing on an individual’s experience with a neurological disorder.

As a competitive long-distance runner, I have often debated the validity of athletic talent. While talent seems to play a key role in sports like soccer, basketball, and tennis which require a sophisticated level of hand-eye coordination, gracefulness, and spatial perception, it seems less critical to endurance sports. I’d like to suggest that pain tolerance is in fact the most important skill of endurance athletes. I believe that this tolerance depends upon an individual’s ability to process and experience physical sensations normally classified as pain as something else. Finally, I assert that pain tolerance can be learned and may affect arenas other than athletics.

 by Catherine Curry

Learning goes beyond its traditional meaning - learning happens also when the mentor find itself in an uncomfortable or confusing situation. The author draws on persona experience from Bryn Mawr's Praxis program.

by Emma Cohan

A statement on balancing traditional with progressive methods of teaching and how one can decide for the better path when he/she finds him/herself at crossroads.

        As a child, I remember being comfortable in unfamiliar environments only when my mother was in sight. As soon as she would go to a different room, I would stop what I was doing and follow her. It is now widely known that a parent’s attention, comfort, and touch is very important for normal development. However, this was only possible by pioneering work in the area.

The first experiments in this field were done by Harry Harlow at the University of Wisconsin. Through initial observations, Harlow noticed that baby monkeys who were separated from their mothers were attached to a piece of cloth, which they carried around everywhere. He extrapolated this

by Alexandra Martinez

The question in this essay is - when should a mentor try to push a learner to study more than he or she desires?