EduCenter

  Learning with Passion and Enthusiasm releases dopamine, which means it works better and is more fun Learning happens inside our brain when new information connects with existing memory. When we are excited or enthusiastic our brain happens to do that much better. In a famous experiment American psychologist, Hans Breiter put cocaine addicts into an MRI. The effect of the drug excited the addicts and the researcher saw a lot of activity in what’s called the Nucleus Accumbent. German scientists did the same experiment with young men and pictures of Porsche cars, which caused the same area to light up. When they did it with pictures of a Daihatsu.. it didn’t. What’s going on here? As soon as we expect something nice to happen, the brain releases it's happiness chemicals dopamine and endorphin as well as other neurotransmitters. While dopamine and endorphin delight us, the other neurotransmitters send information from A to B. This connects new information from outside the brain with ...

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. - Maimonides (1138-1204)      Independence is a problem when 55% of young adults in the U.S., between ages 18-34, are still financially dependent on their parents. That is more than half! As a teacher and director of child development centers for over a decade, I've encountered children who were about to transition to kindergarten without being able to dress themselves, pour milk into a cup, or even string an intelligible sentence together. It's not because these children aren't capable, but they haven't been given the time and training to develop those skills due to impatience or enabling. This has been called learned helplessness. Before the advent of public education, children would work as farm hands and operate machinery in factories as young as five or six, meanwhile our progressive five-year-olds cannot even tie their own shoes. I'm not advocating for child...

     Speaking is already in our genes. But reading is not. Until about 100 years ago most people didn't do it all. When we read fiction especially, we create new pathways in our brain. Reading 30 pages of fiction every night, gets the pathways thicker and thicker. Our brain needs a workout just like our body.      Rita Carter is a writer, broadcaster and journalist who specializes in the workings of the human brain. Her books include the first layman’s guide to neuroscience: Mapping the Mind, which has been translated into 14 languages. For seven years she presented London’s nightly news programme, “Thames News” , and has written for magazines and newspapers throughout the world, including the London Times, Telegraph, Guardian and New Scientist. She has a deep interest in bringing art and science together and is a Patron at the influential London-based Foundation “Art and Mind”. Rita Carter is a writer, broadcaster and journalist who specializes in the...

Educator: A Calling, not a Job      Educators are leaving schools at a rapid rate and the national academic scores are decreasing just as fast. One of the Universities I had the pleasure of teaching at shut down suddenly because less students are pursuing undergraduate degrees. The government has allocated funds to entice people to pursue a career in teaching, but they are immediately deterred by the state of public education, treatment of teachers in the classroom, and the rise in behavioral disorders. We need to change the way we approach education and reevaluate what it means to be a teacher. What It Means to be An Educator      The term "educator" has changed in recent years from an individual who teaches children skills to become lifelong learners to a person who watches kids learn from a Chromebook. In an attempt to hire more "teachers" public education systems have created a suboptimal and counterproductive way for learning to be automated; t...