write write, I can write!

I can read I can dance, I can sing – I’m alive

I can learn new things each day and face the world with two front feet. Mother mary of gualalupelahara, I am alive.
Three feet, eight arms and a hairy chest, what’s next.

a question.

a transcendental journey into outer space. inner space. we are the daughters of sense.

power beyond unthinkable power.

IMAGINE. I can imagine.

black babies on the coast of south africa getting all they need every day  they’re alive. In a hut and happy with the peace sharks.

boom boom blood heart magic body breathhhhh

a study sunday

1. entertain a thought without accepting it. ~Aristotle
2. Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils. ~Hector Berlioz
3. An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made, in a narrow field. ~Niels Bohr
4. Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school. ~Albert Einstein
5. What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child. ~George Bernard Shaw
6. Learning is what most adults will do for a living in the 21st century. ~Perelman
7. I have never let my schooling interfere with my education. ~Mark Twain
8. Formal education will make you a living; self-education will make you a fortune. ~Jim Rohn
9. Education is that which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding. ~Ambrose Bierce
10. In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad. ~Friedrich Nietzsche
11. The only person who is educated is the one who has learned how to learn and change. ~Carl Rogers
12. A liberally educated person meets new ideas with curiosity and fascination. An illiberally educated person meets new ideas with fear. ~James B. Stockdale
13. A teacher is one who makes himself progressively unnecessary. ~Thomas Carruthers
14. The authority of those who teach is often an obstacle to those who want to learn. ~Cicero
15. Teachers open the door, but you must enter by yourself. ~Chinese Proverb
16. I cannot teach anybody anything, I can only make them think. ~Socrates
17. Education would be so much more effective if its purpose were to ensure that by the time they leave school every boy and girl should know how much they don’t know, and be imbued with a lifelong desire to know it. ~Sir William Haley
18. In a completely rational society, the best of us would aspire to be teachers and the rest of us would have to settle for something less, because passing civilization along from one generation to the next ought to be the highest honor and the highest responsibility anyone could have. ~Lee Iacocca
19. The job of an educator is to teach students to see vitality in themselves. ~Joseph Campbell
20. Education is not the filling of a bucket, but the lighting of a fire. ~W. B. Yeats
21. A professor can never better distinguish himself in his work than by encouraging a clever pupil, for the true discoverers are among them, as comets amongst the stars. ~Linnaeus
22. Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous. ~Confucius
23. The true teacher defends his pupils against his own personal influence. He inspires self-trust. He guides their eyes from himself to the spirit that quickens him. He will have no disciple. ~Amos Bronson Alcott
24. Upon the subject of education, not presuming to dictate any plan or system respecting it, I can only say that I view it as the most important subject which we as a people may be engaged in. ~Abraham Lincoln
25. Instruction begins when you, the teacher, learn from the learner; put yourself in his place so that you may understand… what he learns and the way he understands it. — Soren Kierkegaard
26. The highest result of education is tolerance. — Helen Keller
27. Nothing is ever achieved without enthusiasm. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
28. The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires. — William Arthur Ward
29. Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever. — Gandhi
30. I have never in my life learned anything from any man who agreed with me. — Dudley Field Malone
31. How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book! The book exists for us, perchance, that will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. — Henry David Thoreau
32. Genius without education is like silver in the mine. — Benjamin Franklin
33. How is it that little children are so intelligent and men so stupid? It must be education that does it — Alexander Dumas
34. If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail. — Abraham Maslow
35. There is nothing more unequal than the equal treatment of unequal people. — Thomas Jefferson

Braining the Brain

Dyscalculia is a type of specific learning disability (SLD) involving innate difficulty in learning or comprehending mathematics.

Overview

Dyscalculia was originally identified in case studies of patients who suffered specific arithmetic disabilities as a result of damage to specific regions of the brain. Recent research suggests that dyscalculia can also occur developmentally, as a genetically-linked learning disability which affects a person’s ability to understand, remember, or manipulate numbers or number facts (e.g., the multiplication tables). The term is often used to refer specifically to the inability to perform arithmetic operations, but it is also defined by some educational professionals and cognitive psychologists as a more fundamental inability to conceptualize numbers as abstract concepts of comparative quantities (a deficit in “number sense”).[1] Those who argue for this more constrained definition of dyscalculia sometimes prefer to use the technical term Arithmetic Difficulties (AD) to refer to calculation and number memory deficits.

Dyscalculia is a lesser known disability, similar and potentially related to dyslexia and developmental dyspraxia. Dyscalculia occurs in people across the whole IQ range, and sufferers often, but not always, also have difficulties with time, measurement, and spatial reasoning. Current estimates suggest it may affect about 5% of the population. Although some researchers believe that dyscalculia necessarily implies mathematical reasoning difficulties as well as difficulties with arithmetic operations, there is evidence (especially from brain damaged patients) that arithmetic (e.g. calculation and number fact memory) and mathematical (abstract reasoning with numbers) abilities can be dissociated. That is (some researchers argue), an individual might suffer arithmetic difficulties (or dyscalculia), with no impairment of, or even giftedness in, abstract mathematical reasoning abilities.

The word dyscalculia comes from Greek and Latin which means: “counting badly”. The prefix “dys” comes from Greek and means “badly”. “Calculia” comes from the Latin “calculare”. which means “to count”. That word “calculare” again comes from “calculus”, which means “pebble” or one of the counters on an abacus.

Dyscalculia can be detected at a young age and measures can be taken to ease the problems faced by younger students. The main problem is understanding the way mathematics is taught to children. In the way that dyslexia can be dealt with by using a slightly different approach to teaching, so can dyscalculia. However, dyscalculia is the lesser known of these learning disorders and so is often not recognized.

Another common manifestation of the condition emerges when the individual is faced with equation type of problems which contain both integers and letters (3A + 4C). It can be difficult for the person to differentiate between the integers and the letters. Confusion such as reading a ‘5’ for an ‘S’ or not being able to distinguish between a zero ‘0’ for the letter ‘O’ can keep algebra from being mastered. This particular form of dyscalculia is often not diagnosed until middle or high school is entered.

* Frequent difficulties with arithmetic, confusing the signs: +, -, ÷ and ×.

* Difficulty with everyday tasks like checking change and reading analog clocks.
* Inability to comprehend financial planning or budgeting, sometimes even at a basic level; for example, estimating the cost of the items in a shopping basket or balancing a checkbook.
* Difficulty with multiplication-tables, mental arithmetic, etc.
* May do fairly well in subjects such as science and geometry, which require logic rather than formulae, until a higher level requiring calculations is obtained.
* Difficulty with conceptualizing time and judging the passing of time.
* Particularly problems to differentiating between left and right.
* Difficulty navigating or mentally “turning” the map to face the current direction rather than the common North=Top usage.
* Having particularly difficulty mentally estimating the measurement of an object or distance (e.g., whether something is 10 or 20 feet (3 or 6 meters) away).
* Often inability to grasp and remember mathematical concepts, rules, formulae, and sequences.
* An inability to read a sequence of numbers, or transposing them when repeated such turning 56 into 65.
* Difficulty keeping score during games.
* Difficulty with games such as poker with more flexible rules for scoring.
* Difficulty in activities requiring sequential processing, from the physical (such as dance steps) to the abstract (reading, writing and signaling things in the right order). May have trouble even with a calculator due to difficulties in the process of feeding in variables.
* The condition may lead in extreme cases to a phobia or durable anxiety of mathematics and mathematic-numeric devices/coherences.
* Low Latent inhibition, i.e., over-sensitivity to noise, smell, light and the inability to tune out, filtering unwanted information or impressions. Might have a well-developed sense of imagination due to this (possibly as cognitive compensation to mathematical-numeric deficits).

Potential causes

Scientists have yet to understand the causes of dyscalculia. They have been investigating in several domains.

* Neurological: Dyscalculia has been associated with lesions to the supramarginal and angular gyri at the junction between the temporal and parietal lobes of the cerebral cortex.[2][3]
* Deficits in working memory: Adams and Hitch[4] argue that working memory is a major factor in mental addition. From this base, Geary[5] conducted a study that suggested there was a working memory deficit for those who suffered from dyscalculia. However, working memory problems are confounded with general learning difficulties, thus Geary’s findings may not be specific to dyscalculia but rather may reflect a greater learning deficit.

Studies of mathematically gifted students have shown increased EEG activity in the right hemisphere during algorithmic computational processing. There is some evidence of right hemisphere deficits in dyscalculia.

Other causes may be:

* Short term memory being disturbed or reduced, making it difficult to remember calculations.
* Congenital or hereditary disorders. Studies show indications of this, but the evidence is not yet concrete.[citation needed]
* A combination of these factors.

Cure

Dyscalculia has no cure per se, but various treatment options have been explored. Counselling can help, but not necessarily to a large degree. No therapy has been properly verified and proved to be effective. Some anecdotal evidence suggests, however, that a certain amount of mathematical proficiency can be acquired by alternative systems of mathematical calculation such as Eastern mathematics. Anecdotal evidence also suggests, in fact, that dyscalculic individuals might themselves pursue such systems out of need or interest. Some suggest that in many cases it is caused by hormonal changes and incomplete structural growth in the frontal lobe, and so the individual’s executive function might start leveling out after the brain has finished its maturation (at the age of about 18 or 21). They suggest this can be compared to children who start speaking late but become extremely good with language after a certain age passes.

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Now conscious of my alternative individual brain work, how do I incorporate heavy number skills into me?

My brain will be my brain.

Ces’t la vie.

Let it be

tangerines for dreaming

Finally creating a tangible blog. This feels good. Thank you for visiting. Expect to see a variety of things going on within this blog. There is always a lot going on.

Anything can happen.