Brain Juice Baby

Look at this…

Is it just a coincidence that some of the nations with the  highest consumption of coffee are also some of the highest achievers on the PISA academic results in MATH, SCIENCE, and LITERACY!

want proof? here and here

HMMMMM!

Drink Up Folks!!!!!

electronic conscience

Texas Judge David Cabos has implemented the use of ankle bracelets to help reduce school truancy. Anna Maria Tremonte interviewed him in response to a program she aired on the rising truancy rate in Canadian schools. Finding effective solutions was the target of her investigation. The Judge issued some very interesting words about the use of the ankle tracking bracelets…

“It kinda serves as an electronic conscience as well” (17:35m)

Whole radio interview available here: http://www.cbc.ca/video/news/audioplayer.html?clipid=1678089964 (start listening at around 11:30)

Can a conscience be electronically induced? If it is possible to see the use of these electronic surveillance devices as a way of reinforcing important strategies of socialization (like going to school (regardless of the quality of schooling received)), what does that mean for the kind of mindful labour that Matthew Crawford and Wendell Berry advocate as important for virtuous engagement with the world? Can being mindful be transferred onto a device?

Here is Crawford…

“…modern science adopts an otherworldy ideal of how we come to know nature: through mental constructions that are more intellectually tractable than material reality, and in particular amenable to mathematical representation. Through such renderings we become masters of nature. Yet the kind of thinking that begins from idealizations such as the frictionless surface and the perfect vacuum sometimes fail us, because it isn’t sufficiently involved with the particulars.”

Instead…

“…to be a good mechanic (or any other kind of person Crawford claims) you have to be constantly attentive to the possibility that you may be wrong.”

We need to, ”…perceive (the world) clearly, and this requires a kind of “un-selfing”. [A]nything which alters consciousness in the direction of unselfishness, objectivity, and realism is to be connected with virtue. [V]irtue is the attempt to pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is.”

Crawford suggests that if we remain in the world of projections (via ‘modern science’)…

“We have to wonder, then, whether degraded work entails not just dumbing down but also a certain unintended moral education…There seems to be a vicious circle in which degraded work plays a pedagogical role, forming workers into material that is ill suited for anything but the over-determined world of careless labour.”

So then the irony of the ankle bracelet technology is that it is being used to help students get a better education when in fact my removing conscientious engagement with the world it may in fact being accomplishing quite the opposite effect?

Back at it...

I am over at the university for this Summer session. I am taking ED 2500 which is a introductory course for prospective applicants to the ED department. Next wee we get placed in a local school to observe and participate half days Monday to Thursday. I am looking forward to being back in the schools again. Since I have been in university my time on campus with junior and senior high students has been significantly reduced. This has easily been the hardest part of my transition - at least from a professional perspective. (There have been other more significant issues WE have faced in the last while on a personal level) My favorite part of youth ministry was the amount of time I got to spend with kids especially in their world - school. So it really seems like I have been cut off in some ways from a huge part of my life. This afternoon listening to my fellow students before class brought me back. They were discussing their addiction to various TV shows - like the Hills. It's weird the kind of connection that I am making with students in my class.
Now more than ever I am self conscious of my weight problem. I am not sure why 'cause it never really bothered me before. Part of it is that there has been no small focus on appropriate dress for our mini practicum. Long and short - it still amazes me that strangers wanna engage with me in a significant way as an individual. I have had some pretty significant conversations with a number of individuals already. It's always perplexing to me. But i recognize that whatever it is that I possess it is something that I must be responsible with before God. I can't actually identify what it is about who I am that others find interesting enough to want to engage with so I am left with this sense of awe that anyone would want to 'hang out' with me.
Anyways