Thinking about the upcoming kayaking season…

A new study just released by the National Science Foundation gives some clues about how to develop those math skills I’ve talked about here. Sure enough, playing with puzzles helps to build spatial skills which are critical to being able to do math and understand science.

http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=123203&WT.mc_id=USNSF_51&WT.mc_ev=click

It is fun to realize that my husband’s first handmade gifts for our grandchildren has been…puzzles.  Here we are at Christmas in 2009 when Sam opened his..horse. Sister Grace lends a hand there. Then Grace goes and finds her puzzle that granddad made for her 2nd Christmas. And all is well. We spend time playing the puzzles and every year, there is at least one new, age appropriate puzzle for fun play between grandkids and grandparents….

I discovered a new site and a beautiful poem there. I will share it at the end of this post. But to begin, it is worth considering what we know about poetry as ‘talk’ and its effects for our health. Doctors benefit. Reading poetry has been found to increase empathy for patients. [http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2929.2005.02178.x/full]
[http://www.stfm.org/fmhub/Fullpdf/July01/lame.pdf]

Patients can benefit from reading poetry aloud, contributing to healthier and less stressed breathing and heart rates. [http://ajpheart.physiology.org/content/287/2/H579.short]

Perhaps a poem a day… keeps the doctor at bay…

{ naked } from Maria Korporal on Vimeo.

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/deed.en

In my book, Talking about health, I tell the story about dealing with back and shoulder pain with physical therapy and the exercises I learned to use during the day. One includes setting a 30 minute timer to remind me to get up and move around… Well, another strategy that a colleague has adopted is a motorized desk…

I talked about visiting a Marcellus Shale drilling site last spring. I didn’t say much about the noise. But it was …loud. I guess the noise starts well before the drilling begins. And we know quite a bit about the effects of noise on human health. The Environmental Protection Agency summarizes it at this link: http://www.epa.gov/air/noise.html …things like increased blood pressure, hearing loss, sleep loss, and then loss of productivity…

Why do we talk in “either” “or” terms when we know better?

It is not “either” we drill for Marcellus shale “or” we will remain energy dependent.  

It is not “either” we quit drilling for Marcellus shale “or” we will destroy the environment.

As long as we keep talking and thinking that way, here is the story…

  I am reading some research about how math anxiety leads us to avoid doing things that   might have math or numbers included. I read one study where it all came rushing back to me. I was a freshman at the University of Michigan and taking the first of three classes in calculus. I didn’t quite understand some of the homework, so I visited the graduate teaching assistant’s office and was told, “If you don’t understand this, you better get out while you can ‘cuz it only gets harder.” I wasn’t feeling anxious about math until that meeting. In fact, I have always loved math and have a high aptitude for math. But worry and anxiety washed over me. There was no one to ask about this that I knew. It was my second week at a huge university with 10s of thousands of students. The TA must know what he was talking about. I dropped the class. Only to pick it up again and complete the three calculus courses with success later.

Still, I read the research conducted by Jackson and colleagues and that experience came flooding back, as the researchers found that at the college level, especially freshman year, “Students were told to leave class if they did not understand the material.”

Perhaps such experiences and our own love for math and science leads us to spend time with our granddaughter and grandson doing math. Making it a game more often than not, with me playing with my grandson–who will be 4 years old in the next week–counting and arranging and rearranging.