Thinking styles

How do you think?

To answer that question you need to introspect and look deep in your mind and observe. This discussion will explore human consciousness especially as it pertains to education. I was involved in neuropsychology and learning disabilities for a long time and I have found some unique relationships. It is important to understand how your students think. But before you can do that, you need to know what makes you tick. Introspect with me.

When I ask "How do you think?" I am not talking about content or process but how you experience your thinking. This goes beyond the standard learning styles approach, but there most definitely is a relationship.

For me, it started in the second grade. The teacher told the class to image something and she asked everyone whether they “got it”. And I couldn’t do it. I kept my deep dark secret until, many years later, I happened to mention to one of my students that I did not have visual imagery. Her reaction was instantaneous disbelief. How can you think!!!

In that moment I knew people did not think in the same way. How do I think?

I think in spoken words. There are no images to that thinking. I have some spatial imagery, but not at all visual. And then, like my student, there are those who use an image while I am speaking my 1000 words.

Let me tell you about another way I think, by pointing to that famous phrase “Deduction, my dear Watson, deduction.” That is wrong. Holms uses induction, not deduction. Holms took a speck of dust and faint aroma and came to a conclusion. That is induction. It is starting with the pieces and building a whole. Like using Tinker Toy.

Deduction would be more like: “It has been raining for the past week and the man who has not been here, will be dry. I need to look for a dry man.” You start with the overall and explore what flows from that. You are using deduction. Starting from the general and getting increasingly more specific.

Think about a Rubix Cube. I have not the faintest idea on how to move those blocks in any meaningful way. I am very much interested in spatial relations and use a simple measure called the Flags Test.The person is presented with a standard flag and must determine whether rotated forms are or are not be the same as the standard. The task is to determine whether the alternatives were or were not same flag in different orientations.

When I watched people taking the test, two types were immediately became obvious: Those, who rotated the test booklet to try to match the alternative with the standard, and those who did not. What were those individuals doing who did not move the booklet? Some of them were just breezing through the test and were rotating the flags mentally. The rest were were agonizing over "why do we have to do this?"

I belong to the third group. When I do this test I do not match images but talk my way through. “If the cross is on the left of the star and you turned it 270 degrees would the cross be on the right or the left?” I am a fast thinker and I can squeak by, but the Flags Test is not my thing.

Ok, I just gave you a glimpse into the Mind of DrZ. I gave you a summary of my thinking and ways to answer the question, “How do you think”

How important is visually imagery in your thinking?

This is a good ice breaker.
When a song “runs through your head” are you listening to the music or singing it?

A Researcher Looks at LD

A Researcher Looks at LD

I am a retired professor of NeuroPsychology who developed a research program on the relationship between the brain and learning disability. I want to outline one particular study and show its importance in how we diagnose and teach the children we now label learning disabled.

An identified group of poor readers who had clear phonological deficits in reading were compared to average readers on two simple tasks. A group of words preselected to be in the sight vocabulary of all participants were paired under two conditions. In one case the student had to say whether the words meant the same, opposite, or unrelated. In the second task the students had to say whether the two words rhymed.

In the semantic task there were no differences between the two groups, but the students with phonological deficits performed much worse on the rhyme task. Even though they knew what the word meant and its relationship with other words, they could not pronounce the word.

I was never a K-12 teacher but it seems to make more sense to build on strength than remediate weakness. The purpose of reading is to get meaning from the printed word and the all the children in the study could do that. A prime approach is phonetic decoding. The poor readers could not use that approach, but they learned to read despite it. What is ironic is that we call the way the poor readers do it without phonics as speed reading and pay for a course to learn it.

A phonetic approach worked for me and for many others, but it does not work for everyone. If phonetic decoding does not work for some children, use something that will.

Closing Questions

Phonetic decoding is a Means toward the End of reading. Are we confusing the End and the Means?
Do we use phonics for deaf children?


Note: The study was a published Ph,D. dissertation and available on request.

How do you think?

I taught neuropsychological research with an emphasis on special education for 25 years. I got started in this area when I told a friend that I did not have visual imagery. Her reaction was, "How do you think?"
I think by talking to myself but she thought via mental imagery. From there I developed a theory of the causes and remediation of reading disability.

To get started, try a simple experiment. Image an animal. Now rate it from 0-10 in terms of vividness and being lifelike. Did you image with your eyes open or closed? Now image with your eyes closed if they were open or open if they were closed. Now rate the image. Did it change?

I have tried this demonstration many times and about 50% of the people image with their eyes open and a majority of them, find the image decreases in vividness when they close them. But how often do we hear the instructions: Close your eyes and imagine.....

Try this in your classroom and let's hear what you find.

A closing question: When a song runs through your head, who is doing the singing?

Who were the Pioneers of the Internet

It is 1980 and the web was not invented, but the Bulletin Board System (BBS) flourished. They served the same function of a website, emal, file transfer, all in text. But most were served by a single phone line and there was no communication among the BBS.

I remember the Sister BBS in Staten Island, NY had to close down because of a hacker.
I found a 300 baud modem a little slow and felt the need to upgrade soon. Ancient history.

And then the creation of the multiuser BBS. I was on the Alianthus tree, but there were many more.
This multiuser technology turned commercial and the Source, Compuserve, and others evolved into AOL.

In those days the "Internet" was limited to a few universities working with the DOD. There were lots of regional networks like bitnet, fidonet, usenet, but internetworking was not always easy.

In 1981 (or so) Bill McGarry was publishing the Handicap Digest using Listserv is the Father of all mailing list managers. The Handicap Digest HCAP-L was a compilation of all material available relating to persons with disabilities. I guess you could call him a ProtoGoogle.

Norm Coombs from the University of Rochester was promoting distance learning for persons with disabilities. He ultimately created an organization called EASI promoting equal access for persons with disabilities. I attended a webinar sponsored by EASI this week on using the voice synthesis to navigate Excel.

A little bit later networks devoted to K-12 arose and grew into major Listserv mailing lists like Patt Haring's Kidsnet.
In 1990 Anne Pemberton brought her own Apple IIe and 1200 baud modem and had her LD kids emailing to netpal all over the world. Chatback sponsored the Christmas dinner, where children all over the UK could tell what they ate.

Back in those days, the LD kids were shoved onto the computers because they liked it there and were quiet. And the better computer teachers were taking advantage of pre-internet networking.

Do you think that someone could have gotten the hint and found some way to teach these kids using computers instead of just dumping them on the computer teacher. The real irony is that when the Education Establishment suddenly realized the value of the computer and the Internet, the logical thing to do was to take the LD kids off the computers and make them learn the basics. They don't know enough to use the computers. We will reserve it for the brightest kids who can make the most out of it.

PS While Anne Pemberton's LD kids were emailing around the world, the gifted kids were learning bridge.

While all this was going on, what were the Universities doing? In 1994 I hooked up with Robert Ambrose who had created the Enabling Support Foundation. He refurbished donated computers and gave them to persons with disabilities and provided training. I was able to get two lines from my university dedicated to ESF and the clients reached the Internet. At that point there were a total of 12 lines. That they had two to spare shows the use of the internet on a college campus in 1994.

The Pioneers of Internet were the persons with disabilities and K-12 Education. IBM had a saying: Pioneers get arrows in the back.

There were two arrows. Windows and the World Wide Web.
Before windows only Macintosh had a graphical interface and used a mouse. The PC was controled by command line and menus. Bill Gates put out a graphical interface that runs on Dos and impossible to use. Windows 1 was born. And today, he has succeeded in turning a perfectly good digital computer into simulated analogue computer with how many gigs of software?

Arrow 1. How do the blind navigate a graphical interface with a mouse? PWD typically have below average income and it is more expensive to buy a computer that needs a larger computer with more storage, ram and processing speed.

Arrow 2. The World Wide Web was created in the early 1990;s. It was hypertext. If you go to a node and select it, you would get to another node. For example, you are reading an article that cites a reference and you click on the reference to take a look. I remember using a program using hypertext in 1981. It would be brilliant on the Internet.

And then some bright spoilsport said, hey we are not limited to text. The addition of images and sounds added two dimensions to the web but at a horrible price in bandwidth.

Now we need a broadband connection in addition to the already expensive computer to use the Internet.

In 1990 persons with disability hailed the Internet as leveling the playing field. Then windows and the web enticed the universities and the general population onto the internet and suddenly the playing field is as lopsided as it ever was.

A blind person cannot join FaceBook and many other social networks


Pioneers do indeed get arrows in the back.

The Anatomy of Consciousness

I taught neuropsychological research with an emphasis on special education for 25 years. I got started in this area when I told a friend that I did not have visual imagery. Her reaction was, "How do you think?"

I think by talking to myself but she thought via mental imagery. From there I developed a theory of the causes and remediation of reading disability.

To get started, try a simple experiment. Image an animal. Now rate it from 0-10 in terms of vividness and being lifelike. Did you image with your eyes open or closed? Now image with your eyes closed if they were open or open if they were closed. Now rate the image. Did it change?

I have tried this demonstration many times and about 50% of the people image with their eyes open and a majority of them, find the image decreases in vividness when they close them. But how often do we hear the instructions: Close your eyes and imagine.....


A closing question: When a song runs through your head, who is doing the singing?

Teachers must be held accountable

Teachers must be held accountable

There is no question that teacher's must be accountable for their performance. Why should they be different than anyone else? Easy to say but more difficult accomplish.

How do we measure performance?
Performance is usually defined in terms of the students performance. So far so good.

How do we measure student performance?
By using multiple choice tests!

If you use a test score criterion to judge a teachers performance, the teacher will make sure her students pass the test.

Why have multiple choice tests replaced teacher evaluation? Has this emphasis come at the expense of a broader education?

When did we stop trusting our teachers? Why?

Are there active groups who think that teacher evaluation is more important than scores on a multiple choice test?

Option Strategy Buy a Put

In the previous section I discussed the use of a Call option in place of buying a stock that you think will increase in value. In this section I will discuss the use of a Put option in place of shorting a stock you think will decrease in value. Most people are familiar with the buy low—sell high logic of buying a stock, that is, buy a stock, it increases in value, and sell it for a profit. Shorting a stock uses a reverse strategy of sell high—buy low. When you short a stock you borrow the stock and sell it at the current market price and then buy it back at a lower price if and when the stock drops in value. There are three issues that you must consider when you short a stock.

1. You must pay interest on the borrowed stock
2. If the stock increases in value you are subject to unlimited loss when you have to buy back the borrowed stock.
3. Shorting a stock is not allowed in all accounts, most notably IRA accounts.

A Put option gives the buyer of the option the right to sell the underlying stock at the Strike Price until the Expiration Date. The buyer of a put is bearish on the stock. Suppose you think Microsoft will have an adjustment problem in the first 6 months after Bill Gates retired. On July 18, 2008, Microsoft closed at 25.86 and you could have sold 100 shares short for $2586 which would be credited to your account. In January 2009 the stock decreased by 33% and cost 17.10 and you would have a gain of 8.46 points. However the interest you pay on the borrowed stock results in an average cost of 7% or $90 for a net gain of $756 or 30%.

Now take a look at what you could do with a Put option. You could buy a Put option with a Strike of 27.50 that will eon January 16, 2009 for a Premium of 3.20. With Microsoft at 17.10 the option profit would be the Strike Price, less the Stock Price, less the Premium paid: 27.5-17.10-3.20 = 7.20. This is a profit $720 on an investment of $320 or 225%.

Discuss this blog on the ESF Forum
Forum

Education in the 21st Century Mathematics

In the nineteenth century prodigious skills of arithmetic computation was a prerequisite for top employment. During the course of the twentieth century the need for this skill diminished as technology was able to automate arithmetic. In the 21st Century we still insist that the calculation skill is somehow the basis of the rest of mathematics. If a child cannot learn arithmetic, an obsolete skill, he will have a major problem in school. Suddenly poor computational skills becomes a "math disability".

I do not advocate that schools abolish teaching computation. Let there be arithmetic courses, but also let there be mathematical courses where arithmetic is invisible. How you make arithmetic invisible is a matter of taste, but let me share mine.

Use a spreadsheet to present problems in arithmetic facts like an worksheet but with instant feedback and automatic storage of the results. Use a spreadsheet to teach and sharpen the estimation skills of the student.

At the same time you show the commands and formulas one can write in a spreadsheet to automatically get the answers in that same worksheet. That child has learned the arithmetic facts and the spreadsheet becomes an electronic manipulative.

During the rest of Mathematics, arithmetic is invisible and the student is given work problems and uses the spreadsheet to solve them.

For example,

Teach them to use Goal Seek to solve one variable algebra and solver for multivariate equations. If they have learned enough Algebra to write those equations in a spreadsheet then let the spreadsheet take care of the arithmetic.

Another example,

A spreadsheet can produce 2 and 3 dimensional objects that could be used in the more graphic mathematics as Geometry and Trigonometry. The cosine and sine functions are arithmetic free but you have to know when to use them.

This is, of course, is merely a preliminary outline, but the thrust will not change. Teach arithmetic as a desirable skill but teach other parts of mathematics where the student can take the arithmetic for granted. Just like in the workplace of the 21st Century.

Education in the 21st Century Reading

In the 19th Century Reading was as important a skill as it is today and phonetic decoding was the basic tool use to teach reading. The 20th century did relatively little to the reading process. Probably more than half the population prefer reading from paper than from a screen or a Kindle. One thing, however, has remained as strong across 3 Centuries: Phonics!!!

The main point of phonics is that if you sound out the word and can hear it you will know what it means. For the most part it is an effective strategy and those for whom it does not work, we simply call reading disabled.

Let us take a step back. The purpose of reading is to get meaning from the printed word. A phonetic approach requires you to look at the word and auditorize it (at least mentally) and when you hear the word, you will know what it means. This assumes that English is inherently phonetic and the reader knows the word to begin with. Neither are necessarily true, but let us accept the phonetic premise.

I learned to read in a phonics environment and fortunately it worked for me. But it does not work for everyone, so let us not mandate it for everyone. What alternative are there? One solution is a whole word approach, but the phonics proponents are wont to point out how the Chinese have to memorize 10,000 symbols rather than 26 letters. My first reaction is that the Chinese are a country with the largest population in the world, the fastest growing economy, and an impressive Olympic showing. They are not perfect...but they are patient.

The Phonecians, on the other hand, have been all but absorbed in Lebonon. In Japan, children start out with phonetic Kana, but when they are ready to advance, they move to the pictographic Kanji.

That being said, let me assume there is validity in making a connection between the printed word and it sound. A phonics approach says let the sound be created by the student decoding print. One alternative approach would be to pair the word with its auditory counterpart so the connection between the sound and the letters of the word are given to the student rather than requiring the student to produce the sound of the word. The basic premise of phonetic approach are retained, but it may be an easier approach for some students.

Some students will learn to connect the printed word with its meaning better by speaking and phonetic decoding but others will learn better by hearing which still teaches the connection between the printed word and its sound, but it does so by turning the standard phonetic approach upside down.

These two approaches will work best for students who learn best by speaking or hearing, but what about visual learners or those who learn by writing. There are as many ways to teach reading as there are people who read. Phonics has its place as one of the ways to teach reading, but it should not be the only way. We cannot adopt a one size fits all mentality in Education, especially if that one is bogged down in the 19th Century.

To discuss this topic visit the Forums on the Enabling Support Foundation and visit the Communication Center.

A open discussion on option trading

Based on some questions I had on my last Blog on buying a Call, I decided to start a discussion on the Forum of the Enabling Support Foundation. If you want to learn about option trading in a low key format, join us.

http://www.enabling.org/drupal/forum/21

An example of a Call Option

In my last blog I spoke about the option trading strategy of buying a call and now I want to suggest a way for you to actually do something about it. The investment I am considering is American Oriental Bioengineering (AOB). It will cost about $220 per 100 share contract and will not expire for two years. You can invest about $140 for a one year expiration date. In short, you buy a $5 call on AOB which will cost you $220 or $140 to control 100 shares of stock. If the company goes to 10, in the 2 year (1 year) period the option will be worth $1000. If it goes to 20, $2000 etc. You could double that if you controlled 200 shares or $440 ($180) to double your gain (but of course doubling your risk),

Why do I think this is a good investiment? 1) The market is low now and it looks like a good entry point; 2) The company is in China which is the world's fastest growing economy; 3) It is a pharmaceutical company that produces Chinese herbal medicines that have been used for a 1000 years and more; 4) MSN Money rates it a 7 (http://moneycentral.msn.com/detail/stock_quote?Symbol=aob&getquote=Get+Quote); 5) The Motley Fool listed it as a 5 star stock. http://msn.fool.com/investing/general/2009/01/22/5-star-stocks-on-the-upswing.aspx?logvisit=y&source=eedmsnlnk0010001&published=2009-01-22

Downside? Quality control issues. If a Chinese company can sell contaminated products, so could this company. The economy could not recover for 3 years.

Options for the Nervous Novice

Options for the Nervous Novice is meant for someone who knows little or nothing about options. I want to show some very useful investing strategies that provide a greater potential for gain and, at the same time, greater protection. That does not mean you can not lose, but you will lose less.

The goal is to progress from English to Optionese with as little lost in translation as possible.

Buying a call is a bullish strategy. That is, you think a stock is going up. One alternative is to buy the stock and sell it for a higher price than you bought it.

But there is another alternative. You can buy an option that will give you the right buy the stock at some set price in the future. If the stock is high enough above that price you will make a profit. Consider a stock currently at 80 which you expect to go to 100.

Stock
You can buy 100 shares for $8000 and will make a profit of $2000 if the stock goes to 100. If the stock goes down to 60 you have lost $2000. If the company went bankrupt you would have lost the whole $8000.

Option
You can also buy a Call with a Strike Price of 80 for 2 per share. An option contract controls 100 shares of the stock, so the Call would have cost you $200. If the stock goes up, the worth of option would also go up. With a stock price of 100 that same option you bought at 2 is now worth 20. The Call gave you the right to buy the stock at 80 and the stock is at 100. Since you bought the option at 2 and sold it at 20, you made $1800. If the stock went down, you would have lost $200 you paid for the option.

If you bought the stock you would have made a $2000 profit on an $8000 investment or 25%, with the stock price at 100. If the stock went bankrupt you could lose $8000.

If you bought the option you would have made a $1800 profit on a $200 investment. If the stock went down you would have lost the $200 you paid for the option.

That is a rather simplified example, but it gives an idea of the power of options. A fuller version can be found on the Market Synthesis website.
Link to the website

Feel free to ask questions and make suggestions at the Options 101 Forum.
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