Day 190 Learning on foot

This blog is for my psychology nerds out there; you know who you are.  Teaching Chinese kids about psychology is so freaking fun, it seriously is.  Most days I love my job here in Beijing.  These kids are very talented in math and science, so they have been eating up the neuropsychology unit.  We've had a blast, in and out of the classroom....

Many of these kids have artistic and musical talents as
well, as it is something that is fostered in the Chinese
culture.  They believe in the left brain/right brain
phenomenon, and that it is important to exercise the
creative side of their brain in an effort to improve
overall cognitive functioning.  They, of course, use
different words in referring to more traditional Chinese
medicine, but the idea is all the same.  Look at
this neuron!  IT IS BEAUTIFULLY SHADED!!!

So their neurons are displayed in the classroom around my artistic attempt
at the brain, lol.  Ok, psyc nerds....where's the parietal lobe? Temporal
lobe?  Frontal lobe?  Occipital lobe? Medulla?  Brain stem? Cerebellum?
Sensory cortex? Motor cortex?  Do you remember their functions?!

Gabby-girl's neuron is stunning :)  Points for being aesthetically appealing!

This unit provided many 'field trips'.  The kids get all excited when I tell them we're going on a field trip.  Well, until we took this one....

We took a walk about the building, settled down on the fifth floor, and I gathered them all in the ladies bathroom.  There were fits of giggling immediately.  Crazy American teacher is up to no good again :)  After a bit of coaxing, I got the boys to enter, too.

The bathroom provided the perfect backdrop to my lecture on neural activity.  I started with, "How is flushing a toilet like a neuron firing?"  For starters, electrical messages travel away from the soma, down the axon...we hope the water in a toilet in a toilet also travels away and down the sewer pipe!   Looking at the water in the toilet bowl, this illustrates the resting potential of a neuron. When we flush the handle, the water comes rushing in, like the positive ions come flooding in during depolarization.  I show this cool video clip to illustrate :)

Once we flush, like a neuron, there is a refractory period- or a period of rest.  No matter how often you push the handle, it will not flush again. (I also take this opportunity for a little sex education to explain to the boys and girls that once that boy's 'puppy' fires, it also needs a refractory period before it can fire again!  I love to make them giggle and squirm, but the point is, my stories are effective :)  I went on to tell them that when they are 80 years old, and their 'puppy' no longer fires, it will be both a happy and a sad day- sad that it no longer fires, and happy because they will have remembered something they learned long ago, back when they were sixteen years old and sitting in Mrs. McDaniel's AP Psychology class, lol)  All is not lost....

So, like neurons, the toilet flushing is an all or nothing event.  Push the handle halfway; it will not flush.  When a neuron's electrical charge reaches -55 millivolts, an action potential will occur causing the neuron to fire.  It will not fire until it reaches that electrical threshold. Flush it, and depolarization occurs yet again.

With that lesson learned, they all had to  have
a picture taken on their phones to send to their
parents- "Guess what we learned today?"

 

After that little lesson, it was time to move the field trip outdoors.
We played a game of synaptic tag,  Axon bulbs were lined up on one side,
dendrites on the other.  On my go, the axon bulbs released neurotransmitter
chemicals into the synaptic gap.  The game was with enzymes in the
gap trying to stop the 'chemical message' from getting through.

They had to play several rounds; they loved it :)

Then it was time for a round of neural chain tag- to illustrate
how a sending neuron reabsorbs excessive neurotransmitters
in a process called 'reuptake'.  When the neural chain became a
game of 'crack the whip', it was time to stop :)

My Cambridge AS-level kids take an entirely different approach to psychology.  It has been a challenge for me to restructure my teaching.  In their program, they have 20 'Core Studies' which they must learn. There are five topics in psychology that we cover- cognitive, developmental, physiological, social psychology, and individual differences (psychopathology).  However, there is no 'traditional' textbook.  Here's a link that we use in the classroom (Look under AS level): Maguire taxi study.

Their textbook is nothing more than written summaries on four pieces of published research on each given topic.  That is how they learn about psychology- to memorize 20 pieces of research- all of it. Most of these kids have yet to be exposed to statistics or research methods, so I am simultaneously teaching concepts in psychology (what's a hippocampus?!) while identifying the independent variable, dependent variable, experimental group, control group, the procedure, apparatus used, hypothesis tested, results, etc.  I generally do a 'mini lecture' from the AP course content to set the stage for the next piece of research we delve in to.  It's maddening.  To have sixteen year old kids digesting published research in psychology as the only means of learning about the field of psyc is plain crazy talk, to me. It's the kind of work a third year student in Psychology at a university would be doing; analyzing published research.  These poor kids needed a field trip, too. Off we go....

So, we were covering the Maguire et al (1997) study Recalling
Routes Around London: Activation of the Right Hippocampus
in Taxi Drivers. (ugh!)  We discussed cognitive maps, as it
pertained to the taxi driver's ability to recall routes to
different locations in London from memory.  I asked the students to
get a mental picture (cognitive map) of Beijing, and tell
me how to get to Tiananmen Square.  As they were attempting
 to tell me, I looked out the window at the beautiful spring
day and I said, "Well, why don't you just show me!"
So, off we went!!!

The boys were cute; they were pooling their money to pay
for our subway ride there and back.  Sadly, it is an hour
train ride away, and ain't nobody got time for that!  As
we got to the turn style down below, our trip abruptly ended.
I promised we would return, for real, before the end of the year.

On our walk though, I quizzed them on the details of this study.
Who were the participants?  How many were there?  How were
the participants gathered?  What was their average age?
On average, how many years experience had they been a cab
driver?  Were they right handed or left handed?  (I wish I were
joking- these are the kinds of questions they are asked in
their final 'papers'- the British word for exams.)
Of course, this resulted in another photo opp on their iPhones
to send home to their parents, "Guess what we did today?!"

As we walked back to school, we passed by the WeDome' bakery.  We
paused at the front window, watching Lucy and Ethel slave away in
the kitchen.  As we could smell of the deliciousness coming from the bakery,
I gave a quick lesson on sensation and perception, and how our olfactory (chemical)
 sense works.  It served as an introduction to next week's core study by
DeMatte et al (2007) Olfactory Cues Modulate Facial Attractiveness.  
In other words, boys, wear your cologne!

I bought us each a blueberry custard tart, and we called it a day.  

So tell me, what did you learn today?!

G'nite, y'all!