“Fear is the number one disease that can turn your genes on and off. Fear is a true killer so we can’t let the kids be scared,” she said.
“A lot of kids have a fear-based response to math. They’re reacting as if there’s a tiger in the room and if you’re reacting as if there’s a tiger in the room you can’t learn.”
“And if you’re trying to learn off a computer, it’s releasing too much serotonin, which means your brain won’t work.”
Davidson explained an exercise she had for the children to help them with their mental health.
“The younger kids are going to draw sad faces and then happy faces and then what makes them happy because they want to turn sad thoughts into positive thoughts,” Davidson said.
She gave a further example.
“ ‘Oh, I hate doing laundry.’ Change it into, ‘I’m thankful that I have laundry to do,’ because you want to release good chemicals in your body because that keeps you healthy,” she said.
After a question from The Lake Report regarding the status of COVID-19 testing at the pod, the founders refused to answer and asked to be withheld from the publication and further interviews.
A day in the pod: No homework and quantum physics for four-year-olds at Virgil private school
A good supposed to defend its members from humiliation. Now shaming is in vogue
23 billion text messages are sent every day, each one an opportunity to unintentionally offend someone
How to grow a backyard rainforest (and get ready for the birds)
John Inazu (Washington University; Google Scholar), The Life We're Looking For:
Last week, I participated in a public dialogue organized by The Carver Project with my friends Andy Crouch, Tish Harrison Warren, and Michael Wear. We focused on Andy’s new book, The Life We’re Looking For: Reclaiming Relationship in a Technological World. Following Andy's framing comments, the rest of us applied the book to the three areas of The Carver Project’s mission: university (me), church (Tish), and society (Michael). We had all read Andy’s book, but none of us had much of an idea of what the others were going to say. Yet it all seemed to work. And I think it worked because we trusted each other. ...
These themes of friendship and trust called to mind Tish’s recent New York Times piece on marriage [I Married The Wrong Person, And I’m So Glad I Did].
Virginia Gazette, Former W&M Law Professor Remembered as a ‘Great and Good Man’
Daily ‘breath training’ can work as well as medicine to reduce high blood pressure NPR: “It’s well known that weightlifting can strengthen our biceps and quads. Now, there’s accumulating evidence that strengthening the muscles we use to breathe is beneficial too. New research shows that a daily dose of muscle training for the diaphragm and other breathing muscles helps promote heart health and reduces high blood pressure.
“The muscles we use to breathe atrophy, just like the rest of our muscles tend to do as we get older,” explains researcher Daniel Craighead, an integrative physiologist at the University of Colorado Boulder. To test what happens when these muscles are given a good workout, he and his colleagues recruited healthy volunteers ages 18 to 82 to try a daily five-minute technique using a resistance-breathing training device called PowerBreathe. The hand-held machine — one of several on the market — looks like an inhaler. When people breathe into it, the device provides resistance, making it harder to inhale…”
Shovel Knight Dig review: retro meets modern in this clever roguelike
William Boyd: Q & A
Any Human Heart-author William Boyd has a new book coming out -- The Romantic -- and at The Guardian Anthony Cummins has a Q & A with the author, William Boyd: ‘The books world is much tougher now’.
Interesting (and troubling) to hear how times have changed:
How has the writing life changed since you began publishing ?
The 1980s was a kind of boom period but the challenge for a literary novelist now is to just keep the show on the road. It used to be you could write a novel every couple of years or so and have a perfectly nice bourgeois life. Now the mid-list has gone. The brutal fact is you either sell or you don’t. Friends of mine who’ve written 12 novels can’t get published or their advances have dropped by 80%. It’s a much tougher world.
As to Stendhal, I' m not so sure that he: "isn’t read so much in English nowadays", as Cummins has it -- recall also, that there's a new translation of Red and Black, by Raymond N. MacKenzie, just out from the University of Minnesota Press; see their publicity page.
Nobel Prize in Literature betting
The 2022 Nobel Prize in Litrature will be announced on 6 October -- and betting odds are now up at Ladbrokes.
They posted odds, but this is surely not how even only semi-literate bettors would rate the contenders (beyond sentimental favorite (but unlikely choice) Salman Rushdie (8/1)). Stephen King is tied for third, at 10/1 (sorry, it ain't going to happen), and eight authors have odds of 12/1 or better -- tilting this exercise ridiculously way in the house's favor. (Given that we don't even know whether some of these authors have been nominated -- and only five or so remain in the final running -- odds in general should be much higher.) Oh, and Michel Houellebecq is the favorite, at 7/1.
Uneven diacritical marking -- well done with Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong'o, Hélène Cixous, and Dubravka Ugrešić; couldn't be bothered with 'Mircea Cartarescu', 'Maryse Conde', or 'Ivan Vladislavic' --, ineligible authors (Javier Marías: he dead), and simple carelessness ('Both Strauss') suggest just how (un)serious(ly) they take the whole thing, but, hey, it attracts attention and the eyeballs/clicks (and presumably more than just occasional betting-dollars).
(As to more serious discussion, the World Literature Forum is valiantly doing its part -- 1418 posts in their Nobel Prize in Literature 2022 Speculation-thread as I write this --, and there's a bit of action at The Mookse and the Gripes discussion board on their 2022 Nobel Prize-thread (101 posts, at this time), but I have to admit I haven't been paying much attention.
Most of my personal favorites are much the same as in previous years, with no new(er) authors breaking through for a while now, so I don't have much to add. But maybe I will as the announcement approaches ?)