What is EQ and Why Do We Need It?

This week the unbelievable occurred. A fifteen year old girl was gang raped by 6 or 7 young men while another dozen or more watched, laughed, and took photos. This act was not committed by a street gang in LA but by a group of students attending a homecoming dance at the local high school in Richmond, California.
Lessons that teach children to 'get along with your neighbor' have always been high on the agenda at preschools. During the next several grade levels social skills continue to be an integral part of school lessons until a baseline of acceptable group behavior is reached. After that, the time spent specifically on interpersonal skills begins to fade to make room for areas of academic intelligence; reading, writing, and arithmetic. But are schools truly preparing a young person for a fulfilling and useful life by neglecting emotional and social skills in later years?
Daniel Goleman brought this subject to the nation's attention in 1995 in his book, "Emotional Intelligence". He wondered why some students with high IQ's did not succeed in school as well as others less gifted intellectually. And why talented adults sometimes fail where less talented adults succeed. He concluded that education cannot be accomplished in the abstract but requires a balance of emotional and intellectual skill sets. This work set the stage for a new look at the acquisition of a full set of necessary human capabilities including self-awareness, self-discipline, and empathy, disciplines for regulating emotion termed 'emotional intelligence', or EQ. These capabilities are not set at birth, but must be nurtured and developed. A comprehensive life skills curriculum that included EQ skills would likely have prevented the tragic incident at Richmond High.
A successful EQ curriculum is developmental and chronologically allied with brain and biological maturation. Those major transition times of childhood, passing into grade school and again into junior high or middle school, and the traumatic yet critical entry into puberty, are crucial times for emotional and social lessons. The emotional effects of these passages, if particularly distressful, can echo and re-echo down life's future corridors. An EQ based life skills curriculum will establish both a realistic anticipatory understanding and a framework of behavior expectations in advance of the development of the actual cognitive capabilities that follow puberty and that will allow informed decision making in the future.
Empathy, that 'sense of other', and the self-awareness from which it stems are the building blocks of civilization and the humanity that holds it together. Who would wish their child to react to inhuman acts such as beatings and rape with laughter and photo taking? Who would not prefer their child to use that same phone to dial 911 and to raise a cry of distress? But such a culture does not develop naturally; schools must become actively involved in developing curriculums that shape the culture. In the words of the song from South Pacific, “They must be carefully taught!”.

What Brain Research Means to Us by Rich Gamble

The esoteric world of neuroscience may hold more practical significance for all of us than we suspect. Within the last two decades, thanks to visual clues supplied by MRI and PET scans, researchers have dramatically increased their knowledge of how the brain learns. And what they have found is of vital importance to us as parents and teachers.

The old adages, such as “Spare the rod and spoil the child” and “All work and no play make Jack a dull boy” seem to have a scientific basis, at least in part. In fact, brain scientists have found that many intuitive educational methods used parents over the years are based in sound practice. But researchers are also finding that other practices may be harmful, or at best ineffective.

Take learning a language, for example. Traditionally, children have learned the language of the home from birth and later attempting to learn a second language in elementary school or even in high school or college. But researchers have found that the ‘window’ for natural language assimilation is open from infancy to age seven or so, after which time language learning occurs in a distinctly different neural system. Naturally bilingual children have learned both languages within the early time window and store both in the same neural system. In fact, it appears that some aspects of language learning, particularly inflection and pitch, may actually happen in the womb.

And there appears to be a strong relationship between exercise and brain function. For ‘Jack’ not to be a dull ‘boy’, according to John Ratey, MD, author of 'Spark', he needs to exercise daily, preferable first thing in the morning, to induce the flow of special nutrients and proteins to the brain which will sharpen his memory and enhance his ability to master new information.

While ‘sparing the rod’ evokes practices of a bygone era, and properly so, the fundamental concept of framing a structure with immediate consequences for misbehavior has a basis in brain science. A child who practices dishonesty, for example, lacks the cognitive tools to project the future social consequences of lying. This window for future abstract thinking, researchers have found, does not open until puberty. Until then, a system for behavior modification is required that apes the future functioning of a trio of brain areas, the Limbic Area (emotional), Frontal Lobe (reasoning), and Somatosensory Cortex (bodily sensing), a triangle that will one day support ‘conscience’ or ethical processing. Such a system, according to behavior researchers, should involve subjecting the dishonest child to discomfort at the act, a clear explanation of the moral principle involved, and punishment delayed slightly to elicit anticipatory discomfort.

The adage "Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy and wealthy and wise" may not be true for everyone, brain studies reveal. Sleep researchers have found that with the arrival of puberty comes a circadian shift that causes adolescents to be wakeful an hour later than before. Needing as much sleep, but getting less, these children find themselves caught between their own biology and educational traditions that require them to arise at the same early time for school, with sleepiness and poor attention the natural result.

As important as the work of brain researchers is, it is more important to us as parents and teachers to stay informed since it is we who are best placed to synthesize and utilize the science for the education of our children.

Confronting Reality by Rich Gamble

Yesterday I Googled the subject "climate change" and was surprised to find a preponderance of doubters on the page that opened before me. Not that I didn't expect that they would be out there – those who find it inconvenient to change their ways, those who are fatalistic in their views, those who have financial interests in maintaining the status quo. My surprise stemmed from the apparent fact that the doubters seemed to have a lot to say, and that the supporters said very little. My reason for Googling the topic was to learn more about the reported increase in melting of a glacier in Kashmir the Himalayas, an event that had come peripherally into my consciousness when a TV news report flashed by, an event of no small importance in consideration of the huge population of people dependent upon a consistent flow of water from that icy storage. I did find a report about it, buried half way down the column of search results. And just below that result was another report containing a statement from a Kashmir official downplaying the research results, saying that while the report may be true, several other glaciers in the area appear to be growing.

Clearly, without a dramatic illustration of climate change, such as an entire city engulfed in flood water (oh, wait! That did happen!), the skeptics are not prepared to accept that our climate is changing and that we the people will need to change as a result. Never mind that the predictions of the prognosticators are being realized as I speak, in fact sooner than most foretold. Those indicators are all present, but in scattered places about the globe; this is, after all, a global crisis. The scientists and those that synthesize their findings (reporters, writers) call for increased sea ice melt, glacier melt, sea level rise, increased coastal storm damage, greater storm intensity, greater precipitation amounts in storms, decreasing rainfall and increasing drought, increased wildfires, and so on. No one expected all of this to occur in one single location. But it is all occurring increasingly and alarmingly, as foretold, around the globe.

Teasing out and presenting here even a portion of the multitudinous examples of foretold global weather changes that appear to be materializing would be tedious and time consuming, if fascinating. I propose then to content myself with an investigation of the event that generated this piece, the reported unusual rate of melt of the Kashmir glacier. For background, one should know that the Himalayan Glaciers form the world’s largest ice body outside of the polar caps and are popularly known as the “Water Towers of Asia”, because they are the water source for the largest rivers on that continent. According to the report I read yesterday (ART News, Oct. 13, 2009) Indian Kashmir’s largest glacier, the Kolahoi Glacier, has shrunk 11 square miles in the last two decades, faster than all other glaciers in the region and threatening the water supply for tens of thousands of people. Experts attribute the temperature rise causing this shrinkage to climate change. The IPCC reported in 2007 that the glaciers in the Himalayas are receding quicker than those in other parts of the world. But (whoa!) India’s Environmental Minister Jairam Ramesh rushed in to say that “more scientific studies were needed to conclusively establish the link” between climate change and melting glaciers. He then pointed out that although a “couple” of Himalayan glaciers were receding, some others were advancing, and others were receding at a decreasing rate compared with the last few decades! (Can you spell ‘obfuscate’?). Shakil Ramsoo, assistant professor of geology at the University of Kashmir and the leader of the three year study said: “Other small Kashmir glaciers are also shrinking and the main reason is that the winter temperature in Kashmir is rising.” (Seems clear to me!) “’Global warming’ is a misnomer” (John Holdren, in Hot, Flat, and Crowded, Friedman) “It implies something uniform, gradual, mainly about temperature, and quite possibly benign. What is happening is…none of those. It is uneven geographically…A more accurate label…is ‘global climate disruption’”. A better term, according to Friedman, might be “Global Weirding”.

Increased glacier melt around the globe that must inevitably be accompanied by devastating effects such as flash flooding from moraine dams collapsing and inconsistent and diminishing water flow to the world’s major rivers was observed back in the 70’s. Al Gore’s film “An Inconvenient Truth” memorably illustrated the disappearing of once mighty glaciers with current photos juxtaposed to old postcards. Seeing is believing. Concerned groups around the world have placed monitors and data gathering devices on glaciers to measure the rate of melt. The facts are immutable. But leadership is about dealing with those facts, not hoping that they are wrong or will change.