Rebecca Zook - Math Tutoring Online

From my favorite magazine, The Week:

Modern humans have embraced multitasking with all four limbs. We text while walking, chat on the phone while driving, check e-mail while writing the annual report. Psychology textbooks suggest that our brains can’t successfully process so much at once. “But if you walk around on the street, you see lots of people multitasking,” Stanford researcher Eyal Ophir tells BBCnews.com. “So we asked ourselves, ‘What is it that these multitaskers are good at that enable them to do this?’”

High multitaskers consistently scored much worse; they were less able to ignore distractions, had more fallible memories, and couldn’t switch to new tasks as readily. “The shocking discovery of this research” is that high multitaskers “are lousy at everything that’s necessary for multi¬tasking,” says co-author Clifford Nass. “They’re suckers for irrelevancy. Everything distracts them.” Left unclear is why chronic multitaskers fail. Are they naturally bad at focusing, so they multitask to compensate? Or does multitasking actively degrade their ability to concentrate? Either way, the lesson is the same: If you want to get more done, try doing less.

Aich! It’s what I’ve suspected all along.

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Why Sleep Is Awesome

Here’s an article from chiropractor Dr. Ben Kim, another binaural beat user! He explains how he sets aside 30-60 minutes each day with no distractions or interruptions to practice “clean focus time.” And he uses binaural beats to focus!

Disclaimer: I haven’t used the beats that Dr. Ben Kim developed and sells on his website. (I’m not sure if they’re better than the free binaural beats on healingbeats.com). But I really wanted to share his thoughts on clean focus time and binaural beats.

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Entrain Your Brain #1

Mickey Hart eloquently describes rhythmic entrainment in his book Drumming at the Edge of Magic. If you put a kid with no drumming experience in a group of people all playing at the same tempo, eventually the kid will “entrain” and start playing in rhythm with everyone else, without even thinking about it. It is inevitable—and it’s just a question of time before it happens, because as humans, we entrain to each other’s sound waves.

But did you know that the human brain also entrains when exposed to brain waves?!

Brain wave entrainment, aka “Binaural Beats,” works by playing one frequency into one ear and a slightly different frequency into the other ear. The difference between the frequencies creates a third wave—in this case, inside your skull—that you can only hear using headphones. In these tracks, the frequencies of the two waves going into each ear are calculated to produce a third sound wave that is the same frequency as a certain brain wave.

Since different states of consciousness are associated with different brain waves, you can trigger the state of consciousness you want by immersing your brain in the sound wave that matches the brain wave!

For example, you can use delta waves to trigger sleep, or beta/gamma waves to trigger focus for studying. Theta waves trigger meditative states, and alpha waves induce relaxation. You can even learn to design your own brainwave tracks!

Healingbeats.com offers free downloads of binaural beats. I’ve used the delta wave track to help me sleep. I’ve also used the “study” track.

My experiences have varied—the more receptive and relaxed I’m feeling, the easier it seems to be let the tracks to shift my consciousness. Sometimes it takes a while, but sometimes, with the sleep track, the effects were so rapid I was almost scared! (“Did someone drug me?”)

Thanks again to my awesome brother for telling me about this great site! And thank you healingbeats.com for many hours of sleep I otherwise would never have experienced!

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FOLLOWUP:
In an earlier post, I wrote about how some classroom teachers are replacing their students’ chairs with stability balls to help their students focus. I tried this myself with a tutoring student of mine who is a 5th grader with ADHD. Unfortunately, the ball was way too big for him—he couldn’t keep his feet flat on the floor. Also, he spent most of the time bouncing up and down on the ball, which was disappointingly nausea-inducing for me. It made it much harder for me to focus on the lesson and make eye contact with him!

Clearly, I attempted this before I had read the longer Associated Press article about Tiffany Miller, where she explains:

“You have to work hard at it all day,” Miller said. “They’re kids. You have to constantly remind them to check their posture, keep their feet flat on the floor. And every half-hour or so, we’ll just stop and I’ll say, ‘OK, stand up. Reach to the sky. Touch your toes. OK, sit back down.’ And then we’ll keep going.”

So if you decide to implement this in your own classroom or tutoring sessions, keep in mind…

Top Two Tips for Replacing Students’ Chairs with Stability Balls:

1. Give your students verbal instructions about their posture and their feet to keep them from bouncing all over the place.
2. Make sure the ball is the right size for the student. Most recommend:
under 4′10″ 16″ or 42cm
4′11″ – 5′4″ 21″ or 55cm
5′5″ – 5′11′ 25″ or 65cm
6′ and taller 29″ or 75cm

A cool tip to figure out what size ball you should order, from the blog getfitwithval:
“If you do not have access to an already inflated stability ball or you are ordering online, you can check your seating position by squatting with your back against a wall and lowering down until your knees are at a 90 degree position. Mark the wall and measure the height that you need.”

I also contacted Tiffany Miller and asked her for more specific verbal instructions to give kids so the ball actually helps them focus instead of serving as a distractor. If I hear back from her, I will definitely post her response here!

Related Posts: Throw Away Your Chair (Part 1)

…Courtesy of one of my favorite magazines, The Week!

If your child squirms …
It’s almost impossible to keep grade-school pupils from squirming in their chairs. But a growing number of school districts throughout the country have hit on a solution: They’re seating the kids on big, rubbery exercise stability balls at their desks. By balancing their posteriors on the balls, the children work out their restlessness and find they are able to concentrate better on their studies. “The whole theory with the brain is that when your body’s engaged, your brain’s engaged,” said Tiffany Miller, a fourth-grade teacher in Fort Collins, Colo. “I call it actively sitting.” — from The Week Magazine, “It Wasn’t All Bad” section, Friday, March 20, 2009

You go, Tiffany Miller!! Wow—I love it when we find simple ways to maximize learning.