Cathy Healy

[CH Note: Marvin, a former math teacher in Kingston, works with Jamaica’s inner city children, using Legos robots and other programs to teach logic and problem solving skills. TED-UK interview | Stanford ]

May 26 e-mail

KINGSTON, Jamaica — Just wanted you to know what I am fine inspite what has been happening. It has sparked a real war between the criminal gangs and the security forces and may not end anytime soon. Many gangs are also using the opportunity to retaliate on other factions, separate and apart from defending the arrest of the sought after drug king pin. The vicious cycle continues as gangs attack the police and the police later retaliate, and then the gangs attack again.

Many former students reside in some of the warring communities but I am in touch with them and know that they are safe, if not traumatized. The direct impact on our current Lego Yuh Mind Jrs Robotics Club has been our inability to have meetings to prepare for the Moonbots challenge submission on May 28. It is unlikely that we will be able to complete our entry by then.

Schools have not opened this week and while persons still go to work, they try to be home by noon.

It is traumatic time for the nation as the death toll from violent clashes rise every day and the flare ups spread to more and more parts of the country, not just in Kingston. To add insult to injury, reports are that the Dudus, the druglord, is still not captured.

On a brighter note, preparations for our summer programme are well underway with online registration being facilitated through our ‘finally’ updated website, www.hallsoflearning.com. This year we added another course, “Artful Bricksters”, to teach mosaics and sculptures with LEGO. Also, we will introduce a brand new (non-lego based) programme, “Puzzle Yuh Brain” where children solve puzzles and play games that develop their strengths in logic, deduction, problem solving etc. Our outreach will continue to expand, and is ever more important in light of the mental rebuilding that will need to take place.

Hard to pick a favorite today, but it’s always an interesting read with the Sunday Washington Post. Finally settled on Kathleen Parker’s column: Does God play favorites? This piece is that one that led me to action, which was to download to my iPad’s Kindle app, Fingerprints of God, by Barbara Bradley Hagerty. Here’s what caught my attention and why I forwarded this column to a few friends and family.

When it comes to whose prayers carry more weight in the heavenly realm, well, who really knows? But new brain research supports the likelihood that one man’s prayer is as good as any other’s.

Barbara Bradley Hagerty, the award-winning National Public Radio religion reporter, participated in a peyote ceremony in Arizona, meditated while wearing a brain scanner at the University of Wisconsin and donned a “God helmet” in a neuroscientist’s lab in Canada in her quest to discover the secrets of prayer and, possibly, proof of God.

In her book, “Fingerprints of God,” Hagerty tries to answer a question that has plagued her for years: Is there more than this? She couldn’t accept mainstream science’s answer that we are “a collection of molecules with no greater purpose than to eke out a few decades.” Instead, she sought out spiritual virtuosos (people who practice prayer, religiously), as well as neurologists, geneticists, physicists and medical researchers who are using the newest tools of science to discern the circumstantial evidence of God.

Her research led to some startling conclusions that have caused no small amount of Sturm und Drang among those who believe theirs is the one true way. She found that whether one is a Sikh, a Catholic nun, a Buddhist monk or a Sufi Muslim, the brain reacts to focused prayer and meditation much in the same way. The same parts light up and the same parts go dark during deep meditation.

Apparently, we have a “God spot” and “God genes.” And though some are more generously endowed than others, spiritual experience is a human phenomenon, not a religious one. Different routes to the same destination.

A close second for fav of the day was the book review about who the pilgrims were before they became The Pilgrims: Making Haste from Babylon: The Mayflower Pilgrims ad Their World: A New History by Nick Bunker. Reviewed by John Demos, emeritus historian from Yale.

….Nick Bunker, a former banker and a gifted writer for sure, offers a remarkably fresh take on (it’s true) an old and well-worn story….

But it’s the route followed, more than the destination, that makes this book so distinctive. Characters, places, episodes, stories: These are the stuff of Bunker’s tell, and they make for an unusually lively read….

I’m particularly intrigued by Bunker’s analysis that although the Pilgrims’s separatism was “infused with the values of gentility and ‘seasoned with Greek and Roman ideals of Republican virtue.’ As such, it yielded secular consequences in the formation of a new community that ‘had to pay its way and govern itself, as well as kneel on the Sabbath….’ “

These conclusions fit with my world view, which didn’t have proof or details about Pilgrim life, and which, Haste will give me. I’ll order Haste, too, if it is on Kindle (or iBooks.) I’m interested, but not $30 interested. [Note: the book is not available on either. Short-sighted.]

Third runner up for fav of the day was political consultant Donna Brazile’s op-ed call to:

“…replace the pundits with ‘people who have genuine expertise – whether from their academic work, professional life or personal experience — on the key issues of the day. Instead of partisan talking heads or mad hatters from the ‘tea party’ preaching their views on, say, health care and taxes, let’s hear from doctors and insurance professionals, or the number-crunchers from the Congressional Budget Office. They’re much better equipped to help views, listeners and readers wade through the facts, arguments and data….”

I agree. And that’s why I watch PBS’s News Hour. Except…I find it more often boring than before, when Jim Lehrer was the clear lead for the show. I haven’t analyzed why I’ve stopped tuning in several nights a week…but my finger has been voting.

And because it is Sunday and I have some time, let me quickly say that I’m following a number of on-going stories, among them:

(1) BP oil spill (Solution that seemed so good didn’t work and now trying new approaches. I marvel at the engineering cleverness and wonder if this will be the high-point of their lives, when those involved stopping and containing the oil damage, look back.)

(2) Michelle Rhee and DC Public Schools (somehow found a couple million to pay for six new ass’t superintendents to work more closely with principals to make sure schools are improving …. but wasn’t part of what she was about was to hire well and give responsibility to principals? And to cut out layers of administrators?)

(3) Times Square Bomber (Official Pakistan Taliban connection…and…what that means next in the US-Pakistan relationship, especially as relates to Pakistan’s continuing support of such groups in the contested Kashmir area, which are consider protection for Pakistan against India.)

(4) Bob Bennett being ousted by Tea Party Utahans. (I continue to wonder if the “purity” Republicans will beat Democrats in November, given my belief that independents control the election, and a lot of things can happen in six months.)

(5) Murder of Yeardly Love, the U-Va lacrosse player by an ex-boy friend U-Va lacrosse player. (Her funeral yesterday, attended by nearly 2,000, included lacrosse cheers, pins, ribbons, and school colors. I suspect that lacrosse feels under attack. At least two elite schools, Duke and now U-Va, have male lacrosse cultures of heavy drinking with violent results. What will the lacrosse community do to change its culture? Is it a lacrosse culture or a lacrosse culture at a few universities? When fraternities get in such trouble on a campus, they are punished or sometimes, shut down. The young man who killed her claims it was an accident, and I’m sure it was, now that he’s sober and not drunkenly enraged. So…in this case was it simply a young man who happened to be a star lacrosse player who happened to have a drinking-anger problem…and not a lacrosse coincidence?)

Lots going on…that’s enough for now.

First day: Y’s 20/20/20 exercise class

2007 Stanford Fellows: Marvin Hall reports from battle-torn Jamaica

News Fav: All religions light up same places in brain