Yes, I know it’s easy to pick on Malcolm Gladwell. But so be it. In his 2008 article on teaching and quarterbacking, Gladwell got a lot of mileage out of the idea that “no one knows what a person with the potential to be a great teacher looks like.”

Maybe Gladwell was throwing us a red herring. Predicting who will be a good teacher matters less if the skills of good teachers can be imparted to the average or below average teachers. An article in the New York Times magazine tells the story of Doug Lemov, a consultant and former teacher who set out to catalogue behaviors of effective teachers and break them down into steps other teachers can follow.

All Lemov’s techniques depend on his close reading of the students’ point of view, which he is constantly imagining. In Boston, he declared himself on a personal quest to eliminate the saying of “shh” in classrooms, citing what he called “the fundamental ambiguity of ‘shh.’ Are you asking the kids not to talk, or are you asking kids to talk more quietly?” A teacher’s control, he said repeatedly, should be “an exercise in purpose, not in power.” So there is Warm/Strict, technique No. 45, in which a correction comes with a smile and an explanation for its cause — “Sweetheart, we don’t do that in this classroom because it keeps us from making the most of our learning time.”

The J-Factor, No. 46, is a list of ways to inject a classroom with joy, from giving students nicknames to handing out vocabulary words in sealed envelopes to build suspense. In Cold Call, No. 22, stolen from Harvard Business School, which Lemov attended, the students don’t raise their hands — the teacher picks the one who will answer the question. Lemov’s favorite variety has the teacher ask the question first, and then say the student’s name, forcing every single student to do the work of figuring out an answer.

When boiled down in this way, suddenly good teachers — the outliers — are not miracle workers. They have skills other teachers can learn.

It’s good to see someone breaking out of the terms of the stale vaccine / autism controversy. Here’s Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times last week:

Concern about toxins in the environment used to be a fringe view. But alarm has moved into the medical mainstream. Toxicologists, endocrinologists and oncologists seem to be the most concerned.

One uncertainty is to what extent the reported increases in autism simply reflect a more common diagnosis of what might previously have been called mental retardation. There are genetic components to autism (identical twins are more likely to share autism than fraternal twins), but genetics explains only about one-quarter of autism cases.

Suspicions of toxins arise partly because studies have found that disproportionate shares of children develop autism after they are exposed in the womb to medications such as thalidomide (a sedative), misoprostol (ulcer medicine) and valproic acid (anticonvulsant). Of children born to women who took valproic acid early in pregnancy, 11 percent were autistic. In each case, fetuses seem most vulnerable to these drugs in the first trimester of pregnancy, sometimes just a few weeks after conception.

I like the way Kristof framed this. Who’s in favor of toxins in our environment, after all?

Thanks, Sue!

Via Time (photo is NSFW):

Some transsexuals say the country’s open-minded Health Minister, Roselyne Bachelot, removed transsexualism from the list of mental disorders because it was an outdated classification and because she wanted to acknowledge the work transsexuals have done to further their cause. But others see a potentially more troubling motive. Tin worries that politicians may be making allowances on this front to avoid engaging in debate on legalizing gay marriage or removing barriers to allowing gay adults to adopt.

I don’t know much about transgender or French politics. If you do, feel free to chime in below.

Time to circle back to the NYTimes magazine article I mentioned a few weeks ago, “The Americanization of Mental Illness.” The author, Ethan Watters, made a couple of points related to schizophrenia. One had to do with something called expressed emotion of family members toward a loved one suffering schizophrenia.

R]esearchers have long documented how certain emotional reactions from family members correlate with higher relapse rates for people who have a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Collectively referred to as “high expressed emotion,” these reactions include criticism, hostility and emotional overinvolvement (like overprotectiveness or constant intrusiveness in the patient’s life). In one study, 67 percent of white American families with a schizophrenic family member were rated as “high EE.”

Watters says this reaction reflects an American way of thinking

They tended to believe that individuals are the captains of their own destiny and should be able to overcome their problems by force of personal will.

I called an expert on schizophrenia, epidemiologist Ezra Susser of Columbia University, for confirmation. Susser says high expressed emotion could be caused by the stress of having a loved one going through a schizophrenic episode. “If you can help the family reduce the levels of expressed emotion,” he says, “that seems to improve the course and outcome [of the disease].”

Here’s an interesting article from More Intelligent Life, a lifestyle magazine published by The Economist. The author is one John Sterns, who was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, which is a combination of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. He describes his symptoms as follows:

I hear voices (“auditory hallucinations”, technically). They come from all directions and fill my mind with hateful, self-destructive demands. One comes from above the crown of my head and commands, “You must die”. Another rests on my left shoulder and says, “You should be dead”. A third whispers insidiously into my left ear, “Kill yourself”.

But the most persistent and long-standing of my voices, which began when I was eight years old, pounds on my left shoulder like a jackhammer, repeating, “I hate myself. I hate myself. I hate myself. I hate myself. I hate myself. I hate myself. I hate myself. I hate myself.” It never ends. My response to this particular voice was to develop a permanent cringe in my right shoulder. I am now spending thousands of dollars to correct compressed discs in my neck that have caused me chronic pain for nearly 30 years.

I don’t know if this article is about the same John Sterns, but I’m guessing these are his blog and his Twitter feed.