Learning Begins

Learning Begins
Author: Andrew C. Watson
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 174
Release: 2017-03-08
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1475833385

Learning Begins, written by a teacher for teachers, translates current brain research into practical classroom strategies. Because students learn with their brains, it simply makes sense for teachers to explore educational psychology and neuroscience. And yet, information in these fields can be daunting and contradictory. Worse still, few researchers can clearly explain the specific classroom uses of their remarkable discoveries. Learning Begins both explains this research and makes it useful for teachers and administrators. Part I investigates the science of working memory: a cognitive capacity essential to all school work. When teachers recognize the many classroom perils that can overwhelm working memory, they can use research-aligned strategies to protect it, and thereby promote student learning. Part II reveals the complexities of student attention. By understanding the three neural sub-processes that create attention, teachers can structure their classrooms and their lessons to help students focus on and understand new material. Written in a lively and approachable voice, based on years of classroom experience and a decade of scientific study, Learning Begins makes educational psychology and neuroscience clear and useful in schools and classrooms.

Andrew Watson

Andrew Watson
Author: Tony Talburt
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2017
Genre: Athletes, Black
ISBN: 9781910553626

Today, seeing Black footballers playing the game at the very highest level is considered very normal. This, certainly, was not the case one hundred and forty years ago, and this is what makes the story of Andrew Watson so remarkable. It seems hard to imagine that a Guyanese-born Black man could head the Scottish national football team in 1881 in a game against England. Not only was he captain, but he also led them to a 6-1 victory in London - an achievement that still ranks as England's heaviest ever defeat on home soil.

Learning Grows

Learning Grows
Author: Andrew C. Watson
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 175
Release: 2019-04-30
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1475833350

Combining a lively voice with scientific research, Learning Grows explores the fascinating and useful world of student motivation. Written for teachers—and everyone interested in teaching and learning—Learning Grows helps classrooms flourish by fostering students’ intrinsic motivation. Part I delves into Mindset. Although seemingly well known, this theory is often oversimplified and widely misunderstood. By exploring its step-by-step historical development, we can use it more flexibly and effectively to help learners ‘charge!’ when they might otherwise ‘retreat.’ Part II enters the paradoxical world of Stereotype Threat. A surprising cascade of counter-intuitive effects can cause students to struggle in school—not because they don’t care, but because they work too hard. The right classroom strategies block this demotivational pathway, and thereby foster student learning. By interleaving psychology and neuroscience research with dozens of practical classroom examples, Learning Grows makes these two theories both clear and immediately useful. Learning Grows is the second book in the series “A Teacher’s Guide to the Learning Brain.” The first book, Learning Begins, studies the science of working memory and attention.

Revolutions that Made the Earth

Revolutions that Made the Earth
Author: Tim Lenton
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 440
Release: 2013-04-11
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0191501778

The Earth that sustains us today was born out of a few remarkable, near-catastrophic revolutions, started by biological innovations and marked by global environmental consequences. The revolutions have certain features in common, such as an increase in complexity, energy utilization, and information processing by life. This book describes these revolutions, showing the fundamental interdependence of the evolution of life and its non-living environment. We would not exist unless these upheavals had led eventually to 'successful' outcomes - meaning that after each one, at length, a new stable world emerged. The current planet-reshaping activities of our species may be the start of another great Earth system revolution, but there is no guarantee that this one will be successful. The book explains what a successful transition through it might look like, if we are wise enough to steer such a course. This book places humanity in context as part of the Earth system, using a new scientific synthesis to illustrate our debt to the deep past and our potential for the future.

The Goldilocks Map: A classroom teacher's quest to evaluate 'brain-based' teaching advice

The Goldilocks Map: A classroom teacher's quest to evaluate 'brain-based' teaching advice
Author: Andrew C. Watson
Publisher: Hachette UK
Total Pages: 213
Release: 2021-05-03
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1914351193

In the last 20 years, the cognitive sciences have revealed fresh, surprising, and useful insights into how and why our students learn. Teachers can now draw on psychology and neuroscience research to supplement, reconsider, even overturn our traditions and training. To use this research most wisely, teachers must find our way to an elusive Goldilocks Zone. Instead of resisting all research-based guidance, we should be ready to take it to heart – even when it challenges both our training and conventional wisdom. Instead of accepting all research-based guidance, we should be ready to reject it emphatically – especially the hyped-up edu-fads that exaggerate and misinterpret psychology findings. How can we get this Goldilocks balance “just right”? This book offers a specific, practical quest map to discover just such a balance. By critically examining the source, the research, and ourselves, teachers can develop the skills necessary to be effective research skeptics. Written by a teacher with 18 years in the classroom – and 13 years studying neuroscience and psychology – The Goldilocks Map transforms brain research from a daunting monologue into an approachable, exciting, and lively conversation.

DNA

DNA
Author: James D. Watson
Publisher: Knopf
Total Pages: 464
Release: 2009-01-21
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0307521486

Fifty years ago, James D. Watson, then just twentyfour, helped launch the greatest ongoing scientific quest of our time. Now, with unique authority and sweeping vision, he gives us the first full account of the genetic revolution—from Mendel’s garden to the double helix to the sequencing of the human genome and beyond. Watson’s lively, panoramic narrative begins with the fanciful speculations of the ancients as to why “like begets like” before skipping ahead to 1866, when an Austrian monk named Gregor Mendel first deduced the basic laws of inheritance. But genetics as we recognize it today—with its capacity, both thrilling and sobering, to manipulate the very essence of living things—came into being only with the rise of molecular investigations culminating in the breakthrough discovery of the structure of DNA, for which Watson shared a Nobel prize in 1962. In the DNA molecule’s graceful curves was the key to a whole new science. Having shown that the secret of life is chemical, modern genetics has set mankind off on a journey unimaginable just a few decades ago. Watson provides the general reader with clear explanations of molecular processes and emerging technologies. He shows us how DNA continues to alter our understanding of human origins, and of our identities as groups and as individuals. And with the insight of one who has remained close to every advance in research since the double helix, he reveals how genetics has unleashed a wealth of possibilities to alter the human condition—from genetically modified foods to genetically modified babies—and transformed itself from a domain of pure research into one of big business as well. It is a sometimes topsy-turvy world full of great minds and great egos, driven by ambitions to improve the human condition as well as to improve investment portfolios, a world vividly captured in these pages. Facing a future of choices and social and ethical implications of which we dare not remain uninformed, we could have no better guide than James Watson, who leads us with the same bravura storytelling that made The Double Helix one of the most successful books on science ever published. Infused with a scientist’s awe at nature’s marvels and a humanist’s profound sympathies, DNA is destined to become the classic telling of the defining scientific saga of our age.

Under Our Skin

Under Our Skin
Author: Benjamin Watson
Publisher: NavPress
Total Pages: 189
Release: 2015-11-17
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1496413326

Can it ever get better? This is the question Benjamin Watson is asking. In a country aflame with the fallout from the racial divide—in which Ferguson, Charleston, and the Confederate flag dominate the national news, daily seeming to rip the wounds open ever wider—is there hope for honest and healing conversation? For finally coming to understand each other on issues that are ultimately about so much more than black and white? An NFL tight end for the New Orleans Saints and a widely read and followed commentator on social media, Watson has taken the Internet by storm with his remarkable insights about some of the most sensitive and charged topics of our day. Now, in Under Our Skin, Watson draws from his own life, his family legacy, and his role as a husband and father to sensitively and honestly examine both sides of the race debate and appeal to the power and possibility of faith as a step toward healing.

Digital Images and Human Vision

Digital Images and Human Vision
Author: Andrew B. Watson
Publisher: Bradford Books
Total Pages: 224
Release: 1993
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 9780262231718

These fifteen contributions by distinguished vision and imaging scientists explore the role of human vision in the design of modem image communication systems. A dominant theme in the book is image compression—how compression algorithms can be designed to make best use of what we know about human vision. Electronic image communications, which encompass television, high-definition television, teleconferencing, multimedia, digital photography, desktop publishing, and digital movies, is a rapidly growing segment of technology and business. Because these products and technologies are designed for human viewing, knowledge of human perception is essential to optimal design. This book provides a timely compendium of important ideas and perspectives on such subjects as the key aspects of human visual sensitivity that are relevant to image communications and, conversely, the major problems in image communications that vision science can address; the mathematical models of human vision that are useful in the design of image comunications systems; reliable and efficient methods of evaluating visual quality; and aspects of human vision that can be exploited to provide substantial improvements in coding efficiency. Andrew B. Watson is Senior Scientist for Vision Research at NASA. Contributors: Albert J. Ahumada, Jr. E. Barth. V. Michael Bove, Jr. Gershon Buchsbaum. Phillipe Cassereau. Pamela C. Cosman. Scott J. Daly. Michael Eckert. Bernd Girod. William E. Glenn. Robert M. Gray. Paul J. Hearty. Bradley Horowitz. Stanley Klein. Jeffrey Lubin, Cynthia Null. Karen L. Oehler. Alex Pentland. Todd Reed. Andrew B. Watson. B. Wegmann. Christof Zetsche.

The Way of the Desert

The Way of the Desert
Author: Andrew Watson
Publisher: Brf
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2011-11
Genre: Bible
ISBN: 9781841017983

In the Bible the desert is a place of punishment and discipline, but also of blessing and love's reawakening. Both Jesus and the people of Israel before him spent time in the desert, learning what it meant to be chosen and loved and holy. Yet while the people of the Exodus frequently got it wrong, providing some cautionary tales for us to learn from, Jesus himself constantly got it right, offering a perfect model for us to follow. In The Way of the Desert Andrew Watson takes us on a Lenten journey from Ash Wednesday to Easter Day, from the parting of the Red Sea to Israel's entry into the promised land. Combining these Old Testament scriptures with insight from the Gospels, he reveals the continuing relevance of the exodus story to all who would seek to follow Christ. The author writes: 'It became the must-have accessory among Christian young people in the 1990s: a rubber wristband cryptically inscribed with the letters WWJD. A hundred years earlier, Charles Sheldon, American pastor and Christian Socialist, had written a book entitled What Would Jesus Do? and the initials on the wristbands picked up just the same question. Whatever situations we face in life - whatever decisions we are called upon to make - the issue of WWJD is vital for the Christian disciple. Jesus' call, after all, is to "follow me."' 'As a church leader at the time when WWJD wristbands were selling by the truckload, I was therefore positive about this simple summons to Christian thinking and discipleship. My only reservation was that WWJD seemed to beg a prior question, and one on which our young people appeared increasingly hazy, namely "What Did Jesus Do?" Short of marketing my own range of WDJD wristbands there were limited means to get my message across, though I mentioned it in the odd sermon at the time. But the danger of asking speculative questions about Jesus without rooting them clearly in the Jesus of the Gospels is a real one. How easy to construct a Jesus of my own making, a pocket Jesus (or idol, to use the Bible's own term), who conveniently seems to share my views on politics, religion, money and relationships, without making me feel uncomfortable or challenged at all!' 'As we approach Lent, the question "What did Jesus do?" yields some interesting answers, for the 40 days of Lent reflect the period that Jesus spent in the wilderness following his baptism and before the start of his public ministry. It's a period briefly mentioned by the Gospel writer Mark (1:12 - 13) and described in greater detail by fellow evangelists Matthew (4:1 - 11) and Luke (4:1 - 13). So what did Jesus do in what we could call the first Lent?'

Agricultural Innovation in the Early Islamic World

Agricultural Innovation in the Early Islamic World
Author: Andrew M. Watson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2008-07-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780521068833

This study describes and explains the revolutionary changes which transformed the agricultural life of the Islamicized world in the four centuries following the early Arab conquests. Professor Watson discusses eighteen crops - from sorghum and rye to the watermelon - which spread through the Near East and North Africa during this period. Their origins, diffusion and uses are reviewed. The book investigates the mechanics of diffusion, the routes by which plants spread, and the processes by which they were acclimatized in their new environment. The social and economic history of agriculture in the medieval Islamic world is assessed in a review of wide importance. Professor Watson sets out to refute the view that the early Islamic period was one of agricultural decline in the Near East. He shows that, in contrast to the late Roman and Sasanian periods, it was a time of agricultural and demographic expansion. Agricultural innovation in the early Islamic world will be of interest to economic, social and agricultural historians and to those concerned with Islam and its effect on Africa and Asia.