I have not posted for a while, due a change that's been making different demands on my time.
Since the begining of January, I have been working as a long-term Sub, teaching science to 7th and 8th graders, and a weekly hour of 'health' to 6th graders. It is a lot of fun.
One of the new things is that I am learning to see the world through the eyes of 11-15 year-olds. Hence this article by John Tierney in the NY Times caught my attention. (btw, I do enjoy Tierney...)
Understanding the digital generations' approach to social networking is certainly getting everyone's attention these days; researchers at UPenn included, it seems. They studied the most-e-mailed articles on the NY Times website over a six-month period. (well, it is not clear to me that the NY Times readership is part of a 'digital generation', so extrapolation of these results to teenagers is purely mine)
Here's what caught my attention
Building on prior research, the Penn researchers defined the quality as an “emotion of self-transcendence, a feeling of admiration and elevation in the face of something greater than the self.”
They used two criteria for an awe-inspiring story: Its scale is large, and it requires “mental accommodation” by forcing the reader to view the world in a different way.
“It involves the opening and broadening of the mind,” write Dr. Berger and Dr. Milkman, who is a behavioral economist at Wharton.
Whereas 20% of the articles on the Home page made the cut, by the above definition, 30% of the articles in the Science page qualified.
That's pretty encouraging for a science teacher, notwithstanding the multiple sources of possible bias in these findings.
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