DREAM STATES
Deirdre Barrett’s article, “Answers in Your Dreams,” brought back memories. In 1960 I was the first woman pioneer in the EEG study of sleep and dreams.

Barrett mentions William Dement’s 1972 study. I took part in an earlier effort by Dement while working on my dissertation at Mount Sinai Hospital. Dement called with a problem-solving experiment he wanted to try: “Tell your subject, ‘The letters ‘O T T F F’ are the first letters in a well-known series. Once you add the next two letters correctly, you can add an infinite number of letters.’” (The next two are “S S” for “six” and “seven.”) I gave the problem to a subject in my sleep lab before she went to bed, and in the morning she said she had dreamt a lot.

“I was in Bloomingdale’s,” she said. “I was looking at a list of things I needed to buy, and at the end of the list was written ‘Silk Stockings’—the point is, on my list, it wasn’t written out, just the letters ‘S S.’ Isn’t that silly?”

I was dumbfounded. After she left I called Dement from a pay phone in the hospital. “I think it means she was trying—she came awfully close,” he exclaimed. “What an incredible coincidence!” Nice, huh?
Judith S. Antrobus
New York City

IN DEFENSE OF PRESCHOOL
As a longtime reader of your magazine, I was quite surprised to open this month’s issue and find the preschool I send my children to savaged in “The Death of Preschool,” by Paul Tullis.
Although Tullis quoted many fine scientific studies about the importance of play, I believe that his own research was shoddy at best. Yes, Montessori Shir Hashirim does include direct instruction, but the children also have a great deal of playtime. His ultimate conceit that sending a child to a school where she gets to learn about all sorts of whales might lead to “toxic stress” and hippocampus damage is specious at best.

Tullis’s most egregious error is that he seems to have missed the possibility that there are many ways to make education fun. Certainly there is not an expert out there who would recommend no education for preschool children: After all, what are we doing when we read to them at night? We are teaching them the basic fundamentals of reading—albeit in a way that is enjoyable for them.

Montessori Shir Hashirim strives to instill a lifelong love of learning in our children. I believe they do that very well. Basically, this school creates future readers of Scientific American Mind.

Your poorly argued, offensive article, however, has created an ex-reader of Scientific American Mind.
Stuart Gibbs
via e-mail

The debate over direct teaching versus discovery learning through play is not new. Though not always confined to preschool education, this debate is usually centered on the problem of constructing a discovery learning program in which learning can be observed and assessed. The difficulty stems from the demands of managing a classroom with 12 to 20 children while at the same time trying to assess individual learning. Although it can be done, the variability associated with play-based learning is much greater than that associated with direct instruction. Teachers have often not been adequately prepared to administer and justify play- and activity-based programs and thus have been vulnerable to criticisms of them.
William James Wagner
via e-mail

2 Comments

1. 1. JamesDavis 04:59 PM 4/1/12

   In defense of preschool: The best way for a small child to learn is play while they learn and learn while they play. A child retains more when they hear, see, say, and experience learning first hand. This is especially true for preschool children; that is why it is important that the teacher is a well qualified preschool teacher who is very familiar with this form of teaching and learning. It is a well known fact, by all the best teachers who teach small children, that preschool children learn best when they are outside where they can experience what the teacher is presenting to them.

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2. 2. DrLPalmer 03:26 AM 4/4/12

   Please get Montessori straight. Misunderstandings of Montessori are universal. Three stages take place in a Montessori lesson where the teacher sits down with an individual pupil and demonstrates/teaches the proper use of a didactic tool (activity) and the self-correcting aspects of the materials. 1. "This is..." (names and explains). 2. Teacher tests knowledge by asking or telling open-ended sentence fragment, "Which is...? (Recognition: child points to or selects). 3. Teacher asks or otherwise cues response, "What is...? (recall). Children, while demonstrating amazing attention and concentration while engaging with activities in the highly prepared classroom, are NOT playing in the usual sense of doing whatever the choose to do. In fact, the Montessori teacher removes the child or material if it is not used appropriately. The child may not use the material for purposes other than what is intended to be taught at a particular stage using the prepared teaching tool. The didactic materials are designed to teach explicit understandings through appropriate repetition of construction or arrangement. Each of the materials is taught directly to each child individually to the point that the child can take the materials and complete the activity to completion and self-satisfaction. Without knowing the complete description of the criteria in the article, I suspect that the authors equated incidental learning and free play with preschool practice and that viewpoint, while common, is incorrect. PreSCHOOL teaches and practices fundamental concepts as foundations for more advanced steps in curricular sequences. Playful approaches may be different from "play" and careful definition leads to clarity and deeper understanding of professional practice.
   Even preschool literature is read for the purpose of modeling problems, behavior, and morals. Classroom materials are tools for teaching something explicit. Otherwise, play is just pastime wandering. Pretend play is valuable because it exercises fantasy and visualization. Recognizing the different types of play is essential for teachers so that development can be noticed and encouraged.
   Lyelle Palmer, Ph.D., Winona State Univ.(Emeritus).

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