The British Monarchy - Queen Victoria

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mobile phone bans 'improve school exams results' (Are mobiles educationally disruptive?)

Mobile phone bans 'improve school exam results'

Banning mobile phones from schools has the effect of giving pupils an extra week's education over the course of an academic year, researchers say.

The study, published by the London School of Economics, looked at schools in four English cities and found test scores increased by more than 6% in those which banned phones.

Low-achieving and low-income students improved the most, researchers claim.

More than 90% of British teenagers own a mobile phone.

Report authors Louis-Philippe Beland and Richard Murphy say despite the benefits of new mobile technology phones cause distractions, reduce productivity and are detrimental to learning.

'Reduce inequality'

"We found that not only did student achievement improve, but also that low-achieving and low income students gained the most," the economists said.

"We found the impact of banning phones for these students was equivalent to an additional hour a week in school, or to increasing the school year by five days."

The report surveyed the test scores of secondary schools in Birmingham, Leicester, London and Manchester before and after phone bans were introduced.

Muck-up day meaning

"Muck-up day" is the name given to a tradition within secondary schools where graduating final-year students are involved with pranks and other activities on their last official day of school.

Adult piano lessons: Never too late to learn?

When Clemency Burton-Hill returned to piano lessons as an adult, she found herself in good company. Grown-ups everywhere are learning the instrument to relieve stress, focus their minds – and for the sheer joy it brings.

They say that youth is wasted on the young, but it’s nothing compared to piano lessons.

When I look back at my younger self and remember how I battled against learning the instrument and how quickly I gave it up, I’m gnawed at by rage. Why, why didn’t I practise when I had the chance? And why do I find myself in my thirties, suffering the mortification of learning the piano again, the indignity of being rubbish at something my eight-year-old self could do, the sheer misery of the difference between how I want something to sound and what actually happens when I play?

The only consolation I can take from this is that I’m not alone. I often hear from listeners on my BBC Radio 3 Breakfast show who say they’re revisiting in adulthood the instruments they gave up as children, and it’s invariably the keyboard to which they return. Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger recently wrote a beautiful book – Play It Again: An Amateur against the Impossible – that explores the year he spent learning Chopin’s No Ballade 1, aged 56. And he was just one of the many high-profile amateur pianists, including actor Simon Russell Beale and the former UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, Ed Balls, who were persuaded to tackle Schumann’s Kinderszenen (Scenes from Childhood) live onstage at a concert in London last year.

Gluttons for punishment?

So what’s behind this trend, I wonder? Why are so many otherwise sane adults submitting themselves to the strictures of daily scales and arpeggios and asking the terrifying question of whether an adult brain is still plastic enough to learn – and memorise – some of the most complex music ever written?

“It’s an overriding passion, not just for the music [but] for the challenge,” reckons Lucy Parham, the leading concert pianist who taught Rusbridger his Chopin. “And the challenge is constant: there’s always a harder piece, you can always take it to the next level, you’re never finished. But there’s also the fact that the piano is your friend; it’s always there. That gathers more significance as you get older: what you can express through it, in a personal language, becomes incredibly important.”

This is certainly true for British actor and director Samuel West, who tells me he recently bought himself a “proper” piano again, and has started practising daily for the first time in 30 years. “As an adult you’re much more knowledgeable about your own moods, so it becomes much more possible to use music as a way to express yourself,” he says. ”"If I have a little piece I can play, I can listen to myself better, I can express myself better. That’s entirely a function of being older, and that’s a joy.”

West, also an amateur cellist, had nurtured a desire to master the Aria from Bach’s Goldberg Variations for as long as he could remember. “It was something I felt I really ought to know. It’s simple, but it’s difficult and complex enough to keep me going until I die. Consider Glenn Gould: he rarely ever recorded the same piece twice, but he famously re-recorded the Goldberg Variations when he was older, despite having had huge acclaim when he was twenty-three. He didn’t feel he’d said enough.”

West would be the first to admit he is no Glenn Gould. Didn’t he find the learning process maddening, given how out of practise he was? “The fascinating thing is how much my hands remembered,” he says. “When you’re small you learn faster, your hands are more adept, it’s just much, much easier; as an adult, the fear that getting back to any kind of match fitness will take forever is a bit depressing. But it’s worth it: I got myself a piece I’d wanted to learn and I taught it to myself and that was really satisfying. Even if my fingering was rubbish.’

Keys to happiness

An easy reward for the amateur pianist lies in the fact that, unlike a violin or cello, the keyboard is percussive. While the instrument certainly has its challenges – around 88 of the damned things – at least when you strike a key, you know what note will sound. “With the piano you can play small things beautifully because you don’t have the tuning challenge,” Parham points out. “That makes it slightly more doable, and intellectually, people like it very much. When you learn as a child you do it because, say, your mum makes you go to piano lessons. But when you make the conscious decision to learn as an adult you’re paying with your hard-earned cash and time.”

Then there is what Parham calls “the de-stressing element”. She cites one of her students, a banker, who travels constantly for his job but is learning a fiendishly difficult Schubert sonata. “Instead of reading endless emails on the plane, he’s downloaded the score onto his iPad and he studies that,” she says. “He loves it.” Gripped as we are by the supposed wonders of daily ‘mindfulness’ meditation – apparently even Wimbledon champion Novak Djokovic is a fan – it’s intriguing that Rusbridger describes practising the piano in similar terms. On the mornings he plays before heading into the office, he notices an increased zing and focus for the rest of the day. “With other people it’s yoga or a run or a burst in the gym,” he writes. “Twenty minutes on the piano has the same effect for me. Once it’s in the bank I’m ready for more or less anything the day can throw at me. Without it, things are harder.”

This perceived magical effect is grounded in hard science. Ray Dolan, one of the many neuroscientists Rusbridger talked to in an attempt to understand what was happening to his brain during his Chopin year, explains that whenever Rusbridger plays the piano, his brain is liberated from the “explicit… over-representational mind” of his day job. That has advantages not just for his brain but for his body. He goes through the piano days calmer; everything benefits.

But perhaps above all else, there is the sheer joy of playing. My decision to get back to the piano was inspired in part by the lovely things that happened whenever I walked past one of the pianos that street artist Luke Jerram placed all over New York as part of his project Play Me, I’m Yours, launched in London in 2009 and so popular it was subsequently rolled out it in cities all over the globe. “The piano is such a great communal thing, such a great bringer together of people, even if you can only play the simplest thing,” Parham says. “It makes me sad that more people don’t get back to it as adults for the simple fear of not being good enough. They’d never think that about sport: people pick up a tennis racket or kick a football about even though they know they’re no Andy Murray or David Beckham. I’d like to start a campaign: just do it!”

why does music evoke memories? CAE/CPE COURSES

Why does music evoke memories?

Songs from the past can stir powerful emotions and transport us back in time. Tiffany Jenkins explores what happens in our brains when music carries us away.

Rhythm Is a Dancer’ is the song that does it for me.

It’s a tune by the German Eurodance group Snap!, that was played a lot one summer as I travelled across Europe. I hear just one refrain from it – “It's a soul companion/ You can feel it everywhere” – and the late nights and sandy beaches come immediately to mind. But were I deliberately to try and remember something particular from that holiday, without the music, I would recall nothing as immediate or emotional. This is an experience shared by everyone: hear a piece of music from decades later and you are transported back to that particular moment, like stepping into a time machine. You can feel everything as if you were actually there. The relationship between music and memory is powerful, and new research is hoping to discover how these memories work for therapeutic effect. It is already used to help dementia patients, the elderly, and for those suffering from depression.

Music has been an important mnemonic device for thousands of years. David C Rubin is a specialist in autobiographical memory and oral traditions and in his ground-breaking book Memory in Oral Traditions he explains how epic stories like Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey were passed down verbally using poetic devices. Before the narratives could be written down, they were chanted or sung. Oral tradition depended on memory.

The hippocampus and the frontal cortex are two large areas in the brain associated with memory and they take in a great deal of information every minute. Retrieving it is not always easy. It doesn’t simply come when you ask it to. Music helps because it provides a rhythm and rhyme and sometimes alliteration which helps to unlock that information with cues. It is the structure of the song that helps us to remember it, as well as the melody and the images the words provoke.

The technique remains important today. Neuroscientists have analysed the brain mechanisms related to memory, finding that words set to music are the easiest to remember. Just think of one of the first songs you could well have sung: “A,B,C,D,E,F,G, come along and sing with me.” Text learnt to music is better remembered when it is heard as a song rather than speech. Try and remember anything set to a tune and your powers of recall will be stronger: “Now I’ve sung my ABC.”

All in the mind

There is a link then between music and memory, but why, when we hear a particular song, do we feel strong emotions rather than just being able to recite the lyrics? If I listen to Rhythm Is a Dancer, I recall the amazing feeling of travelling without my parents for the first time and all the fun I had as much as the  lines of the song, which I might add wasn’t one I cared for particularly − the lyrics are banal or just plain bad. "I'm as serious as cancer when I say rhythm is a dancer" was described by one critic as the ‘worst lyric of all time’ and yet it evokes profound feelings.

There are different kinds of memory, including explicit and implicit memory. Explicit memory is a deliberate, conscious retrieval of the past, often posed by questions like: where was I that summer? Who was I travelling with? Implicit memory is more a reactive, unintentional form of memory.

“A large part of memory takes place in the unconscious mind” Robert Snyder, a composer and chair of the sound programme at the Art Institute of Chicago, tells me. “There are aspects of memory that are remembered implicity, that is, outside of consciousness”. What’s more, he says, “implicit memory systems involve different parts of the brain than explicit memory systems”. It is the explicit memory systems that are damaged by conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease. Implicit systems are robust in comparison. Snyder explains that “things that can affect us from outside of consciousness are often regarded as powerful”. In other words, implicit memory is emotional as well as durable.

Notably, memories stimulated by music often come from particular times in our lives. Classic hits take us back to our teenage years and our twenties, much more than songs of later years. Psychologists have called it the ‘reminiscence bump’. It may work this way because this is an especially important and exciting time in our lives, when we are experience things for the first time and when we become independent. Everything is new and meaningful. Later, life becomes a bit of a blur. Music evokes emotion, but the sound and feeling of it, while important ,don’t necessary define your feelings. A sad song could be associated with a happy time, a happy one with a sad one.

Soundtracks of our lives

It's often pop music that evokes memories from this time in our lives. Why? Well, for a start this music played in the background, whether we selected it or not. There is always something on the radio, in bars, clubs and bedrooms that is contemporary and is almost accidentally attached to a particular time. Pop music is also of the moment. Listen to popular music from the 1960s and 1970s, for example, and you think you know what that time sounded like. There is something more abstract about, say, western classical music, which has become more detached from its original time and may be harder to place.

Cretien van Campen, author of The Proust Effect: The Senses as Doorways to Lost Memories researches the ways different senses act like the madeleine for the French author Marcel Proust in In Search of Lost Time when a bite of the sweet cake takes him back to his childhood with all its smells, colours and feelings. Much of Campen’s work studies the brain, but he makes an important observation about what happens outside of our heads. “Smell differs in that it is a personal memory, whereas there is something very social in our experience of music,” he points out. “Music memories are often shared with peers.” We listen, together. At a party, it is something that we hear whilst dancing or chatting to a friend. We go to concerts or gigs with one another. And it is because music is there as part of lives spent with others – often significant others – that helps make it especially meaningful. Indeed it is often played at or composed for significant occasions, like funerals or weddings, where we witness major life events. 

People who have suffered traumatic brain injuries will often have problems with memory. Music can help bring back some of those special moments of their lives that they have forgotten. Those suffering from dementia can trigger vivid memories by listening to music they heard when they were young. Campen also highlights its uses for those with depression. It can assist people to recall difficult parts of their lives that were not necessarily as bad as they had thought. “People who are depressed often feel as if there is a blanket over their lives”. Hearing music, and remembering various experiences, “can help them remember the more complex experiences.” It’s not that these are always positive, he notes, “but they may be more rounded.” Music cannot cure, but perhaps it can help heal.

Campen is optimistic about the future work: “People worry a lot today about forgetting and the problems with memory. But the beauty is today we are beginning to help with remembering.”  

For many, that will be music to their ears.

WHO WON THE ELECTIONS IN UK

If you want to know how Mr CAMERON FARED in the elections you can read THE ECONOMIST http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2015/05/economist-explains-10?fsrc=nlw|newe|11-05-2015|