flynn011

What is it with boys and computers, eh?  I mean, sure girls will play computer games, too, but research shows that fewer girls than boys display addictive behaviour when it comes to gaming, and it all seems to come down to the way their brains are wired. An article called Boys and Video Games: A Natural Attraction?  reports the fact that three brain structures --  the nucleus accumbens, amygdala, and orbitofrontal cortex -- were stimulated more in the male brain than the female during a controlled test of reactions to computer gaming. These three areas of the brain matter when one looks at their functions.  The first, the nucleus accumbens, is the  region involved in motivation and reward, feelings, and drug addiction    The second, the amygdala, are a pair of regions in the temporal lobe (located toward the bottom of the brain near the ears) and are linked to emotions and aggression, and more importantly for this post, to forming patterns related to l...

I decided to try out what I've read recently about boys and their preference for visual learning modes when I went to tutor a 15-year-old boy in Language Arts (GCSE English to my UK followers). First, he wanted to understand paragraphing in an essay.  I drew something like this: Fruit Bowl Paragraphs, I said, were like pieces of fruit, and the essay was like a fruit bowl.  Most simple essays have three or four pieces of fruit in their fruit bowl, such as an orange, a pear, and an apple.  The key to good writing is to make sure each fruit-bit remains whole; in other words, the writer has to make sure that bits of orange don't try to get into the apple, but that the orange stuff keeps to the orange paragraph, and the apple stuff stays with the apple. I love it when a light seems to go off in a child's brain!  Imagine, 15 years old, bright, top-set sort of student, and yet no one had ever bothered to really explain paragraphing to him. His next concern was about knowing...