We may never have done it ourselves, but we can guess that reconstructing a dinosaur skeleton requires a well-developed Persistence superpower.
Another amazing shot from the archives: Museum staff work on mounting a duck-billed dinosaur, 1916, © AMNH Library/Image #34799
Explore all the photos from the Picturing the Museum collection here: http://bit.ly/l8nOspThis would make a beautiful painting.
The Big-Brained Superhackers Club inaugural meeting may have gotten a late start last night, but that didn’t deter a few Big-Brained Superheroes from sticking around an extra two hours to see the inside of a computer tower for the first time ever. Our Sense of Adventure was all systems go!
The joy and exhilaration of discovering hidden strengths.
So, in early October—in spite of extreme busyness—a couple of us exercised our Sense of Adventure and attended a talk by math wizard Steven Strogatz at Seattle’s Town Hall. Toward the end of the talk, our Empowerment superpower was revved up enough for us to be the first at the microphone to ask Mr. Strogatz for his opinion on the state of math education in the US today and whether he had any good resource suggestions for our young Big-Brained Superheroes. After a lengthy, vigorous, and thorough condemnation of current common practices, he mentioned that, sadly, he did not have any alternative resource suggestions. However, at the conclusion of the scheduled event, an attendee seated in front of us turned around and gave a lengthy, vigorous, and thorough commendation of a program we had never before heard of: JUMP Math.
At this point, contacting the folks at JUMP Math was a no-brainer. Our Sense of Adventure and Empowerment superpowers had already been developed enough to enable us to put finger to keyboard and shoot off a simple email: Can you help us?*. Apparently, yes, yes they could. The JUMP Math staff connected us with a Seattle-based donor who would generously fund JUMP Math’s introduction into The Big-Brained Superheroes Club. Because math is a core subject for us and one with which many of our BBSes seem to struggle, this development is indescribably momentous. In short, we’re so excited that we’re feeling punny enough to JUMP for joy! Thank you, Steven Strogatz, Lara who sat in front of us, folks at JUMP Math, Seattle-based donor, and of course, Sense of Adventure, Empowerment, and as always, Kindness!
Obviously, our next challenge is determining which Pointer Sisters song is more appropriate for this occasion: I’m So Excited or JUMP for My Love?…decisions decisions…
OK, puns over. Here’s an excellent JUMP Math video as some small recompense:
* For some of us big-brained superheroes—big and small—asking for help is one of the more daunting challenges in life. We see this every day in our young BBSes, and we see it in ourselves. So, be prepared for it to become a bit of a recurring theme around these parts.
View Oh the Places Big-Brained Superheroes Go! in a larger map
We in the Big-Brained Superheroes Club have two great loves: our ability to think spatially and our local donors. (Not necessarily in that order.) In that spirit, we’ve created this lovely map of Seattle Big-Brained Superhero-worthy enterprises (along with our comments!) to help make your local holiday shopping easier this season. Don’t just shop smart, shop Big-Brained Superhero smart!
And if you own or patronize a local business/project/organization that you consider to be a Big-Brained Superhero-worthy enterprise, please either make or encourage your favorite entrepreneur to make a donation to The Big-Brained Superheroes Club so that we can check it out! Here are just some of the things we would highly value right now:
And here’s just one of the many reasons you should donate to The Big-Brained Superheroes Club:
Happy holidays to all the big-brained superheroes throughout our fair city and beyond!
Subtitled: A Promise Kept.
In a recent installment of The Big-Brained Superheroes’ Handbook, we briefly discussed how the Big-Brained Superheroes Club economy works. Basically, big-brained superheroes (yes, we’re moving beyond proper noun status—Oxford English Dictionary, here we come!) get rewarded for exercising their superpowers, such as Empathy, Kindness, Persistence, Sense of Adventure, etc. Or, as we sometimes simplistically put it: We essentially created an economy based on being a nice person. But our goals are quite a bit loftier than that. We don’t want to just meet expectations as far as these skills are concerned. We want to exceed expectations. That’s why, when choosing a name for ourselves, we eschewed The Averagely Nice Person’s Club for something a bit more in line with our expectations and abilities.
However, one thing a big-brained superhero understands is that expectations and abilities aren’t enough to achieve our goals. Another essential is motivation. And while we’d all love to feel that the act of becoming a big-brained superhero is its own reward, inertia ain’t just a central rudiment of Newton’s First Law of Motion, if you know what we mean. OK, what we mean is that getting from here to there takes work—both mental and physical. It’s the mental work that we needed to jumpstart.
If you’ve read about Who we are…, you have a very general sense of how we’ve evolved as a club thus far. However, there’s a muddle in the middle about how our reward system evolved*. First, we tried various combinations of stickers and raffle tickets. Over the summer, we moved to “powerbadges” (which were also stickers). And, finally, The Big-Brained Superheroes Club mercantile is in effect. And while the mercantile has only been in operation for a little over a month, it’s a clear winner in terms of both motivation and capacity building.
The motivational benefits of the BBSC mercantile (BBSmart?) are similar to those of the raffle system we were previously using in that both the bank and the raffle tickets enable real-time, rapid rewarding (essential for our young BBSes, we’ve found) and even provide a springboard for negotiation (sometimes, BBSes will engage us on how much they think their work is worth; we frequently encourage these discussions). However, there are several benefits of the mercantile over the raffle. First, the raffle outcome would sometimes feel unfair (to all parties), and as a result, it would actually demotivate. We have much more control over how our current market system works. Second, BBSes like to see their bank accounts grow day after day, so it’s got longer term motivation-driving potential. In that respect, the market can do more to exercise our Persistence and Willpower superpowers than our raffle could. Finally, as we mentioned in the handbook appendix, the market gives us a chance to price store items at the beginning of a club meeting, providing both a quick hit of motivation early on and a chance to do some negotiation and consensus-building.
As far as capacity building goes, the underlying philosophy of the BBSC is oriented toward helping us all help ourselves. The finding and exercising of our superpowers is one aspect of that. However, the BBS market system enables us to learn about other fundamental aspects of our current daily lives. Money, math, interest, savings…those are useful things for us all to understand in today’s America. But beyond that, we want our market to provide a basic intellectual foundation for some more direct entrepreneurial activities we are working toward. Our nice-person-based economy knows no bounds!
* We should note, emphatically, that The Big-Brained Superheroes Club also evolved from rewarding general work to rewarding specific work, as we briefly address here.
Gamma radiation or the innocent glow of squishy circuit LEDs? We can’t say for sure. So, just to be safe, we’ll avoid making her angry.
We probably shouldn’t be admitting this, but we’ve come to realize that The Big-Brained Superheroes Club is extremely vulnerable. To embezzlement, that is.
Yesterday, the club was split up between the gym and the multipurpose room. In the gym was “Mathketball”, in which we solved math problems while shooting baskets (developed after last Monday’s meeting). In the multipurpose room was “Mental Leap”, wherein we memorized and performed relatively complex jump patterns using Chinese jump rope (user-tested and refined at last Wednesday’s meeting…yes, we really do make this stuff up as we go along).
At one point late in the festivities, one of our young Big-Brained Superheroes playing Mental Leap asked whether or not we were going to earn “tickets” (what we’ve taken to calling the quarters from The Big-Brained Superheroes Club bank). We said that we didn’t have any tickets—they were all on the Mathketball court. Immediately, a whole herd of young Big-Brained Superheroes abandoned us for the gym, and the rest of us carried on with our game. Within what seemed like a minute, the herd had returned to the multipurpose room with fists full of tickets. We were nonplussed that they had earned so many in such a seemingly short time. But then, they shoved them all into our hands.
Apparently, Mental Leap is good, but Mental Leap with benefits is even better. And embezzlement must rank a distant third.
Kirby Ferguson speaking at TED on the topic of remixing:
Our creativity comes from without, not from within. We are not self-made. We are dependent on one another, and admitting this to ourselves isn’t an embrace of mediocrity and derivativeness. It’s a…
We briefly mentioned remixing in our Adaptability v. Persistence post. One rationale for viewing Creativity as remixing that we Big-Brained Superheroes can really get behind is that remixing (copying, transforming, and combining) can exercise quite a few of our superpowers (Teamwork, Leadership, Sense of Adventure, Critical Thinking…) in one go. Which is probably why, although The Big-Brained Superheroes Club itself sometimes gets praised for originality, we do seem to take quite a lot of pride in our own fairly derivative origins.
Yesterday, over half of our volunteer staff couldn’t make it to our Big-Brained Superheroes Club meeting. And being the small group that we are, we missed them severely. However, the shortage gave us a great opportunity to exercise our Adaptability superpower, and the way in which we exercised our Adaptability superpower brings us to Part 3 of X of our Big-Brained Superheroes’ Handbook…
Rule #3: Playin’ for keeps is still playin’. (Thank you, Gambit.) As you may have noticed by now, The Big-Brained Superheroes Club has very little use for somber. Sincere surely. Subtle sporadically. But somber scarcely. The truth is that we Big-Brained Superheroes take our responsibilities so seriously that we simply can’t afford somber. Somber carries far too many opportunity costs.
The calculation is simple: How many hours in our lives are any of us going to be able/willing to sit somberly learning? Now, how many hours are there in our lives? If we can agree that the answer to the first question is a small subset of the answer to the second question, we can start to see the cost of somber. We can frequently do the sitting; we can frequently do the learning; we just can’t frequently do the somber. And if we, consciously or unconsciously, start to equate the learning with the somber, then, well, we’re losing countless opportunities.
So, when we ventured forth yesterday with 3/7ths of our volunteer staff, we chose to seek our learning opportunities on the basketball court, where somber isn’t even an option. And where the generally established rules and goals of the game would kindly supplement the boundaries and sense of purpose that our volunteer crew typically brings to club meetings. But, first, homework. With the added incentive of the impending basketball game, we finished our homework in record time yesterday. Before our club meeting was scheduled to start even. (Which, once again, indicates that our usual challenges are less connected to ability than they are to motivation.) And now that that’s over with…
Because The BBSC doesn’t have its own basketball and the community center was all out of them, some kids already on the court got to exercise their own Kindness and Teamwork superpowers and invite us to play with them. In fact, it wasn’t even a question—they wanted us in their game. (Challenge: How can we make The BBSC lab more like the basketball court in this respect? Maybe our young BBSes can help with this problem.) And once we started the game, the words “Teamwork” and “Leadership” frequently flew out of our mouths. “Sense of Adventure” even made several appearances. If we Big-Brained Superheroes spend a bit more time learning this game, the opportunities for articulating and exercising our superpowers appear almost limitless. Instead of exercising our superpowers while shooting hoops, we can be shooting hoops while exercising our superpowers. Opportunities, opportunities, opportunities.
Speaking of opportunities, when one of our young Big-Brained Superheroes spent her break time reading the gym’s Maximum Occupancy sign…opportunity! First, we divided 456 (it’s a fairly large gym) by two and then by three. Next time, we’ll discuss it in terms of halves, thirds, and maybe even halves of halves or fourths. Maybe then, we’ll discuss it relative to the number of people in the gym at the time. And maybe after that even more opportunities will arise.
But we digress (such is one problem with learning)…Going back to Rule #3: If we here at The Big-Brained Superheroes Club had to create a slogan, it would never be “We make learning fun!”; it would be more along the lines of “We don’t make learning not fun!”. (Which is, of course, why we’ll never make for good slogan-makers.) Because, like Gambit, we see our very serious work for what it is—just another opportunity for some very serious play. And so it naturally follows that we see our very serious play as just another opportunity for some very serious work.
One learns many things at The Big-Brained Superheroes Club that one might find nearly impossible to learn anywhere else. For instance, did you know that a shiny, hot pink foil wig is worth less than $5 because it’s made out of a lowly synthetic material instead of being made out of real hair? You just try finding that bit of information in your economic textbooks.
Big-Brained Superheroes, on the other hand, have something better than textbooks. We have the Big-Brained Superheroes Club store.
The Big-Brained Superheroes Club store and bank combination is a mechanism we’ve adopted to help us rapidly reward Club members for using their superpowers. Our BBSC bank includes singles, quarters (which are literally singles cut into quarter pieces), fives, and tens. (We haven’t printed out any benjamins or base-twelve-specific bills. Yet.) Our store includes toys, games, books, etc that have been generously donated by various community-minded folks (and we’re always looking for more!). The evolution of the store and bank combination is something we’ll cover in an Origins post at some point, but here’s the structure of the thing so far:
At the beginning of each Club meeting, all the Big-Brained Superheroes get together and collectively price out several of the most recently donated items for the store. Our pricing model is evolving, but as of now, it’s based on some ambiguous combination of diplomatic consensus and the very visible hand of the meeting moderator. After the pricing and other meeting opening ceremonies are complete, the Big-Brained Superheroes collect their bank accounts (pocket folders containing all the Big-Brained Superhero Bucks they’ve saved so far) and get to work earning more and more and more BBS Bucks. Then, at the end of the day, the BBSes decide how much they’re going to spend at the store and how much they’re going to save in the bank for (currently) 10% interest (though we’re thinking of moving to a Wheel of Interest that ranges from 6-12% just to keep the math interesting). Then, they tally their savings and spendings on the fronts of their bank accounts and put them back in the bank.
Some intriguing observations we’ve made during this process:
Here, 99% Invisible eloquently explains how, if you want to create change, you should first begin with a name.
The Big-Brained Superheroes Club also embraces this philosophy, which is why we place a high priority on calling out our superpowers by name at every opportunity. For example, in our club meetings, the phrase “good work” takes a back seat to “excellent use of your Persistence superpower”. Instead of “that’s beautiful”, we might prefer “way to exercise your Creativity superpower”.
The Big-Brained Superheroes’ Handbook continues with…
Rule #2: Humans are unruly and, therefore, cannot be ruled. (courtesy of those unruly Avengers … yet again) This rule is great for two reasons: 1. It’s a lot more powerful than it may seem at first glance (like us!). 2. Rules about unruly lack of rulability rule!
On a micro scale, unruliness can (and often does) cause great consternation and discord. But on a macro scale, unruliness can (and often does) lead to great originality and inventiveness. The upshot of rule #2 is fairly straightforward: Let’s focus our superpowers on trying to minimize the micro costs of unruliness while maximizing the macro benefits of unruliness. After all, our Respect, Kindness, and Willpower superpowers wouldn’t get us very far without our Empowerment, Sense of Adventure, and Critical Thinking superpowers to go along with them. The Big-Brained Superheroes Club has adopted some tactics to help us out in this process, and we’ll discuss those further at a later time. But for now, let’s focus on the most important point here…
Big-Brained Superheroes actively avoid the control tactics of fear and domination. Supervillains are better at those anyway.
One thing we learn as Big-Brained Superheroes is that there are a lot of “Part _ of X"s in our lives. That’s because knowing the value of "X” means we’re done. We’ve solved the problem. The end. But when it comes to living and learning and living and learning and living and learning and…a Big-Brained Superhero’s work is never done. And that’s just the way we like it.
So, with that in mind, and with this school year’s first Club meeting coming up on October 1st, let’s prepare a bit by reviewing/revising at least some of the never ending Big-Brained Superheroes’ Handbook:
Rule #1: With great power comes great responsibility. (you may have heard that one somewhere before) As Big-Brained Superheroes, we try to be constantly aware of our effect on the world and to expect at least as much from ourselves as we do from others. This is never more true than when working with our younger BBSC members.
Rule #1 manifests in several ways: First, when we’re looking for a behavior from someone else, we should first check ourselves to verify that we are modeling that desired behavior. And the corollary to this is that when we’re looking to change a behavior in someone else, we should first make sure we’re not modeling that very behavior. An example: If we don’t want our young Big-Brained Superheroes to yell at each other, we should avoid yelling at them. Instead, let’s try to, first, use our Willpower to restrain our own impulses, and then, use our Empathy, Respect, and Creativity to find other ways to conduct ourselves and others.
Some options for managing un-Big-Brained Superhero-like behaviors:
Another manifestation of Rule #1 is that we Big-Brained Superheroes must, at all times, be aware of the language we’re using. Along those lines, The Big-Brained Superheroes Club has taken the drastic step of semi-banning certain words: smart/stupid and easy/hard. Not only have we found these words to have little meaning in the context of a BBSC meeting, they’re often used as weapons, which inevitably do more harm than good.
Some methods for avoiding these semi-banned words:
In short, our dictionary of superpowers is intended to bring some more precision into our language and, as a result, into our Club’s value system. A Big-Brained Superhero’s goal is to Always Be Superpowering. Because we’re control freaks, we focus on process (which is more in our control) rather than product (which is less in our control). And being as precise as possible in our language enables us to be as precise as possible in our actions (this point is discussed nicely here). Or, to continue the analogy with Captain America’s shield, we should think of our superpowers as discernibly discrete tools that get stronger and stronger the more we use and refine them.
To be continued…
Here's a good way to exercise our Empowerment superpower:
Think about the things that are important to you. Perhaps you care about creativity, family relationships, your career, or having a sense of humour. Pick two or three of these values and write a few sentences about why they are important to you. You have fifteen minutes. It could change your life.
This simple writing exercise may not seem like anything ground-breaking, but its effects speak for themselves. In a university physics class, Akira Miyake from the University of Colorado used it to close the gap between male and female performance. In the university’s physics course, men typically do better than women but Miyake’s study shows that this has nothing to do with innate ability. With nothing but his fifteen-minute exercise, performed twice at the beginning of the year, he virtually abolished the gender divide and allowed the female physicists to challenge their male peers.
The exercise is designed to affirm a person’s values, boosting their sense of self-worth and integrity, and reinforcing their belief in themselves. For people who suffer from negative stereotypes, this can make all the difference between success and failure.
Closing the achievement gap a few sentences at a time!
Newton’s 3 laws, explained with a bicycle.
Perhaps we’ll employ this video next time we engage in our water bottle rocket experiment. Or maybe we’ll just go ahead and develop vinegar and baking soda-powered bicycles. The transportation of the future!
So, we’ve documented at least some of the story behind the “superheroes” part of The Big-Brained Superheroes Club, but what’s with all this “big-brained” stuff? Well, the answer isn’t as obvious as you might think…
We here at The Big-Brained Superheroes Club believe in science. And as of now, science says teach kids about their brains:
“If we gave students a growth mindset, if we taught them how to think about their intelligence, would that benefit their grades?” Dweck wondered.
So, about 100 seventh graders, all doing poorly in math, were randomly assigned to workshops on good study skills. One workshop gave lessons on how to study well. The other taught about the expanding nature of intelligence and the brain.
The students in the latter group “learned that the brain actually forms new connections every time you learn something new, and that over time, this makes you smarter.”
Basically, the students were given a mini-neuroscience course on how the brain works. By the end of the semester, the group of kids who had been taught that the brain can grow smarter, had significantly better math grades than the other group.
“When they studied, they thought about those neurons forming new connections,” Dweck says. “When they worked hard in school, they actually visualized how their brain was growing.”
Dweck says this new mindset changed the kids’ attitude toward learning and their willingness to put forth effort. Duke University psychologist, Steven Asher, agrees. Teaching children that they’re in charge of their own intellectual growth motivates a child to work hard, he says.
“If you think about a child who’s coping with an especially challenging task, I don’t think there’s anything better in the world than that child hearing from a parent or from a teacher the words, ‘You’ll get there.’ And that, I think, is the spirit of what this is about."
OK. Maybe the answer was obvious. But the point is that we here at The Big-Brained Superheroes Club aren’t just using our big brains…we’re using our big brains to learn about, visualize, and embiggen our big brains. We’re very meta that way.
“You are looking a visual reconstruction (from array-tomography data) of synapses in the mouse somatosensory cortex, the part of the cerebral cortex that is responsive to sensation. Neurons are depicted in green; multicolored dots represent separate synapses.”
Until Professor X’s Cerebro patent expires, we’re forced to resort to more conventional methods of finding Big-Brained Superheroes to help us out during this upcoming school year.
If you have the means, we hope you will Facebook Favorite/twitterify/share via carrier pigeon our VolunteerMatch and Idealist Big-Brained Superhero Mentors Wanted ads! Or, you can just send potential parties of interest to this very blog post…
Big-Brained Superhero Mentors Wanted
At Yesler Community Center, The Big-Brained Superheroes Club, in partnership with RecTech, is working to teach, learn, and hone superhero skills throughout the school year. Your mission is to help kids ages 5-15 improve their academic abilities while developing a language for and concrete awareness of some of their superpowers (aka “soft skills”), such as Leadership, Teamwork, Creativity, and Critical Thinking.
Your immeasurable moxie and big brain are needed at official Club meetings on Mondays and Wednesdays from 4pm to 6pm, starting October 1st at Yesler Community Center. But, if you want to inject your own superhero talents into Club development, we can use your help now!
Requirements:
Humor
Enthusiasm
Responsibility
Originality
Effectiveness
Smarts in language/art/math/science/etc…
+ A do-goody two-shoes attitude perched atop a pile of perspicacity
Big-Brained Superhero Mentor Oath: “Big brains don’t think small. I’m prepared to give these kids my all!”
Admittance to The Big-Brained Superhero Club mentorship program is competitive. Send whatever displays of skill and merit that you deem appropriate, along with your time commitment and schedule availabilities, to: bbs@bigbrainedsuperheroes.org. Or just let us know if you have any questions.
To learn more about The Big-Brained Superheroes Club, visit our website and blog at: www.bigbrainedsuperheroes.org.
If you’ve seen the recent Avengers movie, you have some idea of how The Big-Brained Superheroes Club got started. First, recollect just a few of the challenges that Nick Fury faced when trying to get his band of brainy heroes to trade contretemps for cooperation. Now, add to those recollections a few unconvincing lectures by a crackly voiced, brown-haired girl about how “we’re all in this together.” Finally, toss in a considerable number of math worksheets, some reading exercises, and a bit of homemade play dough, and you have the essence of our weekly after school homework help sessions.
OK, maybe that’s hyperbole. But it’s an analogy based in today’s pop culture…What did you expect? A Lord of the Flies Survivor reference? We’re better than that.
If you’re familiar with Who we are, then you know that one of the top priorities for our after school program is “fostering a collegial atmosphere,” and you know the reason we feel that’s important is that stress has been shown to inhibit learning, and there’s a lot of stress involved in interpersonal conflict, etcetera, etcetera, whatever, just re-watch The Avengers and you’ll get the idea. "That’s great,“ you say, "but what does all that have to do with superheroes? And superpowers—what’s with those?”. Well, just unclench for a second, exercise your Sense of Adventure and Persistence superpowers, and we’ll get there.
Why Superheroes?
Because superheroes have superpowers.
OK, then. Why Superpowers?
Easy. Superpowers are manifestly cool.
A couple of us were sitting in the movie theater watching (SPOILER ALERT!) the recent Avengers movie wondering what made Captain America cool. Was it his spangly outfit? Was it his snazzy shield? Not really. Not to us. What made Captain America cool to us was when, at the end of the movie, he used his Leadership and Teamwork superpowers to inspire the Avengers to make optimal use of their own individual superpowers. To that end, he gave general suggestions rather than specific orders. And he modeled rather than simply dictated the behaviors that he wanted to see. That’s what made him cool. Captain America’s shield and spangly outfit were simply technologies with which he exercised his Leadership and Teamwork superpowers. Or, at least, that’s what we saw.
But beyond the coolness factor, the superpowers metaphor serves a valuable function. Like other metaphors, It helps us see the otherwise unseen. If we flip the standard comic book concept of superpowers upside down and abnormalize the “normal”, we can more easily become aware of, clearly define, and maybe eventually taxonomize the behaviors that we otherwise take for granted on a daily basis. (Shout-out to all the sci-fi nerds rolling their eyes that we’re like a textbook with arms right now…yes, we know you know this, but you’re special.) If our Leadership and Teamwork superpowers start to become as apparent to us as shields and spangly outfits, then we are more likely to pick them up and use them in our most stressful moments. And, at the end of the day, isn’t that what education is about? Giving us the power to defeat supervillains?
UPDATE: Check out the PREQUEL of this origin story HERE: http://www.bigbrainedsuperheroes.org/post/41290034499/what-the-a-why-we-see-stem-as-a-path-to-failure
