Medina, John. Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School. Seattle, WA: Pear Press, 2014.

Chapter 2 of Brain Rules focused on exercise. This chapter addresses the question: “Is there a relationship between exercise and mental alertness?” The chapter goes on to explain that not only is exercise related to mental alertness, it is essential to cognitive skills. The chapter goes on to address issues of  aging and mental alertness through several questions. Medina provides simple but effective examples to present his points. In this chapter he contrast the mental alertness of Jim to the mental alertness of a famous architect. What Medina noticed was that the architect was more alert (clarity and wit) than Jim. He goes on to say, “one of the greatest predictors of successful aging, they found, is the presence or absence of a sedentary lifestyle.” There is a correlation between an active lifestyle and successful aging. The rest of the chapter uses the examples of Jim and Frank to discuss the importance of exercise to brain health. Medina elaborates on how exercise improves a variety of abilities. He also presented that exercise can even improve mental abilities in couch potatoes. About 30 minutes a day of exercise can have a significant impact. Exercise lowers the risk of dementia and Alzheimer’s. Physical activity is also a part of successful academic performance for kids.

I was shocked by how much energy the brain consumes. According to Medina, “The brain gobbles up 20 percent of the body’s energy, even though it’s only about 2 percent of the body’s weight” (27). With this much energy consumption, I can see why exercising, which increases oxygen and blood flow in the body, is connected to mental health. The anecdote about McAdam’s raising the road helped me to visualize how exercise helps to increase blood vessels and thus improve the brain. The examples that Medina provides are clear cut and easy to visualize. Even though he is addressing a topic as complex as the brain, the information presented is very accessible.


Thoughts: The information in this chapter provides a strong argument against the current state of public education. Many schools have cut or limited physical activity during the school day in order to provide more time for instruction and text prep. If the children are not getting adequate physical activity at home, it is possible that they may go through the week with little to no exercise at all. If physical activity has a proven connection to mental alertness, it would make sense of physical activity to be a core part of instruction rather than an afterthought.

Selfe, Cynthia L. And Richard J. Selfe, Jr. “The Politics of the Interface: Power and Its Exercise in Electronic Contact Zones.” College Composition and Communication, 45.4 (December 1994): 480-504. Print.

This article from Selfe and Selfe hit home for me as I have often had concerns about being a gatekeeper or boarder guard. The authors argue that English instructors who use computers can be unknowingly involved in “contributing to a larger cultural system of differential power that has resulted in the systematic domination and marginalization of certain groups of students including among them: women, non-whites, and individuals who speak languages other than English” (481). The article begins with an anecdote racism at the Mexican border. The authors present computers and interfaces as a border zone with “the effects of domination and colonialism” (487). The authors use the concepts of mapping and contact zones to present interfaces as educational spaces and then as maps of : capitalism and class privilege, discursive privilege, and rationalism and lagocentric privilege. Prior to this article, I never considered interfaces, themselves, to be political. The authors present interfaces as “cultural maps of computer systems” on which the “ideological, political, economic, educational—are mapped both implicit and explicitly” (485). The authors contend that English instructors who use computers have to identify these borders and to teach students about them. They provided several recommendations on how to accomplish this. The one that stood out to me was to be a critique and user:

"If we hope to get English composition teachers to recognize how our use of computers achieves both great good and great evil--often at the same time, as Joseph Weizenbaum points out--we have to educate them to be technology critics as well as technology users." (484)

I think this is important for students and instructors because we often use technology and have no idea “how” we use it. I think of how many of my students do now understand how Google works. They believe they type in a search world and the most relevant things pops up. When I have them research Google on Google, many of them find out more about Google’s algorithm and decide that they don’t really want to use Google for “important things.” Teaching the students to be critical of interfaces helps them to be conscious of the interfaces as contact zones and to recognize that these areas are not free from social, cultural, and political ideologies. Knowledge and experience in this area, as well as the development of a critical eye, can help students inside and outside of the classroom.

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