MRI scans of the brain physically show the link between poverty and academic achievement

This is fascinating. As Science Daily reported, a study published Monday from Washington University in St. Louis found that children living in poverty have “irregular brain development” in the frontal and temporal lobes, causing a whole host of problems like depression, stress and poor academic achievement. The hippocampus, an important memory center in the brain, is especially affected.

(Me, speaking to my biology-major boyfriend: “What is the hippocampus known for?” Him: “It’s the nation’s only accredited university for hippopotami.”)

A bit about myself

I’m a reporter, and right now I write about business and real estate for a Philadelphia news site. But I’m also really passionate about education, so I’ve started this blog as a side project.

It will feature news about education in the NJ/PA area and beyond, and a bit of reporting as well. I hope that this blog is useful, fun to read, and, well, educational.

I’m a proud product of the New Jersey public school system (and I’m still friends with a lot of my high school teachers.) While attending college in Chicago, I tutored for four years in public schools on the South Side. This experience was…well, I’ll be writing about it a lot. Let’s just say that I have a lot of opinions. But I hope that this blog will be more educational than polemical, or demagogic.

Speaking of words ending in -agog (or “logmagogs” – now that’s a neologism), an explanation of the blog title: it’s simply pedagogy + thingamagog, to suggest a certain free-ranging randomness in the topics I’ll be covering. While thinking about what to name my blog, I looked up whether the word for a teacher was ‘pedagog’ or ‘pedagogue,’ and came across this etymology of the word:

Greek paidagōgos: slave who looked after his master’s son

I’ll let that definition speak for itself.