Good Advice

O.K. after my last post I took some good advice from a comment a friend of mine posted. I gave up (mostly) on MSNBC and took up NPR. I have learned so much more from NPR than I ever did from cable news sources. Today, I was listening to the podcast while I did the dishes, so I was doubly productive! I was listening to this podcast, which was talking about Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee's Pulitzer prize winning book, The Emperor of all Maladies. The book is referred to as biography of cancer. I don't really think of myself as someone who is science minded, but cancer is such a prevalent problem in modern society that I think I should have at least a basic understanding of it. I was so impressed with Mukherjee's ability to translate descriptions of complex medical procedures and advances into layman's terms. The podcast is only about 30 minutes long, so if you have a few extra moment, I highly recommend it.

One thing that I found particularly interesting about the podcast was the advances in the way cancer is treated. That may sound simplistic and silly, but I didn't realize that only 20 year ago, a cancer patient was treated as a case, not a person. It has only been recently that doctors have started to treat cancer and all of the other symptoms that come with it. They have started providing psychological as well as medical treatment for cancer patients. They also talked about the slow realization (spanning almost 90 years) that a heavier dose of medication won't always fix the problem. They describe the kinds of procedures that were done to get rid of breast cancers. Doctors used to remove a woman's entire breast, many of the lymph nodes, and even tissue as far up as the underarm, all under the assumption that the more breast tissue that was gone, the less likely the cancer was to show back up. 


I was interested in the discussion about breast cancer because I have always wondered why the Susan G. Koman foundation is a separate organization from the American Cancer Society. I guess it seems silly to me to pull money away from all cancer research in order to focus it on a type of cancer that has had huge leaps forward in finding a cure and quelling the symptoms, while there are still cancers out there that doctors still have little idea as to how to cure them, let alone what causes them. Don't get me wrong, I am all for cancer awareness, I just don't think that we should focus on just one type. Based on a chart put out by the American Cancer Society, approximately 19% of cases of breast cancer were fatal, while something like brain cancer has nearly a 60% mortality rate. Brain cancer is something that was actually brought up by Dr. Mukherjee, saying that ideally, he wants to see advances in the medical field's ability to deal with brain cancer because it's cause is widely unknown. I know I am not a scientist, nor am I an expert an any fields relating to this topic, I just see something that doesn't quite add up. Unfortunately, the interview only covered the advances in breast cancer, and did not really address (in a way that I understood) the differences between breast cancer and all the other types, except to say that they have found the genes that can cause breast cancer so it is easier to trace in a family in order to prevent it.


Overall, I feel much more informed on the subject than I did before, and even if I didn't get everything I'd hoped out of it, I still learned a lot.

Young Teachers

Well, I had my learning moment very clearly today. I was sitting in a classroom, with my legs under a desk that only just fit over the top of them. I had two fourth grade girls explaining new words from other countries to me. Back to school I guess...

I have found that I really love doing volunteer work. As much as I want to say that I do it because I "love to help others," as the standard response would go, I do volunteer work selfishly. Is that even possible? I do volunteer work because I like to feel busy, I like to be productive, basically because it keeps my mind alert. I have met so many wonderful people and had so many exciting experiences through volunteer work that I can't say I do it for other people because I have gotten so much out of it for myself. Currently, I am leading a Girl Scout Troop of third and fourth grade girls with a friend of mine. We've been with these girls since the beginning of this school year, so at this point, we know them pretty well.

One of the badges that we have been working on is teaching them about world cultures other than their own. After my co-leader read them a story about paper cranes in Japan (which I learned is Japan's national sign for peace, thanks to another teacher today!) we let two girls talk about experiences they had had with cultures that were new to us. One girl talked about spending her summers in Egypt with a relative. After an interesting description of the turmoil that happened just recently in Egypt, she began to explain how frustrated she got when she was not allowed to walk on the grass, ever. I'm not sure how much of what she described were just rules that were set for her by her family and how much came from a cultural/environmental practice. She even went so far as to explain that while the people in Egypt were protesting, they all stayed on the pavement and off the grass. It is interesting to see how a child uses her experiences with what she sees on TV.  After her explanation of the culture, she taught us how to say "let's go," (YaLLah) "goodbye," (ma'a salama) and "thank you," (shokran). After she finished, another one of the girls talked about her father's family, who was raised (I think) in Algeria. She taught us a little bit of Arabic and some French. I wish I could describe what she talked about, but unfortunately I had to chastise some other girls for being rude and not listening. Ironic, that by scolding them I was then doing what they got in trouble for.

While going back and trying to remember all of the words that the girls taught me today, I realized that doing a Google search is how I get a great deal of my information. I'm not sure if this means that I should be thankful that I have that resource or if it means that I should be more careful, double checking my information with more educational sources. (AKA not Ask.com or Yahoo Answers) I'm even skeptical when I use Wikipedia. (even though I swear by it!) Not because I'm worried about getting incorrect information (I'm actually convinced that an encyclopedia that is edited by the public on a regular basis will ALWAYS be more up to date and correct than an old dusty encyclopedia on a library shelf.) but because I'm afraid that other people won't trust me as a reliable source if they find out that I use Wikipedia. I don't know, what are your thoughts on Wikipedia? I know my teachers always warned against using it, but I think that it is a fantastic jumping off point if you just need to know the basics about something. Along the same lines, what qualities do you look for in a person before you consider them to be a reliable source of information?