Mild Peril

I was reminded of something that happened at this weekend by a LiveJournal entry of a friend where he was basically made to feel very uncomfortable in a group situation. I found myself and Ryan in quite an uncomfortable situation just this last weekend.

I take my son to weekly music lessons and he enjoys it greatly. Or he did until this term. Last year we had an excellent teacher and learnt a great deal. However, this year we have a new teacher who is basically very poor indeed. I’ll go into details on this later, but basically a group of parents went to the offices to complain the previous week, hoping something would change.

Change it did, but I think for the worse. At the start of the lesson, the teacher said we should do some exercises to “wake the children up”. Ryan, having been up since 6am didn’t really need waking up, but anyway. The teacher said that we would do some Brain Gym exercises and immediately my alarm bells started ringing.

I had heard about Brain Gym before on an excellent website called Bad Science, written by Guardian journalist, Ben Goldacre, where it was described as “a vast empire of pseudoscience“. The teacher had the children do an exercise called “Brain Buttons”, best described by Ben :

Is there anything else I can do to make blood and oxygen get to my brain better? Yes, an exercise called “Brain Buttons”: “Make a ‘C’ shape with your thumb and forefinger and place on either side of the breast bone just below the collar bone. Gently rub for 20 or 30 seconds whilst placing your other hand over your navel. Change hands and repeat. This exercise stimulates the flow of oxygen carrying blood through the carotid arteries to the brain to awaken it and increase concentration and relaxation.” Why? “Brain buttons lie directly over and stimulate the carotid arteries.”

I felt very uncomfortable as Ryan and the other children were encouraged to “turn on their brain via the buttons”. Do I tell Ryan not to do the exercise directly, or help him attempt it? In the end, I simply offered him no help and he actually made no attempt to do it. However, I was quite annoyed that I was put in the situation where my child was made (or encouraged to make) to do some nonsense exercise without my consent. It was a music lesson! Looking round, I could see that some of the other parents were looking puzzled as well, whilst the rest were making an attempt to help their children. I think if one of the other parents had told their child not to do it, I would have done the same. I wish now that I had said something.

Anyway, we then settled down to another poor attempt at a music lesson. But that is another story.