Alumni Profile: Neme Alperstein ’71

Meet the coach -- for fifth-grade website creators

"The Web is a window on the rest of the world," said Neme Schlesinger Alperstein '71. Deeply committed to integrating technology into her fifth-graders' curriculum, Alperstein coaches her students in creating dynamic, award-winning websites.

"It’s very nice to have a presence on the Web. The children love it," she acknowledged. But more importantly, creating these sites broadens their horizons, she said. "It expands their vision of where they can go, and opens possibilities for them."

A teacher in a program for the academically gifted and ThinkQuest coach at Public School 56, the Harry Eichler School, in Richmond Hill, Alperstein was named Teacher of the Year 2000 for Community School District 27. Her students won the ThinkQuest Junior 2000 Gold Award in the sports and health category for creating a website on Growing Up With Epilepsy; won the Silver Award in arts and literature for their website on copyrights, From Pokemon^® to Picasso, Art Rights and Wrongs; and won the Thinkquest Junior 1999 Platinum Award in the sports and health category for Yo, It's Time For Braces.

Personal issues and experiences motivate and guide students' choice of topics and site development, Alperstein said. And the sites just grow from there. For example, the site on epilepsy was chosen by a little girl who has epilepsy and wanted her classmates and others to understand what that means. She kept a diary of her condition and asked her doctor at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital to check in at the site to answer questions.

Similarly, one of the students who did the braces site was getting braces. "When she went out on the Web to learn more about it, she found nothing for children by children out there," said Alperstein. Her student site developers e-mailed several orthodontists, who forwarded the children's questions and requests for information to orthodontists across the country through their professional organization. "We went national," said Alperstein. "What started as a cute little site became huge!"

Each website Alperstein’s students create represents months of research. "Nobody anticipates the enormity of the project; it's a long process that goes on for months," she said. Students who choose to do ThinkQuest Junior websites officially sign on in September, and they have to hit the ground running. "Once you sign on, you are committed," she said. "Students spend an awful lot of time both at home and at school reading books and doing advanced research for their projects." The children's website development projects are integrated into the curriculum, which incorporates state learning standards and traditional academic rigors.

Alperstein has nine computers in a classroom of 32 kids whom she describes as "very technology-savvy." Most of them are familiar with word processing capabilities such as changing font size, style and color, and consequently understand how to explore toolbars to do step-by-step formatting. Alperstein also assigns pairs of children to be in charge of specific software programs. "Very often, if I don't know how to do something, the best directive is 'make it work, '" she said. "And they do." Some kids don't even ask for help, she adds. "They say, 'Leave me alone, I'll just play with it.'" Her students have to create files that can be viewed in both Internet browsers, but "kids don't have the same difficulty in learning this as adults do," Alperstein said, laughing.

In mid-March, Alperstein was busy uploading files for the next round of ThinkQuest Junior entries, and she and her students' parents spent many evenings proofreading and checking links on the new websites. "It's a bit frantic, but I think we'll somehow manage (reminiscent of those 'all-nighters' cramming before deadlines)," she wrote at the time. They did, because the sites are now up and running. They are Urban Development For U; Medieval Mayhem; Touring With The Stars in A Royal Production; and Raptors in the City: The Peregrine Falcon, A Conservation Success Story.

Alperstein completed a dual major in political science and in music at Harpur. "Harpur had a very fine faculty," she said. She remembers Professor Jean Casadesus as a piano teacher and John Gardner as a literature teacher, and also Jock Bowen and Dr. Hagopian of English literature. She studied French and spent a year abroad in Nice, where she attended a university with French students and became fluent in French. "I have many fond memories of Harpur (which we called it then) and feel I received a superb education, " she wrote. "Binghamton University still is a super school academically."

Faculty Profile: Linda Spear, distinguished professor of psychology and chair, Psychology Department.

Restructuring in adolescent brains linked to behavior

Many bewildered parents ruefully regard adolescence as a variation on Invasion of the Body Snatchers. A combination of drastic mood shifts with a seemingly gleeful increase in risk taking and an apparent inability (unwillingness?) to reason, all underscored by aggressive defiance in proclaiming independence -- this is how many of them see their teenagers' behavior.

Linda Spear, distinguished professor of psychology and chair of the Psychology Department, sees it differently. "During adolescence you're dealing with an individual whose brain is changing very rapidly," she said. "It's amazing teenagers are as stable as they are, considering this. They really do display remarkable behavioral consistency."

Until recently, the behavioral changes that characterize adolescents have been attributed to increased levels of hormones. But Spear and others who are studying structural changes occurring in adolescent brains have found evidence to challenge that assumption. The fact is, teenagers' brains are not fully developed.

The brain's neural connections increase continuously throughout childhood, but during adolescence certain regions of the brain begin a process of pruning these and forming new connections. "Everything's being remodeled," said Spear. "In the adolescent brain, some connections are literally lost and new ones formed. This remodeling goes on continually throughout life, to some extent. But the magnitude is huge during adolescence, a change almost as great as the change that takes place in the brain of the fetus and young infant."

These alterations occur primarily in the pre-frontal cortex, accumbems, and amygdala -- regions sensitive to stressors related to drug-taking behaviors, said Spear. They're also related to risk taking, and they're activated by novelty-seeking stimuli. "Because of these brain alterations, adolescents' brain systems are seeking stimuli, and that's part of what makes them behave they way they do," she said. "A lot of things that used to make them happy no longer do. So they try new things that will be reinforcing to them and make them feel good."

This urge to seek new stimuli was evolutionarily advantageous for humans as a species. "A quick way for a species to become extinct is to inbreed," Spear explained. "Sexually mature offspring that stay with parents tend to inbreed. Fighting with parents drives them to wander away, preventing inbreeding."

Unfortunately, too many of today's teenagers respond to the urge to seek new stimuli by binge drinking and experimenting with drugs. This is the primary focus of Spear's research.

"We know from clinical studies that the younger you use alcohol and drugs, the more likely you are to be an alcoholic or drug abuser as an adult," said Spear. What isn't known is whether that correlation is causal or points to a predisposition that is present in both adolescents and adults. Neither is it known for certain what the long-term effects of binge drinking are on the brain.

"We need to do more work," said Spear. "If we find out that indeed exposure to alcohol during adolescence leads to alcoholism as an adult, we need to make parents and kids aware of that. A lot of parents today think it's okay for their kids to drink. But there may be a huge cost, and we need to understand what that is."

In the meanwhile, what can parents do? "I'm struck by how some degree of novelty seeking appears to be normative in adolescence," said Spear. "If that's the case, it may be very useful to provide adolescents with opportunities for potential reinforcements rather than to coddle and restrict them. Provide them with opportunities to stretch and find lots of new, stimulating things to do. Provide semi-safe outlets to do risk taking, such as wall climbing. Because if adults don't provide them, they'll find them on their own."