The challenges and opportunities of teaching online
Release Date: 09/30/2020
Conscious aging, redefining yourself and finding fulfillment as you age
Lessons in Lifespan Health
is an author, coach and teacher who leads a yoga class at the USC Leonard Davis School. He joined us to talk about his book, The Art of Conscious Aging and how to redefine yourself and find fulfillment as you age. Transcript I hear all the time, I used to do yoga, but now my body doesn't like it. Well, find a new yoga class. If you remember how it made you feel, then doing it in a new way, maybe a gentler class, maybe a hot yoga class that's in the dark, that's slow, where you hold the poses and no one's looking at you because you may be self-conscious, maybe that's the...
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Studying how the brain’s blood vessels affect cognitive health
Lessons in Lifespan Health
Dan Nation is a professor of gerontology and medicine at USC. His research focuses on vascular factors in the brain and how they affect memory decline and dementia in older adults. He joined us to talk about studying blood vessels in the brain to identify early signs of dementia and potential therapies to treat it. Transcript Speaker 1 (): The variability in your blood pressure day to day, month to month, year to year, and sometimes even beat to beat–the variability in your blood pressure is predictive of dementia risk. So higher levels of blood pressure variability are bad, even if you have...
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Deprescribing and medication management for older adults
Lessons in Lifespan Health
Michelle Keller is an assistant professor of gerontology and the Leonard and Sophie Davis Early Career Chair in Minority Aging at the USC Leonard Davis School. She spoke to us about her research focused on improving patient-clinician communication, medication management, and the identification of dementia in minority older adults. Here are highlights from our conversation. On polypharmacy “When it comes to older adults and medications, it's important to understand that while medications can be incredibly beneficial for treating various conditions, they can also present really unique risks in...
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Improving the health and well-being of family caregivers
Lessons in Lifespan Health
Francesca Falzarano is an assistant professor of gerontology at the USC Leonard Davis School. Her research is inspired by her personal experience as a caregiver to her parents and explores how to improve the mental health and well-being of family caregivers, including through the use of technology. On young caregivers “I think right now it's estimated that five and a half million individuals are under the age of 18 are caring for a parent or some family member with chronic illness, mental health issues, dementia-related illnesses, and other age-related impairments. So, this is something...
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Aging among Black Americans
Lessons in Lifespan Health
Lauren Brown is an assistant professor at the USC Leonard Davis School. Her research uses publicly available data to uncover the unique difficulties Black Americans face in maintaining physical and psychological well-being as they age. Her lab both challenges the methods used to study older Black adults and strives to increase diversity in data science research with the goal of increasing the visibility of Black and Brown people via data and storytelling. Quotes from the episode On the role of racism in biomedical and statistical sciences and disease prediction If you think about the...
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Using dance to ease Parkinson’s symptoms
Lessons in Lifespan Health
Patrick Corbin is an associate professor of practice at the USC Gloria Kaufman School and an internationally renowned dance artist whose career has spanned over 30 years and bridged the worlds of classical ballet, modern and contemporary dance. He recently spoke to us about his work, exploring the positive effects that dance can have on neurology. On movement and movement therapy Well, on a neurological level movement is cognition. Movement stimulates cognition. So that's sort of the sciencey part. The other part is that dance is a multifaceted, multilingual way of movement, and...
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The effects of exercise on the brain
Lessons in Lifespan Health
Connie Cortes is an assistant professor of gerontology at the USC Leonard Davis School. Her work straddles the fields of neuroscience and exercise medicine, and she recently spoke to us about her research seeking to understand what is behind the beneficial effects of exercise on the brain with the goal of developing what she calls “exercise in a pill” therapies for cognitive decline associated with aging and neurodegenerative diseases. On brain plasticity and brain aging Brain plasticity we define as the ability of the brain to adapt to new conditions. And this can be mean...
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Tips for healthy aging
Lessons in Lifespan Health
and instructional associate professor of gerontology at the USC Leonard Davis School, and a specialist in geriatric medicine, joins us for a conversation about healthy aging, including tips on how to keep the body and mind functioning for as long as possible. Quotes from this episode On the importance of setting small goals "People may have all the good intentions, but they might set up goals that are too ambitious and then when they don't reach that goal, they feel frustrated, and they quit… We have to let them understand that goals must be small…So, an apple a day. We have to eat the...
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Cellular balance across the lifespan
Lessons in Lifespan Health
Dion Dickman, associate professor of neuroscience and gerontology, joins George Shannon to discuss how the nervous system processes and stabilizes the transfer of information in healthy brains, aging brains and after injury or disease. Quotes from the episode: On synaptic plasticity: “Synapses are essential, fundamental units of nervous system function and plasticity is this remarkable ability to change. And throughout early development into maturation and even into old age, synapses just have this amazing resilience to change and adapt to different situations and injury disease,...
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A balancing act: homestasis under stress
Lessons in Lifespan Health
is a Distinguished Professor of gerontology, molecular and computational biology, and biochemistry and molecular medicine at USC. Over the course of his career, he has played a central role in defining the pathways and mechanisms by which the body is able to maintain balance under stress and in uncovering the role aging plays in disrupting this balancing act. He recently joined Professor George Shannon to discuss his research on how the body is able to maintain balance under stress and the implications it could have for preventing age-related disease and decline. Quotes from this...
info_outlineProfessor John Walsh, vice dean of education at the USC Leonard Davis School joins Professor George Shannon, holder of the Kevin Xu chair in Gerontology for a conversation on how teachers and students can make the most of online instruction and to discuss how our life experiences can help us meet this challenging moment in time, both in the classroom and outside of it.
Quotes from this episode:
John Walsh
On isolation
Many students are feeling isolated right now and it's obviously forced isolation and they just want to connect. The premed class I'm teaching right now, I have 50 students. And, and so here we are, two weeks into the semester and class ends at the hour 50 minute mark, and I'm having, 10 to 15 students stay afterwards just to hang out and, talk about anything. And they just want to feel connected and, that's a good thing because we got to help them through this.
On always learning
I always tell my students that I’ve never stopped being a student and that I always want to keep learning. And, so I will deliver a lecture, we'll get centered on a topic and philosophically, I know from my reading and from looking at websites or watching videos about how what we're discussing applies to furthering society or helping you in the workplace. But I love hearing the actual application from students where they're down, boots on the ground, and they've experienced this. And they may even say, ” those guidelines, or those principles are all good, however, in my experience…“ And, and then you put that in your back pocket… and then you use that in future lectures. I'm constantly learning and I tell the students, I don't know everything and I really want to learn from you.
On online classrooms:
Well, I think this is a game changer. It was forced down our throats with a pandemic, but this is a game changer. We, as a program have always been a leader at USC in terms of online education and we can't stop being a leader. We just got to keep up on it. These platforms do offer a level of interactivity that we weren't utilizing before.
On collaborative exams
I was just so amazed and so excited watching the active learning that went on during these collaborative exams. I know now that when we are back in session, // I'm going to be sitting there in the auditorium, I'm going to break people up into groups of six or seven, and they're going to do the collaborative exam right there in the auditorium, because it's, I think it's a really cool way to learn.
George Shannon
On his transition from elevator repairman to successful actor to USC professor
I was 55 years old. I didn't have an undergraduate degree. So I spent two years in undergrad getting my undergraduate degree because I had hundreds of units where they were scattered all over in different things that I had touched upon. And then I went into the master's program and did that in two years and was accepted into the PhD program. And so yeah, so that's a long winded way of saying there are, there are lots of things that you can do that come to an unexpectedly. I always say, if someone opens a door for you, don't slam it in their face, go walk in and see what's going on, because it might be an opportunity that can change your life in a very positive way as it did for me. I had four kids and a couple of wives and lots of bills and, and I survived all of that because I didn't turn my back on something that I had never thought of before.
If something presents a change or a mode that you're not expecting, it may be something that can lead you to something that's even more exciting that gives your life more meaning. People ask me if I'm thinking about retiring and I I'm astonished. Of course, I'm first of all, astonished that I'm 80 years old, but secondly, I'm further astonished that anyone would think that I would ever consider retiring as long as I have my faculties about me and I'm able to perform. Because life is an endless performance as long as it lasts.
On online classes
in some ways, from my perspective, I like Zoom because I have on the screen the 40 or 50 students, so I may have in class and I can pick them out and ask them specific questions instead of being in the auditorium where they're all trying to hide in the back of the room. And so I, I find there are some really some positives from this experience.