Mon, 06 Sep 2010: Find your own way to learn
A NYT article on study habits
brought to our attention by Bob Ponterio, co-moderator of flteach, asks why study skills classes haven't caught on to what researchers have been showing for decades. The old saws and canards repeated ad nauseum will not be jettisoned b/c good study habits are seen as a moral issue, not a practical one. To question them is to be immoral.
Reading through this, I found a number of things I do for myself or do with my students that conform to the research findings. I guess I'm ahead of my times.
Mon, 06 Sep 2010: You done good
On one listserv polemics broke out several times over the adverbial use of "good". One time the phrase that elicited outrage was, "How are you?" "Good". "How's it going?", "How're ya doin'?", etc. all required the response "well" according to a large number of teachers.
Of course, I jumped in by going to the dictionary and finding "good" listed in an adverbial usage, which simply confirmed in the mind of the grammar mavens the reality of a liberal conspiracy to undermine authority in general and God in particular. After all, didn't languag liberals put "ain't" in Webster's Third International in 1963? I was working in a bookstore at the time, a John Birch Society bookstore, no less, and recall with relish the howls of outrage from our conservative customers (yes, there were liberals and Democrats in Goldwater's Arizona).
As I study the grammars of languages related to English, I note a similar slide into Socialistic Communism in grammar usage.
Mon, 06 Sep 2010: Where are our Rites of Passage?
This morning on npr I heard a piece which goes to the heart of my Basics category on this blog. It dealt with a society on an Indian reservation designed for girls entering puberty. It is called the Brave Heart Women's Society. The story is called Four Days, Nights: A Girls' Coming-of-Age Ceremony and is one in a series called The Hidden World of Girls. The Kitchen Sisters produced it.
The society is part of a specific culture, the Yankton Sioux, to use the English names, but is universal in the need for all cultures to have a way to bring girls into adulthood and support them. You can listen for yourself at
It almost brought tears to my eyes, not so much b/c these particular girls and this particular culture are in so much danger, danger from outside pressure, from self-destructive behaviors, and lots and lots of exploitation, but b/c their need is so fundamental to making us human.
I think I need to continue on my blog entry about what true conservatism is. This is it.
Mon, 06 Sep 2010: Meet you at the top....... sucker!
We talk about a safe environment for children in our classrooms. By safe, we mean emotionally safe as well as physically safe: safe from bullying, safe from assaults on their ego, safe from gratuitous put-downs, safe from insults to their family and background, etc.
OTOH, we insist on competition in the classroom, pitting one child against another, grading them on a scale from good to bad performance, comparing children, measuring how close or how far they come to meeting a standard set by some committe far away. I always think of that utterly stupid Zig Zigler slogan, "See you at the top!" Moron. The top, by definition in a competitive society, holds only a small number. In a non-competititive society, the top could conceivably be a plateau, a mesa, on which lots of people could fit. But the images projected by the supersalemen and hype-merchants clearly depict a pyramid. Maybe that's why they call them pyramid schemes.
Teachers who want to make all their children successful are praised for their humanity and then fired for not making their class, their school, their district and their state reach the top.
Sat, 04 Sep 2010: My Dickensian childhood
Some years back a very nice man posted frequently to a listserv I was on. He and I disagree greatly about how to teach languages and he often took the conservative view that people shouldn't be cry-babies and he just could not see why students wouldn't go home and do their studies.
In trying to paint a picture of homes where school work might not be the priority, I mentioned a few things in my childhood that interfered with a focus on school. I thought they were pretty mild but he replied that my childhood had been "Dickensian". From then on, I realized he had a white picket-fence view of the world, what we now call a Leave It To Beaver world view. Later, I recounted in some detail the things I had seen as a child, things I made clear were not at all unusual in the world I grew up in.
Before I recount these again,
Sat, 04 Sep 2010: The U.S. as a colonial society cont'd
This is a reply to a thread on the blog Fireside Roundup where education is discussed. A number of posts to the thread used a very broad perspective with which I agreed in principle felt required too much of most people to grasp. I guess that makes me one of those elitists.
This thread leaves me feeling torn. OTOH, if we are trying to reach a wider audience with the notion that discrepanies in educational attainment are due to socio-economic inequalities, we will lose them if we assume on their part the ability to make the connection between the low-performing schools in the poverty-stricken areas of their city and labor policies found in 18th century Brazil. It's just too much of a stretch.
OTOH, it is clear to me that these discrepancies do go back to the colonial foundations of our society. No one who had studied societies around the world would be surprised to find that a group of people, a caste, that had been held in slavery within living memory (my late father-in-law remembered his grandfather, who had been a slave until 1865), was still operating in the society at a disadvantage. No surprise there.
Sat, 04 Sep 2010: More wonderment
More wonderment.
Recently a teacher of Spanish posted to a listserv that she had a child with selective mutism in her class. One response was "now I have officially heard it all!"
Both elicited comments that were quite appropriate, most of them letting the teacher know in no uncertain terms that she needed the support and direction of qualified persons in setting up this child's education plan.
Fri, 03 Sep 2010: Attributions of characteristics and opinions
I just read a post from a fl teacher who uses a classroom reward. In saying so, she commented as an aside that she "knows" giving rewards is a big no-no but "we all work for something."
Two things about this:
One, she states that we all work for something as a way of validating the whole behavioral theory of learning. I am not sure people who say this sort of thing can understand the objection, that it is not to the idea....... sure, I disagree but have no problem with people who say, "As I understand human motivation......." or "The theory I follow says that........" Those are qualified statements, recognizing that others may disagree. But "we all work for something" is a way of saying it that brooks no disagreement. And I do disagree, strongly. I could probably find in five minutes with this person several things she does for which there is no explicity reward.
Two, the attribution to others of viewpoints that they may or may not share. In this case, the writer attributes to some general "they" the belief that giving out rewards in class is a no-no. In this instance, she may be right, i.e. there are any number of schools of thought that proffer evidence that rewards are counterproductive. However, her attribution of this opinion to "them" reminded me of how often I've seen on posts this sort of attribution.
One of the salient ones was when a stalwart of one of the listservs, a politically conservative person with whom I had had plenty of political battles on the list, made a comment when I reported in a thread that I was a strong supporter of the free enterprise system. It seemed that he was surprised that I would be. Why?
Thu, 02 Sep 2010: Some things to cover this long weekend
Lots of things to cover. This weekend I hope to post a lot of entries to the blog.
Daily activities and lesson plans - an overview of what I've done these first 4 weeks plus some particular lessons.
Personal language learning - mainly Norwegian.
African Diaspora - observations of possession
Politics - origin of intransigence
- authoritarianism from a teacher
- the attribution of characteristics & opinions
Wed, 01 Sep 2010: A list of definitions from a listserv
I think there have been a number of interesting points brought up in this so
far rather unwieldy discussion. I've tried to summarize as best I can.
Perhaps others can further clarify any points that they feel I haven't
captured correctly.
Pacing: