2_2_9.pdf. In Defense of Your "Lazy" Child | Always Learning. I’ve been a tutor for 40 years, and I’ve never encountered a lazy student. Scratch the surface of laziness and underneath you’ll find fear, confusion, frustration, lack of knowledge, lack of skills, anger, sadness… And, often, just plain exhaustion. Willpower is a limited resource, and the demands of the school day can drain a student of her ability to attend and persevere. Arriving at the psychology center, participants in a study were enveloped in the luscious aroma from a huge platter of freshly-baked chocolate-chip cookies.
The lucky one-out-of-two college students randomly assigned to the Cookie-Eating Group were instructed to help themselves, but Please don’t eat any of the radishes… Because that heaping bowl of bitter-tasting veggies at the other end of the table was reserved for the less fortunate other half of the participants. Students were left alone in the room, responsible for controlling their behavior. But the Radish Eaters persisted for an average of only eight minutes. Why? Frequent Tests Can Enhance College Learning, Study Finds. The New York Times: Grading college students on quizzes given at the beginning of every class, rather than on midterms or a final exam, increases both attendance and overall performance, scientists reported Wednesday.
The findings — from an experiment in which 901 students in a popular introduction to psychology course at the took their laptops to class and were quizzed online — demonstrate that the computers can act as an aid to teaching, not just a distraction. Moreover, the study is the latest to show how tests can be used to enhance learning as well as measure it. The report, appearing in the journal PLoS One, found that this “testing effect” was particularly strong in students from lower-income households. Psychologists have known for almost a century that altering the timing of tests can affect performance. “This study is important because it introduces a new method to implement frequent quizzing with feedback in large classrooms, which can be difficult to do,” said Jeffrey D. How 21st Century Thinking Is Just Different. How 21st Century Thinking Is Just Different by Terry Heick This content is proudly sponsored by The Institute for the Habits of Mind, promoting the development of personal thinking habits in 21st century learners.
In an era dominated by constant information and the desire to be social, should the tone of thinking for students be different? After all, this is the world of Google. As a result, the tone of thinking can end up uncertain or whimsical, timid or arrogant, sycophant or idolizing–and so, devoid of connections and interdependence.
The nature of social media rests on identity as much as anything else—forcing subjectivity on everything through likes, retweets, shares, and pins. But this takes new habits. Information Abundance There is more information available to any student with a smartphone than an entire empire would have had access to three thousand years ago. New contexts—digital environments that function as humanity-in-your-pocket—demand new approaches and new habits. Persisting. History Detected - May/June 2013. Give kids original source material, teach them how to weigh evidence and defend their conclusions, and they'll shine in class—and as citizens.
In the 1986 comedy Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Ben Stein famously plays a high school teacher who drones on about the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act while his students slump at their desks in a collective stupor. For many kids, that's history: an endless catalog of disconnected dates and names, passed down like scripture from the state textbook, seldom questioned and quickly forgotten. Now take a seat inside Will Colglazier's classroom at Aragon High School in San Mateo. The student population here is fairly typical for the Bay Area: about 30 percent Latino, 30 percent Asian and 40 percent white. Tapping on his laptop, Colglazier shows the class striking black-and-white images of the choking storms that consumed the Plains states in the 1930s. Colglazier builds his thought-provoking classes using an online tool called Reading Like a Historian. Beware of Stephen J. Gould. Followup to: Natural Selection's Speed Limit and Complexity Bound If you've read anything Stephen J.
Gould has ever said about evolutionary biology, I have some bad news for you. In the field of evolutionary biology at large, Gould's reputation is mud. Not because he was wrong. Many honest scientists have made honest mistakes. What Gould did was much worse, involving deliberate misrepresentation of science. In his 1996 book Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin, Stephen J.
What romantics, ha ha, those silly evolutionary biologists, believing in progress! There's just one problem: It's extremely unlikely that any modern evolutionary theorist, however much a romantic, would believe that evolution was accumulating complexity. There was once a time when many evolutionary biologists had a romantic conception of progress, evolution climbing ever-higher mountains of complexity, dinosaur to dog to man.
The upshot, as George Williams wrote: Why did Gould behave thus? Bill Gates’ $100 million database to track students. Text smaller Text bigger By Michael F. Haverluck Over the past 18 months, a massive $100 million public-school database spearheaded by the $36.4 billion-strong Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has been in the making that freely shares student information with private companies. The system has been in operation for several months and already contains millions of K-12 students’ personal identification ‒ ranging from name, address, Social Security number, attendance, test scores, homework completion, career goals, learning disabilities, and even hobbies and attitudes about school. Claiming that the national database will enhance education, the main funder of the project, the Gates Foundation, entered the joint venture with the Carnegie Corporation of New York and school officials from a number of states.
School officials and private companies doing business with districts might have plenty to be happy about with this information-sharing system, but ParentalRights.org President Michael P. Proof: Bill Gates Has No Idea about Schools–or Children | Diane Ravitch. Why the United States Is Destroying Its Education System -... Why the United States Is Destroying Its Education System Posted on Apr 11, 2011 By Chris Hedges A nation that destroys its systems of education, degrades its public information, guts its public libraries and turns its airwaves into vehicles for cheap, mindless amusement becomes deaf, dumb and blind.
It prizes test scores above critical thinking and literacy. It celebrates rote vocational training and the singular, amoral skill of making money. It churns out stunted human products, lacking the capacity and vocabulary to challenge the assumptions and structures of the corporate state. Teachers, their unions under attack, are becoming as replaceable as minimum-wage employees at Burger King. Passing bubble tests celebrates and rewards a peculiar form of analytical intelligence. Teachers, under assault from every direction, are fleeing the profession. Get truth delivered to your inbox every week.
Previous item: The End of Shutdowns Next item: Demanding the Impossible New and Improved Comments. Poor Students Struggle as Class Plays a Greater Role in Success. This column will change your life: has Pelmanism's time come at last? Illustration: Adam Howling In December 1917, an advertisement appeared in Nash's Pall Mall Magazine, posing a question that, nearly a century on, makes no sense: "Do you Pelmanize? " It wouldn't have baffled the magazine's readers, though: by 1917, thanks to hundreds of similar ads, the mind-training system of Pelmanism was big business in Britain; the Pelman Institute boasted addresses in India, Australia and the US.
Suffering from "brain fag", "indefiniteness" or "want of energy"? Pelmanism, delivered by correspondence course, promised to help. Its origins were murky, but the man behind the ads, William Ennever, knew how to build a brand. He was soon claiming endorsements from Robert Baden-Powell, Herbert Asquith and Baroness Orczy. "If it were within my power," wrote one George Henry in 1718, "I would so order it that every... discharged soldier [receive] a free enrollment for a course of Pelmanism. " Which is, I suspect, why Pelmanism is forgotten now. Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky and his Revolutionary Theory of Biosphere and Noosphere.
Irina Trubetskova Department of Natural Resources University of New Hampshire, irina@cisunix.unh.edu The originator of the modern theory of the Biosphere (Grinevald, 1998, p. 21)... One of the greatest thinkers of history and philosophy of science (Levit, 2001, p. 9)... A world-class scientist and writer (Margulis et al., 1998, p. 18)... ... "Just as all educated westerners have heard of Albert Einstein, Gregor Mendel, and Charles Darwin, so all educated Russians know of Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky (1863-1945). This list could be continued with such additions named in his honor as a Moscow Metro station, an avenue in Kiev, a railroad station in central Russia, peaks in Siberia and on the Kurile Islands, an Institute of Geochemistry and Analytical Chemistry of Russian Academy of Sciences, a Biosphere museum (Russian Academy of Sciences, St.
Why is such a great tribute and unprecedented attention given to just one person, even though he is an extraordinary talented scientist? Welcome to YouandYourChildsHealth.org. By Susan R. Johnson MD, FAAP #1 Question: If I am understanding what you wrote in Part I, children that are pre-school age or in kindergarten should not be pushed to write, read or spell because it might create learningdisabilities in the future?
Answer: Yes, this is true. Most young children, less than 7 years of age, have not finished developing their neurological pathways for writing, reading and spelling. Next, in order to read with comprehension and spell, children need to have developed their right brain for visual recognition of small words (ex. if, the, is, are, were, at etc.) and their left brain for phonetics, the ability to match a letter or letters to particular sounds. Now if young children especially 4, 5 and 6 years of age are pushed to read or spell, they can only do this activity by using their right brain since the left brain and bilateral integration of their cerebral hemispheres have not fully developed.
Another area of difficulty is writing. Welcome to YouandYourChildsHealth.org. TV and Our Children’s Minds by Susan R. Johnson, MD, FAAP May 1, 1999, 2007 (revised) TV rots the senses in the head! It kills the imagination dead! It clogs and clutters up the mind! It makes a child so dull and blind. An excerpt from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl, 1964 As a mother and a pediatrician who completed both a three-year residency in Pediatrics and a three-year subspecialty fellowship in Behavioral and Developmental Pediatrics, I started to wonder: “What are we doing to our children’s growth and learning potential by allowing them to watch television and videos as well as spend endless hours playing computer games?”
As a pediatrician, I had always discouraged television viewing, because of the often violent nature of its content (especially cartoons) and because of all the commercials aimed at children. At age 3-1/2 years, our son went on a plane trip to visit his cousins near Boston, and on the plane was shown the movie Mission Impossible. Welcome to YouandYourChildsHealth.org. There is a widely held belief that if we start teaching children to write, read, and spell in preschool and kindergarten, they will become better writers, readers, and spellers by the time they reach the first and second grades. This, however, is not what I have seen clinically. The truth is that children should be only taught to write, read, and spell when their neurological pathways for writing, reading, and spelling have fully formed. There are many neuropsychologists, developmental specialists, occupational therapists, and teachers who are concerned that our current trend in this country of pushing "academics" in preschool and kindergarten will result in even greater increases in the number of children, particularly boys, diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorders, conduct disorders, as well as challenges in visual and auditory processing.
First, children need to develop a strong sense of balance, both when their bodies are moving and when their bodies are still. Disrupting learning II – Day of reckoning. Internet – both as a stack of technologies and as the vector of a sharing culture – brings us credible alternatives to classroom-based education in schools and universities. Most of them involve video lectures, with clear advantages: the pause button, the rearranging of content in 6-20 minutes packets, and the ability to attend from anywhere, at any time.
Furthermore, the locus of learning is not so much the lecture, as the peer-to-peer interaction among students, through forums wikis, Twitter lists, Facebook groups et cetera. All of this is hardly news: I have discussed it before, and even test-driven the model. The real news (at least for me) is that the disruption of learning happened in one year instead of ten. In August I signed up for a course in Social Network Analysis offered by Coursera, a social enterprise founded by two Stanford computer science professors that partners up with universities to offer free courses in just about any subject. Not everything is perfect. » Napster, Udacity, and the Academy Clay Shirky. Fifteen years ago, a research group called The Fraunhofer Institute announced a new digital format for compressing movie files.
This wasn’t a terribly momentous invention, but it did have one interesting side effect: Fraunhofer also had to figure out how to compress the soundtrack. The result was the Motion Picture Experts Group Format 1, Audio Layer III, a format you know and love, though only by its acronym, MP3. The recording industry concluded this new audio format would be no threat, because quality mattered most. Who would listen to an MP3 when they could buy a better-sounding CD at the record store? Then Napster launched, and quickly became the fastest-growing piece of software in history. The industry sued Napster and won, and it collapsed even more suddenly than it had arisen. If Napster had only been about free access, control of legal distribution of music would then have returned the record labels. How did the recording industry win the battle but lose the war? Online Courses and the Future of Higher Education.
Online courses began around 1990 with the growth of more widespread access to the Internet. They spread rapidly in the United States during the last half of the 1990’s buoyed by the dot-com boom, and fell sharply after that bubble burst. During this early period, online courses typically charged fees. Some of the courses catered to individuals who wanted to improve their job prospects, others were meant solely for intellectual enjoyment, while some could be used to obtain college degrees.
For-profit schools with physical facilities, such as DeVry University and the University of Phoenix, were often sponsors of online courses, although a few of these courses were sponsored by nonprofit universities. What is new about the MOOCs (which stands for “massive open online courses”) is not the use of the Internet to instruct in particular subjects, but that they are free, and they often are sponsored by some of the very best universities, such as MIT, Harvard, and Stanford.
MOOCs—Implications for Higher Education. The Case Against Grades. Project Based Instruction in STEM Education. Diane Ravitch's blog. This is your brain on Jane Austen, and researchers at Stanford are taking notes. Ordo Amoris: Norms and Nobility Prologue IV: I Am, I Can, I Ought, I Will. Intro to Inquiry Learning | YouthLearn. Intro Curriculum Update « Existential Type. Learning and thinking - World History & Geography. The 10,000 Hour Elite Excellence Dilemma. The Theory of Change. Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work (9780143117469): Matthew B. Crawford. Udacity in partnership with Pearson VUE announces testing centers. The Stanford Education Experiment Could Change Higher Learning Forever | Wired Science. The Project Gutenberg eBook of Talks To Teachers, by William James. No Student Left Untested by Diane Ravitch. Our Universities: Why Are They Failing? by Anthony Grafton. The Great Ideas.
Research on the Teaching of Math. Achievement-vs-development. FreeRangeKids. 21 Things That Will Be Obsolete by 2020. D.Waring interviews c.Levison on CM. About SEDL. Miss Mason on Mr. Rooper. Mr. Rooper on Mr. Froebel. Audios of IEWs A.Pudewa.