Teach a Kid to Argue - Figures of Speech Why would any sane parent teach his kids to talk back? Because, this father found, it actually increased family harmony. (First published in Disney’s Wondertime Magazine. The article was nominated for a 2007 National Magazine Award.) Those of you who don’t have perfect children will find this familiar: Just as I was withdrawing money in a bank lobby, my 5-year-old daughter chose to throw a temper tantrum, screaming and writhing on the floor while a couple of elderly ladies looked on in disgust. She blinked a couple of times and picked herself up off the floor, pouting but quiet. “What did you say to her?” I explained that “pathetic” was a term used in rhetoric, the ancient art of argument. Under my tutelage in the years that followed, Dorothy and her younger brother, George, became keenly, even alarmingly, persuasive. Why on earth would any parent want that? And let’s face it: Our culture has lost the ability to usefully disagree. “Mary won’t let me play with the car.” “Why should she?” 1.
25 Digital Tools For Better Tutoring Like other areas of education, tutoring has seen some radical changes in the past decade courtesy of new and increasingly innovative technologies. Students and their tutors can now interact at any time and from anywhere in the world, and tutors can create and share educational resources with their students in minutes using high-quality and often low-cost online tools. Learn more about some of the websites and resources that are helping to define the new face of tutoring by reading about a few of the best of these new tools that we’ve collected here. Skype Through Skype, tutors and students don’t even have to be in the same country to interact with one another. In addition to high-quality video chat, the site also makes it easy to share files and even conference in other students or tutors. Here you’ll find another tool that focuses on online tutoring.
Why Forgetting Is Key To Remembering Forgetting isn’t usually thought of in relation to learning, but as it turns out, it might play a role. Herman Ebbinghaus, a German experimental psychologist from the late 19th and early 20th century, was (seemingly) curious about the way people remembered. (And thus forgot.) What made our good man Herman unique though was in his method of study–or rather his focus group. Among other projects, Dr. Among Dr. He is also known for his ideas on the rate of forgetting, claiming that 90% of what is learned is forgotten by learners within 30 days–often within hours. The infographic below reviews some of his ideas–how we remember–and how quickly we forget. This is a cross-post from Online Colleges Related posts:
10th Grader Noa Gutow-Ellis: Testing Is Not Learning Standardized tests are the bane of my existence. Why? Mainly because they don’t show an accurate portrayal of students. Standardized testing came about during the Industrial Revolution when schools were flooded with students and the focus was not on innovative thinking, but rather on preparing students for the manufacturing workforce. Schools were established during the Industrial Revolution to get children out of harm’s way in factories. Standardized tests are a one shot deal. A Necessary Evil? While teachers and administrators often brush off standardized tests as a “necessary evil”, but it doesn’t have to be that way. There are other ways for students to learn more and show what they know. When it came time for the teacher to assess what we learned, he did not give us a traditional test. The real world judges you on the quality of your work, not your ability to regurgitate material. We’re in the 21st century. Let’s act like it. Image attribution flickr user rdecom
How To Cite A Tweet The MLA has acknowledged Twitter’s existence. In case you missed this back in March, twitter, the plucky social media network with much of Facebook’s reach but none of its self-adoration, received a vote of confidence from an unlikely source: the Modern Language Association. Long an indirect but potent tool of torture in English classrooms and University campuses everywhere, the MLA (and other cohorts, including APA and Chicago) released a format for quoting tweets in formal writing. While one may not consider twitter as the most natural primary source of information, if you consider a constant stream of humanity’s chatter as relevant, twitter is then relevant indeed. Could there be more coming? Due to its slow, gloomy gait, formal academia has yet to fully arrive on the social media scene, and when they’ve gotten close, it’s often been with a get off my lawn tone.
When Curious Parents See Math Grades in Real Time Stuyvesant Students Describe Rationale for Cheating Michael Appleton for The New York Times Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan. In June, 71 students at the public school were caught exchanging answers on an exam. “It’s like, ‘I’ll keep my integrity and fail this test’ — no. No one wants to fail a test,” he said, explaining how he and others persuaded themselves to cheat. “You could study for two hours and get an 80, or you could take a risk and get a 90.” A recent alumnus said that by the time he took his French final exam one year, he, along with his classmates, had lost all respect for the teacher. “When it came to French class, where the teacher had literally taught me nothing all year, and during the final the students around me were openly discussing the answers, should I not listen?” In interviews this month, more than three dozen students, alumni and teachers said that large-scale cheating, like an episode in June when 71 juniors were caught exchanging answers to state Regents exams through text messages, was rare at Stuyvesant.
Why Students Cheat on Tests On Wednesday, June 13, Nayeem Ahsan walked into a fourth-floor classroom at Stuyvesant High School with some two dozen other students to take a physics test—one of a number of Regents Exams that many New York State high-school juniors are required to take. Small and skinny with thick black hair and a bright, shy smile, Nayeem is 16. Like many teenage boys, he seems to straddle two worlds: One moment you see a man, another a boy. The son of Bangladeshi immigrants, Nayeem was born in Flushing Hospital and raised in Jackson Heights, a 35-minute subway ride to Stuyvesant in lower Manhattan. In the academically elite world of Stuyvesant, Nayeem maintains solid if unremarkable grades, and is a friendly, popular-enough kid known to take photographs of sports teams after school and post them on Facebook. When he walked into the exam room that morning, he seemed confident and calm. Nayeem had cased the room beforehand. Nayeem had cheated on tests before. He got bolder.
Is Homework Too Hard For Today's Parents? - The Juggle By Sue Shellenbarger Steve Hebert for The Wall Street Journal The ongoing debate over homework focuses mostly on kids’ mounting workloads , and some schools’ efforts to curtail them. A growing number of parents are struggling with another homework trend that threatens to sink their juggle – an increase in extremely complicated homework projects, from neighborhood field trips to do research, to expansive dioramas or multimedia presentations to report on what students have learned, according to parents I interviewed for last Wednesday’s “Work & Family” column on homework. Chris Jordan, a mother of seven children ages 7 through 18, has seen it all. “One of the biggest challenges for me is not to be exasperated by some of the assignments,” says Jordan, a writer for AlphaMom. Other projects demand speedy, ad hoc training in tech skills. Teachers deserve credit for trying to design creative assignments that appeal to kids with varying abilities, including those who love art, crafts or music.