Teach them how to fishEducation

The Case for Explicit Vocabulary Instruction

admin — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 22:01:48 +0000

In the article, “Narrowing the Language Gap: The Case for Explicit Vocabulary Instruction,” Kevin Feldman and Kate Kinsella argue passionately about the importance of mindful vocabulary knowledge building in our school aged children(and especially the long term English learners). According to the authors, even though many experts and researchers have been showing us that strong vocabulary skills are very important for successful academic careers, and even though this particular information has been available to us educators for many decades, there have not been strong enough efforts in building quality lexiconic skills in our students.

I am curious as to why, when there are studies that show the need for a focus on establishment of a strong lexicon base, the educators have not jumped on it. I would love to know what has been the cause of this disconnect and how we can improve this practice or the lack there of.

I agree with the authors that vocabulary building should not rely solely on impromptu, spontaneous learning opportunities. I also agree that structured planning must go into providing a quality English learning experience. I have personally found, both as a teacher and as a student in a learning mode, that a guided learning of new vocabulary words is immensely helpful and an enjoyable way to learn new words.

The more in depth the learning is for the learner and the more layered the experiences are that take place, the better the overall retention of the information would take place. It makes logical sense to me that wide reading of various genres and becoming self-aware of one’s own learning methods can be a powerful asset to the learner.

The point is to equip our children so that they will be ready to succeed in the higher learning environments. Doing this will help them succeed in school and offer them a leg up, or at the least allow them an even playing field with others as they move ahead in higher learning environments and afterwards, in the career fields of their choice.

Here is one of the many great talks by Kate Kinsella :

Click here to view the embedded video.

Patricia Ryan: Don’t insist on English!

admin — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 20:35:46 +0000

Click here to view the embedded video.

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No child left behind, and other assessment tools…

admin — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 01:23:35 +0000

Testings for various purposes have their place in education. The NCLB (No Child Left Behind) Act was implemented to help schools to perform better, and to produce more learned and capable students. I can appreciate that stated goal, but the outcome of this act does not help teachers or schools in general to perform better, not from my own observations, and not from what many public school teachers and administrators have said to me. All signs point to the fact that this act is actually harming our students.

Schools appear to have been forced into a position of becoming less focused on authentically educating their students and become focused on, instead, getting them ready for the standardized exams. Schools do this by creating cramming sessions, taking time away from the students’ real education so that they can score better, so that the schools do not lose funding, which would cause them to cut classes, lay off teachers, etc. NCLB was supposed to cause the schools to become better educational institutions that could offer a better quality education to the young, instead, it placed the focus of the educational institutions on the wrong goal.

We’ve had enough time to see that NCLB not only does not work, but is also making our education worse, we really ought to try our effort at something else, better yet, this time we should really think through in a more organic and intelligent manner and do something that really will work. The answers are not that hard to figure out!

A smarter program might be one that provides coaching and more intuitive/better quality teaching methods for the teachers to become better educators by working with them on class interactions; teachers can be taught constructive ways to help difficult students and healthy ways to encourage a love for learning.

Another intelligent thing to do would be to find a way to pay our teachers wages that they deserve. Teachers are some of the most important people since they help to grow and nurture the minds and hearts of our future generation, our future world. As we treat our teachers as if they are less important, their work can flounder, which in turn causes all of the students under them to flounder in school, and usually in life. Those are just a few ideas that could be powerfully helpful and should produce real positive results!

Instead of punishing schools for not producing students who can pass standardized tests by taking away funding from schools, which causes those schools to become worse educational institutions, why not copy programs that are working, programs such as Jeffery Canada’s and others throughout the country?

Geoffrey Canada’s ‘Harlem Children’s Zone

admin — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 17:46:15 +0000

Click here to view the embedded video.

The good, the bad and the perplexed.

admin — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 19:42:34 +0000

When I was in fourth grade, my classmates and I were the world’s best students and the world’s worst students, and we changed from one to the other almost instantly as one set of feet left our classroom and one entered in. Just like that. Just that quick.

The last time we saw Mrs. Chong, she was busy telling us how much she would miss us over winter break; we all knew that we would miss her quite badly, and looked forward to the spring semester when we could all sit by her feet again and listen to her many tales of the ancient pasts, stories, and histories woven perfectly for our ears and our hearts.

I had a fresh egg that I snuck from my family chicken coup, holding it as carefully as I could in my hands cupped over my lap while anticipating her arrival. I hoped to hand it to my dear teacher before the girl sitting at the other end of the room gave her hers. Our eggs seemed to smooth out her fragile voice that often cracked, interrupting her stories that took us to all kinds of fascinating places. The door opened and a set of feet, carrying with them an alien, a squared faced fat cheeked man who appeared to know how to look at us while not looking at us, charged in to our room.

We were perplexed, to say the least, by our beloved teacher’s sudden disappearance from our lives, but that was not the most perplexing part. The most perplexing part about that terrible and sad event was that we turned into the most trouble making students, it appeared, almost over night, for we were, it seemed almost daily, lined up to be punished for our bad behaviors and our mistakes.

Mrs. Chong was the most beautiful angel that I had ever met. I can honestly say that I have not met her match to this day. She spoke gently at all times, sometimes losing her voice due to her old age; those of us with chicken coups in our homes took turns bringing her fresh eggs that she could drink so that her voice would work. She was one of the oldest teachers in our school. Amongst her many wonderful stories, one that stood out most in my mind was the one that she told us in response to one of us asking her why she walked with a limp and a cane.

She told us a story unlike her usual stories that lifted our hearts and spirits, she told us of a day when she was only a little girl. She remembered on this particular day everyone in her family gathered in her house as if they were hiding from something scary. Her mom then took my teacher outside, helped her climb up in a tree with the instruction to climb higher and made her promise to stay up there no matter what was happening in the house or in the yard. She obeyed her mom and stayed hidden in the tree. She saw occupying soldiers arrive, take everyone out to the yard, and shoot them. Everyone. She saw the soldiers eventually leave but wasn’t sure when she should come back down so she stayed up in the tree. She later fell asleep and fell out of the tree. She told us students that during that time her family was considered one of the most educated and influential families, so the solders were ordered to kill everyone in her family. She was the only one left. When she grew up she dedicated her life to education of the her people and became a teacher.

I remember how much I loved her many stories, but I cannot remember any of them as vividly as I remember the terrible story about how she broke her leg and watched her entire family killed in front of a firing squad.

I don’t remember the shape or any of the details of her face, though I wish I could. I do remember clearly what I felt about her in my heart. I looked forward to seeing her every morning with excitement, and even today I know that every one of my classmates also shared the same thoughts and feelings about her.

It would be no surprise to anyone that my classmates and I were crushed, broken hearted, and disheartened to lose someone like her with no explanation as to why she stopped being our teacher. We were then further disheartened to see a man with large squared fat cheeks walk in and take over Mrs. Chong’s desk. She herself never seemed to sit at her desk but often sat down on a little table close to us, as if wanting to be as close to us as she possibly could.

The man, whose name I don’t remember, sat down and spent the next what-seemed-to-be-forever going through the drawer, getting everything out, emptying them, then pulling things out of his stiff leather brief case and carefully organizing the drawer.

He finally opened his mouth and spoke.

Before he spoke, he pulled out a wooden ruller in a deliberately slow gesture and placed it in front of him. His words were stone heavy, though they seemed to reverberate through out the room and into our ears. We were told rule after rule, and when he was finally done, he lifted the ruller and demonstrated to us how he would snap it on our cheeks if we broke any one of his many rules. I was so scared, as I was sure I had forgotten everyone one of the new rules already; I looked around the room and found, on my classmates faces, the fear that was in my heart.

The perplexing part of all of this was that we, each one of us fourth graders in my class, went from being the best kids there ever could have been to the worst kids there ever were. My whole class slowly learned, as we were being lined up to get our faces slapped with his ruler, that we were all bad children.

That first semester with Mrs. Chong escaped us very quickly for all that we could see was that we were dumb, in addition to bad, because we could not catch up with all of the new fat-square-faced teacher’s rules. We just kept breaking them and getting punished. It was a hell that we couldn’t figure our way around or through. We dreaded every day of the rest of that year. Memories of our teacher who loved us slipped from us, we were busy attempting to survive and failing desperately at being good to remember them. We just couldn’t figure out how.

Looking back now as an adult, I have a better understanding of what happened. We children hadn’t changed. Our first teacher, Mrs. Chong, brought the best out of us, and our second teacher brought out the worst.

Now that my childhood is long behind me, and the dust of the squared-faced man’s ruller has settled, Mrs. Chong is the teacher that I hold dear in my heart, what she was, what she represented, and how she made me feel are impossible for me to forget. She has remained the role model of what and who a teacher is supposed to be for me. Though I lost her from my life too quickly, she was able to impart part of who she was as a teacher with me. I believe I am very lucky to have had her in my life even if our time together was just too short. She allowed the horrible event of her life inspire her to become a passionate educator and she has inspired me to do something very similar with the terrible events of my life.

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The value of hard work

admin — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 08:00:33 +0000

A good teacher once said that students cannot know the true joy of learning until they have worked as hard as they can. I’d like to explore now why this may be true…

Let’s first define for ourselves what “working hard” in school might mean.
Working hard in school means…

Working in a regular and consistent manner – the advantage of this would be that more in depth and long term learning would occur. Exams would be easier to take and cramming would be unnecessary(cramming most often does not result in helping a student do well on their exams anyway, and of course, cramming does not result in quality learning).

Consciously learning to focus one’s attention as fully as one can and mindfully learning, the almost meditative practice of learning to focus one’s mind on the topic at hand.

Fulfilling one’s responsibility of doing all of his or her assigned work and more to create a greater learning experience, as well as learning what it means to be “responsible” for one’s duties/agreement/commitments.

The positive consequence of working hard then is not only getting good grades, but also gaining the hard working habits it would take to help students prepare themselves for a life that is easily productive and easily successful. Working mindfully and regularly to attain sets of knowledge should also help students get ahead in life, though financial success is not the only benefit of working hard. Knowing how to work hard and knowing how to exert oneself in life can bring a sense of self-fulfillment that cannot be experienced otherwise. The value of our children learning how to work hard in school and gaining that habit for their education and their future lives is invaluable, to say the least.

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A Vindication Of The Rights Of Female Identity

admin — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 08:35:07 +0000

Motherhood and fatherhood come with weighty responsibility.

For now, I am going to focus on the mother, one half of the important force in a child’s life. Furthermore I want to talk about the mother who gets to be capable and has been allowed to become a good mother.

Well… who is this good mother? What kind of a person is she? What human quality does she possess? How strong is she so that she can help her children become self-confident and emotionally intelligent people?…

Would you say that… this woman should have a good sense of herself, strong capacity to love, and a deep level of intellectual curiosity, etc.?

While no one is perfect, those characteristics that are mentioned above, a good sense of herself, strong capacity to love, and deep level of intellectual curiosity will definitely be helpful attributes to have if she is to become a good parent.

So… how do we bring up women with those above qualities? To answer that question better, we need to go a little backwards and discuss what kind of an environment this future good mother must have had.

To allow a female to grow up to be that emotionally strong and intellectually developed woman, we must provide a supportive environment for her. We must reveal to her or allow her to discover that she is intelligent, strong, and infinitely capable of just about anything that she puts her mind to. She must be allowed to grow to her full strength as a human being! Make sense, right? If you agree, take a mind walk with me just a little bit further. I have something that I would like to discuss with you as we walk…

Let me now flash backwards in my life a week or so to reveal to you why I am writing this piece in the first place.

At the top of the ninth inning of a Giants home opener game, a portly porkish man with a square-ish head, standing, experiencing too much thought in his unhappy little square-ish head with the umpire’s call, began a string of verbal attacks at a Braves hitter, which went something like, “get up, pick up the bat, don’t be a wuss, it didn’t hurt,” and as if that wasn’t enough he pushed out of his mouth a louder, “don’t be a little girl!”

The guy was almost indescribably obnoxious in his mannerism and voice while he said the words, “don’t be a little girl” But those words are not always said by indescribably obnoxious drunken idiot of a man like him; those words are said by many normal men and even by some women, and this is what concerns me much more than some indescribably obnoxious people.

Since this particular moment with this man, the indescribably obnoxious man who had said “don’t be a little girl,” I have been hearing men who are not so obnoxious as that drunken man repeat his words. I have been witnessing normal average Joes saying it.

Just the other day, I heard John Oliver, a comedian that I like very much, who is definitely not a redneck ignoramus, say it. Right after revealing that the British now have a more sophisticated technology that aides commentary discussing the British elections, to a very impressed looking Jon Stewart (representing the USA), John Oliver said, “yeah, little girl,” (speaking for Britain.)

No matter how different all these people may be from each other, there is one belief system that they all have; when they say, “don’t be a little girl” they are saying, don’t be weak.

Let’s explore possible ways that this can be unhealthy for the females of our lives, and in turn, the lives of all people involved.

When a little girl hears those words, “don’t be a little girl,” she hears that being a little girl represents something that one doesn’t want to be. Being a little girl means being shamefully weak and perhaps even cowardly.

When this is said so often and so easily, with such certainly of its truth that being a little girl means that one is weak, there have to be consequences on the deep unconscious of the female hearing it.

Could this type of treatment of females identity why so many intelligent females put up with bad and unhealthy relationships with men? Could it be that many females at some deep subconscious level believe they are inherently weak, and that they need a man to complete them, no matter at what cost? If females are the ultimate symbol of weakness, how can they expect to be anything of real substance?

I can hear arguments against this going as follows: “but many females manage to be successful and strong and all of those things…” yes, that is true… could it be that it isn’t that these treatments do not affect females, but despite those effects, some of them still rise and the rest have hard time rising from under such weight of emotional put downs and never fully grow? Consider smoking; smoking doesn’t cause cancer in all people but we know that smoking does cause cancer in most.

If continuing the habit of using the phrase “don’t be a little girl” meaning, “don’t be weak” may hurt most females of our generation, we should examine how this also may affect the males of today and of the future. As Mary Wollstonecraft argued once: better education and better treatment of females is needed if we want to protect the potential of the human race. She was saying to everyone that these females whose emotional and intellectual well-being are being put in harms way will grow up to be poor mothers to all, to men and women.

It is just too easy to find examples of the emotionally, intellectually and spiritually stunted women in our generation. I am proposing that we at least give it some thought as to what we are saying to and around our little girls. I am proposing that we give our girls a full and fair chance to grow up to be as strong as any human being has potential to become. I am proposing that we do not use the word “little girls” to symbolize the state that is the weakest of the weakest. I propose that being a little girl is not something to be ashamed of. I am asking that we allow our little girls to grow up to realize their full selves, what ever that may be. I would like to suggest that that world, a world that had honored a full growth of the females, would be a very nice place to be for us all.

Improving education improves economy of a country.

admin — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 19:11:17 +0000

Bob Compton, the film maker of 2Mminutes, talks in his blog about the rigorous high school educational practices in Korea and the affect that it has had on its citizen’s standard of living.

http://2mm.typepad.com/usa/2009/12/the-three-year-high-school-in-korea-is-the-most-intense-darwinian-educational-system-i-have-witnessed-anywhere-in-the-world.html

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Amazing, hopeful and inspiring talk by Patrick Awuah on TED.com

admin — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 19:20:06 +0000

Click here to view the embedded video.

Barbie’s plastic surgery

admin — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 23:32:42 +0000

In 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft, an author of, A Vindication Of The Rights Of Woman, argued that girls should be educated to strengthen their body, heart and mind. During her time females were being taught to focus on learning how to be physically attractive to men so that they may be cared for by the men.

Consequently, the most perfect education, in my opinion, is such an exercise of the understanding as is best calculated to strengthen the body and form the heart. Or, in other words, to enable the individual to attain such habits of virtue as will render it independent. Infact, it is a farce to call any being virtuous whose virtues do not result from the exercise of its own reason.

-Mary Wollstonecraft

Over two hundred years later, Mattel appears to completely lack a good sense and a sense of responsibility toward how some of their best customers are being powerfully mis-educated by them. You can read about it at:

http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/blog/2009/10/13/barbies-fat-ankles-latest-flap-racial-body-image-controversies

I am interested in your thoughts. Please leave me a comment.

Teach them how to fishEducation

The Case for Explicit Vocabulary Instruction

Related Posts

Patricia Ryan: Don’t insist on English!

Random Posts

No child left behind, and other assessment tools…

Related Posts

Geoffrey Canada’s ‘Harlem Children’s Zone

Related Posts

The good, the bad and the perplexed.

Random Posts

The value of hard work

Random Posts

A Vindication Of The Rights Of Female Identity

Related Posts

Improving education improves economy of a country.

Random Posts

Amazing, hopeful and inspiring talk by Patrick Awuah on TED.com

Related Posts

Barbie’s plastic surgery

Related Posts