Decades of studies, many of them by Diana Baumrind, a clinical and developmental psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, have found that the optimal parent is one who is involved and responsive, who sets high expectations but respects her child’s autonomy.
As Lave (1996) argued, research on teaching for the most part ‘reduces teaching to curriculum, to strategies or recipes for organizing students to know some target knowledge’
— Beyond Knowledge: Exploring Why Some Teachers Are More Thoughtfully Adaptive Than Others Colleen M. Fairbanks, Gerald G. Duffy, Beverly S. Faircloth, Ye He, Barbara Levin, Jean Rohr and Catherine Stein (Journal of Teacher Education 2010 61: 161)
After some 30 years of doing such work, I have concluded that classroom teaching … is perhaps the most complex, most challenging, and most demanding, subtle, nuanced and frightening activity that our species ever invented.
— Shulman, L. (2004). Professional development: Leaning from experience. In S. Wilson (Ed.), The wisdom of practice: Essays on teaching, learning, and learning to teach (pp. 503-522). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
keys
This idea, and many of the keys, came from a colleague of mine. Here’s how it worked: I got enough keys for all my students, and then made a tag for each key with a single, made-up line from a story.
I threw the keys in a jar, and each student got to pick out a key. The assignment was simple: tell a story that makes that line make sense.
The story lines:
* She gave me the key, then walked away, dragging the terrified child behind her.
* He looked behind him then whispered, “This key fits the third door.” He handed it to me then walked away, disappearing into the crowd.
* There on the rock, waves crashing around it, waited the key. The oars creaked as I rowed towards it.
* When the thunderstorm had finally passed, I saw a bit of metal by the road. It was a key.
* Why was there a key in the ice cream cone?
* I knew it was old, but which of these musty boxes, here in this spider’s nest of an attic, would the key fit?
* I hate this key and all the trouble it has caused.
* The key’s ridges were cutting my fingers, but I wouldn’t let go.
* The key fit locker #365 at the airport. What had they left me?
* He looked me in the eyes and whispered, “I got a key too, and it’s just like this one.”
* As the key sunk through the waves, I knew I’d be getting wet very soon.
* The key spun through the air. Four hands reached for it. Who would catch it?
* There was a 50/50 chance that this was the right key. I put it in the lock and hoped I’d picked the right one.
* A key was taped to the bottom of his top desk drawer. And there was a note.
* “It was an inside job! This key proves it!”
* She sighed and handed over the key, knowing that months of work had just been lost.
* She collapsed in the meadow, exhausted. She rolled to her side and something sharp poked her in the ribs… a key!
* Through the decades of dust, a clear set of footprints was visible. leading deeper into the tunnel. I held the key tight and followed the footprints.
* She shoved aside cartons of spoiled milk and packages of moldy cheese. There it was in the back of the fridge, just like he said: the key.
* When he woke that morning, he never imagined that he would have to deal with both magical keys and hungry zombies.
* The package, postmarked thirty years in the future, was tiny. She opened the box to find a key.
* He couldn’t disagree. When he held the key, he too felt like a numbing cold creep through his body.
* They found the frozen corpse at the bottom of the cliffs, a single key still clutched tightly in his left hand.
* A carrier pigeon was pecking at the window, a single key tied to its foot.
* They found the key at the bottom of the well, just like the treasure map showed.
* Like a shiny promise, the key taunted me, sparkling inside the glass case.
* I could see the key in her hand. And she saw that I saw.
* How in the world had this key followed me from Iowa to Oregon?
* I’d had the key in my pocket since Tuesday, but I didn’t know it.
I still feel like some of those lines are pretty lame, but overall, the students seemed to like and some fantastic stories were created.
Basically, here’s how it works: Students are given a weekly grid and must select at least three daily activities from a “menu” of 10 categories. Those include pleasurable reading (such as books, magazines, recipes, newspapers); physical activities (walking, biking, skating, swimming, playing sports); hobbies (sewing, gardening, photography, caring for pets); art projects (painting, drawing, collage, dioramas); and community service (mowing a neighbor’s lawn, playing a game with an older person, picking up trash).
This has something to do with teaching (pt.11)
“Soon it became clear to me that quietly and en masse, French parents were achieving outcomes that created a whole different atmosphere for family life. When American families visited our home, the parents usually spent much of the visit refereeing their kids’ spats, helping their toddlers do laps around the kitchen island, or getting down on the floor to build Lego villages. When French friends visited, by contrast, the grownups had coffee and the children played happily by themselves… One of the keys to this education is the simple act of learning how to wait. … Delphine said that she never set out specifically to teach her kids patience. But her family’s daily rituals are an ongoing apprenticeship in how to delay gratification.”
– Pamela Druckerman, Why French Parents Are Superior
this has something to do with teaching (pt. 10)
“What it means to be human is to bring up your children in safety, educate them, keep them healthy, teach them how to care for themselves and others, allow them to develop in their own way among adults who are sane and responsible, who know the value of the world and not its economic potential. It means art, it means time, it means all the invisibles never counted by the GDP and the census figures. It means knowing that life has an inside as well as an outside.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Stone Gods
playing with blocks (or how to teach the writing process for a five-paragraph essay to a 1.5 year old)
did a professor plagiarize a professor who was plagiarizing an already professor-plagiarized sentence?
This has next to absolutely nothing to do with the theme or thesis of this little tumblr, but, well, I needed somewhere to put it. So, here it is.
Let’s call this a plagiarism activity.
Let’s lead with this question: did a professor plagiarize an already plagiarized sentence? Did something more complicated than that happen?
I was just doing some reading and noticed how a few people (ok, not just people, professors, tenured professors even) have remarkably similar sentence structure when writing about the same idea.
Here’s Allington:
Stotsky (1984) synthesized the research on writing-reading relationships. She found better writers read more than poorer writers, better writers tended to be better readers, and better readers produced more syntactically mature compositions than did poorer readers.
Here’s Goen-Salter:
There is a demonstrated connection between learning to write and learning to read. Better writers do end [sic] to be better readers, better writers tend to read more than poorer writers and better readers tend to produce more mature prose than poorer readers (Stotsky).
Here are Homstad and Thorson:
… better writers tend to be better readers, better writers read more than poorer writers, and better readers produce more syntactically mature writing than poorer readers.
So, now that those are on the table, let’s look at Stotsky’s actual words:
To summarize briefly, the correlational studies show almost consistently that better writers tend to be better readers (of their own writing as well as that of other reading material), that better writers tend to read more than poorer writers, and that better readers tend to produce more syntactically mature writing than poorer readers.
So, the question that I ask is: did plagiarism occur, and if so, who plagiarized whom and what kind of plagiarism was it? And, best question yet, did someone plagiarize someone who plagiarized someone else? Also, will I make my students figure it out? Probably, yes.
