We all want to be special, to stand out; there's nothing wrong with this. The irony is that every human being is special to start with, because we're unique to start with.
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the Truth About Being a Hero - WSJ - 14 views
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n the military I could exercise the power of being automatically respected because of the medals on my chest, not because I had done anything right at the moment to earn that respect.
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"A lot of people have done a lot more and gotten a lot less, and a lot of people have done a lot less and gotten a lot more."
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I got my medals, in part, because I did brave acts, but also, in part, because the kids liked me and they spent time writing better eyewitness accounts than they would have written if they hadn't liked me
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The only people who will ever know the value of the ribbons on their chests are the people wearing them—and even they can fool themselves, in both directions.
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he whole assault ground to a halt, except for one kid named Niemi, who had sprinted forward when we came under the intense fire and disappeared up in front of us somewhere.
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alking to a group of us about when it was a platoon leader earned his pay. I knew, floating above that mess, that now that time had come. If I didn't get up and lead, we'd get wiped.
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I'm most proud of is that I simply stood up, in the middle of all that flying metal, and started up the hill all by myself.
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At this point I saw the missing kid, Niemi, pop his head up. He sprinted across the open top of the hill, all alone.
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He was a black kid, all tangled up in black-power politics, almost always angry and sullen. A troublemaker. Yet here he was, most of his body naked with only flapping rags left of his jungle utilities, begging for a rifle when he had a perfect excuse to just bury his head in the clay and quit. I gave him mine. I still had a pistol. He grabbed the rifle, stood up to his full height, fully exposing himself to all the fire, and simply blasted an entire magazine at the two soldiers in front of us, killing both of them. He then went charging into the fight, leaving me stunned for a moment. Why? Who was he doing this for? What is this thing in young men? We were beyond ourselves, beyond politics, beyond good and evil. This was transcendence.
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the only thing he could think to do was sprint across the open hilltop to see if he could find a place from which he could lay down fire to protect them.
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hen a kid I knew from Second Platoon, mainly because of his bad reputation, threw himself down beside me, half his clothes blown away. He was begging people for a rifle. His had been blown out of his hands.
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Myths and Opportunities: Technology in the Classroom by Alan November on Vimeo - 68 views
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"Easy to teach teachers to use technology. Difficult to get the teachers to shift control away from themselves to the kids."
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"Tech robbed kids of the opportunity to make a contribution to their communities." How can I find a way to help kids contribute, via English class?
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"Interdisc. Bauhaus created an amazing flow of ideas." How can we make our classes more interdisc.?
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All of these skills mentioned above are exactly what are essential in the 21st century workplace.
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"this gives students more of a choice to do the kinds of assignments they want to do, as opposed to just the teacher deciding." You would certainly need to check that they were doing challenging, relevant work.
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"Teach kids really good research skills. Have them look up assignments and related material from other teachers from all over the world." And then do what with them?
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"Have an official Note Taker each class as well. Have the class as a whole review the notes to see if they are good/correct."
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"Another solution: you need to be more reflective on the body of work that you are doing. What have I learned? Where have I been and where am I going?" How do you do this?
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Concrete idea for how to answer the above, last question. He used a concrete example from a 3rd grade class: "Have the kids create a podcast every week of what they learned. Have a writer, producer, mixer, etc." Would you do that during class time or outside of classtime?
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"One solution: have an official classroom researcher everyday in your class." The job would be to gather the websites that will be used connected to whatever it is you're studying? Is that right? Need more thought on this.
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"Final Myth: Tech will make kids smarter. Actually it's a distraction. Creates more plagiarism and people wanting to get things done. Losing critical thinking." How can we use the enormous resources of the internet and at the same time increase critical thinking?
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"Another myth: the internet will give people a range of ideas. The opposite is true. People search out their version of the truth, e.g. Fox News or Huffington Post." I find this to be incredibly true.
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"It's a myth that tech will be the great equilizer in society. At least not for now." Why?
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shared by Jason Schmidt on 17 Nov 10
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School Would Be Great If It Weren't for the Damn Kids - 95 views
www.alfiekohn.org/...damnkids.htm
school alfie kohn students edreform education interest current commentary
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It simply doesn’t make sense to try to “purge ‘ineffective’ teachers and principals.” His listener, almost giddy with gratitude now, prepares to chime in, as Samuelson, without pausing, delivers the punch line: That’s right, it’s time to stop blaming teachers and start . . . blaming students!
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His focus is not on students’ achievements (the intellectual accomplishments of individual kids) but only on “student achievement” (the aggregate results of standardized tests)
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As I’ve noted elsewhere, we have reason to worry when schooling is discussed primarily in the context of “global competitiveness” rather than in terms of what children need or what contributes to a democratic culture
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Upon hearing someone castigate students for being insufficiently motivated, a noneconomist might be inclined to ask two questions. The first is: “Motivated to do what, exactly”? Anything they’re told, no matter how unengaging, inappropriate, or, well, demotivating?
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Whenever I see students made to cram facts into their short-term memories for a test, practice a series of decontextualized skills on yet another worksheet, listen passively to a lecture, or inch their way through the insipid prose of a corporate-produced textbook, I find myself thinking of a comment made by Frederick Herzberg, a critic of traditional workplace management: “Idleness, indifference, and irresponsibility,” he said, “are healthy responses to absurd work.”
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The more you reward people for doing something, or for doing it well, the less interest they typically come to have in whatever they had to do to get the reward.
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People who blame students for not being “motivated” tend to think educational success mean little more than higher scores on bad tests and they’re apt to see education itself as a means to making sure our corporations will beat their corporations. The sort of schooling that results is the type almost guaranteed to . . . kill students’ motivation.
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one thing that’s happened is a concatenation of rewards and punishments, including grades, which teach students that learning is just a means to an end.
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inner-city kids get the worst of the sort of schooling that’s not about exploring and discovering and questioning but only about working hard (often at rote tasks) and being nice (read: obedient).
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“Motivation is weak because more students…don't like school, don't work hard and don't do well.” But why don’t they like school (which is the key to understanding why, assuming his premise is correct, they don’t succeed)? What has happened to their desire to figure out how things work, the hunger to make sense of things, with which all children start out?
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if you want to see (intrinsically) motivated kids, you need to visit classrooms or schools that take a nontraditional approach to education, places where students are more likely to be absorbed and frequently delighted, where what they’re doing is not merely “rigorous” (a word often applied to very difficult busywork) but meaningful.
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Alfie Kohn's commentary on an article written by Robert J. Samuelson. Samuelson argues in his article that the problem with education reform is not the usual suspects like ineffective teachers, but kids who are lazy and unmotivated. Interesting read with thoughtful information about student motivation.
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shared by Steve Ransom on 19 Jul 11
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Kozol: 'I'm sick of begging' Congress to do the right thing - The Answer Sheet - The Wa... - 37 views
www.washingtonpost.com/...gIQAGSr0NI_blog.html
kozol poor rich inequality congress education charters joy NCLB
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o culture is starved. Aesthetics are gone. Joy in learning is regarded as a bothersome distraction. "These kids don't have time for joy, or whim, or charm, or inquiry! Leave whim and happiness to the children of the privileged. Poor kids can't afford that luxury." Even good and idealistic inner-city principals tell me that they feel they have no choice.
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"So culture is starved. Aesthetics are gone. Joy in learning is regarded as a bothersome distraction. "These kids don't have time for joy, or whim, or charm, or inquiry! Leave whim and happiness to the children of the privileged. Poor kids can't afford that luxury." Even good and idealistic inner-city principals tell me that they feel they have no choice"
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Does Easy Do It? Children, Games, and Learning - 29 views
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The kind of product I shall pick on here has the form of a game: the player gets into situations that require an appropriate action in order to get on to the next situation along the road to the final goal. So far, this sounds like "tainment." The "edu" part comes from the fact that the actions are schoolish exercises such as those little addition or multiplication sums that schools are so fond of boring kids with. It is clear enough why people do this. Many who want to control children (for example, the less imaginative members of the teaching profession or parents obsessed with kids' grades) become green with envy when they see the energy children pour into computer games. So they say to themselves, "The kids like to play games, we want them to learn multiplication tables, so everyone will be happy if we make games that teach multiplication." The result is shown in a rash of ads that go like this: "Our Software Is So Much Fun That The kids Don't Even Know That They Are Learning" or "Our Games Make Math Easy."
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What is worst about school curriculum is the fragmentation of knowledge into little pieces. This is supposed to make learning easy, but often ends up depriving knowledge of personal meaning and making it boring. Ask a few kids: the reason most don't like school is not that the work is too hard, but that it is utterly boring.
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game designers have a better take on the nature of learning than curriculum designers. They have to. Their livelihoods depend on millions of people being prepared to undertake the serious amount of learning needed to master a complex game. If their public failed to learn, they would go out of business. In the case of curriculum designers, the situation is reversed: their business is boosted whenever students fail to learn and schools clamor for a new curriculum!
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watching kids work at mastering games confirms what I know from my own experience: learning is essentially hard; it happens best when one is deeply engaged in hard and challenging activities.
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The preoccupation in America with "Making It Easy" is self-defeating and cause for serious worry about the deterioration of the learning environment.
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I have found that when they get the support and have access to suitable software systems, children's enthusiasm for playing games easily gives rise to an enthusiasm for making them, and this in turn leads to more sophisticated thinking about all aspects of games, including those aspects that we are discussing here. Of course, the games they can make generally lack the polish and the complexity of those made by professional designers. But the idea that children should draw, write stories and play music is not contradicted by the fact that their work is not of professional quality. I would predict that within a decade, making a computer game will be as much a part of children's culture as any of these art forms.
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The Top 5 Safe Search Engines for Kids - 166 views
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shared by aaxtell on 21 Dec 15
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CCSS "I Can" statements for K-8 - 64 views
www.thecurriculumcorner.com/...hing-ccss-i-can-for-k-6-grades
CCSS Common Core education standards standards-based teaching learning standards
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Kids learn best when they know what they're supposed to be learning. Make learning outcomes explicit with kid-friendly "I Can" statements tied to each Common Core standard.
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Kids learn best when they know what they're supposed to be learning. Make learning outcomes explicit with kid-friendly "I Can" statements tied to each Common Core standard.
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shared by Steve Kelly on 29 Jan 16
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One Easy Thing You Can Do to Improve Your Relationship with Your Kid | Common Sense Media - 22 views
www.commonsensemedia.org/...our-relationship-with-your-kid
media media_literacy ML screentime boundries limits health digitalcitizenship digital citizenship CSM commonsensemedia
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If you own a smartphone, chances are, you love it. You take pictures of your kids, stay in touch with friends and family, keep up with the news, and text your spouse reminders to pick up milk.
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But despite your love for your phone, you probably also feel guilty about using it around your kids too much.
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It's all about taking control over your phone instead of letting it control you. In a nutshell: Put down your phone.
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If you limit your extracurricular phone time, you'll be better able to expect the same from your kids.
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An Introduction to Inquiry-Based Learning - 122 views
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"What kinds of questions make for good inquiry-based projects? As we said, they must first be questions that the kids truly care about because they come up with them themselves. In addition, good questions share the following characteristics: The questions must be answerable. "What is the poem 'Dream Deferred' based on?" is answerable. "Why did Langston Hughes write it?" may be answerable if such information exists, or if the students have some relevant and defensible opinions. "Why did he choose this particular word in line six?" is not answerable because the only person likely to know such a specific answer is Hughes himself, now deceased. The answer cannot be a simple fact. "In what year was Lincoln killed?" doesn't make for a very compelling project because you can just look it up in any number of books or Web sites. "What factors caused the assassination attempt?" might be a good project because it will require research, interpretation, and analysis. The answer can't already be known. "What is hip-hop music?" is a bit too straightforward and the kids are not likely to learn much more than they know already. "What musical styles does hip-hop draw from and how?" offers more opportunity for exploration. The questions must have some objective basis for an answer. "Why is the sky blue?" can be answered through research. "Why did God make the sky blue?" cannot because it is a faith-based question. Both are meaningful, valid, real questions, but the latter isn't appropriate for an inquiry-based project. "What have people said about why God made the sky blue?" might be appropriate. Likewise, "Why did the dinosaurs become extinct?" is ultimately unanswerable in that form because no humans were around to know for sure, but "What do scientists believe was the reason for their extinction?" or "What does the evidence suggest about the cause?" will work. Questions based on value judgments don't work for similar reasons. You can't objectively answer "Is Hamle
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shared by Steve Ransom on 25 Mar 13
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Education Rethink: Kids Don't Actually Hate That - 6 views
www.educationrethink.com/...s-dont-actually-hate-that.html
kids students hate motivation subjects teaching pedagogy meaning relevance choice authentic purpose
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shared by Javier E on 10 May 13
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Money Cuts Both Ways in Education - NYTimes.com - 19 views
www.nytimes.com/...10iht-letter10.html
education youth prospect inequality competition meritocracy self-image
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If you doubt that we live in a winner-take-all economy and that education is the trump card, consider the vast amounts the affluent spend to teach their offspring.
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This power spending on the children of the economic elite is usually — and rightly — cited as further evidence of the dangers of rising income inequality.
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But it may be that the less lavishly educated children lower down the income distribution aren’t the only losers. Being groomed for the winner-take-all economy starting in nursery school turns out to exact a toll on the children at the top, too.
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There is a lively debate among politicians and professors about whether the economy is becoming more polarized and about the importance of education. Dismissing the value of a college education is one of the more popular clever-sounding contrarian ideas of the moment. And there are still a few die-hards who play down the social significance of rising income inequality.
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When you translate these abstract arguments into the practical choices we make in our personal lives, however, the intellectual disagreements melt away. We are all spending a lot more money to educate our kids, and the richest have stepped up their spending more than everyone else.
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spending on children grew over the past four decades and that it became more unequal. “Our findings also show that investment grew more unequal over the study period: parents near the top of the income distribution spent more in real dollars near the end of the 2000s than in the early 1970s, and the gap in spending between rich and poor grew.”
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But it turns out that the children being primed for that race to the top from preschool onward aren’t in such great shape, either.
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“What we are finding again and again, in upper-middle-class school districts, is the proportion who are struggling are significantly higher than in normative samples,” she said. “Upper-middle-class kids are an at-risk group.”
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troubled rich kids. “I was looking for a comparison group for the inner-city kids,” Dr. Luthar told me. “And we happened to find that substance use, depression and anxiety, particularly among the girls, were much higher than among inner-city kids.”
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“I Can, Therefore I Must: Fragility in the Upper Middle Class,” and it describes a world in which the opportunities, and therefore the demands, for upper-middle-class children are infinite.
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“It is an endless cycle, starting from kindergarten,” Dr. Luthar said. “The difficulty is that you have these enrichment activities. It is almost as if, if you have the opportunity, you must avail yourself of it. The pressure is enormous.”
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“When we talk to youngsters now, when they set goals for themselves, they want to match up to at least what their parents have achieved, and that is harder to do.”
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we live in individualistic democracies whose credo is that anyone can be a winner if she tries. But we are also subject to increasingly fierce winner-take-all forces, which means the winners’ circle is ever smaller, and the value of winning is ever higher.
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Why Kids Need Schools to Change | MindShift - 118 views
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The current structure of the school day is obsolete, most would agree. Created during the Industrial Age, the assembly line system we have in place now has little relevance to what we know kids actually need to thrive
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Yet therein lies the paradox. It’s exactly during these uncertain times when people must be willing to try new things, to be more open, curious and experimental, she said. In education, although there are great new models of learning and schooling, they are the exceptions, and the progressive movement has not gained much momentum.
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“One thing we know for sure is that kids learn better when teachers are invested and paying attention and showing they care,” she said. “The biggest impact you’ll have as a teachers is the relationship you establish with your student.”
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The five criteria that Challenge Success brings to schools attempts to modernize the obsolete system in place today: scheduling, project based learning, alternative assessment, climate of care, and parent education.
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Research shows that kids do better in classes where teachers know their names and say hello to them, and when they have their own advocates or advisers at school.
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Conrad Wolfram: Teaching kids real math with computers | TED Talk | TED.com - 23 views
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From rockets to stock markets, many of humanity's most thrilling creations are powered by math. So why do kids lose interest in it? Conrad Wolfram says the part of math we teach - calculation by hand - isn't just tedious, it's mostly irrelevant to real mathematics and the real world. He presents his radical idea: teaching kids math through computer programming.
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» 9 Essential Skills Kids Should Learn :zenhabits - 20 views
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We can’t give our children a set of data to learn, a career to prepare for, when we don’t know what the future will bring. But we can prepare them to adapt to anything, to learn anything, to solve anything, and in about 20 years, to thank us for it.
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Kids in today’s school system are not being prepared well for tomorrow’s world.
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We have never been good at predicting the future, and so raising and educating our kids as if we have any idea what the future will hold is not the smartest notion. How then to prepare our kids for a world that is unpredictable, unknown? By teaching them to adapt, to deal with change, to be prepared for anything by not preparing them for anything specific.
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New study examines print vs. eBooks for kids » kidscreen - 1 views
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As the popularity of digital book reading continues to grow, especially with younger ages, The Joan Ganz Cooney Center has conducted a new study that explores the differences in the way parents and their preschool-age children (three to six) interact when reading print books, basic eBooks and enhanced eBooks together. Read more: http://kidscreen.com/2012/05/29/new-study-examines-print-vs-ebooks-for-kids/#ixzz1wMi11ATv
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Common Core Reading: Difficult, Dahl, Repeat : NPR Ed : NPR - 42 views
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Ms. Wertheimer warms them up with a text-dependent question: "Are all of these native peoples nomadic?"
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"On page 6, paragraph 2," he says, "the first sentence: 'The Haida and Tlingit of the Northwest built permanent wooden homes called longhouses.' "
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seems to engage the kids
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tiring work for the kids
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dives into the packet
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It's a way of labeling books based on the skill needed to read them.
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counterbalance to the tough stuff