Group items tagged

"How did Gladwell misconstrue it? Aside from not having copied the numbers from the actual paper correctly for his book? He says that there is a perfect correspondence between practice and the level of expertise a person attains. And you can't tell that from the paper. The 10,000 hours is an average of differences. You could have two people in any endeavor and one person took 0 hours and another took 20,000 hours, which is something like what happened with two high jumpers I discuss in the book. One guy put in 20,000 and one put in 0, so there's your average of 10,000 hours, but that tells you nothing about an individual. Now, Gladwell doesn't say there's no such thing as genetic talent. I think other writers are stricter than him. [Matthew Syed's] Bounce is a book that minimizes talent. Gladwell does say elite performers are more talented. One of the things that Ericsson criticizes Gladwell about is to say that 10,000 hours is some kind of rule. The paper just says that these performers by the age of 20, these performers have accumulated 10,000 hours but there's no where that says it's a magical number where that's when they become elite or anything like that. These people, by the time they go into their professional careers, have way more than that. That's just where they were when they're 20 as an average, not even to mention their individual differences."

"Google Books: Google Books can be a good research tool for students if they are aware of it and know how to use it. In the video below I provide a short overview of how to use Google Books for research. You can also find screenshots of the process here. "

This article answers a question I have had since 10th grade English - "Is it possible to make Jane Eyre interesting?" I watched the Hamlet video and was thoroughly entertained. I could see these videos being used in 8th grade and high school English classes, especially if you edited one or two short segments (he says a** and b****, but other curse words are bleeped out within the video). These clips could be really useful when discussing the topic of "audience." As a culmination to a unit/lesson on audience, I could see students making their own version of "Thug Notes" or "rewriting" a book to some extent and adapt the work for a specific culture/group of people.

"And yet no one I'm aware of has pointed out one of the more glaring (literally) problems with Jackson's Tolkien films, a problem that has become more evident to me with each installment. It's the choice of his own native land, New Zealand, as the backdrop for these British stories. The island nation of swooping hills and glistening peaks isn't merely an unfortunate choice-it's one of the worst options I can imagine." You could do some really interesting textual analysis stuff like this with comparing book characters and settings with their on screen counterparts. What holds up to the original? What has changed? How does that affect the reader/viewer or change the message of the story? There's plenty of options that students would get into - The Hunger Game Series, The Hobbit, you could even do comic book characters and their on screen counterparts.

We should be creating similar setups for novels with a richer multimedia association and annotated primary texts.

"Flows of Reading takes this process to the next level. We have created a rich environment designed to encourage close critical engagement not only with Moby-Dick but a range of other texts, including the children's picture book, Flotsam; Harry Potter; Hunger Games; and Lord of the Rings. We want to demonstrate that the book's approach can be applied to many different kinds of texts and may revitalize how we teach a diversity of forms of human expression.  We look at many different adaptions and remixes of Moby-Dick from the films featuring Gregory Peck and Patrick Stewart as Ahab to MC Lar's music video, "Ahab" and Pitts-Wiley's Moby-Dick: Then and Now stage production to works that evoke Moby-Dick less directly, including Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan and Battlestar Galacitca's "Scar." "

"Does the fact that people have helped you, make you feel less accomplished? Does it mean you didn't work as hard on the project, didn't write the book, didn't start the business, or finish the marathon?" To me, this is a testament to the importance of collaboration (collaboration between students, yes…but also collaboration as a staff). The best way to achieve greatness is to share and build off of what others have done before us.

An interesting model for novel reflection in general and vocabulary specifically. "Favorite passage: "The urbane activity with which a man receives money is really marvellous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!" Words looked up: Mole (As in "downtown is the battery, where that noble mole is washed by waves ..."): A massive, usually stone wall constructed in the sea, used as a breakwater and built to enclose or protect an anchorage or a harbor. Decoction: An extract obtained from a body by boiling it down. Orchard thieves (Melville refers to having to pay for things as "the most uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us."): I have no idea what this alludes to. Update: D'oh! I am dumb. I (repeatedly) misread this as "orchid thieves," no doubt because I recently read the book of the same name. Yes, the meaning of "orchard thieves" is clear."

"Textual analysis has its limitations, of course, but word counting can illuminate the tendencies of writers in a way that word reading may not." Textual analysis leads to a discussion on author's style. You could do this type of activity with various Word Cloud Generators.

A friend shared this with me and it's a good read. It also summarizes the way that many of our teachers think, and could be an interesting article to share with a teacher and have a discussion about. Ultimate, I have a huge problem with the assumptions and conclusions that are being made here: "Now I'm not calling for abuse; I'd be the first to complain if a teacher called my kids names. But the latest evidence backs up my modest proposal. Studies have now shown, among other things, the benefits of moderate childhood stress; how praise kills kids' self-esteem; and why grit is a better predictor of success than SAT scores. All of which flies in the face of the kinder, gentler philosophy that has dominated American education over the past few decades. The conventional wisdom holds that teachers are supposed to tease knowledge out of students, rather than pound it into their heads. Projects and collaborative learning are applauded; traditional methods like lecturing and memorization-derided as "drill and kill"-are frowned upon, dismissed as a surefire way to suck young minds dry of creativity and motivation. But the conventional wisdom is wrong. And the following eight principles-a manifesto if you will, a battle cry inspired by my old teacher and buttressed by new research-explain why." Why are these seen as two completely different and opposing philosophies of education? That's my question. From my experience, teasing knowledge and understanding out of children stresses the hell out of them. They struggle to give you an answer initially, but when when you are unwilling to spoon feed them or provide them with a "drill and kill" answer, they finally make a connection. In doing so you show the students that their grit and determination has helped them gather a better understanding of the material and become a better student and learner in process.

I may write a decent response to this. She plays just about every false argument card in the book. It needs this treatment - http://www.al.com/opinion/index.ssf/2013/10/huntsville_teacher_common_core.html

This take down of Gladwell's dyslexia chapter http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=8123 makes for a similar parallel.

"I was seeking a replacement for "unfathomable." I thought of "depthless," but, feeling a bit iffy about it, I consulted my old Webster's Second. Yes, it was a synonym for "unfathomable" ("Of measureless depth … unsoundable") but also for "fathomable" ("Having no depth; shallow"). The word was what I think of as an auto-antonym (a term that doesn't appear in Webster's Second): it's its own opposite. Which is to say, it's a mostly unusable word. "