Skip to main content

Home/ UWCSEA Teachers/ Group items tagged concentration

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Katie Day

The Learning Virtues - NYTimes.com - David Brooks on book "Cultural Foundations of Lear... - 0 views

  •  
    "In the Western understanding, students come to school with levels of innate intelligence and curiosity. Teachers try to further arouse that curiosity in specific subjects. There's a lot of active learning - going on field trips, building things. There's great emphasis on questioning authority, critical inquiry and sharing ideas in classroom discussion. In the Chinese understanding, there's less emphasis on innate curiosity or even on specific subject matter. Instead, the learning process itself is the crucial thing. The idea is to perfect the learning virtues in order to become, ultimately, a sage, which is equally a moral and intellectual state. These virtues include: sincerity (an authentic commitment to the task) as well as diligence, perseverance, concentration and respect for teachers. "
Louise Phinney

Amidst Chaos, 15 Minutes of Quiet Time Helps Focus Students | MindShift - 3 views

  •  
    Meditation strengthens the areas of the brain that control our 'fear center.' It helps kids reduce anxiety and increase their ability to reason and concentrate.
Louise Phinney

World Family Names - 0 views

  •  
    Allows you to search the world for family names, shows you where the highest concentration is, shows you the top first names that go with that family name etc
Sean McHugh

How Does Multitasking Change the Way Kids Learn? | MindShift - 2 views

  • “We were amazed at how frequently they multitasked, even though they knew someone was watching,” Rosen says. “It really seems that they could not go for 15 minutes without engaging their devices,” adding, “It was kind of scary, actually.”
  • media multitasking while learning. Attending to multiple streams of information and entertainment while studying, doing homework, or even sitting in class has become common behavior among young people—so common that many of them rarely write a paper or complete a problem set any other way.
  • But evidence from psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience suggests that when students multitask while doing schoolwork, their learning is far spottier and shallower than if the work had their full attention. They understand and remember less, and they have greater difficulty transferring their learning to new contexts.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Under most conditions, the brain simply cannot do two complex tasks at the same time. It can happen only when the two tasks are both very simple and when they don’t compete with each other for the same mental resources. An example would be folding laundry and listening to the weather report on the radio. That’s fine. But listening to a lecture while texting, or doing homework and being on Facebook—each of these tasks is very demanding, and each of them uses the same area of the brain, the prefrontal cortex.”
  • Young people think they can perform two challenging tasks at once, Meyer acknowledges, but “they are deluded,
  • This ability to resist the lure of technology can be consciously cultivated
  • “The good thing about this phenomenon is that it’s a relatively discrete behavior that parents actually can do something about,” she says. “It would be hard to enforce a total ban on media multitasking, but parents can draw a line when it comes to homework and studying—telling their kids, ‘This is a time when you will concentrate on just one thing.’ ”
  • Stop fretting about how much they’re on Facebook. Don’t harass them about how much they play video games. The digital native boosters are right that this is the social and emotional world in which young people live. Just make sure when they’re doing schoolwork, the cell phones are silent, the video screens are dark, and that every last window is closed but one.
Katie Day

Food Experts Worry as World Population and Hunger Grow - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Scientists and development experts across the globe are racing to increase food production by 50 percent over the next two decades to feed the world’s growing population, yet many doubt their chances despite a broad consensus that enough land, water and expertise exist.
  • The number of hungry people in the world rose to 1.02 billion this year, or nearly one in seven people, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, despite a 12-year concentrated effort to cut the number.
  • Agronomists and development experts who gathered in Rome last week generally agreed that the resources and technical knowledge were available to increase food production by 50 percent in 2030 and by 70 percent in 2050 — the amounts needed to feed a population expected to grow to 9.1 billion in 40 years.
  •  
    Oct 21, 2009
Sean McHugh

How Stephen King Teaches Writing - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • One either absorbs the grammatical principles of one’s native language in conversation and in reading or one does not
  • Reading is the key, though. A kid who grows up hearing “It don’t matter to me” can only learn doesn’t if he/she reads it over and over again
  • You need to take out the stuff that’s just sitting there and doing nothing
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Ask yourself what they need to get on in life, the bare minimum (like filling in a job application), and concentrate on that.
    • Sean McHugh
       
      Surely this is true of reading as well? Maybe some students need to just focus on being 'functional' readers, like reading the instructions on a job application.
  • telling the truth is the most important thing, much more important than the grammar
  • I would often ask them to describe operations that they take for granted. Ask a girl to write a paragraph on how she braids her sister’s hair. Ask a boy to explain a sports rule. These are just basic starting points, where students learn to write on paper what they might tell a friend. It keeps it concrete. If you ask a kid to write on “My Favorite Movie,” you’re opening the door to subjectivity, and hence to a flood of clichés
  • See, then say
  • A good reader digging into a good book is wonderful. Musical
  • Reading good fiction is like making the jump from masturbation to sex
  • Good teachers can be trained, if they really want to learn (some are pretty lazy). Great teachers, like Socrates, are born
  • What about teaching? Craft, or art?King: It’s both. The best teachers are artists
1 - 7 of 7
Showing 20 items per page