Group items tagged

Hey, you guys: let me know if this article is "true" as far as Punahou students go. Does the word "drama" mean for you what it means for the students they interviewed? And is what they say about using the word "bullying" true? Maybe you could just comment here or send me an email. Thanks!

A campaign has been started to stop the use of the word "retarded" to refer to people who has intellectual and developmental disabilities. Over the years it has become a derogatory word that children use in schools to assault others. The word also makes disabled people feel excluded from others. I thought this was a good step to potentially stop bullying.

Studies show that bilinguals are "smarter" than monolinguals as it improves cognitive skills. Because bilinguals have to switch languages often, it requires one to monitor the environment which constantly keeps the brain active. 

In a 2011 survey, Renee Engeln, Professor of Psychology at Northwestern University and a colleague found that more than 90 percent of college women reported engaging in fat talk - despite the fact that only 9 percent were actually overweight. In another, 2014 survey, she canvassed thousands of women ranging in age from 16 to 70. Contrary to the stereotype of fat talk as a young woman's practice, she found that fat talk was common across all ages and all body sizes of women. Engeln notes that fat talk is not a harmless social-bonding ritual. According to an analysis of several studies published in 2012 in the Psychology of Women Quarterly, fat talk was linked with body shame, body dissatisfaction and eating-disordered behavior. Engeln also found that fat talk was contagious. She ran an 2012 experiment where young women, "confederates" secretly working for the researchers, joined two other young women seated at a table to discuss magazine advertisements. The ads started out innocently enough. One was for an electronics store. Another was for a water purifier. But the third was a typical fashion ad showing a model in a bikini. In the control condition, confederates commented on the visuals in the background of the fashion ad, but avoided any mention of the model or her appearance. In the "fat talk" condition, the two confederates (neither of whom was overweight) commented on the model. One said: "Look at her thighs. Makes me feel so fat." The other responded: "Me, too. Makes me wish my stomach was anywhere near flat like that." Then it was our subjects' turn. In the control condition, when neither of our confederates engaged in fat talk, none of our subjects fat talked. But when our confederates engaged in fat talk, almost a third of the subjects joined in. These subjects also reported higher levels of body dissatisfaction and shame at the end of the study than did their counterparts in the control condition.

Apparently people who have dyslexia possess skills that are superior to normal readers. People with dyslexia have increased perception. An example would be sharper peripheral vision.

This short documentary explores the reasons that some men sound stereotypically gay, whether they are or not.

SPEAKING two languages rather than just one has obvious practical benefits in an increasingly globalized world. But in recent years, scientists have begun to show that the advantages of bilingualism are even more fundamental than being able to converse with a wider range of people. Being bilingual, it turns out, makes you smarter.

Talks about the benefits of bilingualism. Was a helpful article to my 2nd quarter field project.

"Everyone's entitled to their opinion regarding pronoun acceptability." The use of singular "they" has always been a bit disreputable - you might say it, but you wouldn't want to write it down. But now it's a pronoun whose hour has come. A few months ago, the Washington Post style guide accepted it. And it's been welcomed by people who identify as genderqueer and who feel that "he" and "she" don't necessarily exhaust all the gender possibilities. Universities allow students to select it as their personal pronoun. And so does Facebook, so that your friends will get notices like "Wish them a happy birthday." This use of "they" has been around for a long time. It shows up in Shakespeare, Dickens and George Bernard Shaw. Jane Austen was always saying things like "everybody has their failing." But the Victorian grammarians made it a matter of schoolroom dogma that one could only say "Everybody has his failing," with the understanding that "he" stood in for both sexes. That rule wasn't really discredited until the 1970s, when the second-wave feminists made the generic masculine the paradigm of sexism in language. Male critics ridiculed their complaints as a "libspeak tantrum" and accused them of suffering from "pronoun envy." But most writers now realize that the so-called gender-neutral "he" is anything but. Nobody would ever say, "Every candidate thanked his spouse, including Hillary." When you utter "he," you always bring a male to mind. But once the generic masculine fell out of favor, what were we going to replace it with? People weren't about to adopt a brand-new gender-neutral pronoun the way they were adopting gender-neutral job descriptions. "He or she" was impossibly clunky. It was time to restore singular "they" to respectability. And that's been happening, even in edited books and the media.

Students in South Africa are thought to be at a disadvantage since they switch from learning in their native language to learning in english. Researchers, however, believe that it is more advantageous to students to learn in the language in which they feel most comfortable. Switching between the mother tongue at home and English at school is shown to be a struggle for most children. Since the simplicity of the mother tongue has no ties to english, the children are basically learning two different languages at once, trying to apply the two to one another.

Research has proved repeatedly that children undoubtedly achieve much better when they start schooling in a language linked to one they can already use quite well. Using a familiar language for schooling is a big part of such success, which is why the late South African educationalist Neville Alexander advocated for mother tongue based-bilingual education.

I was curious to find out when and if we ever will all talk the same language. This site shared some insight to people who agreed and disagreed to the idea. Both sides have valid arguments to support their stances.

This article talks about the misconception of swearing in front of your kids. Kids do not seem to be affected by swearing unless it is a racial slur.

This article talked about why reader's now-a-days aren't struggling because electronics, but more because of lack of knowledge. Our Reading comprehension over the years hasn't been getting any better, especially high school seniors. Many people blame the rise in social media and electronics, preventing our development, but it's more related to how people don't have enough basic knowledge.

This article analyzes how accent discrimination has become a problem. People often discriminate when an accent or someone's name is foreign. We also embrace that our words should sound a certain way and even though everyone has an accent, we struggle to have an open mind with those who have a different accent than us.

Daniel T. Willingham, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, notes that while Google is good at finding information, the brain beats it in two essential ways. 1. Context: Champions of Google underestimate how much the meaning of words and sentences changes with context. With the right knowledge in memory, your brain deftly puts words in context. 2. Speed Quick access is supposed to be a great advantage of using the internet. Students have always been able to look up the quadratic equation rather than memorize it, but opening a new browser tab takes moments, not the minutes required to locate the right page in the right book. Yet "moments" is still much slower than the brain operates. That's why the National Mathematics Advisory Panel listed "quick and effortless recall of facts" as one essential of math education. Speed matters for reading, too. Researchers report that readers need to know at least 95 percent of the words in a text for comfortable absorption. Pausing to find a word definition is disruptive. Good readers have reliable, speedy connections among the brain representations of spelling, sound and meaning. Speed matters because it allows other important work - for example, puzzling out the meaning of phrases - to proceed. Using knowledge in the head is also self-sustaining, whereas using knowledge from the internet is not. Every time you retrieve information from memory, it becomes a bit easier to find it the next time.

Being bilingual makes you smarter and can have a profound effect on your brain.

Being bilingual does create certain conflicts between the two language systems that are constantly churning inside a person's head, however, it may be this conflict that allows bilingual children to solve puzzles faster than monolingual children. There seems to be substantial evidence for this using controlled test puzzles, but one must wonder how a puzzle could equate to the real world, and if bilingualism may become a commodity that every parent will strive for their children to attain.

This article provided a great amount of information based on the negative affects texting has on us. Although there were not much on the statistics, the ideas were all there and supported by authors opinions. The author brought up a lot of valid points within the article.

Positive words from coaches and parents to their kids play a crucial role in the development of the child. Youth sports is about the development of the players. Most coaches often forget this and only focus on the win. This can result in yelling at the players and overall very negative language use. However, being "relentlessly positive" can improve the attitude and play of an athlete.

This article elaborates on how dance is a type of language that connects all cultures, and all species around the world. Dancers are thought of as storytellers, and their stories are their bodies and movement.

This article talks about how the Quakers have had a unique use of pronouns in history. I found it interesting that the Quakers refused to use the proper pronouns for rich people such as "you" in the 1600s. They would call people "thou" regardless of class, but rich people were used to using "thou" for lower people. However, "thou" evolved into "they" which is now presently used.