And So It Begins

It's the age-old question parents ask their kids at the end of the school day:  

What did you learn today, my child?  

Their age-old answer has always been infuriatingly the same:

Nothing.  

As I began my journey through grad school today, I decided to prepare myself for that inevitable question from my darling husband and a couple of interested parties.  This little blog will not be particularly interesting and definitely won't be earth-shattering.  It's just to prove to a couple of people, and, let's face it, myself, that I'm actually progressing down the long road to graduation.  I won't even preface each day with quips like this.  So, keep your expectations low, your judgments to a minimum (she didn't know THAT?!), and your comments to yourself.  Well, unless they're encouraging.  You can share those.  

Degree:  Masters in ELL
Class:  Culture

What I Learned Today, 6/01

• We no longer refer to it as "child development" but "human development" because humans can continue to learn and develop their entire lives.  
• All learning is contextual, and a child's life outside the classroom heavily informs their learning in the classroom.  
• Intelligence is malleable and takes many forms.  
• We don't give enough credence to oral skills and rely too heavily on pencil and paper.  This excludes a large subset of students from being deemed "intelligent."  In turn, they face an ever-widening learning gap they struggle their entire lives to overcome.  
• Gardner's Nine Multiple intelligences include:  linguistic, intrapersonal, interpersonal, spatial, logical-mathematical, musical, bodily-kinesthetic, naturalistic, and spiritual.  We possess all of these to some degree.  
• "Critical Periods" are more useful for explaining extreme deprivation rather than variations in normal experiences.  The brain is capable of adapting and compensating.  
• "Enriched Environments" can be problematic because they are based on culturally-based assumptions of what constitutes enrichment.  There is no formula for universal enriching environments that stimulate learning.  
• Helping students see connections between academic disciplines helps them connect education to the world around them.  This provides superior educational results than conventional practices.  It helps students make deeper, more meaningful connections between school and the world because it draws upon their emotional and intellectual resources.  
• Students identify "caring" as the most important characteristic they look for in a teacher.  
• While there are differences in the hemispheres of the brain, no one activity is strictly left- or right-brained.  The entire brain works together.  
• Using and integrating intelligences in various ways lets students exhibit and build upon their strengths and also to use skills that don't necessarily come easily to them.  
• Making cultural assumptions and "dumbing down" curriculum based on those assumptions robs kids of vital learning experiences and widens the achievement gap.