reading
reading
- All
- AEF
- Alternative Education Foundation
- American Hero
- art
- authors
- best practices
- Boxing Day
- Bradbury
- bullying
- Christmas
- civics
- Columbus Day
- constitution
- Cool projects
- curriculum
- Customer
- diversity
- education
- election
- failure
- First Person American
- Gifted
- guest
- Halloween
- history
- holiday
- impeachment
- inclusivity
- Israel
- language
- learning
- Mark Twain
- mid
- midgard
- mystery
- NCSS
- new year
- news
- reading
- Reading Rainbow
- slavery
- Star Trek
- student
- studying
- success
- teaching
- tech
- textbooks
- Thanksgiving
- The G Word
- travel
- tricks of the teacher trade
- veterans
- Vonnegut
education Five Reasons to Read Even Though It’s Hard Reading is hard. No matter what age, the act of deciphering squiggles on a page or a screen is not intuitive and takes a lot of cognitive juice. It is not natural. Human beings have only been producing symbols to stand for the sounds of words for five thousand years, that’s about one quarter of one percent of the span of identifiably human beings on Earth. Just to read this much, your brain had to take several dozen snapshots (saccades). Once the images are sent from the eye to the brain, the brain has to put them together using its reference of images. We’re lucky we have brains instead of computers. The fastest computer in the world, the Tianhe-2 in China, operates a million billion calculations per second. That’s strictly remedial compared to the human brain which runs a billion billion calculations per second. If this was a race, the human brain would finish a calculation in one second that the world’s fastest computer would take forty minutes. continue reading December 18, 2019
education Dear America, You’re Failing: American Reading, Math, and Citizenship Scores Lowest Ever Hi kids. We need to talk. We just got your report card back and there’s good news and bad news. The bad news is that you’re failing. According to the National Assessment of Education Progress, you were down to 34% in reading proficiency two years ago, and it’s significantly worse now. (The Nation’s Report Card in 2019 found that less than a third of eighth graders were reading “proficiently” or at grade level). continue reading November 4, 2019
education Why Bother to Read and Write: An Answer from Larry McMurty When students ask why we bother to read, or even worse to write, I tell them about Famous Shoes. Famous Shoes is a famous Native American tracker in Larry McMurty’s wonderful novel, Streets of Laredo. He can talk to birds and can tell a man’s identity just by smelling his urine. But he can’t read. continue reading November 4, 2019
Contact us
