speach tree

In an effort to try to clean up the house - get rid of old papers etc - I came across a little pad of paper from Free Minds Collective days. We must have been brainstorming some ground-rules or something. Here is the list: confidentiality speak from personal experience, not from sweeping generalizations step up, step back respect support have an open mind: don't be thinking about a response while someone is still talking reflect keep the goals in mind check your body language Here are some other notes... Interventions: 1. use positive reinforcement 2. make the student a leader 3. provide choices 4. deal with sickness, not symptoms 5. build trust but don't confuse building trust with being friends 6. find and encourage passion 7. know the difference between extrinsic and intrinsic rewards 8. sometimes you have to be tough - a mommy (??) [sometimes my own notes confuse me.] Responding to different learning styles: 1. kinesthetic - with your hands 2. present the same concept in di...

some words i have recently re-discovered and with which i have rekindled a romance: hummingbird morsels porcupine crave skitter pumps rush ponytail stem astringent sinister condensation dominate battle mushroom yum words that have lost favor with me recently: space feel syllable tail challenge script descent race class press guilt like futile suicide waterproof sorry I tried to explain the four writing systems in Japanese today with my middle school students. I guess the basic one would be hiragana - a script that indicates different sounds arranged in syllables, which can be rearranged to form words. Katakana , the other basic script is a counterpart sound-script that looks edgier and is used only for foreign words. The third script is kanji , Chinese characters that signal both a sound and a meaning - some kanji characters are associated with multiple sounds and multiple meanings. The final script is romaji , based on the alphabet, used for the transliteration of Japanese words as we...

there is so much to prepare and mobilize for may 1 . and of course, there will be much more to do after may 1. in the meantime, i am trying to stay rested, fed, and productive. somehow i can't seem to focus on my day-jobs, though. i did finish reading other people's children by lisa delpit, however. i am mentally patting myself. i'm going to write my thoughts on it as soon as i can get enough sleep to stay awake through the writing of it.

Reading bell hooks and Lisa Delpit back to back is like being slapped and hugged at the same time with two sets of arms and hands. But I'm the kind of buddhist that doesn't (theoretically) have a problem with being bashed with a stick in the pursuit of enlightenment (although I've never actually meditated with Rinzai folks.) What I'm trying to say is that I am finding it so hard to align myself with the actively loving pedagogy that I adhere to intellectually and to some extent emotionally as well. In my classrooms I often resort to harsh words and stern faces, standard edited English, and "punishment". I am only able to negotiate with one of my groups right now, and sometimes I feel that I am doing them a disservice too by being over-indulgent and not expecting enough of them. a tidbit from Lisa Delpit: "Let there be no doubt: a 'skilled' minority person who is not also capable of critical analysis becomes the trainable, low-level functionary of ...

Must remember... I teach for critical thinking... critical thinking... I've always known that this was what my teaching was supposed to be about, but I think it's taken me close to a year to come close to understanding what this means. What I'm trying to say is that so far, I have been nothing but an entertainer.

In the past five or six months since I started working with (& teaching & learning with) students, I have noticed a greater capacity in me to recognize the immaturities, weaknesses, and insecurities in myself, not just as a teacher, but as a person living in the floating world. Today I feel inspired to share some of these weaknesses with you, my dear readers, because (a) I had a bad day and I need to vent (b) I have been working on my anime curriculum so much that I haven't posted in many days, and more importantly: (c) I hope you will find my analyses useful. What Not To Do When You Have a Class Full of High School Students After School: 1. Gripe to Them about How Little Your Agency Pays You & Make Them Feel Bad about It. Yes it sucks big butt that you don't get compensated for all the work that you do outside of the classroom and outside of the alotted time in your workweek and that your co-workers expect you to suck it up because "everyone else does" i...