I chose this quote because I found it impactful. As teachers of children, we must be so careful with our words and the messages we impart. This is why we’re told to keep political opinions out of the classroom. As a captive audience, students can’t help but start to internalize what we tell them. That is also why it’s important to begin the messages of social justice early. Not every student is hearing what they need to on the subject at home, but they will learn if we reference it often enough at school. It’s easy in the language arts and literature classroom. We can read articles and stories about the oppressed and underserved communities. We can discuss what what if would be like to be in that person’s shoes. By teaching my students to empathize with people that are different races, sexualities, genders, or cultures than them, I’m giving them the skills they’re going to need to function in this modern society. In Connecting Cognitive Development and Constructivism: Implications from Theory for Instruction and Assessment  Lutz and Huitt (2004) assert, “ A major problem facing educators and parents today is that the world is rapidly changing and a worldview that propelled our nation to greatness in the 20th century needs to be replaced by one that is more appropriate for the world in which our children and youth will spend their adult lives. One of the most important skills is the ability to get along with a wide variety of people of different backgrounds, ethnicities, personalities, etc (Lutz and Huitt, p. 10). Therefore, we can bring about positive change in the world if we continue to engage students in other points of view. My question then is this: in what ways can we use the brain’s ability to take in information that may be contradictory to what students have been taught by their parents or society and categorize it as true in a positive way?

etc..." (89).

I have always been interested in the human brain and how it works. Learning more about how children acquire language, the concept of numbers and how to properly walk without falling is intriguing for me. I chose this quote and chapter for that very reason as it explains in detail different aspects of the human brain and how children become speakers, walkers, and math doers.

This quote is explaining that infants when shown various images of household items (3 to a page), they lose interest because they keep seeing the same number of images time and time again. When shown a variety of images with 2, 3, or 4 examples on one page they become more interested in the activity. The only difference among the images is the number on each page that is shown to the infants. Although they are young and unfamiliar with numbers, this is a concept they are beginning to understand.

As mentioned in Why Don't Students Like School,  "Thinking occurs when you combine information (from the environment and longterm memory) in new ways. That combining happens in working memory (11). The more visual exposure infants have to their surrounding environment, the more information they will have stored in their longterm memory. Are they only learning visually? Are they learning when they hear their family speak?

One question I have is pretty generic but fits this discussion, what teaching style helps you learn the best? I ask this because infants are being shown visual images in order for researchers to capture their attention and gain information regarding their level of understanding on the topic. If this is the case, I want to know how you feel you learn the best or have learned the best throughout your experience in school. 

While abroad, I decided to try teaching my HS Seniors, all high-level English speakers, a unit on morphemes. The English exams in Korea are notoriously difficult; many native speakers struggle with them. My thinking was, with a bit of knowledge about the building blocks of English words, those huge chunks of text on the exams might be more quickly decipherable and more easily put into context. This unit did not work. There were extenuating circumstances, but this unit primarily failed on two fronts. I did not provide students with tools to ignite both their declarative AND procedural memory centers and I did not treat ‘meaning’ in a useful way. 

I did not imbue this unit with enough meaning to make it memorable for the students and simultaneously failed to admit that the lesson was “meaningless”. Admittedly, they were able to take heterogeneous and homogeneous (my examples) and extrapolate definitions of heterosexual and homosexual. “Whatever you think about, that’s what you remember” (Willingham, 47). They remembered the ‘sex’ words (sigh), but most of the material was lost. I hated morphemes when they were presented to me in my sophomore year. I was given huge lists of words to memorize and be quizzed on. I did not want to repeat that process, but I saw value in the knowledge. I thought I could do a better job by making the material more relevant to my students’ lives. However, there are things that students will have to learn that do not have meaning (Willingham, 58) and are not relevant to their lives. If I were to repeat this unit (and I might because I still think it has value) I would need to do a better job of splitting the difference between giving it some relevant meaning and admitting that it is also meaningless. I would also need to build functions into the lessons that could ignite declarative AND procedural memory centers in my students. 

I am curious to know how others might handle this situation. How do you teach things that are “meaningless” and what skills do you employ to increase knowledge retention?

 

The complexity here is good for my brain, no doubt. This quotation from How People Learn brings up some very interesting ideas that support best practices in the classroom. Pictures and words together are more effective for retention and building memory. There is repetition involved in learning which activates the brain and cements the pathways accessible when we recall something. There was mention of differences between recalling information such as facts rather than processes but I didn’t get enough practice in this short reading to speak much about that. In light of our obsession these days with fake news, it is no surprise that true and false events can be recalled if there is enough repetition of mental activity around the event whether or not it actually happened or not. Because we develop structures in the brain, there is no guarantee that these are valid. 

 

This leads to a very interesting question. Can we trust our senses? Is something real because we see it? If our brain structures themselves have not got the supporting synapses to see what is real, we see only what the brain determines we can see or recognize in the detail we have already predetermined by our past experiences (true or false but with much mental activity). 

 

Similarly, all of formal systems of education can be misleading or worse, limiting our students in the future if the overall framework is not situated within reality. Education is in this light, dangerous like the exposure to one language limits a child from recognizing and discriminating differences that mean something in a different context. We are back to the social constructivist model (Vygotski) that points out that cultural/societal choices of what is valuable guide the process of learning. In our education system which values itself, we run into a grating problem when students aren’t in school to learn in a standardized way. What if it is not true value? Sure, there are skills and goals that seem worth the effort to impart. 

 

Another question arises. How is the mind really limited to the brain structures that are described as the bases for mental activity? The silent areas of the brain that are supporting higher brain functions are interesting to me. These seem to go beyond the sensory/motor interactions with the world that are more easily reflected by the scans and tests and electrical impulse reading machines we are basing our knowledge of the brain upon. This all leads to the thought that brain structures would be more integratable with real world experience if we exposed students to an authentic environment at an earlier age, perhaps Middle School (Maria Montessouri’s position). 

I also thought it was very interesting as I read about the similarities and differences between learners who are deaf and learning ASL and learners who can hear, but are learning ASL. “When a deaf individual learns to communicate with manual signs, different nervous system processes have replaced the ones normally used for language—a significant achievement…Also, there are similarities between sign language users with normal hearing and sign language users who are deaf that result from their common experiences of engaging in language activities. In other words, specific types of instruction can modify the brain, enabling it to use alternative sensory input to accomplish adaptive functions, in this case, communication” (p. 123). I teach my kinders to sing, sign and read using ASL. I know from experience that they learn their letter names and sounds better when they are also learning to sign. When I assess them on letter names and sounds, they often forget what it is when looking at the print version, but when I show them the sign, they remember! I think it is a huge benefit for them to learn the ASL signs for letters and sounds along with our core reading instruction, which is more visual.

This challenges me because I have never heard of this but it makes so much sense. I translate this to a philosophical space, in which anything underused adapts, and if it is underused over an extended period of time, it becomes somewhat fixed. Much like language acquisition has higher potential the more one uses it at an ideal time of development, so too is the eye and seeing. 

The best example I can reflect upon as it relates to this chapter and this quote, is my personal challenges with language acquisition. I like to joke that I am half Hispanic so I speak half the amount of Spanish it takes to be fluent. As a child my mother did not teach me Spanish, she simply spoke Spanish phrases with me at times either directly or indirectly. I was able to observe her speak with my grandmother in fluent Spanish. My grandmother did not speak English well and her reading and writing skills in both English and Spanish were extremely limited. My mother would have to interpret a lot for her. Anyway, my mother did not teach me Spanish as a child, and so during my primary years I learned English, with a few Spanish phrases. When I finally had the opportunity to learn Spanish as an adult, it was challenging. When I tried to seek help from my mom, I discovered she could only speak Spanish well, but her reading and writing skills were limited in this language. So she could not help me with grammar, spelling, punctuation, sentence structure, conjugations, or advanced vocabulary. Trying to make sense of the language partially on my own, I found myself studying as an elementary school student learning to read and write. It was eye-opening, and it made me wish my mom taught me Spanish. Her reasons for not teaching me the language is not what I take issue with, it's the social reasons why she chose to not teach me the language. She chose not to teach me so I could blend into whiteness easier. As a woman of color this is a challenge that is real in the Hispanic community. There is a constant push and pull of carrying on our culture, while trying to appeal to the American culture that surrounds us. 

Has anyone else had similar challenges with language acquisition?