April 6, 2010

Seeing is Believing but Moving isn’t Proving

In the professional development I've offered teachers for the past 15 years, I've cited experts plenty. When something didn't make sense to a student or a teacher, or to me, the only response I had was to cite the person or the resource that had said it was thus and so. Now, however, if something about written language isn't immediately clear to me, I've learned to investigate it: the evidence is right there, waiting to be discovered! I've stopped taking resources at face value, and started interrogating them instead.
April 17, 2010

A Fine Mess

In teaching language, errors of commission like those above are pretty common. Even more common, however, are errors of omission. If teachers simply omit any information about the morphological structure of words (often because they are unaware themselves), then students persist in approaching words as whole pieces, or as units analyzable by sound only. If teachers commit the error of omitting instruction in favor of memorization, then students will come to think of words and spelling as things to be memorized, rather than as things to be studied, investigated and understood.
April 28, 2010

I Wasn’t Born Yesterday, You Know

Certainly educators and authors do not intend to be in error; they are just ignorant ('unknowing') of the structure that underlies the surface appearance of these words, and they are agnostic about the tools to investigate it. The Oxford English Dictioary defines an agnostic as "One who holds that the existence of anything beyond and behind material phenomena is unknown and (so far as can be judged) unknowable."
October 30, 2010

Raising Consciousness

You know how sometimes a certain word will keep popping up over and over?  By the time the same word has appeared three or four times, […]