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 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."
January 10, 2012

Simply Put: Part I

This past fall, I attended the annual conference of the International Dyslexia Association (IDA), as I have nearly every fall for the past dozen years. I […]
January 13, 2012

Simply Put: Part II

As my last post went up and was seen by the world of LEX readers, I was excited to see 120 hits in a day. That […]