I Speak of Dreams

Social-Emotional Learning, and the Connection to Learning to Read

Link: Social-Emotional Learning & Learning to Read - Mark Greenberg.

Here is where talk is not just about telling other people things, but to tell yourself things. And you see this in working with parents and being a parent, that trying to talk down to a two- or three-year-old who's having a temper tantrum doesn't work.

As much as we'd like to use inductive discipline and talk to the child, when a two-year-old is very upset, you really have to hold him or distract him, take him away from the situation. You can't really talk children out of their emotions. In fact, it's very hard to do that with adults many times. [laughs] But it's not possible with two-year-olds, and that's because when they're upset and their emotions are coursing through their brain, the cognitive capacity to listen to language or to talk to themselves about what's happening is just not present.

Somewhere between age three and four, this magic change begins to occur in which children now begin to use language to represent things to themselves as they're actually happening. And a perfect example of this is in our research. We often use what's called the "strange situation," which is a laboratory situation in which the mother and the child are separated. The mother plays with the child and then leaves the room, and the child is in the room alone. And it's often upsetting. The heart rate goes up, and some are concerned where their mother is, even though they know she's coming back. Some of them will begin to get a little weepy. But oftentimes they'll look in the one-way mirrors we're using to film through, and then they'll say to themselves something like, "My mommy is coming back." Or they'll start to sing to themselves. This is a fundamental aspect of play therapy, as children can now begin to play representationally to manage their emotions.

Go read the whole article -- it is fascinating.

Linguify

Over at Language Log, Geoffrey K. Pullum has found the need for a new term: linguify.

How to disagree online without being disagreeable...

Suzette Hadin Elgin is starting a conversation about How to disagree online without being disagreeable....

... A while back, we had a long discussion in this journal on the topic of how to disagree -- face to face, or perhaps on the telephone -- without being disagreeable [see http://ozarque.livejournal.com/234229 and http://ozarque.livejournal.com/235188 ]. Several people asked questions about whether the strategies and techniques that were talked about in that discussion would transfer to the Internet, and I promised to give that some thought and come back to it. I'm now ready to start working on that, with your help; consider it a work in progress, please, and not intended as The Last Word on any aspect of the topic.

Blogs Can Talk Past Each Other

Update: Kathy Sierra has a post attending to the deficits of "blog conversations" compared to face-to-face conversations

Blog conversations aren't like face to face conversations. 

First "Dick Dawson", who writes at The Life Who Chose Me,  read a particular post in the Carnival of Education. 

The Art of Getting By may shock you with A Shock To The System - on dealing with children with special needs.

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Elgin (and Friends) on Tannen

Suzette Haden Elgin is a linguist and writer, who in one series of books, invented a "women's language" called Laadan.

She now maintains a lively blog at Live Journal, which is sometimes like a seminar as her commentors are fully part of the conversation.

Recently she began a series responding to Deborah Tannen's new book:

my reaction to You're Wearing That?:  Understanding Mothers and Daughters in Conversation would be the same as my reaction to her previous books for the general public, and is easily stated, as follows: The language behavior of the set of American-English-speaking adult women as I perceive it does not correspond to the language behavior of the set that Professor Tannen writes about.

Rule of Three Interpretations:

The Rule of Three Interpretations

Whenever I'm aware that I'm making an interpretation, I have another  choice: I can allow myself to know that more than one interpretation is  possible. A good check on premature interpretation is the Rule of Three  Interpretations:

If I can't think of at least three different  interpretations of what I received, I haven't thought enough about what  it might mean.

This rule slows down the Interpretation step and gives me, the receiver,  a chance to engage my brain before using my mouth. Even after I have  thought of three possible interpretations, however, I should always be  aware of one more possibility: that my list still may not include your  intending meaning.
-- Jerry Weinberg, Quality Software  Management Vol 2, Chapter 6

Related thought: Miller's Law

A Site to Help Stepfamilies

Here is a site from Peter Gerlach  (who is a board member of the Stepfamily Association of America):

This non-profit, educational  divorce-prevention site provides over 150 practical articles and worksheets for  co-parents and supporters. These materials and related guidebooks come from  26 years' professional research.

The Master Stepfamily Myth

        In counseling many hundreds of stepfamily adults and couples, I've witnessed a common pattern: uninformed, busy co-parents often expect their  multi-home stepfamily  to act and feel like a one-home intact ("traditional") biofamily. This  misconception often comes from one more co-parents wanting to avoid identifying themselves as a stepfamily because of  negative associations like failure, weird, unnatural, second best, inferior,  and wicked (stepmother).

Cruelty

"Acts of unrepentant cruelty by the living or the dead are the hardest things to forgive because they provoke the deepest forces of hatred, and self-hatred (the worse you have been treated by someone you love, the more you hate yourself for having loved that person).

Excerpt  From “Forgiving and Not Forgiving" by Jeanne Safer, PhD

Tricks of the Trade

My favorite trick of the trade: Waitress

When you realize you have forgotten to submit an order to the kitchen, go to the table and mournfully say, “Did you just hear that crash?” Nine times out of 10, the customers not only will say “yes,” but actually will believe they just heard a noise of some sort. You can then sigh sadly, and say, “Unfortunately, that was the chef dropping your food,” and then scurry back to the kitchen to hand in the neglected order.

More at Metafilter on this particular article.  If you like this sort of thing, there's a whole blog, tradetricks, for your living pleasure.

Naming Our People

PZ Meyers is ruminating on language and dichotomies, among them the axis that runs from  those "committed to reason, empiricism, and natural evidence" to those "who think inspiration and intuition and all the internal imagery of their minds define their external reality."  Meyers might apply to the Language Log folks.  The commentators are excellent as usual, and Pierce R. Butler  reminds us that Terry Pratchett has coined a word:

‘71-hour Ahmed was not superstitious. He was substitious, which put him in a minority among humans. He didn’t believe in the things everyone believed in but which nevertheless weren’t true. He believed instead in the things that were true in which no one else believed. There are many such substitions, ranging from ‘It’ll get better if you don’t pick at it’ all the way up to ‘Sometimes things just happen.’” - Terry Pratchett, Jingo, pg 238

I resolve to be more substitious and to teach and promote the substitious world-view.

At the same time, Orac has a long essay rebuking Dean Esmay for being gullible in his (Esmay's) skepticism, specifically about HIV and AIDS.   It is

I wonder about the influence of the postmodernist approach -- specifically the deconstructionist approach -- to the widespread mistrust of science and the scientific method.

(see: Daniel Dennett's fable in Postmodernism and Truth; Peter Sacks' Generation X Goes to College):

The author attributes some of the negative attitudes he encounters to the versions of "postmodernism" and such that have filtered down to the student level. I tend to agree. Things were already headed in that direction when I was teaching, and what I have heard since then leads me to believe they've gotten worse. For many students, there is no "truth," no one can possibly be more intelligent or more learned than anyone else, and it is ridiculous and offensive for anyone, including a teacher, to pass judgment on other people by something like giving them grades for their work.... . One of the worst things you can do to a student-sure to raise hackles now since it's so unheard of-is to state or imply that they're wrong about something. All opinions are equal, after all, and their opinions are just as "true for them" as yours are "true for you."

In the sloppily-thought postmodernist world, all views are equal.  Proof (in the sense of scientific evidence) is just another point of view.