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Taking Note of Note-Taking

15/10/2018

 
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The Sumerians were perhaps the first people to use "wedge-shaped" writing tool on flat mud to keep track of projects. This tablet dates from 3200 BCE.
Ever notice people who scribble constantly while attending a talk?  I do because I don’t take notes well.  In fact I hardly take notes at all.  I find note-taking gets in the way of attentive listening.  I’m afraid I’ll miss something if I divert my attention to writing something down.   Note-taking is a different activity than actively listening.  So when I interview an expert to learn about his/her field for a project I’m working on, I bring along a tape recorder.  The only notes I take are about specifics—the spelling of a name, or a particular recommended reading, or a website I should visit.  Later, when I am synthesizing material in my own writing, I can always double check my memory about what I heard with the tape recorder.  I have come to understand that my memory is quite good. And, as a result, I’ve come to rely on it.  If I’m worried about forgetting some of the details after listening all day, I write my notes in the evening. 

It seems that Socrates also noticed this.  He worried about the technology of his day, the stylus, which allowed people to write in clay.  He was afraid that “[Writing] destroys memory [and] weakens the mind, relieving it of…work that makes it strong. [It] is an inhuman thing.” In other words, if you could easily make notes (now carved in clay), you no longer had to remember what you wrote down and so you could now forget it.  Listening and writing are two different and, perhaps, competing verbal activities. Modern research into multitasking indicates that we really don’t do two or more things at once, but simply shift attention back and forth from different tasks. But in college, we were all encouraged to take notes, not only from lectures but from our readings as well.

For my first term paper when I was in college, I learned from a graduate student that 3”x 5” note cards about the research were the order of the day and I diligently wrote them.  But, today, when I’m reading to learn, I find it disruptive to write notes.  When I’m trying to grasp concepts the best way for me to learn is to read several different sources on the same subject. It is only when you can articulate a concept in your own words that you truly “own” it. So I only make a note when something jumps out at me and I know that I’ll want to revisit it. 

But doesn’t the act of writing also strengthen memory?  The many times I forget to bring along the grocery list I had recently created makes no difference at all in collecting every item on that list into my shopping basket.  We authors are verbally articulate about the material in our books because we’ve thought about it and written about it and, as a result, remember it better.  The many pundits who speak so well on news talk shows are all excellent writers.  Good speaking comes from having written and practicing by engaging in substantive conversations.

The Common Core State Standards  “…..require that students systematically acquire knowledge in literature and other disciplines through reading, writing, speaking, and listening.”  To become an articulate, educated person requires interaction of all four of these activities, which I’ve put in red in this post. I’m not sure where note-taking fits into this process.  I have a hunch that it’s one of those highly individualized, personal quirks that everyone has to discover independently. In other words, we each have to figure out what works best in our personal acquisition of knowledge.  This could be a sub-text of the CCSS—although becoming educated involves all four activities, how you make it work for yourself can be discovered only empirically.  There is no one right way, one size fits all.  It is this process of self-discovery that needs to be communicated to teachers and students.
 


Nonfiction Minutes: Stepping Stones to Achieving Excellence

6/6/2018

 
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Excellence.  There is no shortage of exemplars.  They are athletes, entertainers, entrepreneurs, activists, academics, writers.  We shower them with accolades and many are rewarded with large sums of money.  We call them heroes.  Children can name their favorites.  But to a child, and to teenagers, and even young adults these superstars may as well live on another planet.  What is the journey to this pinnacle?  Champions come from all walks of life.  And many individuals, who are born to wealth and privilege, fall by the wayside.  Excellence also shows up in less publicly aggrandized activities.   There are short order cooks, teachers, social workers, wait-staff, knitters, who are stand-outs in their less glamorous worlds.

I started iNK Think Tank because I wanted to highlight excellent nonfiction writing for children.  Our genre has been a stepchild in children’s literature.    For the most part, the nonfiction children read in public schools is from standardized material that “covers” curriculum subjects.   ELA classes have a long tradition of teaching classics.  There is so much to be mined from their excellence that they need a teacher to help students get more from a book than just the words.  Why not expose children to excellence in nonfiction writing where the author’s passion for content shines through the language?

Achieving excellence can be learned.  We get there though a concept called “successive approximations.”  As educators we recognize and reinforce behavior that is in the direction we want our students to go.  Then we have them repeat the process but raise the bar a little higher for the outcomes.  It isn’t a linear path.  Failure is an intrinsic part of the process.  Think how many times the champion figure skater or hockey player must have fallen on the ice in their journeys to the Olympics.  The most important requisite knowledge is that it is hard-won.  But at some point,individuals gets hooked.  They see themselves improving.  They understand the kind of work they must produce consistently to graduate from one level to another.  They certainly understand it if they play video games and get really good at them.  Note that test grades are not necessarily a part of the learning process and sometimes can kill it before it takes hold. 

When it comes to academics the primary skills are literacy-related as defined in the Common Core Standards as listening, speaking, reading, and writing.  The problem, as I see it, is that the standards come divorced from content, particularly content that may be of interest to students.  If motivation is the key to learning and, let’s say, one kid is fanatically interested in some arcane subject matter, like wolf spiders in Australia, academic skills can be acquired in the process of learning about that subject.  Yet all too often, we rush children through the learning ropes without considering the built-in motivations that come with each individual. 

This is the concept behind the Nonfiction Minute.  Children are being introduced to a diversity of topics, written by a diversity of  authors who have achieved excellence in their writing from a diversity of pathways.  Literacy skills are likely to be acquired much more rapidly if they must be used in pursuit of knowledge that fascinates a child.  They can be the key to starting their own academic journey into content that resonates with them.
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Karen Sterling’s brilliant Transfers to Teaching (T2T) helps them on the way to higher learning and academic achievement.  


II hope you understand how we are trying to get to the heart and soul of the learning process that has been hijacked by too many misguided cooks in the education pot.

Good Writing Honors the Reader

19/2/2018

 
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Good writing engages the reader.  As William Zinnser said in his classic book, "good writing is clear thinking." Yet most children would never get past the first sentence of a standardized text book unless it was required reading. Some schools know that and tell teachers not to bother with text.  The tradition of assigned reading assumes it is a way to impart information to readers.  So, as long as the information is there and correct, the student will understand it and the teacher is off the hook because the material has been "covered."  Right?

What happens when the same historical information is written by textbook writers, linguists,  academics and  magazine writers?  What does reading comprehension have to do with the quality of the writing?  Is this something that can be measured?   As a matter of fact, a study was done in 1988 that still holds up well today.  

The writing in question was two 400-word excerpts from a high-school history textbook. The experimenters asked three pairs of writers, two linguists, two college English teachers and two former Time-Life magazine writers to rewrite the passages to make them more understandable to the students. Three hundred eleventh-grade students read the original material and the revisions and were tested on how much they recalled. The results? Students who read the linguists’ and English teachers’ versions did not recall much more or less than they had from the original texts. But students who read the magazine writers version recalled 40 percent more than the original! Naturally, the linguists and English teachers wanted another crack at a rewrite but although the second experiment showed a little improvement, the magazine writers were still twice as effective at communicating. In other words, good writing is memorable. And command of the English language doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a good writer.

Reading teachers have a measurement, called “lexiles (L)” to evaluate the complexity or the level of difficulty of texts. There is another myth that such leveled reading is easier when it comes to comprehension than good writing.  Gerri K. Songer, Education Chair/ Illinois Township High School District 214, measured the lexile level of some sample paragraphs from the recent PARRC  assessment test and came to the conclusion that  “[for students] to independently read the most complex of these passages, [they] will need to read at 1470L by April of their junior year.” As a comparison, I measured a few of my entries here on my blog and they average about 1000L. She also came to some conclusions about the reading levels stipulated by the Common Core State Standards:


  • ​​CCSS finds it more desirable for students to read text that does not follow standard convention rules (i.e. text without an identifiable pattern).​
  • CCSS finds it more desirable for students to read text that is unclear, misleading, old, unfamiliar, ironic, and figurative (text that doesn’t say what it means).
  • CSSS finds it more desirable for students to read text with which few people can identify in terms of life experience.
  • CCSS finds it more desirable for students to read text that has multiple meanings with information that is implied, hidden, or obscure.

And she sums it up: “CCSS advocates utilizing text for educational purposes that follows no pattern, that is unclear and misleading, that few people can identify with, and that has multiple meanings.” I think we're teaching kids to read bad writing. Yet they use excerpts from iNK authors for the standardized tests!

We created the Nonfiction Minute to show good writing to those who buy in to the standardized material used in classrooms full of diverse individual humans.  We include an audio file of the author reading his/her Minute so less fluent readers can access the content, as well as visuals (photos, charts, illustrations, even videos).  We welcome any reading researcher who wants to evaluate our effectiveness. (Write me at: vicki@inkthinktank.org.)   We have all kinds of stats on page views, which doesn't distinguish that each single page view could be a class of twenty-five.
This past week we had 15,751 page views and more than 4,500 new visitors.

Literature has been defined as "the single passionate voice."  Its humanity connects us to the writer just as a teacher's humanity connects him/her to students. Humanity is the common denominator of all authentic communication. 






     Vicki Cobb

    *Award-winning author of more than 90 nonfiction books for children, mostly in science.
    *Former Contributor to the Huffington Post
    *Founder/President of iNK Think Tank, Inc.
    *Passionate advocate for the joy of learning for every child and teacher.


    Disclaimer: All opinions, typos, and grammatical errors are my own,  especially small word omissions which I often don't notice in my fervor.  

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iNK Think Tank, Inc. is a nonprofit with the mission of using nonfiction children's literature in classrooms

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