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Are Children Losing (or Never Acquiring) Social Skills?

1/11/2018

 
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Source: pixabay.com
Over the past ten years I have experienced worrisome interactions with teachers and students.  Last summer, when at a conference, a fourth grader was explaining a school project to me.  I had to request that she make eye contact with me when she was talking to me.  After the request she managed to do so but there were intermittent drifts of glances to some place over my shoulder. 

The other day I had a video conference with some college-bound high-school seniors.  I gave them a number of links to read and asked that they formulate questions for me prior to our meeting.  Only one student had a prepared question and when I asked them questions I was greeted with silence.  Not one hand was raised. 

In a coaching session with young teachers on how to teach the solar system I asked them, “How do we know about the solar system?”  They looked at me with blank fear and then at each other.  I could easily imagine them frantically thinking “what’s the right answer?”  I didn’t want to embarrass them, so I said, “We look at the sky” and followed up with, “and what do we see in the sky?”  “Clouds?” one teacher tentatively responded.  Since we were discussing the solar system, I could only surmise that she was not following the conversation.  I could go on and on with my interactions where any question I asked generated panic that interfered with truly hearing my questions.  I wasn’t testing them.  I was trying to engage them in a conversation where I wasn’t doing most of the talking. But it wasn't working.
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I’m self-reflective.  I worry about my own inability to engage.  Then I talk to my teacher friends in affluent school districts who tell me that kids only care about getting good grades.  They demand instruction on only what they need to do to score well on tests. There is little or no enthusiasm for learning or content. When given choices, students respond by asking the teacher to choose for them. They fear making an incorrect choice as simple as one between colored pencils and markers for an art project.  And their parents have become helicopters on steroids, protecting their children from any form of failure by intimidating teachers.  Teachers are told not to put anything that suggests improvement of a student to the parents in writing.  The threat of lawsuits hover over classroom interactions.  I did an afterschool program through a public library designed to generate creativity.  Instead the students just copied what I modeled for them.  Professors at a school of education in Florida told me about their latest students, whom they called F-Cat babies—students who had experience standardized testing every year since kindergarten.  They feared  that these students only knew the testing environment for their own formal education thus becoming obsessed with testing, not with teaching others  how to learn.

Is there evidence out there that supports my anecdotal experience?  Yes!  I’m giving you links. More than I ever imagined! So I've done a little curating to give you a variety of vantage points.  The Common Core Standards want students to listen, speak, read and write.  Instead, they are addicted to screen and are obsessed with social media.  They don’t know how to have a conversation, make eye contact, even listen to stories.  Here are linke to recent articles from reliable sources.  I'm probably not telling you anything you don't already know.  But the next question is what do we do about it?
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How Too Much Screen Time Affects Kids' Bodies And Brains by Alice G. Walton in Forbes
 
Limiting children's screen time linked to better cognition, study says by Naomi Thomas of CNN

Here’s an instructional You Tube video on how to have a conversation by taking turns speaking and listening.  I found the conversation somewhat stilted but maybe it’s useful.

 Back-and-forth exchanges boost children’s brain response to language by Anne Trafton- MIT News


Protecting your kids from failure isn’t helpful. Here’s how to build their resilience – The Conversation

How Parents Can Foster Autonomy and Encourage Child Development  by Eva Lazar, PhD- Good Therapy

Supporting the Development of Creativity by Laurel Bongiorno –NAEYC

The importance of eye contact in young children, and how to teach it as a social skill Rainforest Learning Centre.

Have you ever noticed how infants make eye contact?   Why do they lose that skill?

Talking to babies: How friendly eye contact can make infants tune in -- and mirror your brain waves by Gwen Dewar, Ph.D-Parenting Science

Why is storytelling important to children? -BBC

Taking Note of Note-Taking

15/10/2018

 
Picture
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.
 


     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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