Friday, October 12, 2018

Gargling gurgling gibberish!


Sunday, October 7, 2018

Just stating the facts...

The gnawing gnarled gnu's nose knows what's new now.







Sunday, September 30, 2018

Wonderful words in English

Glad to say I've heard or used these!! And pumpernickel is one of my favorites--to eat.



Saturday, September 29, 2018

We accept exceptions

Does the cat see the mouse? No, the dirty rat!


Sunday, September 2, 2018

The Creative Classroom Experience book (c) 2018


My 4th book, The Creative Classroom Experience, is now available on Amazon.com in paperback and Kindle. It's a collection of some of my work on this site as well as some featured short stories that I've written**, along with some classic short stories from authors like Mark Twain and Ray Bradbury.

Here's the table of contents:

----------------------------------------------------

1.    Commentary on the Creative Classroom Experience: p. 9
2.    “Welcome to the Creative Classroom”: p. 12
3.    Ground Rules and Principles of the Creative Classroom: p. 17
4.    The Creative Classroom Mandate: p. 21
5.    Grammar – Fundamentals of Reading and Writing: p. 25
6.    “Use to/Used to”: p. 27
7.    English is a crazy thing: p. 29
8.    Lay or Lie?: p. 35
9.    Numb about Numbers?: p. 37
10.  Homophones, homonyms, Synonyms, and Antonyms: p. 38
11.  The Perilous Points of Punctuation: p. 41
12.  Conjunction Junction, what’s your function?: p. 44
13.  Underlining and italics: p. 46
14.  Apostrophe marks show ownership: that’s mine!: p. 48
15.  That’s a Capital idea!: p. 51
16.  Quickly qualify quotes!: p. 53
17.  Clever, Crafty, Creative, and Calculating Commas: p. 55
18.  Writing is a good thing!: p. 59
19.  Oh, no, it’s ‘the dreaded Outline’!: p. 62
20.  THINK and brainstorm out your ideas!: p. 66
21.  “A Thesis is a powerful statement,” I declared: p. 70
22.  Who-What-Where-When-Why-How for a Thesis: p. 74
23.  Classic social archetypes (role models) for a Thesis: p. 77
24.  Four Motivating Factors of Society in Literature: p. 79
25.  The Creative Classroom Part II: a focus on literature and short stories and writing: p. 86
26.  Fluid Learning concepts for extrapolation and juxtaposing ideas: p. 87
27.  “What do you do well and how did you learn this?”: p. 89
28.  Topic Sentences are paragraph starters (and cues): p. 93
29.  Planning a Successful Tent Camping Trip: p. 99
30.  Learn to be a student: take notes and be responsible: p. 102
31.  Use transition words like a ladder for successful writing: p. 106
32.  Read good literature to develop critical thinking: p. 111
33.  “The Jungle” – a lesson in critical thinking: p. 113
34.  Using myth as a theme for a paper: p. 116
35.  Odysseus: the man and the myth: p. 117
36.  A myth: “A Modern Woman for the 21st Century”: p. 123
37.  Go to college and find yourself a career and life: p. 131
38.  Haven’t I seen you somewhere before? Aren’t you famous?:   p. 134
39.  Bird Facts: p. 137
40.  The Renaissance – an outline for 8th grade: p. 140
41.  Let’s Meet the Renaissance: p. 148
42.  The Renaissance Guild Assignments: p. 151
43.  “I’m (not) Afraid of Public Speaking: p. 171
44.  Poetry for Fun and Learning: p. 174
45.  MLA & APA – how to cite information: p. 179
46.  MLA & APA (and more) citation lessons: p. 182
47.  Even MORE Citation help for MLA/APA: p. 185
48.  Signal/Action Verbs show how an idea is presented: p. 188
49.  Sources for potential reading: science fiction, humor, fiction and more: p. 192
50.  “They Bite” by Anthony Boucher: p. 194
51.  “The Veldt” by Ray Bradbury: p. 217
52.  “Jim Wolf and the Wasps” by Mark Twain: p. 250
53.  “Not Wasting a Watermelon” by Mark Twain: p. 255
54.  Great Builder: the Lady and the Brooklyn Bridge: p. 260
55.  “Manna From Heaven” – A one-act play: p. 273
56.  About the Author: p. 296



Monday, July 30, 2018

Good versus Well: grammar lesson


Today's Lunchbox Lesson, c/o Analytical Grammar/Grammar Planet: GOOD and WELL
GOOD: an adjective, modifying/describing a noun. It's typically used three ways:
1. before the noun it modifies ("Have a good time!")
2. after a verb of being ("That movie was good!")
3. after a linking verb ("Those cookies smell good!")

Good should not be used as an adverb to modify a verb.
It would be incorrect to say "I played good at piano practice today." 
It should read, "I played well at piano practice today."
WELL: an adverb, modifying/describing a verb. That means WELL tells *how* something is done. For example, "She did well on her AP exam." (How did she do? She did well!) For example, "He reads quite well for his age." (How does he read? He reads well!)
**In certain cases, well may be used as an adjective and be interchangeable with good:
1. to indicate good health (I feel good/I feel well)
2. to indicate satisfactory conditions (All is good in the city today/All is well in the city today)
GOOD and WELL both change to "better" and "best" in their comparative and superlative forms.
This is a good research paper.
It is much better than your last one.
In fact, it's the best paper in the class!
Everyone played well at the concert today.
The percussion section played better than the string section.
The brass section -- with the saxophone solo -- played the best!
GOOD is always an adjective modifying a noun.
WELL is usually an adverb, modifying a verb. It can, however, be used as an adjective only to describe good health or satisfactory conditions.

Tuesday, July 17, 2018

Learning--and school--is "hard to do"?

"I can't."
Why is that?
"Because it's hard."
Oh. The assignment was difficult to do? The class is hard to learn? Did you try?
"Yes, but it's hard. It's not easy to do."
Excuse me. THIS is hard: learning to walk on blades. Learning to RUN on blades. That's "hard to do." Not learning to do something; no. 
You may not LIKE learning to do something, or it may be DIFFICULT, but it's not "hard to do." It does require effort, concentration, determination, persistence, and application of your thoughts.
But it's really probable that ANY class you take--or project that you need to complete--is a lot easier if you believe you can do it--rather than being a child and learning to walk on blades.
Or better yet: just to stand up on them. 
And THEN learning to walk. Just a few steps.
Just ask these kids. Or better yet--look at their faces.
They're so at ease that it's almost funny to imagine how they don't even think about what struggles they had to overcome. One girl is almost bored: "Will you please go ahead with the starting signal so we can get on with this race?!"

By the way, school is DIFFICULT at times. It may be a class or subject that requires you to THINK or apply yourself--and MAYBE there's no video game or computer to use to solve the concept of the subject. Just imagine that: "I can't use a computer? That's impossible!"
Oh? Really? You mean that's harder than learning to run--or walk--on blades?
Amazing.

By the way: a confession from me about "hard to do." 
I don't like cooking. I'm not comfortable in a kitchen.
I just want it DONE NOW!
But I have to someday soon learn to cook. For real. Not just throwing-it-in-a-frying-pan-with-a-lid-and-wait.
And my specialty is water.
Especially fried water. I PROMISE I can fry water better than most people. I'm a gourmet at preparing fried water! I can fry it faster than some of the most skilled cooks on TV. I mean COMPLETELY well-done-and-gone fried water. Not even a trace of it.
But I have to learn how to cook so I don't do it again.
I may have to--horrors!--take a cooking class.

By the way, let me assure you about something if you're 18 years or older: the toughest test you ever had to take is something you didn't even realize at the time. It's the most important, significant, virtually-demanded-by-social-institutions-test you ever knew.
And you more than likely passed it and never thought twice about it.
Your driver's license.
Imagine that: if you DON'T have one, you need an alternate form of identification. And that's not something that's easy to get. Nor do people understand why you may choose NOT to drive--even though it may have a reasonable answer. You don't HAVE to drive either. But people will expect you to get a license, even for identification purposes.
So that's the toughest test you ever took. Because without that license, you have to do a lot more to PROVE your identification. 
That's easy.

Running--or walking--on blades? 
That's hard to do.
Unless you're a kid who learned and doesn't think twice about it. And they didn't listen to "I can't" in their mind.

So don't tell ME the class--or the assignment--or WHATEVER--is "hard to do" if you didn't apply effort. Or else I'll have to find a way for the kids to write and tell you what they think about "hard to do." They can teach it better than I could.

Friday, June 22, 2018

Students develop School-Community Connections


PROJECT-BASED LEARNING

Mapping Their Futures: Kids Foster School-Community Connections

Students at the Y-PLAN project create bonds through grassroots city planning.

On a sunny Saturday morning in the San Francisco Bay Area, two groups of high school juniors from nearby Emeryville and Richmond step from a school bus to check out an underused public space along the Berkeley waterfront -- a running path laid out on a landfill. The morning reconnaissance is part of Y-PLAN (Youth -- Plan, Learn, Act, Now), a city planning program run by the University of California at Berkeley's Center for Cities & Schools. As traffic barrels along the nearby freeway, students glance around curiously. They are new to this patch of land, even though it's relatively close to where many of them live.

To help the two groups of students get to know one another, Y-PLAN coordinators ask them to give their names as well as something they appreciate about their own neighborhoods. A few mention the freshness of living by the water; others refer to the ability to walk to a grocery store or local basketball court. One young woman, toeing the ground, shrugs her shoulders and mumbles that she can't think of anything she likes about the gritty section of Richmond where she lives. "I don't feel safe there," she says. Others nod knowingly.
For inner-city kids who've grown up with poverty and crime, this sentiment is understandable -- and not unusual. Because the idea of neighborhood has as many negatives as positives, many Y-PLAN students admit to approaching their local project assignments with initial skepticism. But after twelve weeks of working in teams with UC Berkeley mentors to gather a big-picture view of urban planning, including conducting surveys and site research, crafting proposals for two community centers in their respective neighborhoods, and presenting their ideas to a panel of urban-planning professionals, Y-PLAN participants had a new sense of possibilities.
"Y-PLAN changed my perspective," says Julio Arauz, a student at Richmond's John F. Kennedy High School. "It's not just the negative aspect you have to look at. You have to look at the potential -- the bright side of things."
Through the knowledge that they, too, can affect their communities, Y-PLAN students came to some of the same conclusions as the program's founders: Young people have valuable ideas to bring to the city planning table, and educational revitalization can be a catalyst for community revitalization -- and vice versa.

Project: Transformation

Now entering its tenth year, Y-PLAN is "the heart and heartbeat of the Center for Cities & Schools," says Deborah McKoy, creator of Y-PLAN and the center's founder and executive director. Winner of numerous awards from such groups as the Architectural Foundation of San Francisco and the California Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools, Y-PLAN is held every spring for twelve weeks, usually in conjunction with ninth-, tenth-, or eleventh-grade social studies or history classes in hard-pressed East Bay communities. Graduate and undergraduate students in urban planning at UC Berkeley lead a rigorous project-learning curriculum; through initial brainstorming sessions to design sessions to formal presentations for city officials, high school students become stakeholders in the city planning process.
"After they critically analyze the places they are in," says Center for Cities & Schools program manager Ariel Bierbaum, "they learn the process by which those places get transformed -- and their role in that change process."
Past Y-PLAN projects include the redesign of the historic West Oakland train station and a neglected Oakland minipark. This spring, students at Emeryville's Emery Secondary School and in John F. Kennedy High School's Architecture, Construction, and Engineering Technology (ACET) Academy developed recommendations for two projects: a wellness center located in an unused part of the Emeryville school building (designed to serve as a youth and family destination for health and recreational services) and the Martin Luther King Jr. Community Center and Park, a cornerstone of an ongoing revitalization of Richmond's Nystrom neighborhood.
For city planners and administrators who'd been given the task of developing youth programming for the centers, Y-PLAN offered an opportunity to hear from the kind of young people who would be served by centers like these.
Many of the projects Y-PLAN students work on are so large in scale that any effect of the students' input may not be immediately obvious -- no train station or community center can be redesigned in a matter of months. Although student feedback has sometimes influenced city planning decisions, it doesn't necessarily sway them. Still, the overall impact the program has on both the student and professional perspective appears to be significant.
"Y-PLAN makes folks who deal with cities and urban centers aware of the incredible importance and value of public schools," says Deborah McKoy. "Urban public schools are often seen as 'the problem,' when in fact what I think we learn from Y-PLAN is how much a part of the solution they are."

The Finals

At the two schools' final presentations for city administrators, council members, engineers, and architects, students showcased scale drawings and three-dimensional models of each building, backed up by explanatory posters and Microsoft PowerPoint slides with detailed proposals for how the buildings might best be used. Richmond students emphasized the necessity for a tight security staff, a public gun drop-off, and social services such as driver's education, job training, a walking path, and a child-care center. They also proposed replacing a dilapidated playground with a garden or even a café to draw in more "customers."
Emery students presented their wellness center as a place to do homework, make art, use computers, and see counselors. To transform what they described as "a very empty and very dark" space, they incorporated in their design plants, murals, and large windows. They also had a variety of propositions for unused public spaces nearby that could be converted into parks.
Some site aspects students referred to, such as a lack of trash cans or a prevalence of broken gates, "frankly had me squirming," says Richmond city manager Bill Lindsay. "Why aren't we doing this? These ideas are simple and practical and can happen right away." Because budgets are chronically tight, many of the larger, more hopeful suggestions had little chance of coming to fruition in the near term, but the presentations nevertheless had a revelatory and empowering effect.
"Seeing what they want for themselves has been an honor," says Emery participating teacher Madenh Hassan.
"Y-PLAN is a good opportunity for us, because we can actually speak our minds," says self-assured Emery student Chantell Brown. She hopes the Emeryville center will be, among other things, a safe place where young people can go after school -- something teens in low-income, high-crime communities desperately need. She was eager to tell developers, educators, and city administrators "what the 'real' is, what we see every day, what we have to go through."
"Sometimes adults don't take us seriously," adds her classmate, Yesenia Cuatlatl. "Y-PLAN is a good idea because sometimes we say, 'Oh, they really need to change this,' but we don't do anything; we just talk about it."
Judging from the enthusiasm of their audience, the students' work -- and the determination that went with it -- helped adults take them very seriously indeed. As Bill Lindsay told students, "If you ever want to talk about city management as a long-term goal, please give me a call."
Y-PLAN is transformative, says Ariel Bierbaum, for both the audience (civic leaders and urban planners) and for the young presenters, who "gain facility with a new vocabulary and advocate for themselves in a civic space. Even though it's just a semester, from what I've seen, I think the kids hold on to that."

Ripple Effects

Many students do hold onto the experience -- and not just symbolically. As Y-PLAN introduces them to a spectrum of employment opportunities in urban development, planning, politics, and administration, some pursue related careers, many at UC Berkeley. "Without doing Y-PLAN, I don't think many students would have been exposed to those professions, or would even have known they exist," says Jeff Vincent, deputy director of the Center for Cities & Schools. Although the university is a local resource for these students, some do not see prestigious UC Berkeley -- or any college -- as a real possibility. Y-PLAN, which includes a tour of the Berkeley campus and tips on the admissions process, helps make college a more accessible option.
Y-PLAN has also had ripple effects nationwide: From 2000 to 2005, the Center for Cities & Schools worked with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to adapt the Y-PLAN model to HOPE VI, a public-housing-redevelopment initiative. In partnership with thirty-seven cities and more than 500 students, Y-PLAN coordinators led multiple-day "urban-planning boot camps," creating, says Deborah McKoy, "a national network of youth who live in public housing, and who then were a part of the redevelopment of their communities."
And in 2007, Alissa Kronovet, a former Y-PLAN mentor and a graduate of the city planning master's program at UC Berkeley, gathered students from both coasts to form the Young Planners Network (YPN) -- what McKoy refers to as "advanced Y-PLAN" -- an opportunity for students to attend planning conferences and network with students from other cities across North America. The YPN was created after Kronovet and an initial group of fifteen students from the Bay Area and Brooklyn met and worked with students from New Orleans at last year's Planners Network Conference. Participants were eager to continue learning, meeting one another, and, as YPN participant and Emery student Deszeray Williams puts it, "make a career out of helping make my community a better place." In April 2008, 100 people attended the first YPN conference, held in New York City, and a conference is scheduled in Berkeley for next spring.
Now that the program has been running for almost a decade, Center for Cities & Schools staffers have put together a "Y-PLAN Handbook," a step-by-step guide available to the center's school and community partners. Although Y-PLAN is a labor- and resource-intensive undertaking, its founders have high hopes for its scalability -- and, ultimately, for sustained, systemic change in communities and schools.
It's a daunting task, of course, but the Y-PLAN approach embraces one key idea: Start with the kids. "Even though we may not say it, we care about our community as much as adults do," says student Chantell Brown. "We did Y-PLAN so that we could have a voice."
SARA BERNARD IS A FORMER STAFF WRITER AND MULTIMEDIA PRODUCER FOR EDUTOPIA.

Friday, July 7, 2017

The March of the Dinosaurs (full movie)

A great movie about dinosaurs  (both plant eaters and meat eaters)--and their habits and activities.

Monday, April 10, 2017

A word puzzle to reinforce critical thinking and writing skills

In teaching in a foreign country where pedagogy and instructional methods are quite different than Western methods, I have found ways to bring creative thinking and reasoning together: what I call “fluid learning”. To me, this brings both left-and-right brain styles of thinking together in one complete package. As an example, I used a simple word puzzle this week in my writing class. 

My reasons were more than playing a game: it was serious from the start, because my Chinese students DON’T like to brainstorm or word-web out ideas. They just try to write in English, and in doing so, get bogged down and discouraged. But this lesson showed them a lot more than they expected.

First, I made up a word puzzle with business English vocabulary that they will likely encounter in their sophomore classes. Because I’ve taught this course as well, I know what words are commonly used on exams. In Asian countries, especially China, the emphasis is SO strong on “study-memorize-test”. There is no amount of critical thinking taught to the students. And I insist that they need this, especially as international graduate-degree-seeking young men and women.

Then I started the class. I knew they were apprehensive: their mid-term papers were due. And I wrote the word “test” on the board. It raised some of the tension, but then I wrote “con” in front of it: “contest”. It brought laughs and smiles. Yes, I said, this will be a fun exercise for you all, and you will learn to think and write in this lesson.

I gave out the word puzzle papers, FACE DOWN. That’s important: “DON’T turn them over!” I wanted them to learn to LISTEN to me first. Of course, within two minutes, several students had ignored me and begun to scan the paper. I stopped each time and mildly reprimanded them that “you need to LISTEN to me. If this was a job interview process and you read it and saw on the bottom that ‘Failure to listen means you are not qualified for the position,’ you’d be crushed with disappointment.” I reminded them that I wanted everyone to have a fair chance to be the winner of the contest. It doesn’t matter who has the highest grades, I said. This is different.

So then I signaled them to begin. And I could listen (even though I don’t speak Chinese) to their exclamations of surprise and delight when they found words in the puzzle. I watched their earnestness and determination as they pored over the combinations and searched for patterns. I observed them interacting with each other in pairs and groups as they shared results. 

When the first person sounded out that he had completed all the words, the others kept going. I let them continue: their progress was part of my goal. I wanted them to complete the process on their own initiative. We took a short break, and I still saw some of them trying to solve the missing words. What I noticed was that some of them instantly could figure it, while others tried different ways of seeing patterns in the letters. And everyone had his or her own way of doing it.

As a follow-up, I wrote out the list of results and methods that I wanted them to think about for writing a paper about this experience. Again, as noted, my students are NOT the kind who do brainstorming. They are much more inclined to try and memorize something, or to use their cell phones to surf for an answer. And I gleefully told them at the start that they were welcome to use their phones—but that the device would offer no help. They had to learn to THINK first.

I put a title on the board: Solving the Word Puzzle. My students need to learn how and why a title should be on a paper. My reasoning is “What is the idea to be explained in the content? That’s the title.” Then I wrote out a numbered list of items that they had experienced in the process as a way of showing them how to WRITE DOWN ideas and use it as a focal point to bring up more examples of thoughts for the paper:

1. Think independently. 
2. Work in teams; help others
3. Solve problems without directions
4. No phones needed—do this with your own brain power
5. Have fun—get excited!
6. Stay with an idea! Keep pushing for results and answers!
7. Listen first to directions!
8. Learn new vocabulary words
9. Learn word recognition
10. Not use “study-memorize” for results. Use creative-critical thinking.
11. Brainstorming ideas by writing them and seeing where they lead in other results.

My students thanked me and said it was really interesting. They enjoyed the class, and I reminded them that it’s just as important to THINK about writing and then to plan it out first—just like I had done for them with the examples that I listed. 

I said that we will write about this experience and that this list will serve as reminders of how and what and why they learned something, and how to remember it. And then I thanked them for helping me learn to be a better instructor.