Keyword: reading
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Up until the last thirty years or so, reading was the most common form of entertainment. These days, technology has been steadily replacing the entertainment of reading a good book. According to a statistic from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Center for Educational Statistics, fewer than half (48 percent) of adult Americans read literature for pleasure. Reading on a regular basis, however, provides amazing benefits to the health of our brain and our mental well-being. Reading has the power to reduce stress, whereas other forms of media tend to increase stress. TV and the Internet require...
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n Comiskey Park in Dubuque, Iowa, local barber Courtney Holmes decided to do something special. The father of two decided to give free haircuts to kids who would read to him.
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(More about reading): The biggest promises in K-12 involve reading and sight-words. Children are told: Learn your sight-words and you will be good readers! There is a strange tautology in sight-word instruction. When you learn to be a successful reader, you will be a successful reader. That's the weird boilerplate found throughout K-12. Suppose you tell a bunch of six-year-olds that tight-rope walking is easy. Put one foot in front of the other; don’t look down; smile confidently and walk. Children, you stress, cannot enjoy fun on the high wire until they have learned to walk comfortably on the high...
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Our children aren’t being taught to read in ways that line up with what scientists have discovered about how people actually learn. It’s a problem that has been hiding in plain sight for decades. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, more than six in 10 fourth graders aren’t proficient readers. It has been this way since testing began. A third of kids can’t read at a basic level. How do we know that a big part of the problem is how children are being taught? Because reading researchers have done studies in classrooms and clinics, and they’ve shown...
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Hi, I grew up in Chicago and thanks to the internet, I listen to Dan Proft and Amy Jacobson every morning, Chicago's Morning Answer. Dan went to the same school I did, I think, Northwesern. Anyway, he just made a great comment: read some books. History, economics, etc. In other words, don't ever stop educating yourself. The brain is like the body...use it or lose it. 😠Just thought his comment was worth menntioning.
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Democratic senators put on quite a show Thursday at Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation hearing. Desperate for a "gotcha" moment that would disqualify the Trump nominee, the senators asked pointed questions and gave lectures about transparency. But, they embarrassed themselves in the process. Sen. Cory Booker (NJ) got the loudest laugh.Booker's theatrics came at the very beginning of the hearing. He interrupted Chairman Chuck Grassley's opening remarks to announce that he had broken Senate rules and released "committee confidential" documents about Kavanaugh's opinions on racial profiling. He even referred to himself as "Spartacus," as if he was some kind of...
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My End of Summer Reading List: From Eric Metaxas to ISIS By John Zmirak I know that for many of you summer is almost over. Since I live in Texas, we’ve just passed its halfway mark. We might consider putting long pants back on come Halloween. Given that, there’s plenty of time left for “summer reading.” Alas!So here are some of the books I’m partway through and want to recommend to you all through the sweltering days of October.Chance or the Dance?, by Thomas Howard My friend Eric Metaxas was a moving force behind reissuing this 1989 classic. In his...
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....concepts that still help me make sense of the world, like the "racial nadir" — the downturn in American race relations, starting after Reconstruction, that saw the rise of lynchings and the Ku Klux Klan. In doing so, Lies My Teacher Told Me overturned one assumption embedded in the history classes I'd been sitting through all my life: that the United States is constantly ascending from greatness to greatness. "I started out the new edition with the famous two photographs of the inaugural crowds of this guy named President Obama, his first inauguration, and this guy named President Trump, his...
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Just finished The Road to Wigan Pier a book Orwell wrote about leftism and fascism during the 30's in Great Britan. Chilton Williamson from CHRONICLES had recommended it in the magazine's What the Editor's are Reading section. Good selection. This is a discussion of class, industrialization, and Orwell's perspective of what happens when humans are treated as disposable. Interestingly, during the industrialization of Great Britain, there were many thrown out of work and lots of talk, as there is today about the dole (today read guaranteed income) being the way to allow people to be "free." Many other parallels with...
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What’s the best book you’ve read not written by a big name author? What famous author can you not stomach? “All Over But The Shoutin” by Rick Bragg is my favorite. Hemingway is annoying.
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Subtitle: Fix reading and half of our education problems disappear--It's a common problem in the US. Children in the second and third grades, even the fourth and fifth grades, are struggling readers. They guess; they skip ahead; they search for clues from context; they look at pictures to read words. Did I mention they guess? Typically, these children are unsuccessful in most school subjects and very unhappy. The school may think this slow progress is fine. But perhaps you as a parent know younger children who've already learned to read. You worry that your child Is falling behind. You are...
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Years ago, I'd post a quarterly thread asking Freepers what they were reading now. I made mention of the fact that I thought Freepers had to have been some of the more well-read people on the 'Net. I have decided to resume that post. What are you reading? It can be a best seller, a trashy pulp novel, a biography - heck even a technical journal. Just don't answer the post by saying "I'm Reading This Thread". It lost its originality a really long long time ago. I'll start. I'm reading a classic biography from 1970. It's called "Huey Long"...
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Sixty-five percent of the eighth graders in American public schools in 2017 were not proficient in reading and 67 percent were not proficient in mathematics, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress test results released by the U.S. Department of Education. The results are far worse for students enrolled in some urban districts. Among the 27 large urban districts for which the Department of Education published 2017 NAEP test scores, the Detroit public schools had the lowest percentage of students who scored proficient or better in math and the lowest percentage who scored proficient or better in reading. Only...
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Baltimore City students scored near the bottom in reading and math compared to children in other cities and large urban areas on an important national assessment given in 2017. In fourth- and eighth-grade reading, only 13 percent of city students are considered proficient or advanced. In fourth-grade math, 14 percent were proficient and in eighth-grade math 11 percent met the mark, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a federally mandated test from the U.S. Department of Education... That put the Baltimore ahead of only Detroit and Cleveland, and sometimes ahead of Milwaukee and Fresno, Calif. — areas of...
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Many people use the phrases “sight-word” and “vocabulary word” interchangeably, when they are quite different. This confusion, I believe, serves a sinister purpose for our Education Establishment. A sight-word is a one-dimensional object. You know it visually, that’s all. When you see the graphic design, you are supposed to respond in an automatic or conditioned way. You say the sound represented by the design. The Education Establishment pretends this is “reading” but it’s not. On the other hand, a vocabulary word is a multi-dimensional object. Most importantly, you know it phonetically. You say the sounds represented by the letters. This...
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California was sued earlier this month over poor reading skills among its students, a significant legal step in trying to combat lackluster literacy rates amid a larger conversation about education policy in the Golden State.
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The holidays are upon us, and Christmas shopping is in full swing. If you’re stumped about what to get for a fellow freedom-lover in your life, we’ve got you covered. Our trainers recommended some of their favorite book gift ideas that would make a thoughtful present or a friend, family member, or fellow activist. 1. “The Righteous Mind” by Jonathan Haidt In it, Haidt helps explain why liberals, conservatives, and libertarians think differently about issues. He also argues why we should be more willing to entertain diverse viewpoints and understand why people believe what they believe. As an activist, understanding...
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French school children aged 9 to 10 have been ranked the worst in Europe for their reading skills, marking a steady decline in levels since 2001, a new study has revealed. It’s not good news for French schools. The study by PIRLS (Progress in International Reading Literacy Study), which has been carried out every five years since 2001, ranks the reading skills of school children aged 9 to 10 in 50 countries. Thousands of French school pupils took part in the study in the spring of 2016, answering a series of comprehension questions on literary and informative texts. And the...
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Earlier this week John touched on the festival of hot takes surrounding Liz Phipps Soeiro, the librarian at Cambridgeport Elementary School who attempted to refuse a donation of Dr. Seuss books from First Lady Melania Trump. I specify “attempted†because it turned out that the school board stepped in and said it wasn’t her call to begin with. That hot mess should have come and gone fairly quickly, but it turns out that there was another chapter of the story to be written.The Mayor of the town where Dr. Seuss (actually Theodor Geisel) was born decided to add some balance...
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Hundreds of websites broadcast the same misguided message: children must memorize Sight-Words. This message is false. Probably the most aggressive falsehood is that such memorization is easy to do. One popular site proclaims this malarkey: “Because many Sight-Words are phonetically irregular, tend to be abstract, have limited visual correspondence, or even easily understood definitions, students must memorize them to read quickly and fluently.” Note the casual tone: “Students must memorize them.” The school certainly wouldn’t ask children to do something difficult or impossible, would it? Yes, it would! And therein lies the essence of the hoax. In the context of...
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