Because I have so much to do I decided I would advance Puzzle Sunday. Here are some new wooden puzzles. Not for solving now but maybe for a present. I wish all problems could be solved, don't you? I know that this kind of puzzle can be quite difficult. Meantime I'm thinking about where to live. Anyone a suggestion? Maybe in the sea. Or across the sea, in the UK.
I hope everyone finds the way home (preschool level). Did you know that puzzles may help relax anxiety?
There are different concepts in education. One is the so called classical method that has the teacher facing the classroom. Here (in the Netherlands) this method is very common and might be used in classrooms with small groups of tables too. There is an increasing demand for more levels within one classroom. The norm is the mean of the results of the students of the same group. There is little variation in age, and variation is not seen as positive but rather as a problem. The problem is then solved by creating subgroups and again the same system of mean is used for the subgroup. There is a problem. There are quite a few children that fall out. Partly they fall out because they cannot cope with adapting to the difficulty of the tasks, partly they fall out because the tasks are too easy.
Because I'm busy to find a house in a certain region, I use maps a lot these days. So I link a map puzzle today. This jigsaw has countries as pieces of the puzzle.
If I decide I need to buy a house, the way to keep my head free of endless questions is a home buying checklist. Otherwise I will use much time thinking and not doing. I can endlessly think about all difficulties that could happen. I guess that's why DNA is so practical. It is the cell's to do list, a sequential string of amino acids that are reproduced in the right order one by one. It cannot go wrong.
This week was the international mathematics competition in the Netherlands to which 4 million children worldwide participate. The name for this competition is the Kangaroo. On this map you can see what countries participate. For this occasion I thought maths puzzles would be in order. Many, many maths puzzles.
A new find of Miller and Sweatt (2007) may support both the possibility for inheriting memory through DNA and changing DNA through learning.
(see the comments about the link, just click you're sure it is not a spam link)
What if we can inherit memory through DNA? This would explain why there is instinct and recall of trauma without the knowledge of the story. Is methylation the key to the script of our family history? It may give an alternative explanation to why some people are prone to create false memories in Lab situations. The memory isn't false, but doesn't match present history, because it matches prior history.
My idea though is that if our genes is a book, we are not the book, but we live through the book.
I have read about referrer spam and wonder if I did something wrong... I read the article in question about Methylation and I was excited about it. I wrote a comment on my blog, not for profit. I think it might be a piece of the puzzle in what I write about and it might have implication for psychotherapy. This is important! but unfortunately there are people who leave comments only for improving their ranking. It's a pitty that it afflicts those who do have original thinking to put in their blog. I think what I did was legit. What do you think? Is there a second Chez Odile anywhere around?
I still did not hear from the publisher. It is a good sign according to a published writer that I trust. It has been months, and it has been a little less since I have read my book. I ought to make a start to write the other book. The truth is that most of the writing proceeds in my head in thinking. Maybe it is not me who thinks. Maybe I get these thoughts out of the collective unconscious or from forgotten reading or from inspiration. We cannot say anything about thinking by studying the machine that translates thought in words. Can we?
I feel very fortunate to be able to hold this blog. But is it a blog?
or is it a crog?
Cuttner defines a crog as a carefully researched weblog.
I do research, but some is on the web and did study to be able to discern fact from fiction, but how can we ever be sure of what is true or not?
I have many links to scientific articles and sites and books. I add meaning and critical thought, sometimes some irony.
The word carefully is a problem though. I'm worried that a professional journalist would do more thorough research. Is that worry justified? Journalists are only human too. They cannot read everything either...
I was adjusting to using the word blog and I'm not ready to call myself a crogger yet.
Whats more, crog is the name of a webvirus...
I read a book about Proustian love, from I. van Krogten. This was not recently, but it was when I was a student. Amazingly, in the library of Psychology in Amsterdam, there was not even a handful of books about love. This may reflect a cultural trait or the struggle of the department to distance itself from Freud. Interestingly enough in the same period, in Italy there seemed to be an abundant amount of literature about love.
I picture the image of a dutch painting. A dutch woman looks tired and hungry when she plants seeds in the soil. In the Netherlands, the climate did not allow for two harvests and life was harsh for peasants.
Do you like clouds of keywords? These are a visual representation of tags for your website or blog. I don't have one here, but I have one at del.icio.us . I'm a very busy mother and I like that I don't have to bother with templates and clouds, when I don't want to. The point is, that I do have children that want to learn and this is why I try to be a step ahead and read about how to make use of the cloud of tags in an educational fun way.
That's why I love sites such as Hackzine.
Top down or bottom up? Here's a bottom up article (from particular = here: teaching how to listen - to general = here: what is top down teaching & bottom up teaching) & here a top down article (from theory to example)
Today some biology. DNA crosswordpuzzle? indeed. Probably to difficult for me too, or am I underestimating myself again?
I came across a list of different types of learning. From algorithms to decision trees, to-down, Q-learning and bayesian learning. I'm also putting the link in my linksroll.
Neural networks defines top-down learning as a set of cascades of rules. An article that takes time to understand. Did he say that it will take many years before we can program a robot to 'decide' how to answer to spoken language (top-down)?
These are busy days... I'm busy with the children and school, administration and groceries. In the middle of that I got a new idea for two new books. One a very practical book for education, the other a comprehensive theory, explaining and predicting mechanisms. I'm excited about these ideas. But how will I find the energy and the time?
I also have an idea to translate a book that I think should be translated. (I have to check if it isn't)
Do you know what a blogcarnival is, exactly? I came across these when I started blogging. Carnivals are lists of blogs that blog about a certain topic. They are a not complete but good way to find a lot of blogs that you might want to read.
I found this list of carnivals of education. Don't ask me why it is called carnival.
Two of my children are possibly ill or possibly demotivated to go to school or both.
I have not been reading about underachievement for nothing.
Many teachers don't know that underachievement can be caused by too easy learning materials and lessons. They don't know about the mechanism nor do they know how much it affects children and their families. At the primary school I could see which teachers understand it just by looking at the grades of my children. You might argue that the grades only reflect the ability to teach and not how the teacher handles underachievement. True. In my opinion both are true. The successful teacher handles the underachievement better and gives better answers to difficult questions in the learning material. It is about scaffolding again.
citation of an article
"The first task during mediation is to discourage surface or superficial learning. Children are likely to engage in surface strategies as a matter of pragmatics; as a means of self preservation."
Now back to my reality. I hope it is the flue... but I'm pretty sure it is not. This is why we are thinking of moving to a region with better scaffolding, after five years of trying to manage.
After my computer wouldn't follow the simplest commands last night and my posts kept disappearing, I was relieved it was for the best this morning, because I wouldn't have found this site today. Have fun.
I don't believe this, I'm seeing twice my posts... :D :D :D
After my computer wouldn't follow the simplest commands last night and my posts kept disappearing, I was relieved it was for the best this morning, because I wouldn't have found this site today. Have fun.
Noise functions were somewhere years ago in Physics lessons at school. I was fond of physics. I liked curves and representation of sound as a curve and the possibility to show sound interposed one over the other. This is what noise is about. How come we cannot hear a sound when there is noise?
Can I hear something when I eat a coockie? Or many coockies? Or most coockies? When I drink? I rarely drink too much (less than once in 5 years), being a responsible parent. I'm affraid I drank too much coffee, and if I drink too much coffee I'm more likely to loose my sense of humor.
