Month: July 2003

I had fun with this exercise- thought you might get a kick out of it:

4) Describe the educational approach of learning strategies. Choose a mnemonic strategy that is particularly appealing to you and explain why you would use it and how you would use it on a group of children with LD or with ADHD/ served as LD. Note: learning strategies are not appropriate for children with MR. (4 pts.)

Mnemonic strategies have gotten many students through preparing for a final biology exam on the six types of classifications of plants and animals: (Kathy, Please Come Over for Ginger Snaps: Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Genus, Species. I canÃt believe I remember that—) Additional strategies include using word associations to remember state capitals (¦To peek under canvas²- Topeka is the capital of Kansas) and rhymes-( ¦I before e, except after c,² to remember to spell receive and believe differently. )

As a prospective history teacher, I think that it is important to teach kids to see patterns in the development of nations- I am thinking that there must be some clever rhyme or mnemonic strategy that could describe this process. Something like: Bloom, boom, room, then lust, bust, dust.

Cultures in fledgling nations 1. Bloom- The Rise of Ancient Rome, the Renaissance, Victorian England, ¦The American Century,² that is, they have advances in education and culture that allow them to make some major social advances. Then they have a 2. Boom of development and technology- they rapidly build and advance to the edges of their territories, then they need 3. Room, so they expand beyond their borders. 4. Lust for more cropland or for cheaper labor or warm water ports cause them to spread out far beyond what their infrastructure can support when the boom begins to ebb. As the cost of maintaining the empire rises and the empire itself stagnates, these expansionist powers experience a 5. Bust, where the empire collapses or folds in on itself. WhatÃs left of the empire 50 years later? 6. Dust. A shadow of the empireÃs former greatness and the favor of the world reflects how graciously they did or did not leave the stage when the music stopped.

“I guess the reason I don’t use the phrase guerrilla war is because there isn’t one,” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said.

An updated, minimalist version of this Viet Nam era chestnut, which itself was a parody of a poem by Hughes Mearns:

As I was walking up the stair
I met a war that wasn’t there.
It wasn’t there again today
I wish, I wish it would stay away.

Did anyone else know that Strom “DixieKKKrat” Thurmond had a black daughter? No foolin’, folks. Read all about it.

Some excerpts:

In all the words spent on Strom Thurmond’s life and times since his death last week, I have seen no acknowledgment of the most interesting of his sundry racial legacies. She is Essie Mae Washington Williams, a widowed former school teacher in her 70s, living in Los Angeles. Presumably she did not show up for any of the obsequies even though Strom Thurmond was almost certainly her father. Williams is black.
…
We need not dwell on the obvious mind-boggling hypocrisies here: that someone who ran for president on an anti-pool-mixin’ platform was party to an integrated gene pool. Or that Thurmond’s other signature political achievement?the 24-hour-without-bathroom-break filibuster against the Civil Rights Act of 1957?was done in the name of sparing the South from “mongrelization.”

This is too rich! The story I have linked to has some more details, for example, that the mother was his former housekeeper, that sort of thing. Oh, my, my, my….

Jivha, and Anvita, I am calling on you personally to help me out here… After reading Jivha’s post “Jokan-nostalgia bit me!” I realized that you might be able to offer me a little advice. Here is the excerpt that got my attention:
“In our first year during the rainy seasons(the rainy seasons in Calcutta can get *pretty rainy* if you know what I mean! Ask Anvita – she lives there!) the lakes overflowed and there was knee-deep water all through the campus. We had to literally wade from place to place and while doing so would see fish, crabs, water spiders etc. swimming around on the roads on which we were walking. Even an occasional water snake would glide by!”

Well, it’s already been a really rainy year here, and here is the weather forecast for the next week. I am going a little stir crazy- I have a garden to tend, a dog house and a chicken house to build.

What am I supposed to do with myself if it’s always, always, always RAINING?

My brother lost his cool about Ann Coulter over on his blog. Read all about it. I had to throw in my two cents:

let’s just say that you can be assured that if ann coulter looked like linda tripp, she would languish in the obscurity she so richly deserves.

what kind of moron fails to see a distinction between the Roosevelts and the Rosenburgs?

A glaring example of the failure of private schools to effectively educate America’s children….