Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Children Will Listen: Choosing Words Carefully in the Classroom : Teachers at Work : Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus

Buried in an interesting essay about teaching is this snippet about the shortcomings of pounding the square peg of natural language into the round hole of structured data (or more specifically, the round hole of enumerated data types).

Report Card Syndrome. The way report cards work at my school, the comments section allows me to plug in any one of about 200 phrases. Even 200 phrases, though, is not enough, and the phrases that are there must be baffling for some students. "Works to completion" comes to mind. "Inconsistent response to grade-level tasks" also.

Children Will Listen: Choosing Words Carefully in the Classroom : Teachers at Work : Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus

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