September 2010 Blog Posts
(excerpt from The Power of Diversity by Barbara Prashnig)
Fallacy 6: Eating should not be permitted in classrooms during lessons.
Many students concentrate better when they can concentrate better when have something to eat, nibble, chew or drink while learning, and many teachers will have observed that a number of students chew on whatever they can get hold of during classes, particularly when they have to listen for a while, when they are bored or nervous. It seems that mouth stimulation helps them concentrate, and as the brain dehydrates during thinking processes, it is essential that students are allowed to have drinks...
Dyslexia Foundation of New Zealand recognises that the left and right brain hemispheres of a person with dyslexia are wired differently to those in a non-dyslexic:
"... Dyslexia has a substantive neurobiological basis. Brain research, including studies from Yale and Auckland universities, has shown that while it is common to use the ‘verbal’ left side of our brain to understand words, dyslexic people use the ‘pictorial’ right side – making them slower to process and understand language, but stronger in creative areas like problem solving, empathy and lateral thinking."
Dyslexics tend to be top-down rather than bottom-up thinkers. This means that...
Even those of us lucky enough to have a job in today's economy are not always happy at work. A new survey found only 45% of Americans are satisfied with their job, and the trend seems to be similar in Europe. "Down under" in New Zealand and Australia, as many as 65% of people in the IT industry are "keeping their eyes open" for a new position.
It's easy to blame it all on the recession. However, worker dissatisfaction has been on the rise for more than two decades:
Fewer workers consider their jobs interesting.
Incomes have not kept up with inflation....
Let’s consider formal education and ask a few formal education questions:
How many thousands of hours do students sit in classrooms experiencing lectures or lectures, deadly boring activities which bore them to death, which stifle activities their curiosity, and their spontaneously emerging interest?
What happens when a child experiences uncertainty about details of the presentation?
How many hundreds of hours do they spend reading books?
And again, what can students do when they encounter something they do not understand or evokes their curiosity? Will...