To Help Students Learn, Engage the Emotions
Emotion is essential to learning, Dr. Immordino-Yang said, and should not be underestimated or misunderstood as a trend, or as merely the “E” in “SEL,” or social-emotional learning. Emotion is where learning begins, or, as is often the case, where it ends. Put simply, “It is literally neurobiologically impossible to think deeply about things that you don’t care about,” she said.
Seeing the Cycle of Life in My Baby Daughter’s Eyes
The agony of death is more than just physical – it is an existential wound that gnaws away until there is slow, and frequently unwilling, acceptance of the inevitability of one’s mortality. I sometimes see a similar pain in my baby girl’s eyes as she makes another arduous journey – learning how to be alive. Frequently, as she cries when she is hungry, or cries when she is overfed, or cries as she tries to have a bowel movement, or just cries, it seems as if she is yearning to go back to the simple comforts of her mother’s womb.
Haider Javed Warraich, M.D., a fellow in cardiology at Duke University Medical Center, is the author of the book Modern Death – How Medicine Changed the End of Life, to be published in February 2017.
What Every Memoir Writer Must Eventually Decide
The sensitivity to both authentic storytelling and being vulnerable on the page in the interest of relating to your reader will naturally bring you to the issue of what right you have to include another person’s story.
How Books Became The Language My Father And I Found Together
Books are, have always been, a shared vernacular between us. It’s in the pattern of our interactions; each conversation, after a few minutes of personal prologue (“How’s your son?” he’ll ask, to which I’ll answer, “Fine.” Or: “Adrift.” Or: “Let’s talk about something else”), and then he’s telling me what he’s been reading, mysteries usually, high-end crime, Donna Leon and Andrea Camilleri, neither of whose work I know.
Everyone’s Life Is a School Story
The significant role that these school years have on shaping personalities is something I’ve been thinking about as our kids get older, but really came to a head when the kids and I listened to an interview of one of our favorite kids’ book authors recently. We are all big fans of Andrew Clements, who is well known for writing “school stories” such as Frindle and Lunch Money. In explaining the reason that he writes those kinds of stories, he said that it was because everyone’s life is a school story. Everyone has their own stories from school and their own ideas on how these interactions helped shape them as a person. That stuck in my head and when I also ran across a blog post written by Emily McDowell (a favorite illustrator and designer of mine) discussing how school interactions contribute to “limiting beliefs” we have about ourselves, I really started to think about how to approach the concept with my own kids.
