Class Philosophy and Corresponding Resources:
Make It Stick by Brown, Roediger III, and McDaniel
Recent studies indicate that an effective method of learning is interleaving: layering skills so practice is varied and builds. The authors of the book liken it to shooting a basketball. If player A practices shooting from the freethrow line 100 times and player B practices shooting 100 times from varied positions and distances, player B would be most likely to sink a freethrow from the line. In the classroom, practice is varied and spaced out not only to increase mastery but also to minimize forgetting, because going back to retrieve information embeds it more deeply into memory. It makes perfect sense for writing skills because post-graduation tasks will assume …show more content…
If anything, some of the most creative and interesting writers broke the rules, establishing new ways of seeing their worlds. Writers should first be clear, the goal being understandable, not flashy or verbose. The real rules of grammar further this goal. The social rules of grammar exist only to demonstrate one’s social class or level of education. If Huck Finn had followed the social rules of grammar, the story would lose its heart. The invented rules of grammar are even worse: they produce grammar Nazis, those that would ignore the message in order to condemn the messenger. One interesting example is the discontinued agreement between a pronoun and its antecedent. A teacher could introduce “a student” at the beginning of sentence, keeping that person’s identity anonymous for a variety of reasons, but would face the awkward task of which pronoun to select later. Now the student has a gender, and some identity is revealed. In 2017, it’s possible to have a student who prefers not to identify with either gender, now what? Because society has changed, the rules must follow, and now “the student” may become “they,” and like the architectural term, form follows
Make It Stick by Brown, Roediger III, and McDaniel
Recent studies indicate that an effective method of learning is interleaving: layering skills so practice is varied and builds. The authors of the book liken it to shooting a basketball. If player A practices shooting from the freethrow line 100 times and player B practices shooting 100 times from varied positions and distances, player B would be most likely to sink a freethrow from the line. In the classroom, practice is varied and spaced out not only to increase mastery but also to minimize forgetting, because going back to retrieve information embeds it more deeply into memory. It makes perfect sense for writing skills because post-graduation tasks will assume …show more content…
If anything, some of the most creative and interesting writers broke the rules, establishing new ways of seeing their worlds. Writers should first be clear, the goal being understandable, not flashy or verbose. The real rules of grammar further this goal. The social rules of grammar exist only to demonstrate one’s social class or level of education. If Huck Finn had followed the social rules of grammar, the story would lose its heart. The invented rules of grammar are even worse: they produce grammar Nazis, those that would ignore the message in order to condemn the messenger. One interesting example is the discontinued agreement between a pronoun and its antecedent. A teacher could introduce “a student” at the beginning of sentence, keeping that person’s identity anonymous for a variety of reasons, but would face the awkward task of which pronoun to select later. Now the student has a gender, and some identity is revealed. In 2017, it’s possible to have a student who prefers not to identify with either gender, now what? Because society has changed, the rules must follow, and now “the student” may become “they,” and like the architectural term, form follows