Note
For the new school, I need to find videos or books that explain what orienteering is. (I am a little reluctant to go to the NEOC library because I was such a delinquent borrower. Heh heh... I think I need a personal secretary.) Julia, the teacher, said she explained what orienteering is, and the kids got really excited about it. She told me she thinks some of them might become real orienteers.
Yesterday Julia lent me some of the reflections written by her students on their first map-related interactions with the kindergarten reading buddies.
"We got a packet explaining about a map and giving us examples of keys. We read a few pages then showed them the map we made in class. We used symbols and numbers on our map to represent objects."
"Today I had fun teaching my book buddies how to read a map. It was kind of hard since most of them don't know how to read, but it was a fun challenge. When I read the packet I was pointing out all sorts of things. Most of the time they took a long time to figure everything out. It was fun teaching them about maps. I would do it again" And you will, Zane, you will!
"Ryan and I made them search for clues that will help them find things on the map."
"It made me happy that I was teaching someone about something they didn't know that much about. It was a little hard at first to teach my buddy because she didn't speak that much English, but after a while when she understood it better, it was fun and interesting to both of us."
"I think my book buddy liked the maps because he liked finding stuff with the key on the map."
"It felt weird because I was in charge and like a teacher."
"Working with my buddy taught me how to explain things to others."
One kindergartener is high-functioning Down's syndrome. Julia said he was very excited by the maps and really got into it.
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The New Yorker has an article about Maja Mataric, who was in grad school with me at the AI Lab. What with that article and the one about Spiderwoman a little while ago, it's interesting to be of an age where my contemporaries and acquaintances are being profiled in New Yorker articles. Maja is working on robots to interact with autistic kids; the article includes some fine nay-saying by Sherry Turkle.
There was also an intriguing article about how people who hang out with other like-minded people become more polarized, and how that's magnified by the internet. Perhaps AP is an example.
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David spent the last couple of evenings reading this stuff for History homework:
A spectre is haunting Europe...
The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms...
The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie...
The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe...
The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation into a mere money relation...
All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind...
National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature...
Independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with separate interests, laws, governments, and systems of taxation, became lumped together into one nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national class interest, one frontier, and one customs tariff...