Punctuation saves lives

What to do when a bit sleep-deprived and the little one is finally soundly asleep: catch up with the to-do list, right? Well no, my English-teaching brain distracts me from getting ahead with the cooking by seeing vegetables that look like punctuation. 

Never underestimate punctuation! 

Image from here

It's been busy...

Time flies. The new little one is growing and changing almost on a daily basis. Nights and days take on a different rhythm. Sleep slips away elusively. Moving house means not much rest and constantly being on the go, tucking the little one into the sling and getting on with life. Lots of changes and adjustments, finding your footing again. That's life at the moment...

Blurring the boundaries of "screen time"

I seem to have a bit of a soft spot for children's picture books that make a commentary on reading and interaction in the internet age (I wrote about Lane Smith's It's a book here). The newest one to come into my hands is Dot by Randi Zuckerberg and illustrated by Joe Berger. With cheerful illustrations and playful language it tells the story of a little girl called Dot, who "knows a lot". She's an ace with all different types of "screens":

Eventually Dot gets that familiar feeling of screen-time overload. She goes all cross-eyed and disorientated, so that her mom sends her to play outside.

Once outside in the sun, she remembers that she also knows how...

in the real world. The book is charming in it's reminder to leave the virtual world behind sometimes and give ourselves the opportunity to interact and play in the real one.

Having just said that, I have to admit to spending quite a bit of time reading articles via twitter on my phone (very handy with a hungry baby to feed and only one hand free). A New York Times article I recently came across asks the very pertinent question of whether E-Reading to your toddler counts as story time or screen time. The question is of course very relevant as more and more children's books are turned into interactive E-books for tablets, and parents are faced with endless choices of toddler and even baby entertainment for different screens.

According to the article, even the experts aren't sure. What is certain, is that pediatricians and child-development experts advise parents to read to their children regularly from an early age. They also advise no screen time for children under the age of two and less than two hours a day for older children. Where, then, does e-reading fall?

There doesn't seem to be much research out there yet, but the New York Times article points out that a handful of new studies suggest "reading to a child from an electronic device undercuts the dynamic that drives language development". It refers to a 2013 study, Once Upon A Time: Parent-child Dialogue and Storybook Reading in the Electronic Era, which found that 3-5 year olds whose parents read to them using a tablet had lower comprehension rates of the story than those children who were read to using a traditional book. Part of the problem, the researchers explain, was that parents and children using tablets spent more time focusing on the device than on the story. As the stories become more and more interactive in an E-format (which obviously does comes with educational advantages), the focus shifts away from the parent-child dialogue that springs up from the more old-fashioned forms of story time. Researchers have stressed that it is this early conversation around stories that assists language development. The New York Times article quotes Dr Hirsh-Pasek, who sums it up well, "In other words, it's being talked with, not being talked at that teaches children language."

So I guess, Dot does know a lot; we need to strike a healthy balance between the virtual world and the real one.

She's here

Am just popping in to say Alice Winter was born at 1:30 am on Saturday. She's perfect. We got back to our (still temporary) home on Sunday and are now getting to know this new little person.

Too many books...

Source: from here

The above poster expresses how I often feel about reading: a kind of desperate clamouring pressure to get through the pile of unread books I have on my bookshelf or the mental list of classic and contemporary literature I feel I should read. Ridiculously, this even gets a bit stressful sometimes, which is why reading the conclusion of John Miedema's book, Slow Reading (I wrote more about it here), is a good reminder that the reason why we get hooked on books in the first place is pleasure, not to prove ourselves or tick off titles on a list. So, I thought that I'd share those insightful words here:

"It is often said that a person can only read about five thousand books in a lifetime. It is a small range of books given the accelerating quantity available to us. This limitation might lead some readers to rush their reading, thereby increasing the number of books. This response turns a reader into a tourist, jumping from experience to experience, noting only the highlights, being able to say he or she has done it, though not entirely sure what was done. Another response is to simply and happily acknowledge that life is indeed short, and that our smaller selection of books represents a unique expression of our character. This second choice removes the needless pressure from reading, and restores it as a great pleasure."

Waiting

A temporary place.

Not quite here.

Not quite there.

Waiting fills the spaces in between.

Time gathers softy like fabric around moments as they edge closer to that unpredictable Beginning. Little things, washed and folded, are placed in make-shift spaces, and become the visible markers of the waiting.

It's the kind of waiting that settles into your body, the way waiting is felt physically in an uncomfortable chair. I wait for him to get back home. I wait for her; her kicks becoming ever more insistent, impatient even, depending on how you look at it.

Each night I wonder what will happen. The thought lies with me as I wake in the dark and wonder and turn and shift. I will the waiting on.

Waiting... so difficult to explain to a four-year old.

"Can't the baby tell us when it's ready?"

"How long will the baby still be?"

I pull her close to me in the bed and feel her little body snuggle up to mine, seeking that comfortable, familiar intertwining of selves; her thin little arm resting over my big belly.

I can't quite believe it: two.

So soon.

The laptop and the lecture

Technology in the classroom always comes with a certain dapper flashiness about it; it’s usually impressive, eye-catching and attention-grabbing… on the surface at least. There are of course, many benefits to not just allowing, but encouraging and integrating devices such as smart phones, laptops and tablets into the class or lecture room.  It’s not the principle that bothers me as such, but rather the practicalities of it.

I can’t help but think back to the more rudimentary, less exciting, perhaps more quaint and old-fashioned skills: listening, concentrating on one topic being discussed in one room, note-taking, feeling the weight of a textbook, of the active shuffling between pages for easy reference. Things that don’t seem to happen very much anymore, as if classes have been overcome with a kind of technology-induced laziness, a reliance that seems to rob the incentive to actively engage at that particular moment. It’s almost as if those devices, such excellent tools to search out information, put up a barrier to the more immediate, real engagement and interaction of learning in a class or lecture room. After all, everything can be googled later or lecture notes downloaded so that it can be justified to check messages, emails, facebook, do a bit of browsing; effectively there is no need to fully “be” in the class at all. I know it’s not meant to be like that, but somehow it just is, and it appears as if these devices rob our already divided attention further instead of enhancing it.

These thoughts have been going through my mind since I read Nicholas Carr’s interesting post on Students and their Devices, which lead me to Hembrooke and Gay’s landmark study, “The laptop and the lecture: The effects of multitasking in learning environments” (2003). In it, two groups of students receive the same lecture but one group is asked to keep their laptops (and therefore access to the internet) closed. The group who had free access to their laptops did noticeably worse on a test of the content after the lecture than the group who had to keep their laptops closed. It certainly seems to indicate that we are not as good at multitasking as we may think and that it comes with a certain cost to how information is processed from working memory to longer term memory and ultimately how it is transformed into deeper knowledge and understanding.

Hembrooke and Gay point out, “the ubiquity, pervasiveness and mobility of new technologies encourage a simultaneity of activities that goes beyond anything our culture has heretofore ever known. Indeed, the ability to engage in multiple tasks concurrently seems to be the very essence or core motivation for the development of such technologies…Of course, distraction in the lecture hall or classroom is nothing new; note passing, doodling, talking, completing other class assignments, and even taking notes on the current lecture are all familiar forms of low-tech distraction. However, mobile devices and wireless access in the classroom have the potential to bring distraction to new heights; especially as the study of their effects and benefits is in its relative infancy and schools and universities grapple with issues concerning boundary setting and high-tech classroom etiquette.”

These are certainly words that still hold true today.