And now you're not prepared to go to school, and you've just missed the bus — again! Staying home may seem like a good choice, but it just makes it harder to go to school the next day. If you don't like school, the first step is finding out why. You might not like school because a bully is bothering you, or because a kid you don't like wants to hang around with you.
Or maybe you don't get along with your teacher. You might feel different or worry that you don't have enough friends. Sometimes it's a problem with your classes and schoolwork. Maybe the work is too easy and you get bored. Or maybe the work is too hard, or you don't feel as smart as the other kids. Reading or math may be difficult for you, but you're expected to do a lot of it.
You may be getting farther and farther behind, and it may seem like you'll never catch up. Maybe you're dealing with worries, stress, or problems that make it hard to concentrate on schoolwork.
When you stop to think about why you don't like school, you can start taking steps to make things better. It's a good idea to talk to someone about your problems with school. Your mom, dad, relative, teacher, or school counselor will be able to help you. It is apparent that oftentimes the students have not learned what is being questioned, and multiple choice questions require less cognitive thought than response work, which engages the child in the need to understand the material, gain interest, and interpret the material by using inferential thinking and high-level critical analysis in order to better process ideas.
Another aspect of learning involves the success level that can be achieved by a student, which is highly linked to age-appropriateness of the material being taught and then tested. Additionally, a child needs to have some interest in the material in order to benefit from learning and retaining what is learned. It is essential to understand new ideas in the context of what has previously been learned. Learning is continuous and as we grow, so we process ideas better from previously learned concepts.
In other words, an adult thinks completely differently to a child when presented with material since an adult is more likely to process the ideas from a different and more mature point of view. Intelligence occurs from taking risks and remaining persistent in the desire to achieve, as well as genes. However, genes are not the only impactful determinant of intelligence. These include:. This means that students from anywhere in the world can choose to earn their higher education degrees with nothing more than an internet connection, thanks to online schools like the University of the People who believe in education as a human right.
Although people have different ways of learning, school does offer a good starting point for socialization, networking, education and the opportunity to instill a lifelong love of learning. Apply Now. Request Info. Ask a student. UoPeople Arabic. Business Administration. Master's Degree MBA. Bachelor's Degree. Associate's Degree. Computer Science. Health Science. Master of Education M. Ask Me Anything. UoPeople Quality. Regarding ideas presented.
A good deal of the reviews already up discuss the different principles described. I highly recommend reading this for a more informed opinion of those principles. In fact, anyone who does any sort of teaching or tutoring should read this book. It has changed the way I approach the lessons I teach and will most likely affect the way I structure my classes next year. Already I'm asking my seniors in Calculus class to think of ways they can move beyond the surface structure of the problems and see the concepts that are being tested.
In our discussion today of why they find the AP problems so hard, it basically came down to how they were getting lost in the surface of the problem and unable to see the concepts that were being tested which is something that a few members of College Board may want to think about when writing the tests.
It also reaffirms my idea that the schedule as it stands right now doesn't really help students the way that the administration thinks it should. This is the second book the first being The Shallows to describe multi-tasking in a negative light and the impact on the amount of learning we can do.
Here, it's constructed as overloading our Working Memory a concept I already had some exposure to while reading A Mind At A Time and going through a course on All Kinds of Minds which leaves less room for us to actually delve deep into what we are thinking about.
In terms of my school, because students have to think about what class they are going to all the time rotational schedule with a portion of the day fixed , that leaves less room for the students to think about the math I'm trying to teach them.
I don't think that this book will be the final word on education. I don't want it to be. However, what this book should be is a cornerstone in any discussion of how to educate and how to help teachers educate their students.
Beyond the basic principles of how students think, there are also ideas for improving the work teachers do. Yes, the part about Howard Gardner and how the various "ways students learn" isn't founded in science will get a lot of press. What the reviews I've read have left out, though, is that Dr. Willingham's point is NOT that students have different ways of learning, but rather that the material being discussed needs to be the center of the discussion, not whether there is a visual, verbal and kinesthetic way to teach the lesson.
He focuses on the following idea: What is thought about is what is learned. Example: If students are busy making commas with their bodies, they are thinking about its shape, not the purpose of the punctuation. If students are listening to a reading and asked to pay special attention to how the reader "reads" commas, then they are thinking about the effect of the comma on what is read.
That works better after all, knowing the comma's effect is part of knowing the comma than just moving your body into the shape of a comma. Thus making sure our students are thinking about the concept in a particular way will guide the way the lesson can be presented more effectively than trying to fit in various learning styles. In any case, this is an important book for teachers and tutors alike.
It's something that school administration should read Still, I have hope. Jan 02, Amy Rhoda Brown rated it liked it Shelves: non-fiction , how-to-self-help. The title of this book is a bit of a mislead -- it's the title of the first of nine chapters, each dealing with a different lesson that cognitive science can offer to teachers. The criteria for each lesson's inclusion in the book is that the principle should be "fundamental to the mind's operation" -- they don't change with circumstances, age or socio-economic status; other criteria are that applying the principle has a significant impact, there is a large amount of research to back it up, and i The title of this book is a bit of a mislead -- it's the title of the first of nine chapters, each dealing with a different lesson that cognitive science can offer to teachers.
The criteria for each lesson's inclusion in the book is that the principle should be "fundamental to the mind's operation" -- they don't change with circumstances, age or socio-economic status; other criteria are that applying the principle has a significant impact, there is a large amount of research to back it up, and it should suggest novel teaching techniques. The organization of this book is extremely satisfying. Each chapter presents the problem, then the research, and finally a summary and a section called "Indications for the Classroom" which presents specific ideas and techniques.
At the end of the book is a table summarizing all nine principles along with their most important classroom implication. If I owned this book and needed to refer to it, I would put the page numbers for each chapter beside the corresponding row on the summary table and forget the table of contents altogether.
That chapter on the differences between novices and experts is the only one which I really had issue with in terms of content. The author says that novice learners don't think about their subject the same way as experts because they lack the experts' practice and depth of knowledge, and further that there's little benefit in trying to get learners to think like a "real scientist" or a "real historian".
His argument boils down to: there's no point in trying to get students to think like experts because they'd be really bad at it. It seems to me that, specifically with respect to science, the author is conflating "thinking like an experienced, working scientist" with "learning the scientific method", and throwing out the latter because the former is untenable.
School "science" classes involve getting students to do demonstrations and memorize facts, not make predictions, design experiments and interpret results. Obviously a student is not going to be able to do rigorous, productive 21st-century science -- that takes years of study and practice.
But learning how to do everyday science -- how to apply the principles of the scientific method -- is not, if you'll excuse the expression, rocket science. You can "do science" without "being" a scientist.
The more I think about it the more I think the organizing concept of this particular chapter is a strawman created so the author could fit in some important points about novice versus expert thinking.
Developmental editor fail! Suggesting that having students do experiments, compose music or interpret historical source materials won't advance their understanding of a subject is throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Appreciating, from experience, how knowledge and art is created certainly contributes to understanding that knowledge and art.
Apart from that one quibble I think the interpretation and presentation of the research is spot on and very well presented. Oct 10, Rachel Jackson rated it did not like it. Why Don't Students Like School was a slog to get through. I went into it thinking it would help me understand why kids are so reluctant about going to school, even if they do actually enjoy going for different reasons.
Isn't it still cool to say you hate school even if you like it? The title of the book is misleading on its own: the book isn't so much about why kids don't like school, but why kids struggle academically in different ways. Okay, still an interesting topic. Except that Daniel T. Willingham doesn't do it justice at all. He uses cognitive science to explain how people think and how it applies to school, but he does it in such a juvenile, garbled way that I inevitably got bored while reading every single chapter except for one.
If this is a book about why kids don't like school, shouldn't the author try a little harder to make me like his book? A large swath of the book talks about the different types of memory humans possess and how it relates to how information is obtained and retained in the brain. That makes perfect sense, except that Willingham starts with examples that have nothing to do with actual learning: things like "What do you know about the Cavalier poets?
Background knowledge is only background knowledge if it's broad enough for people to understand, and all the examples Willingham gives here are too esoteric to his science to help anyone reading the book. It was a strange combination of too little information and too much information at the same time, depending on what page I was on and what chapter I was reading. The information was very basic but he presented it poorly, and all the tables, figures and statistics he gave did nothing to clarify his point.
I'm no expert on infographics, but I found his use of images cringe-worthy. It's like he thought he should throw some tables and images into the book but didn't actually know what to do with them.
As usual, with cognitive science books such as this one, Willingham is more confusing than clarifying, and he poses more questions than answers them. I alway want to know more about the brain and how people think, but this book only made me more confused than I was when I started it.
Aug 09, Mary rated it it was amazing Shelves: composition-pedagogy. A remarkable book--its focus is on k12, but I'm going to recommend it for our faculty development reading group. Here are some of the notes I keep jolting down on scraps of paper while I listened to it: Creative thinking is built on a basis of facts--you can't compose great music before you know how to hold the violin.
Learning requires two aspects: attention and practice, where practice is consciously doing things that you kind of know how to do. Attention is based in novelty, but practice is by A remarkable book--its focus is on k12, but I'm going to recommend it for our faculty development reading group.
Attention is based in novelty, but practice is by definition, potentially boring, so should be spread out and repeated with small, tiny variations. Also, with this kind of practice, transfer is more likely. Attention can be good, like in changing the media of teaching every minutes to help kids get back on track, but it can also be distracted. He gives the example of a teacher who wears a toga on the day they learn about Rome, but the students focus on the toga and nothing else, or the teacher who spends hours making biscuits with students because they were a staple on the Underground Railroad, but mostly students learn how to make biscuits.
Experts aren't just novices who learned a trick--they started as novices and mastered those beginning skills. I think I'm going to stop teaching Revising Skills of Experts and Novices, because maybe changing a word or two around is training wheels for substantial revision. Students don't have different "learning styles" duh , but they do have different aptitudes for the various intelligences.
Intelligence is malleable and correlates in some proportion with hard work and environmental factors. Teachers, like students, can improve with hard work. Really enjoyed this one! I really enjoyed this book. Even though I am quite positive about the alternative and new ways of education, this book rejects couple of commonly believed myths that are quite popular nowadays. Two most memorable ideas I took: 1 Students can't acquire skills without knowing facts - it is essential to learn facts with understanding of course , because if you don't have the facts to build upon, you cannot really focus on the problem itself.
Therefore, the idea that in the age of Google it's useles I really enjoyed this book. Therefore, the idea that in the age of Google it's useless to remember anything, is a myth. If you don't know anything about math, you can't possibly know what to search for. Each of us have a preferred way of remembering stuff, but it's insane to think that one student should listen to the material and another should read it. In fact, it is always better to acquire material through as many senses as possible.
Also, these helps mainly for rote remembering, such as random numbers or vocabulary. If you are learning some concept that requires understanding, you use different "type of memory" than auditory or visual, so it is basically irrelevant how you got it into your mind in the first place.
Of course, some people have stronger preferences, but in class, it's always best to offer the information in as many ways as possible. I definitely recommend this book to anyone educating themselves or others.
Jan 21, Elizabeth rated it really liked it. A book aimed at K educators about cognitive science and its effects on student learning and behavior. To be perfectly frank, I expected this to be dry and not entirely relevant to my work as an academic instruction librarian, but I was wrong on both counts. It's clear that Willingham is both a scientist and a teacher; he's remarkably good at explaining dense material, frequently reviewing the most important concepts, and using visuals and examples to reinforce learning.
As an instructor, I've A book aimed at K educators about cognitive science and its effects on student learning and behavior. As an instructor, I've started to suspect that I'm a cognitivist at heart, and this book cemented that belief and gave me some practical tips to improve my teaching.
Examples: students can't perform critical thinking without some degree of background knowledge. Students will remember what they spend the most time thinking about. We can improve our working memories by chunking content or automating certain processes in the brain. And, though it seems controversial, learning styles aren't a proven theory, and differentiated instruction should focus on the best way of presenting content, not the best way of approaching individual students.
This is well worth the time of any educator who wants a better understanding of how we learn and create knowledge. I really enjoyed that book, so I expected as much out of this one, and it didn't disappoint! Willingham has a talent or is it "intelligence"? In this work, he sifts through the sense and nonsense of education principles and applies cognitive principles to see if they are valid. Learning styles? Not so much. Multiple intelligences? Sort of a yes. Inherited or fixed intelligence?
These are all concepts that I had been struggling with as a teacher and wondering how to address in my classroom, because honestly there's a lot of conflicting or false information given by professional development and even entire school districts. This book is going to be one I point myself and others back to in order to improve teaching and learn more about my students' minds. Apr 10, Ahmed rated it it was amazing. As a novice teacher, reading this book has been cathartic for me in many ways.
It cemented ideas I've gained through my extremely short experience as a teacher, and introduced me to concepts I wasn't familiar with. Judging from the title alone, I expected the book to center around class management or to address the shortcomings of the educational system.
None of that is mentioned in the book. The book chiefly deals with cognitive skills and how to nurture them in learners. In fact, it talks in g As a novice teacher, reading this book has been cathartic for me in many ways. In fact, it talks in general about how our mind works. So that makes the book accessible to anyone who's interested in learning more about thinking, memory and the necessity of background knowledge when trying to solve any problem or think critically about a given situation.
It doesn't get too technical either. The author's writing style is simple and he tends to use humour, so that made reading this book very enjoyable to me. Dec 17, Mochammad Yusni rated it liked it. I disagree with some things that he proposed on this book, for example when he writes that in teaching teacher should focus on the content delivery not to the students themselves.
This dichotomy can be dangerous, as both are also important. However, this disagreement is minor, as there are a lot of points that he delivers are so mind-opening. If our children fail a class, we feel disappointed. Combine this pressure with the one that children feel they are under from the teachers, and it is not hard to see why children can end up hating school.
School can be filled with so many different types of pressure as well. It is not just about the pressure that they experience from an academic perspective. A lot of children also feel the social pressure that comes with school as well. Making friends can be difficult, and children can often fall out about things. Younger children seem to switch their best friend every day! This can be challenging because, at that moment, children can feel like it is the worst thing in the world that is happening to them.
Rather than telling children not to worry about these issues, teachers and parents need to make children feel like they are heard. If they are struggling with a certain class, help them find ways to overcome their struggles.
If they have fallen out with their friends, listen to them and understand what they are going through. Talk to them and help them find a solution that will make them feel better. Instead, we want to know that we are being listened to and we want someone to help us through the situation.
This is what teachers and parents both need to do when children are struggling and succumbing to the pressure.
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