Differentiation

Currently Listening To: a preview of Lenka's new CD on itunes! (If you've never heard of Lenka, start with these. They're my faves.) (p.s. I saw her in concert my first year of college, before I'd actually ever heard of her. It cost $3. I'm pretty sure she's charging more than that now...)

Differentiation is one of our buzz words in the Ed School. (along with other words like “scaffolding” and “Bloom’s Taxonomy”) It essentially means knowing all your students and their individual strengths and weaknesses and being able to tailor your lesson plan to meet all of them. It’s what, as a teacher, you should be striving for.

Right now, I’m working on an assignment dealing with all of this – taking a lesson plan, creating ‘student profiles’ for three made up students with individualized needs (por ejemplo, one of mine is an English language learner, one is below grade level in reading, etc.) and then marking how you would change (excuse me, differentiate) the lesson plan to meet all these needs.

But the ‘student profile’ is made up of things like multiple intelligences (based on Gardner's Theory of Multiple Intelligences) and learning styles and all that, and before I knew that(/while I was tring to figure out what 'student profile' means and googling things like “differentiating instruction student profile example”), I of course came across all these tests to discover what intelligence I have and what’s my learning style and just personality tests in general.

So of course I took them.

And although maybe I wasn’t quite so efficient in getting my work done, I really feel like I've searched my soul and learned a lot about myself tonight:

• Intelligences: Language (linguistic), followed by social (interpersonal) and body movement (kinesthetic)
• Learning style: Kinesthetic
• Temperament: NF (idealist) (…and because my parents are somewhat obsessed with Myers-Briggs, I already know that I’m an ENFP.)

…What are yours?? (The links above all go to the tests. That's right, I made it that easy for you.)

Slash does anyone else find this as interesting as I do? Maybe this is why I’m in the Ed School and you (probably) aren't...

p.s. I made chili tonight! And it was GOOD.



[image via We Heart It]

Nom?

T-Streez (aka Taylor) just informed me that "nom nom" has been added to the Oxford English Dictionary.

Sure enough, it's true:

Informal, chiefly North American

exclamation an expression of delight when eating.

plural noun (nom noms) delicious food.

verb (nom-nom) eat delicious food with obvious enjoyment.

adjective (nom-nommy) descriptive of delicious food.

[origin — imitative; popularized by the noises made by the character 

Cookie Monster on Sesame Street (usually as “Om nom nom nom”)]

Truth: this. is. frightening.

But let's be real, I'm glad that I now have an Oxford English Dictionary-approved way to describe what is happening in our kitchen right now, thanks to Streez and Monique's celebration of sponteneity: there are currently some nom-nommy nom noms* that I am about to nom-nom. Om nom nom.

*chocolate chip cookies

p.s. Speaking of noms, we definitely had these last week at small group:

[source]

History

Sometimes I forget that I used to live this.

These pictures from a trip I went on to Harar and Jigjiga, in way eastern Ethiopia, in the fall of '07 (another trip in which I tagged along with the Lunsford family, just like London!). It was a 2 day drive, and I remember we spent a significant amount of time in the car learning lines from The Importance of Being Earnest for school. Probably not the backdrop Oscar Wilde intended...

Disclaimer

Quote Love: "Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it." - CS Lewis

Currently Reading: Coriolanus, by Shakespeare. If you ever thought reading Shakespeare was hard, try reading one of his plays that no one's even ever heard of...

Y'all, I don't know if this is the case for you, but April is a month that is busy and just builds and builds into even more busyness. I think it's because, in college, this is all we've got (the first two weeks in May are our finals weeks, and then...summer!) and as people start to realized this, they're like "OH NO we need to do that thing we were going to do before the end of the year!" ...But when everybody realizes this, then there are a lot of things that are happening. Combine this with the end of semester culmination of projects/paper proposals/actual papers/tests/everythingintheworld, it's a lot. AND, on top of that, it's finally spring and beautiful (well, we're still getting there. But I have high hopes for this week) so really all you want to do is laze around in the grass with a book open in front of you for show but really just talking to your friend and possibly drinking an iced coffee. (Correction: Definitely drinking an iced coffe.)

And for me, piled onto this already-occurring phenomenon, I just started a job last weekend -- hours which I am now cramming into the leisurely time I previously had to do all my work. I mean, it will all get done -- it always does -- but it's going to take a little more concentration and intentionality and unfortunate things like that.

All that to say, I will try not to neglect you all, but on some days, it might happen.

But not to worry, come May and you all will have my undivided attention!

In the mean time, here are some pretty pictures that caught my eye on Pinterest today. There's really no rhyme or reason to them -- just that they are lovely(/delicious?) and I think we need some of that up in hurr. Enjoy!

Impossible Things

“I can’t believe THAT!” said Alice.

“Can’t you?” said the Queen in a pitying tone. 

“Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.”

Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said, 

“one can’t believe impossible things.”

“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. 

“When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour 

a day. Why sometimes I believed as many as six 

impossible things before breakfast!”

- from Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

[image via Pinterest]

Don't Forget To Be Awesome

Currently Eating: ice cream

Quote Love: "If people were rain, I was drizzle and she was a hurricane." (from Looking For Alaska)

I had the best intentions to get so much work done today. But unfortunately (or really fortunately) my work involves looking up a bunch of YA Lit stuff. And, of course, in doing, I got a wee bit sidetracked (story of my life) when I started watching Vlogbrothers...

Let me back up just a minute. Have you ever read a John Green book? I read Looking For Alaska for YA Lit at the beginning of the semester and it was phenomenal. It was one of those books that makes you sad when you finished because you just want to keep being part of those characters' lives. Do you know what I mean? Anyway, I read another one of his books, An Abundance of Katherines, last weekend, and it was also great. His writing is 1. hilarious, 2. so real (in terms of characters and life and stuff) and 3. addicting. I highly recommend it.

Now back to Vlogbrothers. About four years ago, John Green and his brother, Hank, decided to only communicate through video blogs that they had to post to each other every day for an entire year. This was called Brotherhood 2.0. Of course, because these guys are hilarious, about a bajillion other people started watching them, and they kept on making them, and became Vlogbrothers.

You can start with this one: 

(For our YA Lit final project, which can basically be about anything we want as long as it relates to YA Lit, one of my friends is going to focus John Green and how he's an author yet he's created this entire community, which is awesome. And I'm a little jealous of this idea because I have no idea what my project's going to be on. Even though technically I think we were supposed to let the teacher know our ideas like two weeks ago. Whooops.) (P.S. If you have any ideas for me, that's be cool.)

Saturday Afternoon

Currently Reading: Tropic of Orange by Karen Tei Yamashita

Currently Sitting: on the couch next to a sleeping Monique. Madeline is making cupcakes nearby, and in less than an hour our neighbors are coming over to cook us dinner :]

This is what I did yesterday:

before                                                                                         after

Items discovered on the desk include (but are not limited to): 6 books, 2 magazines, 2 notebooks, 1 catalog, 2 mugs, a lot of random junk (such as a solitary glove and a bunch of safety pins) and a billion papers.

...successful day?