20190826

Mon 26 Aug 2019 09:28:41 AM EDT Slept from eleven to six without waking. High of seventy-eight today, with rain in the evening. Work: - FL rent increases Done. - Firefly disk space Done. - 4 PM Entrata call Done. Twenty-minute walk at lunch. Cooler, breezy, rain imminent. Sound of crickets, a morning dove in flight. Home: - Decide whether or not to return Doc Martens (too small?) Done. They're OK. (9 UK, 10 US) - Renew Let's Encrypt cert Done. - Work on collab dungeon? - SDL? A bit. https://paulgorman.org/technical/golang-sdl.txt.html https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-the-uk/revisiting-sutton-hoo-britains-mythical-ship-burial > In July, 1937, Edith Pretty, a wealthy widow and local magistrate, attended a flower show in Woodbridge, a picturesque, red-brick town on the Suffolk coast, in search of archeological advice. Pretty, who was fifty-three, lived with her son on a five-hundred-acre estate named Sutton Hoo, a few miles outside the town. In Old English, Hoo means a spur of land, and Pretty’s house, a large, pale villa, sat on a bluff overlooking sandy heathland that sloped down to the river Deben. Pretty had always been curious about a strange set of mounds that was visible from the house. The hillocks were marked on maps as Roman tumuli—burial mounds—and a guest who stayed with Pretty once claimed to see a ghostly warrior on horseback, riding through the grounds. An elderly laborer on the estate, known as Old Pettit, swore that the mounds contained treasure. Now Pretty wanted to investigate. At the flower show, she approached a history teacher and antiquarian named Vincent Redstone and asked what she should do next. Redstone introduced her to the curator of the Ipswich Museum, who suggested that she hire the museum’s freelance, self-taught archeologist—a local man named Basil Brown—to take a look at the tumuli. > Within three days, he and his team began to uncover the outline of a twenty-seven-metre Anglo-Saxon rowing boat that had been hauled up from the river and buried on the land above the shore. The wooden ribs had rotted away in the acidic soil, but the rivets remained, along with a beautiful, intricate imprint of the ship, as if a great crocodile had slept in the sand. Brown worked carefully with tools borrowed from the Pretty household: a coal shovel, pastry brushes, a penknife. He knew that nothing on this scale from the period had been found before. The middle of the vessel was “as wide as our small room at home,” he wrote to his wife, May. As he dug, Brown found signs of Tudor grave robbers: the ashes of a fire, an old beer bottle. He searched for a burial chamber. On the evening of June 14th, when he was alone on the mound, with the light failing, Brown came across an iron ring and the edge of a decayed wooden box. He knocked on it and it rang hollow. “I pushed my finger into a cavity, this may of course only contain bones but I shall see very soon now I know.” > The find at Sutton Hoo turned out to be Europe’s largest ship burial, complete with treasure, and it ended Britain’s Dark Ages. Until the summer of 1939, traces of the country’s ancient past ran out, more or less, with the departure of the Romans, in about 410 A.D., and started up again with the first Viking raids, almost four hundred years later. “It comes to us from a period of our history whose archaeological remains . . . otherwise comprise ‘nothing larger than a bucket or longer than a sword,’ ” the British Museum noted, in 1946. > Even so, the physical objects dug up at Sutton Hoo have never quite felt like the main event. There was no ship, after all. And there was no king. (His bones and teeth rotted to nothing as well.) The power of the find was at once ethereal—the ghostly impression of an entire vanished society—and in the manner of the discovery itself, which might have been lifted from an Agatha Christie novel. Europe stood on the edge of the abyss, and here was the butler, bringing lemon-barley water to the archeologists in the garden. > In order to celebrate the find, Pretty wanted to host a sherry party among the tumuli, with a brass band. She sent out invitation cards, “At Home . . . to view remains of Viking ship burial.” In between the cards being sent out and the guests arriving, the most important gold and silver artifacts were found. On the day of the party, this hoard had to be kept secret—a perfect test of English restraint. Brown wore a suit and Pretty did not recognize him. The lead archeologist, Charles Phillips, addressed the crowd in the blandest terms possible. A Spitfire circled overhead, drowning out most of what he had to say. https://www.apmreports.org/story/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-how-schools-teach-reading > Goodman rejected the idea that reading is a precise process that involves exact or detailed perception of letters or words. Instead, he argued that as people read, they make predictions about the words on the page using these three cues: > > - graphic cues (what do the letters tell you about what the word might be?) > - syntactic cues (what kind of word could it be, for example, a noun or a verb?) > - semantic cues (what word would make sense here, based on the context?) > > Goodman concluded that: > > > Skill in reading involves not greater precision, but more accurate first guesses based on better sampling techniques, greater control over language structure, broadened experiences and increased conceptual development. As the child develops reading skill and speed, he uses increasingly fewer graphic cues. > > Goodman's proposal became the theoretical basis for a new approach to teaching reading that would soon take hold in American schools. > > Previously, the question of how to teach reading had focused on one of two basic ideas. > > One idea is that reading is a visual memory process. The teaching method associated with this idea is known as "whole word." The whole word approach was perhaps best embodied in the "Dick and Jane" books that first appeared in the 1930s. The books rely on word repetition, and pictures to support the meaning of the text. The idea is that if you see words enough, you eventually store them in your memory as visual images. > > The other idea is that reading requires knowledge of the relationships between sounds and letters. Children learn to read by sounding out words. This approach is known as phonics. It goes way back, popularized in the 1800s with the McGuffey readers. > > These two ideas — whole word and phonics — had been taking turns as the favored way to teach reading until Goodman came along with what came to be known among educators as the "three-cueing system." > > So, in 1975, Stanovich and a fellow graduate student set out to test the idea in their lab. They recruited readers of various ages and abilities and gave them a series of word-reading tasks. Their hypothesis was that skilled readers rely more on contextual cues to recognize words than poor readers, who probably weren't as good at using context. > > They couldn't have been more wrong. > > "To our surprise, all of our research results pointed in the opposite direction," Stanovich wrote. "It was the poorer readers, not the more skilled readers, who were more reliant on context to facilitate word recognition."13 > > The skilled readers could instantly recognize words without relying on context. Other researchers have confirmed these findings with similar experiments. It turns out that the ability to read words in isolation quickly and accurately is the hallmark of being a skilled reader. This is now one of the most consistent and well-replicated findings in all of reading research.14 > > Other studies revealed further problems with the cueing theory:15 > > - Skilled readers don't scan words and sample from the graphic cues in an incidental way; instead, they very quickly recognize a word as a sequence of letters. That's how good readers instantly know the difference between "house" and "horse," for example. > - Experiments that force people to use context to predict words show that even skilled readers can correctly guess only a fraction of the words; this is one reason people who rely on context to identify words are poor readers. > - Weak word recognition skills are the most common and debilitating source of reading problems.16 > > The results of these studies are not controversial or contested among scientists who study reading. The findings have been incorporated into every major scientific model of how reading works. > > But cueing is still alive and well in schools. > > Adams thought this [three cues] diagram made perfect sense. The research clearly shows that readers use all of these cues to understand what they're reading. > > But Adams soon figured out the disconnect. Teachers understood these cues not just as the way readers construct meaning from text, but as the way readers actually identify the words on the page. And they thought that teaching kids to decode or sound out words was not necessary. > > "The most important thing was for the children to understand and enjoy the text," Adams said. "And from that understanding and joy of reading, the words on the page would just pop out at them." > > She would explain to teachers at every opportunity that explicitly teaching children about the relationships between sounds and letters is essential to ensure all kids get off to a good start in reading. But she got tons of pushback from teachers. "They didn't want to teach phonics!" she recalled in frustration. > > To understand why cueing can get in the way of children's reading development, it's essential to understand how our brains process the words we see. > > Reading scientists have known for decades that the hallmark of being a skilled reader is the ability to instantly and accurately recognize words.33 If you're a skilled reader, your brain has gotten so good at reading words that you process the word "chair" faster than you process a picture of a chair.34 You know tens of thousands of words instantly, on sight. How did you learn to do that? > > It happens through a process called "orthographic mapping."35 This occurs when you pay attention to the details of a written word and link the word's pronunciation and meaning with its sequence of letters.36 A child knows the meaning and pronunciation of "pony." The word gets mapped to his memory when he links the sounds /p/ /o/ /n/ /y/ to the written word "pony." > > But they said many teachers don't see any problem with cueing. After all, one of the cues is to look at the letters in the word. What's wrong with teaching kids lots of different strategies to figure out unknown words?44 > > "I remember before we started looking at the science and everything, I thought to myself, 'Reading is so hard for kids, so what if they use the picture?'" said Soraya Sajous-Brooks, the early literacy coach at Prescott Elementary School in West Oakland. "Like, use everything you've got." > > But she's come to understand that cueing sends the message to kids that they don't need to sound out words. Her students would get phonics instruction in one part of the day. Then they'd go reader's workshop and be taught that when they come to a word they don't know, they have lots of strategies. They can sound it out. They can also check the first letter, look at the picture, think of a word that makes sense. > > Teaching cueing and phonics doesn't work, Sajous-Brooks said. "One negates the other." > > Other vocabulary words these first-graders had learned were posted on cards around the classroom. They included: wander, persevere, squint and scrumptious. The kids weren't expected to read those words yet. The idea is to build their oral vocabulary so that when they can read those words, they know what the words mean. > > This comes straight from the scientific research, which shows that reading comprehension is the product of two things.48 First, a child needs to be able to sound out a word. Second, the child needs to know the meaning of the word she just sounded out. So, in a first-grade classroom that's following the research, you will see explicit phonics instruction and also lessons that build oral vocabulary and background knowledge. And you will see kids practicing what they've been taught. https://www.metafilter.com/182714/On-cooling-the-mark-out http://infofranpro.wdfiles.com/local--files/19520101-on-cooling/19520101%20On%20cooling.pdf https://faculty.washington.edu/rsoder/EDUC310/571BurtonClarkCoolingOut.pdf Wow. Servings: grains 4/6, fruit 3/4, vegetables 3/4, dairy 3/2, meat 4/3, nuts 0/0.5 Brunch: banana, orange, cucumber, tomato, an egg, coffee Lunch: yogurt, carrots, apple Afternoon snack: coffee Dinner: chicken sandwich, fries

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