mondays are for learning

Mondays are generally the most hated day of the week, bringing the beginning of the school and work week. But today i realized that Mondays are actually pretty great. (it helps that my Monday schedule isn't too overwhelming but whatever). Today was a great day full of learning!

We've started the geometry unit in Math Education, come to find out that there are multiple kinds of geometry. Who knew? Imagine this: you start at your house and travel 10 miles south. You then travel 10 miles west and another ten miles north. Have you arrived back at your house? If you said no, you are correct. If you said yes, you are correct. How is this possible, you ask? Well according to Euclidean Geometry, it isn't possible because the plane we work on is 2-dimensional. But should we work with Spherical Geometry (like on the globe) this situation would be true.

Then in Cognitive Development we've been discussing memory and encoding. Always a fascinating subject and my teacher's dry sense of humor just makes it better. Last week he told us about how certain experiences are automatically encoded into our Long Term Memory (LTM). For example, he remembers how to perform heart surgery on a dog because they actually had to do that when he was a grad student. But does he remember what he had for breakfast two months ago? Probably not.

in Literacy we read a few articles about the topic on Monday and discuss them in class on Wednesday. This week was comprehension. The Rosenblatt article? Phenomenal! i actually saved some of the quotes because i love them so much. So here are the key points i found about comprehension

• "In any linguistic event, any process will be affected by the physical and emotional state of the individual"
• "The “meaning” does not reside ready-made or “in” the text or “in” the reader but happens or comes into being during the transaction between reader and text"
• "Writers facing a blank page, like readers approaching a text, have only their individual linguistic capital to draw on"
• "Writing is always an event in time, occurring at a particular moment in the writer’s biography, in particular circumstances, under particular external as well as internal pressures"
• "Because each individual’s experience is unique, differences due to social, ethnic, educational, and personal factors exist"
• "Writing deepens the reader’s understanding of the importance of paying attention to diction, syntactic positions, emphasis, imagery, and conventions of genre"