Amen!
Monday, October 20, 2014
Friday, October 17, 2014
Feeling Proud. ..
Our family is lovin' this MN Fall weather!
Got to enjoy our annual "leaf pile day" last Sunday at the neighbor's!
Earlier this week we had conferences at school for Roslyn and Andray and both kids had
GREAT REPORTS!
Roslyn is doing great in school - her reading and writing are improving every day.
Her favorite thing to do at school is FREE PLAY and Calendar duties ;)
Andray's teacher was all smiles when she spoke about him.
He's taken 9 AR tests already and scored 100% on all of them!
Jake and I were proud parents on Monday night!
Wednesday, October 15, 2014
9 Years Ago...Feels Like Yesterday...
9 years ago already my Gpa Shorty earned his eternal wings in Heaven.
He's thought of and missed every day!
We grandkids learned a lot of LIFE LESSONS from Gpa Shorty on the farm...
NEVER GIVE UP!
Tuesday, October 14, 2014
Oh Happy Day...
Happy 87th Birthday to this beautiful woman - my Gram and best friend.
Wish I could give you a hug today!
87 years old, still living on the farm, still gardening...and still playing ball with her grandkids!
Summer 2014 - Priceless!
And a very Happy 14th "Golden" Anniversary to my big bro Aaron and his beautiful wife Megan!
Was a perfect fall wedding 14 years ago!
So thankful for the family Aaron and Megan have created!
Gram holding her 15th great-grandchild, Louis William!
OH HAPPY DAY!
Monday, October 13, 2014
Remembering a Great Man...
2 years ago today Gpa Andy left us for Heaven...he is missed!
So thankful Andray and Roslyn had a relationship with him and remember him.
Gpa Andy was by far one of the greatest and sweetest persons I've ever known.
Friday, October 10, 2014
Wednesday, October 8, 2014
The Learning "Myth" - Interesting Point of View
The Learning Myth: Why I'll Never Tell My Son He's Smart
Tue, 19 Aug 2014 14:43:00
By: Salman Khan
My 5-year-old son has just started reading. Every night, we lie on his bed and he reads a short book to me. Inevitably, he’ll hit a word that he has trouble with: last night the word was “gratefully.” He eventually got it after a fairly painful minute. He then said, “Dad, aren’t you glad how I struggled with that word? I think I could feel my brain growing.” I smiled: my son was now verbalizing the tell-tale signs of a “growth mindset.” But this wasn’t by accident. Recently, I put into practice research I had been reading about for the past few years: I decided to praise my son not when he succeeded at things he was already good at, but when he persevered with things that he found difficult. I stressed to him that by struggling, your brain grows. Between the deep body of research on the field of learning mindsets and this personal experience with my son, I am more convinced than ever that mindsets toward learning could matter more than anything else we teach.
Researchers have known for some time that the brain is like a muscle; that the more you use it, the more it grows. They’ve found that neural connections form and deepen most when we make mistakes doing difficult tasks rather than repeatedly having success with easy ones.
However, not everyone realizes this. Dr. Carol Dweck of Stanford University has been studying people’s mindsets towards learning for decades. She has found that most people adhere to one of two mindsets: fixed or growth. Fixed mindsets mistakenly believe that people are either smart or not, that intelligence is fixed by genes. People with growth mindsets correctly believe that capability and intelligence can be grown through effort, struggle and failure. Dweck found that those with a fixed mindset tended to focus their effort on tasks where they had a high likelihood of success and avoided tasks where they may have had to struggle, which limited their learning. People with a growth mindset, however, embraced challenges, and understood that tenacity and effort could change their learning outcomes. As you can imagine, this correlated with the latter group more actively pushing themselves and growing intellectually.
The good news is that mindsets can be taught; they’re malleable. What’s really fascinating is that Dweck and others have developed techniques that they call “growth mindset interventions,” which have shown that even small changes in communication or seemingly innocuous comments can have fairly long-lasting implications for a person’s mindset. For instance, praising someone’s process (“I really like how you struggled with that problem”) versus praising an innate trait or talent (“You’re so clever!”) is one way to reinforce a growth mindset with someone. Process praise acknowledges the effort; talent praise reinforces the notion that one only succeeds (or doesn’t) based on a fixed trait. And we’ve seen this on Khan Academy as well: students are spending more time learning on Khan Academy after being exposed to messages that praise their tenacity and grit and that underscore that the brain is like a muscle.
The Internet is a dream for someone with a growth mindset. Between Khan Academy, MOOCs, and others, there is unprecedented access to endless content to help you grow your mind. However, society isn’t going to fully take advantage of this without growth mindsets being more prevalent. So what if we actively tried to change that? What if we began using whatever means are at our disposal to start performing growth mindset interventions on everyone we cared about? This is much bigger than Khan Academy or algebra — it applies to how you communicate with your children, how you manage your team at work, how you learn a new language or instrument. If society as a whole begins to embrace the struggle of learning, there is no end to what that could mean for global human potential.
And now here’s a surprise for you. By reading this article itself, you’ve just undergone the first half of a growth-mindset intervention. The research shows that just being exposed to the research itself (for example, knowing that the brain grows most by getting questions wrong, not right) can begin to change a person’s mindset. The second half of the intervention is for you to communicate the research with others. We’ve made a video (above) that celebrates the struggle of learning that will help you do this. After all, when my son, or for that matter, anyone else asks me about learning, I only want them to know one thing. As long as they embrace struggle and mistakes, they can learn anything.
Interesting Read - I'll still always remind my kids daily how SMART they really are :)
Parenting is quite the JOURNEY!
I truly learn something NEW every day!
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