I reflect on my week — resting, proofreading opportunities, and how to begin the research process with Wikipedia.
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Rest
This week I was sick.
It was one of those colds that brewed under the surface for a year in order to give the biggest punch once it surfaced. My dramatic flare is warranted after how much it messed up my schedule.
That, however, was a blessing in disguise.
It gave me a chance to slow down and not jump the gun.
I am not the most patient of people, so it was a forced slowdown.
At the gate, you hear the announcement, “The pilot does not feel it is the absolute perfect time to fly. Since he is still waiting for the best conditions ever known to man and the perfect frame of mind, we are forced to cancel the flight.”
Now, would it not have been better for the flight to have taken off nearly perfectly rather than not at all?
Well, students find themselves in the pilot’s seat of their own life, struggling with perfection.
Here I want to discuss perfectionism and how to work past unhealthy perfectionism.
Striving to get the mark closer to perfect can awaken strengths and problem solving abilities you didn’t know you had!
Furthermore, while striving to get closer to perfect, you maintain high academic standards and perform well.
“Aim for the stars and, even if you fail, you will land on the moon” rings true at this moment.
The act of earnest striving for perfectionism, can lead to achieving sufficiently high marks before the illusive 100% comes.
Unhealthy Perfectionism
On the other hand, perfectionism can be taken too far.
I have seen many of my friends and classmates lose their health and joy through uncompromising ambition towards 100%.
It is always important to keep things in perspective and see how one grade does not impact you 5 or 10 years down the line.
Unwavering ambition can lead to burnout and regret.
Jade, a recent high school graduate in England, made a controversial video about regretting her perfect exam scores. This regret does not come from ingratitude but from an awareness of the price paid for those grades.
What do you gain, if you get perfect grades, but lose your health and passion?
You can watch the whole video here:
That said, I read an interesting article recently, which discussed the perfectionism of gifted students.
If school takes no effort whatsoever for some students, then what would perfectionism for them look like?
In my experience, the number one place unhealthy perfectionism rears its ugly head is in “procrastination perfectionism.”
I myself have a life sentence, unfortunately. Linda Sapadin of Reed University defines this as: “You’re overly concerned with not meeting high expectations; you work so hard you never finish (or, sometimes, never start)” (read the full article here).
While at university, I was in the Honors College. Despite being surrounded by the “best and brightest,” we all waited to start our major projects.
In my case, I needed to see how each step would go.
I wanted to mentally foresee finding the resources, having the main points of the outline, and then writing the final draft, before I began anything.
This goes back to fear or feeling unprepared.
Though for some, like our pilot in the introduction, we may hunger for that perfect state of mind without fatigue or worry. Regardless, the allure of perfectionism can stop us from even starting.
Ways to Combat It
There are many ways to work through the negative effects of perfectionism. Here I will list four:
1.Make sure you schedule your project well.
Do not write down: “write essay,” but instead breakdown the project into manageable pieces.
You can focus your perfectionism on each step, rather than being overwhelmed by the whole.
I discuss this further in 3 Do’s and Don’ts, which you can read here.
2. Zoom out in time.
Will this essay matter in three months?
Will this test haunt me in five years? Most likely it will not even be on your mind in five days; therefore, relax.
3. Focus on what you are writing and building.
Forget about the grades for a second.
If you make something wonderful, then the grade you deserve will follow.
You can see it clearly, but when you reach for it…well…it does not turn out as you would have predicted.
All the more true for Middle Schoolers who are just beginning to articulate themselves fully in writing.
Here I want to explain a method to help young students write descriptions.
The secret is to use your eyes instead of your hands.
Don’t want to read the article? Watch my youtube video instead 👇🏻
First and foremost, I provide a picture of a scene.
At a young age, visualizing everything in your mind distracts from trying to write. You ask for a lot of juggling.
I like to use scenes from Disney films because they are very recognizable and the student already knows the story.
Secondly, I break down what I want to know.
Over the course of several lessons, I would devote a lesson to each of these:
Actions
The literal actions that take place in the scene.
Standing, running, holding, laughing, looking, etc.
The people themselves and their appearance
Woman or man?
Young girl or teenage boy?
What color is her hair?
What type of shirt is he wearing?
How big are her eyes?
Connecting everything
Does her red hair connect with his red hair?
Could they be related?
Why is she looking at this?
Does her expression explain how she feels about the painting?
Thirdly, I will ask them to make a list for each category.
I am very serious about making a list.
I do not want them to attempt to write a paragraph too soon.
When we read young people’s writing, too often it resembles: “she looks sad. she is in a dress. It is sunny. she…. it….”
This is because our brains naturally wants to just process the information.
Young students (and many adults) cannot articulate themselves at the same moment they are digesting the information. Thus, I separate the steps.
Lastly, we write the paragraph!
Since everything is processed and organized, the student writes with more confidence.
Everything has come from the student.
I have not fed them the lines.
Moreover, they have arrived to it in a way that does not overload or pressure them.
The result, the paragraph itself.
We may then talk about combining smaller pieces of information or about the order of ideas.
The main outcome is that we have something to work with.
We can keep our discussion firmly rooted in writing instead of juggling mental images and overwhelming number of ideas.
Here is an example.
Actions
An older woman stands at the door.
She is holding a key.
The young woman gasps.
She holds a scroll.
She turns around.
The women are looking at each other.
Appearance
The older woman is the stepmother. (It is not wrong to add plot points taken from the film itself because the picture is just there to help stimulate the student.)
She has dark hair, probably grey.
Her whole appearance is cast in shadow.
She is wearing a dark magenta dress.
The magenta dress is very long. It goes up to the neck and down to the wrist and ankles.
The other woman is younger.
She is Cinderella.
She is very pretty.
Her hair is strawberry blonde and short.
Cinderella is wearing a dress, blue and brown, and an apron, white.
Her eyes are very large and blue.
He mouth is opened very wide.
The room itself is hardly seen.
There is a door, table, and mirror.
The mirror is large, but slightly broken.
Connection
Cinderella has big eyes and an open mouth because she sees her stepmother at the door.
Her big eyes and opened mouth show that she is shocked.
The step mother is holding a key because she wants to lock the door.
The scroll invites Cinderella to the Ball.
Summary paragraph
Cinderella is a beautiful young girl with blue eyes and strawberry blonde hair. She is holding an invitation to the Ball. Her stepmother clutches the key ready to lock her into a room. Cinderella gasps at the sight of her stepmother because she is shocked.
No, this inevitably would not be what an 11 year old would write.
I wrote it to demonstrate the concept.
However, I have seen that with this exercise the student writes more than usual.
Until being displaced by French and then English, Latin held the position of being the literary language of the West.
Authors took to their pens with it to record ideas of philosophy, politics, spirituality, science, diplomacy, music, and love.
You may have heard of some of the most famous Latin authors: Caesar, Cicero, Virgil, Ovid, and Seneca.
The list does not end there…additionally: Augustine, Bede, Erasmus, Issac Newton, etc.
No matter what you are interested in, there is a book for you in Latin!
There is even a thrilling description of a haunted house by Pliny the Younger. What are you waiting for?
Here I want to introduce you to Latin by highlighting its differences from English.
When deciding whether to take up a language, understanding its features informs upon your decision.
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The Familiar
Cozy up with your new Latin book effortlessly with the same alphabet as ours.
It is like ours with only a few differences, for example no “j” or “w” and “v” is written as “u” and vice versa.
A full explanation on pronunciation can be found here.
The sound of Latin is very melodic with its long and short vowels. Here is a preview:
The Differences
The grape and the raisin
English is a very word-rich language.
Like a delicious stew, with it we combine many large and small elements to create hearty sentences.
Latin is not like this.
It uses the least words necessary to say the absolute most.
Like a raisin, it packs a punch in the smallest form possible.
And so, when translating to and from Latin, it can feel like moving between a grape and a raisin.
Imagining the water leaving the grape or putting water into the raisin creates intentionality with each word choice.
Students worry about adding too many words in English or they have trepidation over the lack of words in Latin.
Regarding the transition as a change in the fruit itself helps.
The office and the briefcase
This transformation happens because Latin is an “inflected language.”
This means “the nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and verbs have variable endings that indicate the relationship of the words to each other in a sentence” (Wheelock’s Latin p. xxvi).
Think of it this way.
English is like an office.
Everything stands independently of everything else — the bookcase, the lamp, the laptop, and the chair.
Latin is like a briefcase.
The laptop, books, and pens are all together within one portable object. Both are offices of sorts, but they are packaged differently.
In English word placement is very important because that conveys meaning and grammar.
However, in Latin, since the words carry their own meaning and grammar within the variable endings.
You can have fewer words and they are not in a fixed spot within the sentence.
The number one difficulty for English speakers in reading Latin, in my opinion, is word order!
This issue directly results from Latin’s inflected nature.
Though word order does exist in Latin, it is significantly more fluid than that of English.
Students hate to see the direct object first or sentences without a clearly visible pronoun subject.
Exposure to lots of Latin cures this.
That said, the student must make the conscious effort to understand that Latin operates significantly different than English.
A secondary hiccup finds itself in Latin’s lack of articles (a, an, the) and diminished use of possessive adjectives (my, your, ours, etc).
When inflating that raisin, the color of the fruit changes to green.
So too, while translating into English the color of the language changes as we add in our own vital elements.
Surveying this here is easier said than done.
Time and dedication are required to straddle the complexity of Latin’s inflected system.
Motivation sits at the root of that effort.
So why Latin?
Why Learn Latin?
1.Your vocabulary will grow.
Once you know the root of some our English words, taken from Latin originally, then you will know many more English words instantly.
Additionally, your eyes will be open to the components of words you already know.
This knowledge will carry into other languages with similar words.
While they compose their essays, they will ask themselves the same questions.
Learning reading comprehension is an important step in any child’s education.
Not every student can read well.
Some students struggle to connect the details and myriad of facts they encounter.
What do you do?
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Memorizing Cards
I am mesmerized by people with an excellent memory.
One can demonstrate this asset through the memorizing of decks of cards.
I cannot do this and never will, but it got me thinking.
Cards themselves are basically meaningless pieces of information. If you can find a way to remember them, then you can carry that over onto other situations.
I gave my students random cards from a deck.
I asked them to remember those cards for 30 seconds.
They did so easily when I did not talk, but the second round I talked during those entire 30 seconds and they were unsuccessful.
Afterwards, I showed them how to make the random cards into a story.
Then, students were able to remember the cards for any length of time within the lesson.
Here is an example:
Jack = The jack
Loves = The heart suit
To ace = Ace
Irish = The clubs suit
5 = 5
Higher = the spades suit (it looks like an up arrow)
Honing the skill
After this, I want to hone the skill of story telling, with that story lasting only a sentence or two.
I give my students random facts and ask them to connect them into a story.
We must concentrate on this, because a story that does not connect properly will be harder to remember.
If I say, “A man runs down the street and sees a boy,” now I must remember him running and seeing the boy, which is more work.
I can tweak the story somewhat…. “A man runs and almost trips over a boy sitting in the street.”
Now I have a bond between the man and the boy.
You cannot have the man tripping without the boy in the street.
Many times I will give the students random pieces of information in order for them to practice making meaningful connections.
I make the story and also reinforce items: an old man with an old and a $12 ring for a 12 year-old granddaughter.
Applying the skill
Lastly, we need to apply this to an actual reading assignment.
I will ask the students to read the passage to themselves and then ask me about any words they do not know.
Then we will go over it together to make sure they understand the words and passage 100%.
Now we employ the story-telling technique in order to keep track of important items.
the main argument
something in parallel or conflicting
one example.
Here is an example:
A mother goes shopping with her teenage, ninja son. He says, “Mom, all my friends are wearing black! I want this shirt.” She responds, “We are just regular farmers. You should dress normally. I like this shirt more.”
Though inauthentic it captures the main points in a funny and unexpected way. (text original source here)
Stories are more potent and useful when they are weird, funny, and unexpected.
The goal of the story is to digest and install the information without making your mind work even harder to remember even more.
As you move through a reading, you can employ this technique as you go.
Instead of trying to remember what happened two paragraphs up, just review the story going on in your mind.
They are learning a skill with this, not merely a method.
They are connecting facts over and over.
With time, the inventive and strange stories slip away and what remains is the ability to keep track of and connect information within a reading.
Everyone will have different stories and they may see them as a movie in their mind or just more text.
This is adaptable to all kinds of learners because it is completely individualized.
Making the short story serves as a vehicle to remember and digest what the student has read.
