Saturday, August 8, 2009

Cognition: The mental process of knowing, including aspects such as awareness, perception, reasoning and judgement.

Day 4 of MyReadingLab.
This online study guide supports my 'Intro to College Reading and Writing' class following the text, 'Bridging the Gap'. I am in hell.
This is day 2 of Stephanie trying to grasp the concept of supporting ideas. I teach this stuff in my Cambridge and Toefl exam courses with my non-English speaking students including how to outline a subject, write introductions, topic sentences with supporting ideas, summaries and conclusions. Now, you would think that I would be able to pass out of this particular study area!
It occured to me that either,
a. My brain is softer than I thought
b. I am not very bright
c. Maybe I think differently or,
d. All of the above

This reminds me of a story. My sister Val has a fabulous daughter named MacKenzie and long story short sent her for a short period of time to a Montessori school when she was 4 years old. At one point early in the year, Val was summoned to school for a meeting with one of MacKenzie's teachers who was concerned with a cognitive test Kenzie had taken that week.

The teacher had shown Kenz a series of three figures and asked her to put them in order.
fig. 1
a little girl
fig. 2
a little girl licking an ice cream cone
fig. 3
a little girl with an ice cream cone

She explained to my sister the correct order was:
fig. 1
fig. 3
fig. 2
Explanation: a little girl gets an ice cream cone and eats it.

Then she proceeded to show Val the order Kenzie had chosen:
fig. 2
fig. 1
fig. 3
Kenzie's explanation: a little girl eats an ice cream cone, when it's gone she asks for another one!

Post script: My sister did take her daughter out of that school the very next week.

Tomorrow I will attempt to cross over into the dimension of supporting ideas. (Then I intend to treat myself to some gelato.)
I guess I do think differently and now I have to train my mind to think in a different way.

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