My day got off to a cold start-- no hot water! The quirks of an old building... Luckily, the sessions were so fascinating that I quickly forgot about it. Today's presentations were about fractions, culture, language and brain development. Despite being quite different topics, they all focused on the importance of affect, and more specifically, how emotional connections are critical to learning. A few bits of interesting information:
1) Chinese teachers have multiple approaches to teaching fractions. They understand fractions from multiple perspectives and can communicate them with students. American teachers are lucky if they have one approach.
2) Indian language has several letters/sounds that don't exist in English. By age 1, English-speaking children can't differentiate these sounds- but youngsters can!
3) The frontal lobe of the brain is not fully developed in females until age 22... and age 26 for males.
Today, I presented on "Intimate disclosure and internalizing symptoms among best friends of young adolescents". (It's a fancy title for a presentation basically about the relation of teens' conversations and anxiety/depression.) It went really well, except for some technical difficulty. The projector shut down in the middle of my presentation- another quirk of an old building! I just kept going, and it came back on a few minutes later. The group gave me some wonderful feedback- lots of new ways to think about this topic along with ideas for future research!
Our sessions ended at lunchtime, so I spent the afternoon touring around Oxford with Dr. Julie Phillips of the University of Northern Iowa. We went to the Ashmolean Museum of art and archeology. The Egyptian exhibits were my favorite. Then, we headed through town to the Carfax Tower, which was the center of town many years ago. We climbed 99 steps (up a TINY spiral staircase) to the very top and were rewarded with an incredible view of Oxford. As always, here are some pics.
On tomorrow's agenda- more presentations and a visit to Hogwarts! (aka Christ Church)
No comments:
Post a Comment