Metaglossia: The Translation World

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One career mentor of mine (and multi-millionaire) said that an inviolable part of his day was reading. He spends at least 1 hour per day – every work day – just reading.
He explained this reading may be books or articles in his industry, it might be mindset and self-improvement topics, or it might be just learning more about what is going on in the world (to understand how it affects his industry).
But whatever the topic, this daily practice was something he never missed – he felt this time was vitally important.
Now, I’ll be honest. I don’t usually spend a full hour reading industry, self-improvement, skill building or other professional works each day, but the idea has stayed with me.
He believed it so important to keep learning, to stay on top of his profession and to learn SOMETHING each and every day – whether it was specific work skills or just general mindset information – that he set aside time each day to do so, and never missed it.
He said it was the ONE thing he did every day.
This man is an entrepreneur – he owns his own company. So he understands the importance of focusing on revenue-generating actions. He has to take solid action toward building his business, and yet continual learning is something he credited with his success.
As I mentioned last week, he truly takes to heart my message of backing up and making sure to see the big picture.
However, I think it is more than just the reading that was important; it is the mindset behind the practice, as well as the discipline, that made the action so important.
Continual Learning

Read more: http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/lifestyle/2012/10/19/aurelia-flores-reading-as-part-your-daily-practice/#ixzz29lr8lzS6

As a non-native, there are two rules that I try to obey since moving to the local region. Rule one: Don’t judge bayou people and tell them how to live their lives. Rule two: Obey rule one. Thrifty, brave, reverent, kind and most of the others I am aces with, but I struggle when it comes to obedience, so please forgive me for disobeying rule two.

Another school year is upon us and, the governor’s reform aside, nothing has happened to give confidence that the education of your children will improve.

Education will not improve until you start reforming parents’ thinking and appreciation of the need and value of education.

Parents have to be made to understand that reading starts education.

Education cannot happen without acquiring reading skills and appreciation for the need to read.

However, many parents were not reared in households that needed reading skills because their parents could provide for the family without needing the skills and appreciation of reading. So parents can’t give what they weren’t given.

Disobeying rule two, here is a way to initiate reading skills and build reading appreciation. There are many retired teachers who are just wringing their hands in frustration over the continued decline of education.

By using a systematic, multi-sensory approach to teaching, such as the Orton Gillingham methodology, students can learn to excel in their reading and writing skills.

The details are sketchy, but Education Minister George Abbott's effort to involve teachers in improving children's reading is a positive step.

As school prepare for changes under the Common Core, some educators are turning to a program that strengthens students' history knowledge and reading comprehension.

For years, bands of educators have been trying to free history instruction from the mire of memorization and propel it instead with the kinds of inquiry that drive historians themselves. Now, the common-core standards may offer more impetus for districts and schools to adopt that brand of instruction.
A study of one such approach suggests that it can yield a triple academic benefit: It can deepen students’ content knowledge, help them think like historians, and also build their reading comprehension.
The Reading Like a Historian program, a set of 75 free secondary school lessons in U.S. history, is getting a new wave of attention as teachers adapt to the Common Core State Standards in English/language arts. Those guidelines, adopted by all but four states, demand that teachers of all subjects help students learn to master challenging nonfiction and build strong arguments based on evidence.
Searching for ways to teach those literacy skills across the curriculum, while building students’ content knowledge and thinking skills, some educators have turned to that program. Designed under the tutelage of history educator Sam Wineburg, it has been downloaded from the website of the research project he directs, the Stanford History Education Group, more than 330,000 times in the past 2½ years.
“It completely changed the way I teach history, and my students are getting so much more out of it,” said Terri Camajani, who teaches U.S. history and government at Washington High School in San Francisco. “They get really into it. And their reading level just jumps; you can see it in their writing,” she said.

A photo of slaves is reviewed by students at Sunnyvale Middle School as they learn about slavery in America.
—Ramin Rahimian for Education Week
Ms. Camajani was one of the teachers involved in a 2008 experiment that gauged the impact of Reading Like a Historian lessons on 11th graders in 10 San Francisco high school classes. Teachers in half the classrooms had been trained to use the lessons; those in the other half did not use them. After six months, students using the program outperformed those in the control group in factual knowledge, reading comprehension, and a suite of analytical and strategic skills dubbed “historical thinking.”
Avishag Reisman, who led the curriculum development and the study as part of her doctoral work at Stanford University under Mr. Wineburg, said the program “seems to hit a number of important goals. Literacy skills: got that. Higher-level thinking and domain-specific reading: got that. And basic facts: got that, too. Students did better on the nuts and bolts because they were embedded in meaningful instruction.”
And they did better even though their teachers “didn’t always implement the lessons with the highest level of fidelity,” said Ms. Reisman, who published her findings last fall and winter in two journals, the Journal of Curriculum Studies and Cognition and Instruction. That suggests, she said, that improved professional development could produce even stronger results.
Going to the Source
The program takes primary-source documents as its centerpiece and shifts textbooks into a supporting role. Each lesson begins with a question, such as, “How should we remember the dropping of the atomic bomb?” or “Did Pocahontas save John Smith’s life?” Students must dig into letters, articles, speeches, and other documents to understand events and develop interpretations buttressed by evidence from what they read.
Teachers trained in the approach focus heavily on four key skills: “sourcing,” to gauge how authors’ viewpoints and reasons for writing affect their accounts of events; “contextualization,” to get a full picture of what was happening at the time; “corroboration,” to help students sort out contradictory anecdotes and facts; and “close reading,” to help them absorb text slowly and deeply, parsing words and sentences for meaning.

As an educator, you know that summer break means a loss of learning skills in students. What can you as an educator do to help prevent this throughout the year? How can you extend learning throughout the summer?