Well, it's happening again. The slow trickling out of students from summer school. It's hard to tell what it is - it's been both raising and hot outside. So the weather might be causing students to just stay home. It's also not easy - regular school is hard enough to relate to your own life, but summer school? That seems even worse. I'm trying to make a class that teaches students the skills they need to English class, and a lot of them are really seeing the value in it and trying hard. I hope they stick with it to the end. But so far, about half of the students who were signed up for summer school have stopped coming. So it's tough to maintain the energy in the room when it feels like students are dropping out. But we're going to keep trying. Because if you made it this far, something awesome is going to happen. We're going to start doing research.
Research is something that most students think they know how to do, but most people don't even get. Most people are being lied to and fooled constantly - by the news, by other people, by memes that just have a picture and some words. And I want to show students how to figure out what the truth it. Sometimes you see something and you're like "damn! That's crazy!" but then it turns out to be very false. Like, there was this thing going around the Internet the other day about how Caitlyn Jenner supposedly said she looks more feminine than Serena Williams (the tennis player). This was totally false, but many people believed it. And many people don't even know how to find out what is true and what is false. Luckily, there are several ways. One of them is snopes.com
http://m.snopes.com/caitlyn-serena/
The purpose of snopes is to figure out what is true on the Internet and what is false. But even beyond snopes, I want to teach my students how to look at sources of information (articles, websites, books, videos) and decide if they can trust it or not based on logical reasoning, the credentials of the authors, and looking to see if the data is verified by other sources. And if students can get good at that, they will never be fooled again.
Research is something that most students think they know how to do, but most people don't even get. Most people are being lied to and fooled constantly - by the news, by other people, by memes that just have a picture and some words. And I want to show students how to figure out what the truth it. Sometimes you see something and you're like "damn! That's crazy!" but then it turns out to be very false. Like, there was this thing going around the Internet the other day about how Caitlyn Jenner supposedly said she looks more feminine than Serena Williams (the tennis player). This was totally false, but many people believed it. And many people don't even know how to find out what is true and what is false. Luckily, there are several ways. One of them is snopes.com
http://m.snopes.com/caitlyn-serena/
The purpose of snopes is to figure out what is true on the Internet and what is false. But even beyond snopes, I want to teach my students how to look at sources of information (articles, websites, books, videos) and decide if they can trust it or not based on logical reasoning, the credentials of the authors, and looking to see if the data is verified by other sources. And if students can get good at that, they will never be fooled again.