week 5monday 9/18

chapter 6

• D & colleagues trying to understand why children given strange answers for reasons other than being unable to conserve or decenter.

• can language have meaning independent of the context? D talks about the difference between "timeless meaning" and meaning in the "ongoing flow of 'real life'." (57)

• "sheer linguistic form"? (61) kids not able to use language totally out of context

• difference between Piaget’s task, Rose & Blank’s, and McGarrigle’s “naughty Teddy”

• "possible, without invoking inability to decenter, to allow that something like 'domination by the look of the thing' may occur." (63).

• cars and garages tasks: “empty garage salient for them…what the child expects to hear influenced not only by clues about the speaker's intentions but also by more impersonal features of the situation he is considering." (65)

• "Underlying this suggestion are fundamental notions about the ways we relate to the world. The most important is the idea that this relation is active on our part from the beginning. We do not just sit and wait for the world to impinge upon us. We try actively to interpret it, to make sense of it. We grapple with it, we construe it intellectually, we represent it to ourselves….we are, by nature, questioners.” (67)

• (68) 3 influences on child's interpretation• assessment of speaker’s intentions • way child would represent situation to

herself if adults not there• knowledge of the language

• (69) 3 possible sources of differences between younger kids and older kids

– less knowledge about language– hasn’t learned when to give primacy to

language and when not– finds it difficult to pay scrupulous

attention to language in its own right

• (70) quay is pronounced key.• "common but naive assumption" (73)

that understanding a word is an all-or-none affair

chapter 7

• to "move beyond the bounds of human sense" (75).

• embedded thinking—tied directly to experience

• disembedded thinking—moving beyond direct experience

• "The better you are at tackling problems without having to be sustained by human sense the more likely you are to succeed in our educational system...." (77)

• "He imported new premises of his own—frequently basing them on human sense—or he ignored part of what was 'given’." (78)

• make sure you understand the Henle household-problems task (79)

• understanding the envelope problem: at the time it was cheaper to send unsealed envelopes (81)

• “It is not a matter of taking a single step which makes us capable of efficient disembedded thinking thereafter in all circumstances” (82)

• “you cannot master any formal system unless you have learned to take at least some steps beyond the bounds of human sense, and the problem of helping children to begin to do this in the early stages of their schooling—or even earlier—has not be properly recognized and is usually not tackled in any adequate way." (82)

• "change the value system without denying the significance of intellectual skills"? (83)

• "apartheid"—between thinking and doing

• “while it may make sense to postulate that we each possess some genetically determined ‘intellectual potential,’ in which case individuals will surely differ in this respect as in others, there is no reason to suppose that most of us—or any of us for that matter—manage to come even close to realizing what we are capable of” (86)

• tools of the mind

wednesday 9/20

Anna• “My job is to be a mother substitute.”• “The toddler curriculum is a

curriculum of love and play.”• “What was wrong with me that I was

left-handed and black.”• Loving children in general is no help

when dealing with 9 or 19 or 29 flesh-and-blood children. What happens when someone is changing her 40th diaper of the day?

• “I don’t even like strollers….Kids need to practice walking.”

• “She took care of us and now we will take care of her. The never-ending circle of love has not beginning and has no ending.”