Pure Manaʻo

G. Randy Kasten in edutopia.org  espouses critical thinking as a necessary skill in the age of spin. He says: Every educator is in a position to teach students how to gather information, evaluate it, screen out distractions and think for themselves. Because critical thinking is so important, some believe that every educator has not only the opportunities, but also the obligation to incorporate critical thinking into his or her subject area. This helps students evaluate prepackaged conclusions and clears a path for original thoughts. According to the author, the inexperience and naivete of students makes them easy targets for misinformation, misunderstandings and misalignment. The onus is on the teachers of all content areas to continue to develop critical thinking skills for our students. I was observing in a 6th grade lower math class the other day and the teacher was showing them graphs and asking them to talk about what the graph was supposed to be showing and whether i...

“Let’s Get Higher Scores on These New Assessments” by Timothy Shanahan in The Reading Teacher, March 2015 (Vol. 68, #6, p. 459-463), available for purchase at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/trtr.1329/pdf Timothy Shanahan in The Reading Teacher  identifies three things that we need to teach well in order to prepare students for standardized assessments: Strategies for figuring out unknown words Making sense of sentences Silent reading for understanding There are old strategies connected to these that have been out of fashion but with the intense demand for higher order thinking skills with Common Core, perhaps it's time to dust off those techniques that I used to use for preparing my AP language students: study of latin root words (etymology) - MUGS (mechanics, usage and grammar) bell ringers and time for reading for understanding and critique. What needs to be let go in order to allow this? What can never be forgotten?

What did I seriously learn about myself?  I hate following plans.  Daily doesn't work for me.  I am a writer who hates to write when I am forced to write. I really am not writing for anyone but myself so I can absolve myself.

What is the scenery for this book - where does he hang out. Maybe at Mai Tais - loud music, people crammed in - he can't stay in one place for too long, but in Honolulu, he can hide for long periods of time, change venues - but it's hard because he stands out. He does stints of homelessness along the river in Kakaako or by Honolulu Community College. Homeless on the beach or even camping in the valleys.

Day 2 is looking at creating a character with the personality traits of someone you love, but the physical characteristics of someone you don't care for. I've been thinking about moving these Hawaiian myths of the immortals to the 22nd century Hawai'i. There still around so what are they doing? Where are they living. I think the farther away Kamapua'a roams from Puna, the more pretty boy oily he gets. He is the party boy that everyone loves and hates in Honolulu, but behind the wall, when he is at home in the forest, he really is a different person.

 Kamapua'a by   808keaolani I really need to write an article, but I'm having a hard time starting, so I'm trying this 12-day plan of Simple Writing Exercises. Twelve days seems like a long shot for me, but I'll just try it. Day 1: Write 10 potential book titles of books you'd like to write. 1. Mo'olono: Creating an Authentic Dissertation to Tell a Hawaiian Story 2. Finding Your Metaphor to Create an Authentic Dissertation 3. The Mo'o Project 4. Hawaiian Immortals 5. The Disruptor 6. The Trickster 7. The Innocents 8. The Old Ones 9. A Gathering of Queens 10. The Creatures Amongst Us

I came across this poem, "Eating the Bones" by Ellen Bass while I was actually looking for something else, but it just struck me that she is writing about us. Maybe it is a fish and not a piece of beef, but this is my family. Podcast episode 1.02 Eating the Bones The women in my family strip the succulent flesh from broiled chicken, scrape the drumstick clean; bite off the cartilage chew the gristle, crush the porous swellings at the ends of each slender baton. With strong molars they split the tibia, sucking out the dense marrow. They use up love, they swallow every dark grain, so at the end there’s nothing left, a scant pile of splinters on the empty white plate. From  The Human Line  by Ellen Bass. Copyright © 2007 by Ellen Bass Similar to the poem "Sonrisas" by Pat Mora - how do I show this world, how do I show the people through this type of close study of a simple act like eating? I also look to Juliet Kono's "Pearls" in Hilo...