Translate this Blog

Traduisez , Übersetzen Sie, Traduca , Traduza , Traduzca , 翻訳しなさい , 번역하다 , 翻译 , يترجم

Monday, April 23, 2018

The Problem With Hurrying Childhood Learning

 Education Week 
-Getty
When he lectured in the United States, Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget would invariably get what he called "the American question" from a member of the audience. After he had explained various developmental phases that young children go through in their understanding of concepts like length and volume, someone would raise their hand and ask, "How can we accelerate a child's progress through the stages?"
Baffled, Piaget would explain that there is absolutely no advantage to speeding up a child's progression. The point of knowing the stages is to be aware of what stage a child is in, so that we can create the conditions and offer the guidance to help her move to the next one. It's not a race.
One of the most insidious results of the testing madness afflicting education has been an emphasis on speeding toward a particular outcome-a reading level, a cut score-without taking the time to ask what is sacrificed in that rush.
But I see too many kids who are hurried and harried toward the level they're "supposed" to be on by the end of a given grading period, with too little attention given to the path they're walking to get there. I see children begin to define themselves by test scores, grades, and how quickly they're leapfrogging from one level to the next.
Here are two ways that teachers, parents, and administrators can take a deep breath and see past the timetables set by adults to the particular journeys of the children themselves.

1. Focus on the path, not just the destination.

Kids should like school. They should become strong readers, writers, scientists, and mathematicians, but they should also enjoy reading, writing, science, and math.
This year, my district made a massive shift toward the Reading Units of Study developed by Lucy Calkins and others. Instead of spending so much time on phonics worksheets, textbooks, and numbered questions at the end of the story, kids now spend half an hour each day simply reading books they have chosen that are roughly on their reading level.
That half-hour block is partly a time for my 1st graders to apply the many daily mini-lessons I have taught them-everything from strategies for figuring out an unknown word to thinking about how the characters solve the problem in the story. But it's also a time for getting comfortable in a beanbag or camping chair, doing shrill voices for the wicked stepmother in Adelita, or giggling with a friend over Piggie and Elephant's antics.
My students' collective reading progress this year has been remarkable. They have moved up an average of 5.6 levels on the Fountas & Pinnell Benchmark Assessment System, compared to the district expectation of three levels by this point in the year, despite the fact that all 23 children are English learners.
But here's the critical point about their progress: that growth is a positive side effect, not the end goal, of the block of time we call the "Wild Reading Rumpus." The true purpose of that reading time is for my students to come to love reading, so that they will lead richer lives-not just in the future, when they go on to college or a career, but in the present.
We adults tend to dramatically discount the present moment in favor of future outcomes. Yet childhood is a fleeting time. It's like the Buddhist description of a human life: a bird flying in one window and flying out the other, before you have time to do more than gasp. We should be encouraging the children in our care to revel in their childhood, not hurry out of it as if children were no more than miniature, imperfect versions of adults.

2. Honor growth above proficiency.

Most kids at my school, where 99 percent live in poverty and 85 percent speak English as a second language, are reading and doing math on or above grade level by the time they leave 5th grade. But many of them don't end kindergarten or 1st grade as "proficient" readers or mathematicians according to the benchmark level set by the district or the Measures of Academic Progress cut score.
Why? Because it takes time to learn English and to become a strong reader, writer, or mathematician. We have to give children that time. We have to celebrate every step along their steep path to proficiency, rather than holding up only the end goal-a particular reading level or test score-as the single outcome worth celebrating.
I have a friend whose daughter has cerebral palsy. I asked him once if her disability had influenced his work as a high school teacher of struggling readers. He said that watching his daughter's gradual progress toward developmental milestones had taught him to celebrate incremental steps his students took in their reading that were so small most teachers would not even notice them.
I would love it if every 1st grader in my class finished the year reading "on grade level." But I care far more about two other measures: whether the pace of their growth has put them on a trajectory to get where they need to be, and whether they are finding pleasure and meaning in the many individual steps that make up that long journey.
We took the MAP test in math last week. Most of the students reached their growth goals, and their collective growth was 111 percent of the "projected growth met" metric-despite the fact that every child in the class is an English learner who lives in poverty.
When we celebrated their perseverance and hard work, I had children stand and be applauded not according to how high their score was, but according to how much growth they had made. Ailuk, one of my students from the Marshall Islands, had one of the lower scores in the class but she had made the third highest growth: 28 points higher than her score in September. My two students with autism, Annie and Armando, had middle-range scores but moved up the most: 35 points for Annie and 37 for Armando.
If the only thing that mattered was the score itself, Ailuk would be considered a "low-performing" student, and Annie and Armando would be seen as average students. But if you look at how far they have come, these three children are excelling.
We are workers of gradual miracles. Gardeners know how long seeds take to grow. It's hard work tilling the soil, nurturing the first fragile green tendrils, and staying vigilant when frosts or murderous insects threaten the seedlings' survival.
Our job as teachers is no different. The work of sustaining a gradual miracle requires patience. If we can teach ourselves that hard habit, our students will grow. They may also learn to slow down, delight in the present, and take time to fully experience the many moments before the harvest.

Justin Minkel teaches 1st and 2nd grade at Jones Elementary in Springdale, Ark., a high-performing, high-poverty school where 85 percent of the students are English-language learners. A former Teach For America corps member, Minkel was the 2007 Arkansas Teacher of the Year. In his instruction, he is focused on bringing advanced learning opportunities to immigrant and at-risk students. Follow him at @JustinMinkel

If you liked this post, Dont forget to BOOKMARK it for others as well. Please CLICK your favorite SOCIAL BOOKMARKING ELEMENT:

StumpleUpon Ma.gnolia DiggIt! Del.icio.us Blinklist Yahoo Furl Technorati Simpy Spurl Reddit Google

Saturday, April 7, 2018

8 must read tips for trading Bitcoin and Altcoins

YUVAL GOV 

Safety rules were written with blood. That statement sounds familiar to every soldier around. Although we are not dealing with a risk to human lives, losing your expensive Bitcoins by making mistakes trading is definitely not a fun situation.
So, how we can avoid those mistakes in our trading? How to be mostly on the green side? First, it is important to note that to trade right requires attention and your one hundred percent focus. Secondly, trading is not for everyone. The following tips are easy to internalize because these tips were “written in blood” (my own blood). However, it’s still difficult to apply them in real-time. After all, we are not rational human beings.
  1. Have a reason before entering each trade: Start a trade only when you know why you’re starting and have a clear strategy for afterwards.
    Not all traders make gains from trading, since this is a zero-sum game (for everyone who benefits someone else loses on the other side).The Altcoins market is driven by large whales (yes, the same ones responsible for placing huge blocks of hundreds of Bitcoins on the order book). The whales are just waiting patiently for innocent little fish like us to make mistakes. Even if you aspire to trade on a daily basis, sometimes it is better not to earn and do nothing, instead of jumping into the rushing water and exposing your coins to losses. From my experience, there are days where you only keep your profits by not trading at all.
  2. Target and stop when starting a trade: For each trade we must set a clear target level for taking profit and more importantly, a stop-loss level for cutting losses. A Stop-loss is setting the level of loss where the trade will get closed.
Here again, it is important considering a number of factors when choosing a stop loss level correctly. Most traders fail when they fall in love with a trade or the coin itself. They may say, “Here it will turn around, and I will get out of this trade with a minimum loss, I’m sure”. They’re letting their ego take control of them and unlike the traditional stock exchange where extreme daily movements are considered 2-3% in value, Crypto trades are a lot more riskier: in my life as a trader I’ve seen a coin dumping by 80% just in a few hours! And nobody wants to be the one who is left holding it.
  1. Meet FOMO (fear of missing out): Indeed, it really isn’t fun to see such situations from the outside – when a certain coin is being pumped up like crazy with huge two-digit gains in minutes.
That bold green candle yells at you “you are the only one not holding me”. At exactly this point you will notice lame people flooding the Crypto forums and the exchanges’ Troll boxes to talk about this pump. But what do we do now? Very simple, Keep moving forward. True, it’s possible that many may have caught the rise ahead of us and it can continue raising, but bare in mind that the whales (as mentioned above) are just waiting for small buyers on the way up to sell them the coins they bought in cheaper prices. Prices are now high and it’s clear that the current coin holders only consist of those little fish. Needless to say, the next step is usually the bright red candle which sells through the whole order book.
  1. Risk Management: little pig eats a lot, big pig gets eaten. This statement tells the story of the market profits from our perspective. To be a profitable trader, you never look for the peak of the movement. You look for the small profits that will accumulate into a big one.
Manage risk wisely across your portfolio. For example, you should never invest more than small percentage of your portfolio in a non-liquid market (very high risk). To those trades we will assign greater tolerance – the stop and target levels will be chosen far from the buying level.
  1. The underlying asset creates volatile market conditions: Most Altcoins are traded according to the Bitcoin value.
Bitcoin is a volatile asset (relative to FIAT) and this fact should be taken into consideration, especially in the days when the Bitcoin value is moving sharply. Bitcoin and Altcoins have an inverse relationship in their value, i.e. when the value of Bitcoin rises then Altcoins are losing their Bitcoin value, and vice versa. When Bitcoin is volatile, our conditions for trading are kind of foggy. During fog we can’t see much ahead, so it is better to have close targets for our trades or not to trade at all.
Foggy Market
Foggy Market
  1. Tips for trading Altcoins: Most Altcoins lose their value over time. They simply bleed their value away slowly (sometimes rapidly).
Take this into account when holding Alts for the medium and long term, and of course choose them carefully. What kind of Alts are recommended for the long term? Remember, this is only when there is a reason for making a trade. The projects/coins that have a higher daily trading volume and which have a widespread community behind them, with continuous development, are here to stay with us:
Ethereum ETH, Monero XMR, Factom FCT, DASH, are all leading coins and traded the most volume daily. You should follow the coin’s chart and identify low and stable periods. Such periods are likely to be a consolidation period by the whales, and when the right time comes, accompanied by a good press release of the project, the pump will start and they will sell in profit.
  1. A word about public ICOs (crowd-sales): Many new projects choose to make a crowd-sale where they offer investors an early opportunity to buy a share of the project (tokens or coins) in what is meant to be a good price for the tokens.
The motivation for the investors is that the token will be traded from day one on the exchanges and would yield a nice profit to the ICO participants. In recent years, there have been many successful ICOs, both the project itself and especially in measuring the yield for investors. Coins doubled, or tripled, their value and much more in relation to their value on the crowd sale. Augur’s preliminary crowd-sale (we reported on it previously here) yielded investors a phenomenal 1,000% for their investment. Okay, but what’s the catch here? Not all the projects benefit their investors. Many ICOs proved to be complete scams, not only were they not being traded at all but some projects disappeared with the money and we have not heard from them right up to this day.
So how do you know if you should invest in an ICO? It’s not about science, it is important to pay attention to the level of seriousness of the project and its team. Look for the project’s website (does it look like a child has built it during computer school?), Who is the team behind the project – Are they hiding behind nicknames or proudly present themselves on their website? Pay attention to the Bitcointalk thread (does it exist at all?) and how the team members respond to technical questions. Is there a large community behind the project? Expect to see a Slack gathering its community. Watch out the amount raised: A project which had raised too little will probably will not be able to develop over time, a project which had raised huge amount – there won’t be enough investors left out there to buy coins on exchanges. And most importantly is risk management. Never put all eggs in one basket and invest too much of your portfolio in one ICO.
  1. A final tip – practical steps to implement right away:
  • Fees, fees, fees: Multiple trade actions = More fees. It’s always advisable to post the command (maker) and not to buy from the order book (taker). In Poloniex exchange, the difference is 0.1% in favor of the maker. That’s quite a bit.
  • Traders with no pressure: Don’t start trading unless you have the optimal conditions to make the decision to start a trade and know when and how to get out of it. Pressure almost always creates losing trades. Wait for the next opportunity, you will get there.
  • Setting goals and placing sell orders: always set your goals by putting sell orders. You don’t know when a whale will pump your coin up to catch your command (and pay a reduced fee on the “maker” side, remember?).
augur_selloff
Augur Sell-off. Losing 75% in one second and back up
A successful strategy regarding this is placing very low buy orders. About a week ago a crazy dump occurred, selling off Augor coin down to 25% of its value! After a short while the market recovered slightly and anyone who had low buy these low orders could easily double or triple their investment. Placing buy orders requires special care, don’t wake up when you’re far away from the market to find your buy order is suddenly higher than the current market price!
  • Buy the rumor, sell the news. When major news sites publish articles it is usually exactly the right time to actually get out of the trade.
  • You have made a good trade, but as always, the moment you sold your coin runs up again! First, meet this guy – Murphy’s Law. Secondly, read over what was written previously here and never enter position again under pressure. As long as there is profit – you are ok. Go on to your next trade and don’t find yourself losing it.
  • Leave your ego aside. The goal here is not to be right on your trades, but to make a profit. Do not waste resources (time and money) to try to prove that you should’ve been entering that trade. Remember, there is no trader who never loses, at least sometimes. The equation is simple – get the total profits to be higher than the total losses.
  • What is short? long? how to leverage your trades? Follow here 
  • crypto margin trading for beginners

If you liked this post, Dont forget to BOOKMARK it for others as well. Please CLICK your favorite SOCIAL BOOKMARKING ELEMENT:

StumpleUpon Ma.gnolia DiggIt! Del.icio.us Blinklist Yahoo Furl Technorati Simpy Spurl Reddit Google

Monday, April 2, 2018

VIDEO: Poetic prayer makes Erdoğan couple shed tears in Albania

TIRANA

VIDEO: Poetic prayer makes Erdoğan couple shed tears in Albania
DHA Photo
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his wife Emine Erdoğan shed tears on May 13 while a student recited a patriotic, Islamic-toned poem that Erdoğan had recently read on television.

Erdoğan was in the Preza village near the Albanian capital Tirana to inaugurate a mosque during his official visit to the Balkan country. 

During the ceremony, which turned into a political rally with more than 8,000 attendees, a student of a Turkish religious vocational imam-hatip school recited “Dua” (Prayer), a poem by Turkish nationalist poet Arif Nihat Asya, who passed away in 1975. The Erdoğan couple could not stop their tears while the student read the poem.

Erdoğan himself had read the poem last month in a television commercial filmed to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Turkish victory in the Gallipoli campaign during World War I. 

The choice of the poem and the way that it was repeatedly broadcast by many Turkish TV channels had stirred a political debate at the time, amid claims that the video amounted to “exploitation of history, religion and emotions,” as well as being a “personal advertisement” for Erdoğan.

Here is the English translation of Asya’s “Dua” (Prayer): 

“We all have hoarse voices... Do not leave 
our minarets with no call to prayer, my God!
Bring us those who make honey
Do not leave us with no hive, my God!
Minarets have no mahya [a string of lights set up between two minarets to flash a short text, often featuring moral or religious themes]
Do not take the Milky Way away from our skies, my God!
Do not leave this country, which was kneaded by Muslims,
with no Muslims, my God”
Give us strength... Do not leave the field of jihad
with no pahlevan [wrestler], My God!
Do not leave these masses, who look for a hero,
with no hero, My God!
Let us know how to resist the foe, 
do not leave us lifeless, my God!
On the path to tomorrows, do not leave
our years with no Ramadan [month], my God!
Disperse your herd, if left unattended,
Do not leave them with no shepherd, my God!
Do not leave us with no love, no water, no air
and with no country, my God!”

If you liked this post, Dont forget to BOOKMARK it for others as well. Please CLICK your favorite SOCIAL BOOKMARKING ELEMENT:

StumpleUpon Ma.gnolia DiggIt! Del.icio.us Blinklist Yahoo Furl Technorati Simpy Spurl Reddit Google

Contact Me or Subscribe to my posts

Click to Join my FaceBook Blog Group Page

If you want to send a quick message to me, please click

To Subscribe to my posts, please choose:

Search my Blog for posts that are of interest to you...results will be displayed below

Custom Search

Here are the Results, if you seached for a post

Blog Archive

About Me

My photo
Dubai, DXB, United Arab Emirates

Washington, USA

Western Europe Time (GMT)

Dubai

Pakistan

Australia