Comments from participants
Hi,
Dr. Cooper,
I
thoroughly enjoyed the training in October in
Meanwhile,
I have been using mnemonic devices in our multi-level small-group adult basic ed
class with great success. One source of confusion for all the students was
the “on-no” twosome. It was the first device I tried with them; the
weighted word is the “no.” I drew a cylinder on the straight line on
the “n”, had a straight line coming out the top, and a plunger-type thing
out of the bottom. The verbal cue: “When you were a kid and at the
doctor’s office, what did you say when you saw a nurse walk in with one of
these?” The answer, of course, is “No!” One student had
trouble with the “-ink” family, and since she is fortunately old enough to
remember fountain pens, we drew a pen on the straight line of the
“i”—which, of course, is dotting the “i.” She remembers it as
the “ink pen.” Don’t know if it makes sense to anybody else, but it
doesn’t have to, since it works for her.
I
have used the tic-tac-toe math in only a very basic way so far, but it has been
a tremendous help to two young men in the pre-GED class who had trouble learning
their multiplication. Not only does this lack slow them down in basic
calculations, it makes it almost impossible for them to work with fractions.
One student is new and still in the process of learning the tic-tac-toe method,
but the other has been using it for a month, and when asked if he had a message
to pass on to you, he said, “Thank you! I don’t know if I’d ever
have memorized that stuff.” He sets his grids up at the beginning of the
lesson, and is good to go, with accuracy and relative speed almost guaranteed.
One of the women says it’s just as easy for her to pull facts from memory, and
I explained that this is an alternate route for people who hadn’t had luck
memorizing the tables—and that each person should use what works best for him.
Last
Saturday we had an in-service training for active tutors; we took the
opportunity to introduce some of your concepts and gave brief examples of
techniques you taught in October. The time was just too short, but on the
evaluation more than half of the tutors requested that we go into more depth at
the next meeting. They were engaged and full of questions throughout the
segment. Our time ran out just at lunch, but when I mentioned tic-tac-toe
math in passing, there was a hue and cry to see a short demonstration. The
tutors seemed to have the same reaction most of the trainees had in October; I
think we all recognized our own “differences,” sometimes for the first time.
We also recognized how fortunate we were to have figured out how to compensate
for them, or to have had the right kind of help in doing so.
In
reviewing the material, I was struck by a thought that made me smile. The
point you made about a particular thought process being either a positive or
negative depending on the situation is one I have long applied in another area
of my life. The same thing is true in marriage: the spouse who is casual
about picking up after himself is also the spouse who is not upset when I am
sewing draperies and have fabric strewn from one end of the house to the other.
It may be one of the secrets of a happy marriage—it certainly is
characteristic of ours!
Thank
you for all the insights and help your have provided. The materials you
sent are enormously helpful as well.
Best
regards,
Nancy
Demarest
Tutoring
Program Coordinator
Literacy
Council of Southwest Louisiana, Inc.