There has been a fair amount of publicity about a recent study that showed that living in poverty affected children’s brains. It sorta’ reminds me of studies I’ve seen that show that people who live in low-income communities are sick more often — I wonder how much money is spent on studies that demonstrate the obvious.
Susan Ohanian’s blog, though, alerted me specifically to the USA Today article about the study. The article said the study concluded:
Such deficiencies are reversible through intensive intervention such as focused lessons and games that encourage children to think out loud or use executive function.
Of course, helping people to organize to change the poverty conditions apparently wasn’t mentioned as a possible solution.
Susan’s blog also pointed out a letter written by Stephen Krashen in response to the article and study and, like pretty much everything Krashen writes, it’s definitely worth reading.
LOL Larry!
I saw the title on our RSS feed and I thought somebody had let the cat out of the bag about Krashen! I had a good chuckle, private joke.
I love that he prompts a lot of thinking but on the other hand, if I used the Kraschen shotgun approach to discovery and hypothesis creation, I too would be wrong at least half the time….but god bless him for throwing generalities out there and sprinkling them with big sounding names so we can all appear experts!
Happy Holidays,
David