A Justice Site
Mirror Sites:
CSUDH - Habermas - UWP
California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Soka University Japan - Transcend Art and Peace
Created: February 22, 2002
Latest Update: February 22, 2002
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu
Tools for Self Help
Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata and Individaul Authors, February 2002.
"Fair use" encouraged.Kids, there are lots of things you can do to help yourself with some of the tasks you have come to think you do badly.
First of all, trust me, you can do these tasks. You can spell enough to pass spelling inspection. You can write standard English grammar well enough to pass writing inspection. What makes you believe that you can't is the labeling that you've internalized. Every time you get back a paper with corrections all over it, it feels like you can't do it. And you begin to believe that yourself. Not true.
The trick is you maybe don't have the time or the motivation to turn yourself into a "good" speller or a "good" writer. But that isn't really what they're demanding of you.
Yes, you should spell reasonably well. That means that you shouldn't misspell RESEARCH in a research class. But most of you are swift enough to figure that out, yes? And you shouldn't write sentences in which verbs don't agree with subjects in the Graduate Writing Exam, yes? Those criteria are not the same as making correct choices in grammar in all your writing. Most of us, your professors, can't do that.
I still haven't figured out whether the comma goes inside or outside the quotation marks and what the exact rules for that are. Oh, I've looked it up. But I don't run into it very often. And then, the next time, I have to look it up all over again. That's why we have EDITORS. They keep a rule book on their desks. Spelling and grammar are like reading. Some of us get it intuitively, and some of us need to be taught phonics. How well you spell, how well you master the intricate rules of grammar is not a reliable indicator of your intelligence. They are reliable indicators of how much practice you've had in writing. But schools and teachers found out long ago that multiple choice tests were less demanding than essays, and many of them, the teachers, that is, were genuinely tired. So they switched to the easier tests. And you got less writing practice.
Our job at this point is first of all, to give you faith again in your own ability. Writing is easy if, and only if, you've had lots of practice. Spelling also is easy, if and only if, someone has taught you how the spelling system works, and how to make learning it manageable. PANIC SHEETS are tools designed to do that.
PANIC SHEETS:
I invented PANIC SHEETS for a friend in graduate school at USC. We were taking a graduate statistics class and Vera just could not keep all the formulas straight. We were using a book that was three inches thick, and Vera was trying to memorize the silly thing, which did its best to avoid the mention of mathematics in the whole book. That meant that it took three pages to say what they could have said in half a page, with just a little math.
I had a degree in math. So I hated the book. But the teacher was good. Well, good for those of us who understood what we were doing, but he couldn't get down to the level of those who really did think they couldn't do math. Vera was one of those. The more I worked with her, the more panicked she was. In desperation, we went to our teacher, Sandy Labovitz. He wasn't much help. He had no idea of what it's like to be scared of math. But he did promise us an open text exam, and said that we were welcome to use our notes.
So the problem was how on earth to get Vera to take notes that would prevent her from panicking. We worked together in the USC dorm week after week. She still panicked. But slowly, I began to recognize that she wasn't experiencing global panic attacks; she was freaking out over very specific things. In the process of working through a problem, a formula would pop up, and she would freak - absolute irresolvable panic, and she would give up.
I had a speciality in learning theory. Equipped with a pretty thorough understanding of how we learn, I decided to use Wolpe deconditioning, a therapeudic modality that works fairly well with panic. I set up problems, lots of them, that had formulas pop up somewhere in the process of solving them. Then we worked out a way for her to deal with the panic. Specific small steps she could take.
- First, she learned to tell herself. "I feel panic. Did I just come up against a formula?"
- If the answer was "yes," then she turned to her formula list (PANIC SHEET 1) and located the formula there.
- There the formula was translated into words we had worked on together. v = lwh, for example. We could have written v represents the volume, which is measured by the length (l) times the width (w) times the height (h). So I should multiply the value for l by the value for w by the value for h. That gives me the volume. And don't forget that it's in cubic feet or centimeters or whatever. What does it mean? Well, that's the amount of liquid or fat or whatever that the container could hold.
Notice that we left nothing to chance. We identified every term. We stated how to enter each term into her calculator (this was before the days of computers). And we carefully wrote out a reasonable interpretation of the results.
Over a period of weeks we did this with all the formulas we were likely to encounter on the exam. And then I proudly labeled the packet of notes "PANIC SHEETS." Vera kept them in front of her through the whole exam, and shuffled back and forth through them. At one point Sandy came by and gazed curiously at this packet of notes she clung to. Only then did I realize that what caught his eye was my bright pink label: PANIC SHEETS.
Vera passed. And we got our doctorates from USC. And ever since my Wolpe deconditioning plan for panic on exams has remained: PANIC SHEETS.