#Thorndike Press

[robertleemurphy]

Bear Flag Revolt to be Published in 2025

My fifth frontier historical novel, Bear Flag Revolt, has been acquired by Thorndike Press. A large print hardcover and/or softcover edition will be released in April 2025. This adventure story tells how Kit Carson and John Frémont stole California from Mexico. This first Bear Flag was destroyed during the great San Francisco earthquake in 1906. American settlers rebelled in 1845 when Mexican…

[schweizercomics]

Swashtober 23: The Reverend Doctor Syn!

The mild-mannered elderly priest of the village of Romney Marsh doesn't like seeing corrupt Napoleonic-era naval press gangs enslaving his coastal parishioners, so he does what any good clergyman would do: dusts of his killin' skills from his former life as a believed-dead murderous pirate to wreak horrifying havoc on the officers of King George while disguised as a scarecrow. From the 1915 novel by actor and Gallipoli veteran Russell Thorndike.

[lauragirl53]

Check out this listing I just added to my Poshmark closet: SANDRA BROWN LARGE PRINT WHITE HOT COPYRIGHT 2004 SIMON & SCHUSTER , INC FICT..

[mohdsalmanlone600]

Trial & Error Theory

The Trial and Error theory of learning, by Edward Thorndike, is about how people and animals learn through their experiences. Thorndike believed that learning happens by trying different things and seeing what works. When someone tries different actions and gets a good result, they're likely to repeat that action in the future. This is called the Law of Effect. If the outcome is bad, they'll probably avoid doing that action again.

Thorndike studied this theory using puzzle boxes with animals like cats. He observed that these animals learned to escape the box by trying different actions until they discovered the correct one that led to freedom, like pressing a lever or pushing a button. Over time, they learned which actions worked best through trial and error.

This theory suggests that learning is a gradual process, where individuals learn from their successes and mistakes. It emphasizes the importance of feedback and reinforcement in shaping behavior. Thorndike's work on Trial and Error theory laid the groundwork for understanding how learning takes place through experimentation and experience.

[the-merry-librarian]

Before the Ever After is a poignant and personal verse novel, told from the point of view of a young man whose father is a former professional football player. Set at the turn of the millennium, when many football players were experiencing memory loss, aggression, migraines, confusion, and other symptoms without a clearly defined cause, Ever After follows Zachariah Junior (nicknamed ZJ) as he watches his father slowly lose himself to a disease that no one wants to suggest might be linked to his former career.

Genre: Fiction, Verse Novel (Coretta Scott King Author Award)

Target Age Group:

Middle Grade – Grades 5-9

Justification:

In order to fulfil the CSK Author Award category of my project, I sought out a list of winners through the past several years; Ever After was the winner in 2021 and caught my attention because of the subject matter. Loss of a parent to mental illness, specifically dementia and other diseases which affect memory, is a very personal topic to me. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Ever After was a verse novel—after I’d already borrowed it from my library—but I chose to evaluate it for the CSK category.

Evaluation:

Every character is unique, given details to make them stand out from one another in both broad ways and subtler details. One of ZJ’s friends, Ollie, is an orphan found abandoned outside of a church; Darry loves to dance; Daniel is a risk-taker. Characters are also defined with smaller details, like ZJ’s mother, who “only eats candy bars/when she’s worrying,” because “Chocolate[…]helps her think.” (p. 88) The theme of music is woven throughout the novel as ZJ writes songs, for and about his father, and into the format of the novel itself—many of the poems are songs that ZJ writes. The pacing of Ever After is both fast and slow—looming, impending, a disaster in slow-motion. The narrative begins in 1999 and continues through the spring of 2001; two years of Zachariah’s slow unraveling, happening too quickly to stop and dragging on agonizingly slow. It reflects very accurately the feeling of watching a parent’s decline. The mood is sorrowful, hopeful, nostalgic; ZJ always hopes that there’s a way for his father to get better, and is always remembering better days. My mother passed away in April of 2020, following years of mental decline; she suffered from Lewy body dementia, which was only diagnosed after I went to college, but she first started exhibiting symptoms when I was eleven or twelve. Multiple times during this book, I had to stop reading, because it brought too much back—ZJ’s dad not remembering his name, ZJ’s confusion and feeling of being lost, the quiet fearful helplessness of not knowing what’s wrong. Ever After is a beautiful book, and I recommend it wholeheartedly, but I don’t think I can ever read it again.

References:

2021 Coretta Scott King Book Award winners and honorees. Brilliant Books. (2021, August 5). https://www.brilliant-books.net/2021-coretta-scott-king-book-award-winners-and-honorees Penguin Young Readers. (n.d.). Before the ever after by Jacqueline Woodson: 9780399545443: Penguinrandomhouse.com: Books. PenguinRandomhouse.com. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/535796/before-the-ever-after-by-jacqueline-woodson/ Woodson, J. (2020). Before the Ever After. Thorndike Press, a part of Gale, a Cengage Company.

[whats-in-a-sentence]

The more he studied the data, the more he came to believe that the tests – verbal, mathematical, and behavioral – measured only how well the examinee did on a particular examination. To say that the scores, taken together, indicated something called general intelligence, Brigham concluded, was to indulge in "psychophrenology", to confuse the test name – e.g., "verbal" – with the reality of the trait, and to misidentify the summed traits with intelligence.³

3. Carl Campbell Brigham, "Intelligence Tests of Immigrant Groups", Psychological Review, 37 (March 1930), pp. 158-160, 164-165; Brigham to C. B. Davenport, Dec. 8, 1929, Charles B. Davenport Papers, Carl Campbell Brigham file; Walter Lippmann, "The Mystery of the 'A' Men", New Republic, Nov. 1, 1922, p. 246; Edward L. Thorndike, "Tests of Intelligence: Reliability, Significance, Susceptibility to Special Training and Adaptation to the Nature of the Task", School and Society, 9 (Feb. 15, 1919), 189-95; Lancelot Hogben, "Heredity and Human Affairs:, in J. G. Crowther, ed., Science for a New World (Harper & Bros., 1934), pp. 44-45. In Britain, Cyril Burt thought that the psychophrenology could be avoided through the approach pioneered early in the century by the British psychologist Charles Spearman, who contended that people possessed a general intelligence, an entity that no one mental test could measure but which, in its various factors, individual tests all captured in some proportion. Spearman called the general capability g and developed a complicated mathematical procedure – factor analysis – to determine it. Though a eugenic sympathizer, Spearman had been much less concerned with demonstrating a biological basis of intelligence than with developing a mathematical instrument that would transform theories of mind into constructs as solid as theories of physics. Burt, quite in contrast, in later years built on Spearman's work – he took more credit for the advancement than he deserved – with the aim of exploiting factor analysis to demonstrate that intelligence was inherited. However, the British psychologist Godfrey Thomson, one of the major developers of the mathematical techniques of factor analysis, perceived considerable ambiguity in what mathematics revealed. To Thomson, the ambiguity did not "prove that we have no such 'factors'. But it does show that perhaps we haven't, that perhaps they are fictions – possibly very useful fictions, but still fictions." L. S. Hearnshaw, Cyril Burt, Psychologist (Cornell University Press, 1979), pp. 154-55, 129; Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (W. W. Norton, 1981), pp. 151, 239, 252, 262-63, 272-73; Bernard Norton, "Charles Spearman and the Generation Factor in Intelligence: Genesis and Interpretation in the Light of Sociopersonal Considerations", Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 15 (1979), 150, 147, 148; Godfrey Thomson [autobiography], in A History of Psychology in Autobiography (Russell and Russell, 1968), IV, 283.

"In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity" - Daniel J. Kevles

[horrorpatch]

Shudder Announces Streaming Premiere of Stewart Thorndike's BAD THINGS!

Shudder will host the streaming debut of Stewart Thorndike’s BAD THINGS. Both written and directed by Thorndike, it stars Gayle Rankin, Hari Nef, and Molly Ringwald. The film will premiere on the streaming service beginning on August 25th. Get more details on the release down below. From The Press Release NEW YORK, NY (April 20th, 2023) – Shudder, AMC Networks’ premiere streaming service for…

[biostudyblog]

Learning

Classical Conditioning

While researching dog digestion, Ivan Pavlov accidentally made an interesting discovery; the dogs were learning to pair sounds in their environment with their food, eliciting natural responses like salivation even when no food was present. Pavlov had accidentally stumbled upon the concept of classical conditioning. He looked closer into this concept and made many interesting discoveries which became invaluable in understanding how learning works in both humans and animals. In his experiments, there was an unconditioned stimulus (US), which is something which elicits a natural response in subjects. For example, food causes salivation- the salivation is the unconditioned response (UR). By pairing a neutral stimulus such as a tuning fork with the unconditioned stimulus, the dog’s learnt to pair that sound with food, and began to salivate when the tuning fork was rung, even without food being present. At this point, the salivation is now a conditioned response (CR), and the tuning fork is a conditioned stimulus (CS).

It is considered learning when the animal responds to the CS without the US. This initial learning is called acquisition, after the acquiring of new behaviour. Repeated pairings of a CS and US can yield stronger CR’s, but only to a certain degree. The order and timing of the pairing also impact the strength of the CR. The fastest acquisition occurred when the tuning fork is rung, and while it is still ringing, the dogs are presented with food. This is called delayed conditioning. There are other kinds of conditioning but have not been shown to be as effective.

Trace conditioning: The presentation of the CS, followed by a short break, followed by the presentation of the US

Simultaneous conditioning: The CS and the US are presented at the same time.

Backward conditioning: US is presented first and is followed by the CS. 

Unlearning behaviour is known as extinction. This is defined when the CS no longer causes the CR. An interesting part of this process is spontaneous recovery, where after the extinction of the conditioned response, it briefly reappears when presented with the conditioned stimulus. The tendency to respond to similar CS’s is known as a generalisation (the dog responds to a bell as well as a tuning fork). Subjects can also learn to differentiate or discriminate between different stimuli. 

Many other experiments looking at Classical Conditioning have taken place, however, one significant one was John Watson and Rosalie Rayner’s Little Albert experiment. They brought a little white rat to the little boy and taught him to associate the rat with a loud bang, causing him to be afraid of the rat. The boy ended up generalising, as he was afraid of other white fluffy things such as beards and a white rabbit. This is an example of aversive conditioning. Where a negative response is taught to a subject, rather than a positive one. Another example of aversive conditioning is the use of horrible tasting nail polish to dissuade nail biters from biting.

When a CS elicits a CR, it’s briefly possible to use the CS as an US to condition a response to a new stimulus. This is second-order, or higher-order conditioning. 

Biology & Classical Conditioning

Classical conditioning does not always work. Recent research has shown that humans and animals are more biologically prepared to make certain connections over others. A good example of this is learned taste aversions. If you eat too much of certain food and begin to feel nauseous, you will learn to avoid that food or drink. They can cause powerful aversions after just one bad incident, and in fact, the two events are often separated by several hours. Taste aversions most commonly take place with strong and unusual tastes. The CS (the food) must be salient (noticeable) in order to cause the aversion. John Garcia and Robert Koelling performed an experiment showing how rats made certain associations more than others. The results of that experiment are shown in the table below. The ease with how animals learn taste aversions is known as the Garcia Effect. 

Operant Conditioning

Operant Conditioning is a type of learning based on the association of consequences with behaviour. Edward Thorndike was one of the first to research this phenomenon. His experiments involved putting a cat into a puzzle box. The cat was in a cage next to a bowl of food and had to get out to get the food. The amount of time it took for the cat to get out of the box decreased over a series of trials. The amount of time decreased gradually showing that the cat was learning the new behaviour without mental activity, but just by connecting a stimulus and a response. This led to Thorndike’s law of effect, which states that if the consequences of a behaviour are pleasurable, the stimulus-response connection will strengthen, and the subject will likely repeat that behaviour. If the consequences are negative, the likelihood of the behaviour will decrease. He labelled this instrumental learning.

B.F Skinner coined the term operant conditioning. He invented a contraption called a Skinner box which delivered food to an animal by pressing a lever, pushing a button, or pecking a disk. The food is a reinforcer, and giving the food is reinforcement. There are two types of reinforcement; positive and negative. Positive reinforcement is the addition of something pleasant, and negative reinforcement is the removal of something unpleasant. Escape learning allows a subject to terminate an aversive stimulus, while avoidance learning enables them to avoid the stimulus completely. If a child causes a fuss in class and is asked to leave, that is escape learning. If he decides to skive off altogether, that’s avoidance learning. Behaviour can also be shaped by negative consequences. This is known as punishment. Positive punishment is the addition of something unpleasant, while negative punishment or omission training is the removal of something pleasant.

Punishment vs Reinforcement

Punishment is operant conditioning’s aversive conditioning. It is most effective if it is delivered immediately after the undesired behaviour. Harsh punishments can have unintended consequences, for example hitting your dog may dissuade it from misbehaving, but may cause fear or anger in the dog. 

To get the rat to pull the lever in the box, Skinner used a process known as shaping. Shaping reinforces the steps used to arrive at the desired behaviour. If you’ve ever trained a dog, you’ll know that training requires incremental steps towards the behaviour, instead of immediately expecting them to do it. By rewarding approximations of the behaviour, it increases the chances they will stumble upon it later. Animals can also be taught to perform a number of responses successively. This concept is known as chaining. 

Vocabulary used for classical conditioning also works with operant conditioning. Here they are with the context of a rat in a skinner box.

Acquisition: The rat learns to press the lever to get food

Extinction: The rat stops pressing the lever as it no longer gets food

Spontaneous Recovery: After extinguishing the original behaviour, without further training, the rat begins to press the bar again.

Generalisation: If the rat presses things like buttons, not just levers to get food

Discrimination: If the rat is only taught to press a specific bar, or only to press the bar when a sound is playing (in this scenario, the tone is a discriminative stimulus.)

There are two kinds of reinforcers. Primary reinforcers are naturally rewarding.  Things like food, water, and rest that we don’t need to learn to enjoy. Secondary reinforcers are things we have learnt to value, such as praise or allowing someone to play a video game. Money is a generalised reinforcer, as it can be traded for virtually anything. An application of generalised reinforcers is called the token economy, where every time a person in a token economy performs something desired, they receive a token that they can trade for one of a variety of reinforcers. Not all reinforcers are desirable, and they’re not desirable all the time. Try rewarding a teen who’s just stuffed their face with cake, with even more cake and see how willing they are to win it. The idea that the reinforcing properties of something depend on the situation connects with the Premack principle, where whichever of the two activities is preferred can be used to encourage the less preferred activity.

Reinforcement Schedules

When behaviour has just begun to be learnt, continuous reinforcement is best, however, once it has been learnt, a partial reinforcement schedule tends to be ideal. According to the partial-reinforcement effect, behaviours are more resistant to extinction if the animal hasn’t been reinforcement hasn’t been done continuously. The types of partial-reinforcement are described in the table below.

Noticing a break in a variable pattern is much more difficult, which is why variable patterns are more resistant to extinction.

Biology and Operant Conditioning

As cool as operant conditioning is, it has its limits. Animals will not perform certain behaviours that go against their natural inclinations, for example, rats will not walk backwards. The tendency for animals to ignore rewards to pursue their typical behavioural patterns is called instinctive drift.

Cognitive Learning

The Contingency Model

The Pavlovian model of classical conditioning is known as the contiguity model as it states that the more times two things are paired, the greater the learning that will take place. Robert Rescorla’s research revised the Pavlovian model to apply it to more complicated scenarios.

In his experiments, he had two dogs, both of which were presented with food and a bell 10 times. However, one of the other dogs was also presented with 5 trials where the food was given with no bell, and 5 trials where the bell was rung with no food. Common sense says the first dog would have a stronger response, but the contiguity model says that their responses would be the same.

In comes Rescorla’s revision; the contingency model. This model states that A is contingent upon B when A depends on B and vice versa. In other words, the presence of one event reliably predicts the presence of the other. For the first dog, the food is contingent upon the presence of the bell, however, for the second one, the relationship between the US and the CS is less clear, making the following response less strong.

Observational Learning

 As children grow up, they learn how to behave based on how the people in their lives do. This is known as observational learning, or modelling, and was studied extensively by Albert Bandura while he was forming his social-learning theory. 

Modelling has two basic components: observation and imitation. In a scenario with two brothers, while the older brother is playing football outside, the little brother watches his little brother, and imitates his behaviour, playing football as well. However, modelling isn’t all positive. Children who grow up in abusive environments are more likely to model that behaviour when they grow up, leading to a cycle of behaviour.

Latent Learning

Edward Tolman did substantial research into latent learning. Latent learning is learning that only becomes obvious when reinforcement is given for learning it. 

In his experiments, Tolman had 3 groups of rats go through a maze. One group was rewarded every time they finished the maze. Their performance in the maze improved rapidly. The second group was never rewarded and showed gradual improvement. The third group wasn’t rewarded for the first half of the trials, but for the second half received a reward. In the first half, their performance matched with the second group, however in the second half of the trials, their performance spiked, showing that the rats had learnt their way around the maze in the first half of the trials, however, their performance didn’t drastically improve because they weren’t motivated to improve.

Abstract Learning

Abstract learning is the idea that we learn in general, not necessarily about specific behaviours. Some animals used in skinner boxes like pigeons and rats have shown this ability. Pigeons, for example, have learnt to peck pictures that had never seen before if those pictures were of chairs.

Insight Learning

Wolfgang Kohler performed insight learning experiments on chimpanzees. Insight learning occurs when someone suddenly realises how to do a problem. A moment of insight can happen when you’re taking a test when all of a sudden you realise what the answer is. Kohler argued that learning happened in this sudden fashion because of insight and not because of the gradual strengthening of S-R connections. 

In his study with chimpanzees, he put them into scenarios to see how they’d solve problems. In one, he suspended a banana from the ceiling, out of the chimps reach. He found that the chimps would spend most of their time unproductively using their time rather than gradually working towards the banana. All of a sudden, they would have a moment of insight, and stack boxes to reach it. 

[info5420blog1and2]

Inside Out and Back Again

by  Thanhhà Lai 

Entry: Historical Fiction

Justification

I chose this entry initially because it has Asian representation. However, upon thinking about my region of Texas (DFW) I remembered that we seem to have a massive Vietnamese population. From there I put myself in the shoes of a librarian working in my city wanting to showcase books that would represent children in the city. I managed to find this book that not only has so many awards and praise but is also written by a woman who lived through the horrors of the Vietnam War as a child. Vietnamese children can see themselves in this girl and experience something that their parents might have lived through as children themselves.

Evaluation

1. After reading the book, I felt like the awards it garnered were well deserved. The writing is emotional but doesn’t dwell too much on dark topics, probably because it’s a children’s book. It’s clear that the author drew from her own experiences. Not to mention the emotions waiting in the background that are tied to the fate of Kim Ha’s father. It’s clear that when they lose him, they feel like they’ve lost their only real tie to Vietnam. Watching Kim Ha be bullied by the white students was rough but also expected since she was different looking. And the fact that the poor girl also had to deal with her brothers, no matter their behavior, made me feel glad I’m an only child.

2. The historical importance of the book isn’t to be ignored. I can’t think of any historical fiction books for children about Vietnam off the top of my head. Especially ones drawn from personal experience. Lai clearly turns her experiences into a well-written book and a positive experience for future readers to enjoy. I think because Lai had a personal stake in the story, writing it must have come quite easily to her. Not to mention how hard a topic like this is to write from an emotional standpoint. Lai turns suffering into release and children reading this might see themselves in Kim Ha.

3. When Kim Ha writes that she would prefer wartime Vietnam over peacetime Alabama, it becomes clear that just because she’s safe in another country, that doesn’t mean her battles are over. The way Lai explains how prejudice colors how people treat others is evident in Kim Ha’s words. Even though we as sometimes white readers might think Kim Ha escaping impoverished Vietnam for wealthy America is an improvement, she makes it clear that oppression comes in many forms. She’s bullied by a boy she dubs as ‘Pink Boy’ who has ‘white hair and white eyebrows’ and is definitely a white boy. America isn’t less oppressive as Vietnam and it’s own form is used against people that don’t look like Pink Boy, like Kim Ha. Pink Boy probably would have continued to bully her if she wasn’t made cool due to being related to her cool older brother Vu. In this way, America is implied to be just as savage as Vietnam, except it’s better at hiding it.

Conclusion

As stated above, I’d choose this for Vietnamese patrons to have a book with a kid that looks like them. It’d also serve to perhaps put a name to what they might be experiencing from other kids at their schools. I’d make sure that their parents are okay with such a serious topic even though the book is for children. Perhaps the parents would in turn use this book to explain the diaspora that Vietnamese people experienced 50 years ago.

Citation

Lai, T. (2018). Inside out and back again. Thorndike Press Large Print.

[brentcarolyn]

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AcrossAllAges.com 🌎 Discover...What’s In It for YOU? “Empower learning with educational-focused content and technology learners need to discover new insights and skills.”—Thorndike Press 💫Learn more 📚 amazon.com/author/carolynabrent #Eschatology #Growth #PersonalGrowth & #Christianity, #Inspiration #books #family #education #spiritual #life #love #hope #family #Christian #peace #bible #grace #ocean #meditation #Selfcare #Love #family #Wellness #Aging #Hope #purpose #audiobook #guide #caregiving #Hope #purpose #parentslove https://www.instagram.com/p/CEUAfS9geMs/?igshid=1v9kmlfdari0b

[margridarnauds]

officialqueer replied to your post “My favorite thing about DIsney’s take on The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh...”

What is this it sounds incredible

Scarecrow of Romney Marsh was a special that aired on The Wonderful World of Disney in 1963 in a series of three parts, and it’s about a county vicar named Dr. Syn who, in the face of King George III’s taxes and the ever-looming threat of the naval press gang, decides to take matters into his own hands and decides to head up the local smuggling ring. He becomes so successful at his job that the king sends a regiment of soldiers under the command of General Pugh to bring them to heel and offers a thousand pounds for any information leading to his arrest. 

In order to prevent anyone from knowing it’s him, he and two of his most trusted lieutenants (one of whom is his right-hand man/live in partner Mipps, in the middle, and the other one is the squire’s son John, to the right) dress up in masks that I’m fairly certain were specifically designed to haunt the nightmares of children growing up in the 60s. 

Now, in the original series of novels by Russell Thorndike, Syn had a complicated past involving an unfaithful wife, pirates, blood, guts, exploding ships, everything, including a love interest in the form of the squire’s DAUGHTER. But, here, they managed to bend themselves over so spectacularly by making her a very underaged him, thus putting all the emotional focus on Mipps and Syn instead and not giving a hint towards ANY past romantic attachments for Syn, as well giving Syn an archenemy DEDICATED to his arrest in the form of General Pugh. 

Whoops. You outplayed yourself, Disney.

So much. 

Sadly enough, there isn’t as much interaction between Pugh and the Vicar, but they do *have* to meet at the Squire’s house semi-regularly. So Dr Syn knows what he’s planning and can stay one step ahead. 

 In his episode introduction, Walt appears to believe that the Scarecrow was a real person, despite the fact the original never CLAIMED to be anything more than a swashbuckling piece of historical fiction, but...given that it’s Walt Disney, I’m not sure whether he GENUINELY believed it or not. Either way, it’s a fun bit of trivia. It also comes with an incredibly catchy opening: 

Unfortunately, the release for it’s been very limited through the years. They released it out of The Disney Vault briefly in 2010, and at this point the only way to get ahold of legitimate copies is to track down those second hand, with them being known to go for upwards of $200-300. Which...is obscene. But nostalgia factor’s a powerful thing. And there are always PLENTY of people offering high quality bootlegs on demand. 

Also, it looks like this account uploaded the entire thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaSTjq-fK1M&t=2152s, though the quality is...sad. There’s another, higher quality one available as well, but it somehow managed to cut out most of the first episode. 

[blackchildrensbooksandauthors]

10 Books for National Minority Mental Health Awareness Month

National Minority Mental Health Awareness Month was first observed in July 2008. The purpose of the month is “to help raise awareness about mental illness and its effects on racial and ethnic minority populations.” The U. S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Minority Health has statistics and helpful information for organizations, families, and individuals in marginalized communities who want to learn more about how to recognize, care, and receive help for those living with mental illnesses. Sometimes exploring literature with children, in classroom or home settings, can introduce and encourage talks about tough topics. The ten fiction books listed include a mix of picture, middle-grade, and young adult titles. Mental illness may not be the primary theme in all the books, but all are valuable tools for raising awareness.

Books:

Sometimes My Mommy Gets Angry  | Bebe Moore Campbell | Putnam | 2003 

The Face at the Window | Regina Hanson | Clarion Books | 1997 

Towers Falling | Jewell Parker Rhodes | Little, Brown BYR | 2016 

The Dream Bearer | Walter Dean Myers | Thorndike Press | 2003 

A Piece of Heaven | Sharon Dennis Wyeth | Yearling | 2007 

Little & Lion | Brandy Colbert | Little, Brown BYR | 2017  

Tiffany Sly Lives Here Now | Dana L. Davis | Harlequin Teen | 2018 

A Bitter Pill to Swallow | Tiffany Gholar | Blurb | 2016 

Humming Whispers | Angela Johnson | Scholastic | 1996 

The Beauty That Remains | Ashley Woodfolk | Delacorte Press | 2018

Find more children’s and young adult books by Black authors here   

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Your thoughtful donation will support our mission to promote awareness of children’s and young adult literature by Black authors. Our stories matter. Thank you!

[cgreene1324]

Readerly Exploration 3 02/25/2019 Carolyn Greene

Readerly Exploration 3 02/25/2019

Reading 1:Literacy in the 21stCentury Chapter 1 “Becoming an Effective Literacy Teacher” (Tompkins, 2018)

Big Takeaway: Chapter 1’s main objective is to lay out an overview of certain principles that those who are called effective teachers of literacy must possess.Tompkins provides nine principles for teachers to strive for when constructing balanced literacy instruction.

Nugget:“Teachers who learn about their students’ home language and culture and embed them into their instruction are more likely to be successful” (pg. 28). This quote from the chapter really stuck out to me after taking EDUC 311 with Dr. Keller in the fall. The idea of supporting and honoring students’ home cultures is crucial to supporting the English learners in our classrooms.

Readerly Exploration: Read a wide variety of genres and formats of texts to grow in their knowledge and experiences as a reader:Get inspiration from the assigned course reading(s) to find and read another text from a different genre or format and connect the two in some way.

For my readerly exploration, I looked up one of the books that the author had recommended at the beginning of the chapter. The book I found was under the list “Multicultural Books”. I chose to look up and read Inside Out and Back Again, by Thanhha Lai. I chose this book because it has won a National Book Award and is a Newberry Honor Book. One thing that is unique about this book is that the story is told through verse like a poem. The story depicts the life of a young girl whose family is forced to flee their home during the Vietnam War. Hà and her family immigrate to America and settle in Alabama. Through this journey Hà faces the challenge of being in a new place, school and culture. What makes this story so relevant to the chapter from our textbook is the authentic depiction of a young girl’s journey to the states and her integration into the school system of this country. Her story, based on the author’s real experience and so many others is the reason why the portion of this chapter regarding English learners is so important. These students can provide our classrooms with rich experiences and culture if we as teachers take the time to learn about their home language and culture. As teachers we can learn just as much from our students as they can learn from us.

Tompkins, G. (2017). Literacy for the 21st century: A balanced approach (Seventh ed.). Pearson.

Lai, T. (2018).Inside out & back again. Waterville, ME: Thorndike Press.

[witchyfashion]

The Master of the Macabre

"Dr. Syn's creator cannot but write interestingly. . . . Some of the strange stories are horrible and not for the squeamish." - Sydney Morning Herald "These tales of terror and violence are quite nightmarish in their exciting conception." - Glasgow Evening News "Master of the Macabre is certainly macabre and provides just what you want, if you enjoy reading of 'ghosts and ghoulies, long leggity beasties and things that go bump in the night.'" The Star (Sheffield) "It is all very good reading for a windy night, alone in front of an open fireplace." - Winnipeg Tribune "This book is strange, thrilling and certainly macabre." - Yorkshire Evening Press Tayler Kent flees London in a blinding snowstorm, hoping to escape the ghosts that haunt his home. Instead, he finds things may have gone from bad to worse when he crashes his car, breaks his ankle, and is forced to take refuge at a medieval monastery now inhabited by the eccentric Charles Hogarth, known as "The Master of the Macabre." As Kent's ankle heals, Hogarth entertains him with fine food, brandy, and a series of gruesome stories connected with an odd assortment of old relics on display in a curio cabinet. But the terrors are not confined to Hogarth's tales: the monastery is haunted by the evil spirit of an apostate monk and besieged by more corporeal foes, who will stop at nothing to get their hands on one of the Master's treasures. . . . Best known for his series of novels featuring the smuggler Dr. Syn, Russell Thorndike (1885-1972) in The Master of the Macabre (1947) delivers an irresistible mix of horror, adventure, and black humour that is sure to please fans of classic ghost stories and supernatural fiction. This first-ever republication of the novel includes the original jacket art and a new introduction by Mark Valentine.

https://amzn.to/2q6haPP

[rhianna]

Bibliographic Record

Author

Thorndike, Lynn, 1882-1965

Title     A History of Magic and Experimental Science, Volume 1 (of 2): During the First Thirteen Centuries of Our Era

Original Publication   United States :Columbia University Press,1923.

Credits     Tim Lindell, Les Galloway and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https:

//www.pgdp.net

(This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)

Language   English

Category   Text

EBook-No.67792

Release Date   Apr 7, 2022

Copyright Status    Public domain in the USA.

[talabib]

Small Habits Can Have A Big Impact On Your Life. 

How many habits do you have? You might need a minute to think about that question, because habits are, by definition, behaviors that we perform automatically, with little or no thought. From making a coffee when we get up in the morning to brushing our teeth before bed at night, our habits subtly guide our daily lives. 

As a result, you may not realize how much power there is in habits. If repeated every day, even the smallest actions, from saving a dollar to smoking a single cigarette, can accumulate force and have a huge effect. So understanding and embracing habits is a great way to take control of your life and achieve more. 

In this post, you’ll learn precisely what habits are, how they are formed and how you can harness them to change your life for the better. 

Small habits can have a surprisingly powerful impact on your life. 

Imagine a plane taking off from Los Angeles en route to New York. If, during takeoff, the pilot decided to adjust course 3.5 degrees to the south, the plane’s nose would move just a few feet. Outside of the cockpit, no one on board would notice the small movement. But over the course of a journey across the country, the impact of the change would be considerable, and the confused passengers would alight from their plane in Washington, DC, not New York. 

We don’t notice tiny changes, because their immediate impact is negligible. If you are out of shape today, and go for a 20-minute jog, you’ll still be out of shape tomorrow. Conversely, if you eat a family-size pizza for dinner, it won’t make you overweight overnight. But if we repeat small behaviors day after day, our choices compound into major results. Eat pizza every day, and it’s likely you will have gained considerable weight after a year. Go jogging for 20 minutes every day, and you’ll eventually be leaner and fitter, even though you won’t have noticed the change happening.   

If you want to make a positive change in your life, you should recognize that change requires patience, as well as confidence that your habits are keeping you on the right trajectory – even if you aren’t seeing immediate results. 

So if you find that your behaviors and habits don’t seem to be paying off, try to focus on your current trajectory rather than your current results. If you have little money in the bank but you are saving something each month, then you can be confident that your trajectory is right. Your current results might not be great, but keep going in this direction and, in a few months or a few years, you will notice a major improvement. By contrast, a millionaire who outspends his earnings each month may not be worried about his bank statements from one month to the next, but, in the end, his trajectory will catch up with him. 

The key to making big changes in your life doesn’t have to involve major upheaval; you don’t need to revolutionize your behavior or reinvent yourself. Rather, you can make tiny changes to your behavior, which, when repeated time and time again, will become habits that may lead to big results. 

Habits are automated behaviors that we’ve learned from experience. 

When you walk into a dark room, you don’t think about what to do next; you instinctively reach for a light switch. It’s a habit – a behavior that you’ve repeated so many times that it now happens automatically. 

So how are habits formed? Well, our brain figures out how to respond to new situations through a process of trial and error. Nineteenth-century psychologist Edward Thorndike famously demonstrated this with an experiment where cats were placed in a black box. Unsurprisingly, each cat immediately tried to escape from the box, sniffing at its corners and clawing at its walls. Eventually, the cat would find a lever that, when pressed, would open a door, enabling escape. 

Thorndike then took the cats that’d successfully escaped and repeated the experiment. His findings? Well, after being put in the box a few times, each cat learned the trick. Rather than scrambling around for a minute or more, the cats went straight for the lever. After 20 or 30 attempts, the average cat could escape in just six seconds. In other words, the process of getting out of the box had become habitual. 

Thorndike had discovered that behaviors that give satisfying consequences – in this case, gaining freedom – tend to be repeated until they become automatic. 

Like cats in the nineteenth century, we also stumble across satisfying solutions to life’s difficulties and predicaments. And, thankfully, we now understand a little more about how habits work. 

Habits begin with a cue, or a trigger to act. Walking into a dark room cues you to perform an action that will enable sight. Next comes a craving for a change in state – in this case, to be able to see. Then comes our response, or action – flicking the light switch. The final step in the process, and the end goal of every habit, is the reward. Here, it’s the feeling of mild relief and comfort that comes from being able to see your surroundings. 

Every habit is subject to the same process. Do you habitually drink coffee every morning? Waking up is your cue, triggering a craving to feel alert. Your response is to drag yourself out of bed and make a cup of joe. Your reward is feeling alert and ready to face the world. 

But, of course, not all habits are good for us. Now that we understand how habits work, let’s look at building positive ones that improve our lives. 

Building new habits requires hard-to-miss cues and a plan of action. 

All of us have cues that trigger certain habits. The buzz of your phone, for example, is a cue to check your messages. 

And once you understand that certain stimuli can prompt habitual behavior, you can use this knowledge to change your habits. How? Well, one way is to change your surroundings and general environment to encourage better habits. 

Just take the work of Boston-based doctor Anne Thorndike. She wanted to improve her patients’ dietary habits without requiring them to make a conscious decision. How did she pull this off? She had the hospital cafeteria rearranged. Originally, the refrigerators next to the cash registers contained only soda. Thorndike introduced water, not only there, but at every other drink station. Over three months, soda sales dropped by 11 percent, while water sales shot up by 25 percent. People were making healthier choices, just because the cue to drink water rather than soda was more prominent. 

So simple changes to our environment can make a big difference. Want to practice guitar? Leave the instrument out in the center of the room. Trying to eat healthier snacks? Leave them out on the counter, instead of in the salad drawer. Make your cues as obvious as possible, and you’ll be more likely to respond to them. 

A second great way to strengthen cues is to use implementation intentions. 

Most of us tend to be too vague about our intentions. We say, “I’m going to eat better,” and simply hope that we’ll follow through. An implementation intention introduces a clear plan of action, setting out when and where you’ll carry out the habit you’d like to cultivate. And research shows that it works. 

A study of voters in the United States found that the citizens who were asked the questions “At what time will you vote?” and “How will you get to the voting station?” were more likely to actually turn out than those who were just asked if they would vote.   

So don’t just say, “I’ll run more often.” Say, “On Monday, Wednesday and Friday, when the alarm goes off, the first thing I’ll do is don my running gear and clock two miles.” Then leave your running shoes out where you’ll see them. You’ll be giving yourself both a clear plan and an obvious cue, and it may surprise you how much easier this will make it to actually build a positive running habit. 

Humans are motivated by the anticipation of reward, so making habits attractive will help you stick to them. 

In 1954, neuroscientists James Olds and Peter Milner ran an experiment to test the neurology of desire. Using electrodes, they blocked the release of the neurotransmitter dopamine in rats. To their surprise, the rats simply lost the will to live. They had no desire to eat, drink, reproduce or do anything else. Mere days later, they all died of thirst. 

The human brain releases dopamine, a hormone that makes us feel good, when we do pleasurable things such as eating or having sex. But we also get a hit of feel-good dopamine when we simply anticipate those pleasurable activities. It’s the brain’s way of driving us onward and encouraging us to actually do things. So, in the brain’s reward system, desiring something is on par with getting something, which goes a long way toward explaining why kids enjoy the anticipation of Christmas so much. It’s also why daydreaming about your upcoming hot date is so pleasurable. 

We can also turn this knowledge to our advantage when trying to form habits. If we make a habit something we look forward to, we’ll be much more likely to follow through and actually do it. 

A great technique for this is temptation bundling. That’s when you take a behavior that you think of as important but unappealing and link it to a behavior that you’re drawn to – one that will generate that motivating dopamine hit. 

Ronan Byrne, an engineering student in Ireland, knew he should exercise more, but he got little enjoyment from working out. However, he did enjoy watching Netflix. So he hacked an exercise bike, connecting it to his laptop and writing code that would only allow Netflix to run if he was cycling at a certain speed. By linking exercise – literally – to a behavior that he was naturally drawn to, he transformed a distasteful activity into a pleasurable one. 

You don’t need to be an engineer to apply this to your life. If you need to work out, but you want to catch up on the latest A-list gossip, you could commit to only reading magazines while at the gym. If you want to watch sports, but you need to make sales calls, promise yourself a half hour of ESPN after you talk to your tenth prospect. Soon enough, you may even find those unattractive tasks enjoyable, since you’ll be anticipating a pleasing reward while carrying them out. 

If you want to build a new habit, make that habit as easy to adopt as possible. 

We often spend a lot of time on behaviors that are easy. Scrolling through social media, for example, takes zero effort, so it’s easy for it to fill up lots of our time. Doing a hundred push-ups or studying Mandarin Chinese, in contrast, requires a lot of effort. Repeating those behaviors daily until they become habitual is tough. 

So making behaviors as easy as possible is key to turning them into habits. Luckily, there are a few tricks we can embrace to make anything seem easier. The first is to focus on reducing friction. 

For example, Joe has always been hopeless at sending greeting cards, while his wife never fails to do so. Why? Well, she keeps a box of greeting cards at home, presorted by occasion, making it easier to send congratulations or condolences or whatever is called for. Since she doesn’t have to go out and buy a card when someone gets married or has an accident, there’s no friction involved in sending one. 

You can also use this approach to increase friction for bad habits. If you want to waste less time in front of the TV, unplug it and take the batteries out of the remote. Doing so will introduce enough friction to ensure you only watch when you really want to. 

The second trick for making a habit easier in the long term is the two-minute rule, a way to make any new activity feel manageable. The principle is that any activity can be distilled into a habit that is doable within two minutes. Want to read more? Don’t commit to reading one book every week – instead, make a habit of reading two pages per night. Want to run a marathon? Commit to simply putting on your running gear every day after work. 

The two-minute rule is a way to build easily achievable habits, and those can lead you on to greater things. Once you’ve pulled on your running shoes, you’ll probably head out for a run. Once you’ve read two pages, you’ll likely continue. The rule recognizes that simply getting started is the first and most important step toward doing something. 

Now let’s take a look at the final rule for using habits to improve your life. 

Making your habits immediately satisfying is essential to effective behavior change. 

In the 1990s, public health researcher Stephen Luby, working in the neighborhood of Karachi, Pakistan, achieved a huge 52-percent reduction in diarrhea among the local children. Pneumonia rates dropped by 48 percent, and skin infections by 35 percent. Luby’s secret? Nice soap. 

Luby had known that handwashing and basic sanitation were essential to reducing illness. The locals understood this, too; they just weren’t turning their knowledge into a habit. Everything changed when Luby worked with Proctor and Gamble to introduce a premium soap into the neighborhood for free. Overnight, handwashing became a satisfying experience. The new soap lathered easily and smelled delightful. Suddenly, everyone was washing their hands, because it was now a pleasing activity. 

The final and most important rule for behavioral change is to make habits satisfying. This can be difficult, for evolutionary reasons. Today, we live in what academics call a delayed-return environment. You turn up at the office today, but the return – a paycheck – doesn’t come until the end of the month. You go to the gym in the morning, but you don’t lose weight overnight. 

Our brains, though, evolved to cope with the immediate-return environment of earlier humans, who weren’t thinking about long-term returns like saving for retirement or sticking to a diet. They were focused on immediate concerns like finding their next meal, seeking shelter and staying alert enough to escape any nearby lions. 

Immediate returns can encourage bad habits, too. Smoking may give you lung cancer in 20 years, but, in the moment, it relieves your stress and the craving for nicotine, which means you may ignore the long-term effects and indulge in a cigarette. 

So when you are pursuing habits with a delayed return, try to attach some immediate gratification to them. 

For example, a couple wanted to eat out less, cook more, get healthier and save money. To do so, they opened a savings account called “Trip to Europe,” and every time they avoided a meal out, transferred $50 to it. The short-term satisfaction of seeing $50 land in that savings account provided the immediate gratification they needed to keep them on track for the ultimate, longer-term reward.   

However pleasurable and satisfying we make habits, we may still fail to maintain them. So let’s take a look at how we can stick to our good intentions. 

Create a framework to keep your habits on track, using trackers and contracts. 

Whether you’re trying to write your journal or give up smoking, managing your own behaviors can be hard. Thankfully, there are a few simple measures that can help. 

Habit tracking is a simple but effective technique. Many people have kept a record of their habits; one of the most well known is founding father Benjamin Franklin. From the age of 20, Franklin kept a notebook in which he recorded adherence to 13 personal virtues, which included aims like avoiding frivolous conversation and to always be doing something useful. He noted his success every night. 

You, too, can develop a habit tracker, using a simple calendar or diary, and crossing off every day that you stick with your chosen behaviors. You’ll find it effective, because habit tracking itself is an attractive, and satisfying, habit. The anticipation and action of crossing off each day will feel good and keep you motivated. 

A second technique is to develop a habit contract that imposes negative consequences if you fail to stay on track. 

Bryan Harris, an entrepreneur from Nashville, took his habit contract very seriously. In a contract signed by him, his wife and his personal trainer, he committed to get his weight down to 200 pounds. He identified specific habits that would help get him there, including tracking his food intake each day and weighing himself each week. Then he set up penalties for not doing those things. If he failed to track food intake, he would have to pay $100 to his trainer; if he failed to weigh himself, he would owe $500 to his wife. The strategy worked, driven not just by his fear of losing money but by his fear of losing face in front of two people who mattered to him. Humans are social animals. We care about the opinions of those around us, so simply knowing that someone is watching you can be a powerful motivator for success. 

So why not set yourself a habit contract? Even if it isn’t as detailed as Harris’s, consider making a commitment to your partner, your best friend or one of your coworkers. If you agree upon a set of consequences for failing to follow through, you’ll be much more likely to stick to your habits. And as we’ve seen, sticking to a positive habit, however small, is a surefire way to achieve big things in life. 

A tiny change in your behavior will not transform your life overnight. But turn that behavior into a habit that you perform every day and it absolutely can lead to big changes. Changing your life is not about making big breakthroughs or revolutionizing your entire life. Rather, it’s about building a positive system of habits that, when combined, deliver remarkable results.   

Action plan: Use habit stacking to introduce new behaviors. 

If you want to build a new habit, you could try stacking it on top of an existing habit. Let’s say you want to start meditating, but you’re struggling to find the time. Try thinking about those things you do effortlessly each day, like drinking coffee in the morning. Then just stack the new habit on top. Commit to meditating each morning when you’ve finished your coffee, and build on the natural momentum that comes from a habit you already have.