Maybe Bathroom Breaks Are Bad

The last time I talked about bathroom breaks, I ran into a woman with a serious case of OCD. There was also the time a woman was singing "Jesus Loves The Little Children" in the stall next to me, but we won't get into that.

This time it was about child rearing techniques. Who knew such interesting research topics could be found in the ladies room?

In any case, an older woman was talking to a younger woman about ways to prevent poor behavior in children called the "extinction technique." The older woman explained that recognized behavior is repeated behavior, so if bad behavior is ignored and good behavior is recognized and rewarded, then it is the repeated behavior. If bad behavior is ignored, then to a child's mind, it didn't happen.

I'm not certain if I agree with that entirely, but it got me thinking about how this might be researched and applied by educators and others who specialize in child development.

I decided to try the ERIC database through the Marriott Library Article Databases.



This database has what I think is the best resources for education available, so I thought it would be a good place to start. To get there, I went to the library home page, clicked on Article Databases & More, and then on the letter 'E' to get to a list of databases that start with that letter. I scrolled down until I got to the one that said ERIC (Ebsco). There are several places to get information from ERIC because it originally from the U.S. Department of Education, but I like working with the Ebsco database vendor interface best.

Once I was in the database, I searched for "extinction technique."

And there they were, articles about exactly what the women in the bathroom were talking about. They ranged from information about how to help children with potentially dangerous self-destructive behaviors to behavior management information for parents using the extinction technique.

Ah, I do love when a good search comes together and I learn something new!

A-squared Plus B-squared Equals C-squared

I was over on CNN.com this morning and read an article about frustrated parents teaching their kids math "old school" style. You know, things like long division written out by hand. Apparently, teachers are more about the theory behind math rather than the rote application of it.

In the end...it's kind of all the same to me.



I hate math. No, I mean I really hate math. A lot.

And I don't think I'm alone.

I can't balance a checkbook without a calculator. I'm grateful every day for online banking that means I don't even need to do that now. All throughout school, though, nothing about math made sense to me. I just. Didn't. Get. It. Math did not compute. Don't even get me started on the time I walked into a calculus class to find the test I thought was the following Wednesday was, in fact, that Wednesday. As in, three minutes from when I walked into class. I almost fainted, and my ears buzzed. It was like every teenage nightmare of showing up to school in your underwear from every bad high school movie.

For a chronic honor roll student, being bad at math was seriously bad news. Math was consistently my lowest grade, right down there with my Physical Education grade. Yeah, I'm not athletic either.

The fact is, a lot of students have math anxiety. It's something teachers have to deal with all the time. So, I was wondering what, exactly, do teachers learn to cope with this phenomenon of evil (aka mathematics).

For the geekly librarian that I am, that means looking it up. Searching for online articles in education databases. What have teachers written or said about math anxiety? How do they cope with it?

To find out, I could go to the Marriott Library homepage, clicking on Article Databases under Research Tools, and then using the drop down menu for Select Database by Subject and selecting Education.

Now there are a lot of Education databases to choose from, and many of them would probably work, but I'm going to go for ERIC. Once I click on that database to access it, I can type in my search for education and mathematics anxiety.

I get all kinds of articles and conference reports about how teachers cope with math anxiety and how to help students get past it so they can grasp the topic more easily.

Interesting stuff. I'm not sure it'll ever make me like math, but it's good to know that the education field recognizes the issue and is making strides to help students overcome it. There are all kinds of articles in education databases, on everything from teaching and learning foreign language skills, arts in school, special education, and a lot more.