What Playing Candy Land Taught Me About Teaching Composition

This post originally appeared at Balancing Jane.

My daughter is three, and right now she loves to play board games. This is awesome because we're a family of board game players, and I'm glad that she's getting started on picking up this important cultural heritage so that she can soon join in on the family holiday tradition of laughing at the crazy drawings in Telestrations or coming up with Loretta Lynn's "Lincoln" for triple points in Scattergories. Unfortunately (for me anyway), she's not quite up to those standards right now, so we're stuck with Candy Land and this needlessly complicated but completely skill-void atrocity called The Lady Bug Game.

Dev Ed in the News: Does Remediation Need Remediation?

Leticia Bustillos, a remedial education consultant, has a post over at Huffington Post about the problems with the way we talk about remedial and developmental courses. She suggests our conceptions of remedial education are too limiting, especially on a policy level:

Unfortunately, policymakers and their outdated definition of "remediation" stubbornly cling to a perception that does not fully account for the issue's complexity. Rather than asking the question, "What does it take to successfully serve students considered underprepared?" policymakers are more inclined to ask "What does it take to make remedial education programs most efficient?" In doing so, policies emerging from this imprudent focus do not make allowances for the "development" of students as learners and impose arbitrary timelines and restrictions for the mastery of knowledge.

Read the whole thing here. 

Do you agree with Bustillos? What would be the best way to remediate our discussion of remediation?