Extreme Writing

In recent years, educators have become increasingly concerned about the writing skills of students in elementary, middle, and high school. They wonder what can be done to build proper writing skills, particularly in a generation of students who may consider text messaging to be the only writing a person needs to do. Extreme Writing describes how teachers can build upon the eagerness and skills that students apply to recreational, social, and friendly writing, bringing enjoyment back into writing for students. The Extreme Writing approach is not a precise formula for student achievement; rather, it is a shared discovery of the process, the adventure, the wonder, and the liberation inherent in writing.

Are your students excited about writing? Do you want them to be? Do you want them to ask for more writing opportunities and assignments? Do you want them to engage in writing tasks more quickly and with more fluency? The traditional five-step writing process never explicitly teaches students to be fluent in their writing—to be able to write quickly on any topic. Extreme Writing targets precisely that with focused, daily writing sessions that provide students with consistent, long-term engagement. It is designed to appeal to students in grades 4–8, and—best of all—the approach involves little extra work for you. In The Power of Extreme Writing, author Diana Cruchley not only outlines the process but also describes what it looks like in the classroom, explains how to assess student work, and highlights more than a dozen unique inspirations that motivate students to write. Extreme Writing: it's fun, it's fast, and it works.

Are your students excited about writing? Do you want them to be? Do you want them to ask for more writing opportunities and assignments? Do you want them to engage in writing tasks more quickly and with more fluency? The traditional five-step writing process never explicitly teaches students to be fluent in their writing—to be able to write quickly on any topic. Extreme Writing targets precisely that with focused, daily writing sessions that provide students with consistent, long-term engagement. It is designed to appeal to students in grades 4–8, and—best of all—the approach involves little extra work for you. In The Power of Extreme Writing, author Diana Cruchley not only outlines the process but also describes what it looks like in the classroom, explains how to assess student work, and highlights more than a dozen unique inspirations that motivate students to write. Extreme Writing: it’s fun, it’s fast, and it works.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th Conference on Extreme Programming and Agile Methods, XP/Agile Universe 2004, held in Calgary, Canada in August 2004. The 18 revised full papers presented together with summaries of workshops, panels, and tutorials were carefully reviewed and selected from 45 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on testing and integration, managing requirements and usability, pair programming, foundations of agility, process adaptation, and educational issues.

True disagreements are hard to achieve, and even harder to maintain, for the ghost of final agreement constantly haunts them. The Babylonian Talmud, however, escapes from that ghost of agreement, and provokes unsettling questions: Are there any conditions under which disagreement might constitute a genuine relationship between minds? Are disagreements always only temporary steps toward final agreement? Must a community of disagreement always imply agreement, as in an agreement to disagree? What is Talmud? rethinks the task of philological, literary, historical, and cultural analysis of the Talmud. It introduces an aspect of this task that has best been approximated by the philosophical, anthropological, and ontological interrogation of human being in relationship to the Other-whether animal, divine, or human. In both engagement and disengagement with post-Heideggerian traditions of thought, Sergey Dogopolski complements philological-historical and cultural approaches to the Talmud with a rigorous anthropological, ontological, and Talmudic inquiry. He redefines the place of the Talmud and its study, both traditional and academic, in the intellectual map of the West, arguing that Talmud is a scholarly art of its own and represents a fundamental intellectual discipline, not a mere application of logical, grammatical, or even rhetorical arts for the purpose of textual hermeneutics. In Talmudic intellectual art, disagreement is a fundamental category. What Is Talmud? rediscovers disagreement as the ultimate condition of finite human existence or co-existence.

Berger’s slim, user-friendly volume on academic writing is a gift to linguistically-stressed academics. Author of 60 published books, the author speaks to junior scholars and graduate students about the process and products of academic writing. He differentiates between business writing skills for memos, proposals, and reports, and the scholarly writing that occurs in journals and books. He has suggestions for getting the “turgid” out of turgid academic prose and offers suggestions on how to best structure various forms of documents for effective communication. Written in Berger’s friendly, personal style, he shows by example that academics can write good, readable prose in a variety of genres.

In Helping Your Child with Extreme Picky Eating, a family doctor specializing in childhood feeding joins forces with a speech pathologist to help you support your child’s nutrition, healthy growth, and end meal-time anxiety (for your child and you) once and for all. Are you parenting a child with ‘extreme’ picky eating? Do you worry your child isn’t getting the nutrition he or she needs? Are you tired of fighting over food, suspect that what you’ve tried may be making things worse, but don’t know how to help? Having a child with ‘extreme’ picky eating is frustrating and sometimes scary. Children with feeding disorders, food aversions, or selective eating often experience anxiety around food, and the power struggles can negatively impact your relationship with your child. Children with extreme picky eating can also miss out on parties or camp because they can’t find “safe” foods. But you don’t have to choose between fighting over every bite and only serving a handful of safe foods for years on end. Helping Your Child with Extreme Picky Eating offers hope, even if your child has “failed” feeding therapies before. After gaining a foundation of understanding of your child’s challenges and the dynamics at play, you’ll be ready for the 5 steps (built around the clinically proven STEPS+ approach—Supportive Treatment of Eating in PartnershipS) that transform feeding and meals so your child can learn to enjoy a variety of foods in the right amounts for healthy growth. You’ll discover specific strategies for dealing with anxiety, low appetite, sensory challenges, autism spectrum-related feeding issues, oral motor delay, and medically-based feeding problems. Tips and exercises reinforce what you’ve learned, and dozens of “scripts” help you respond to your child in the heat of the moment, as well as to others in your child’s life (grandparents or your child’s teacher) as you help them support your family on this journey. This book will prove an invaluable guide to restore peace to your dinner table and help you raise a healthy eater.

"How to retire in your 20s and 30s (without winning the lottery). This book provides a robust strategy that makes it possible to stop working for money in less than a decade."--Page 4 of cover.