A month after he came to the US with his parents Robert was enrolled in kindergarten in a multi-ethnic, mixed income suburban district. This district has a policy that all students born outside the US must be placed in ELL classes, no exceptions.

Blanket policies are rarely a good idea, even if that policy would have helped Juanita. Here’s why.

Robert was born in South Africa to British parents. English is not only his native language, it is his only language. He speaks it with better enunciation and grammar than the school aid who insisted she had to enroll him in the ELL class.

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Test-taking Tips

Ø Read each question carefully and more than once

Ø Read the questions before you read the longer text

Ø Underline important words in the text as you read

Ø Do easy questions first

Ø Skip the hard questions and come back to them later (put a mark in your test booklet next to the ones you skip)

Ø Eliminate wrong answers and make your best guess

Ø Trust yourself, your first guess is usually the best

Ø If you do want to change an answer, be sure to erase the first one completely

Ø Use your reading strategies-you’ve been practicing them all year!

It takes practice to gain confidence in applying the fair use reasoning process. There is no one “right” answer in making a fair use determination, which is why the courts have established a “reasonableness standard” which limits the liability of librarians or teachers who make a good-faith judgment that might be judged to be a violation of copyright.

No one fair use checklist “fits” a particular case or situation. In some cases, a checklist can actually interfere with reasoning. A checklist can become a substitute or a short-cut for critical thinking. In thinking about fair use, each particular case must be critically examined through a reasoning process. SO if an educator goes through such a process to justify their use as fair use, it would be unlikely that that educator would “get into trouble” for copyright violation.

This situation is common in teaching the arts to high school students. The kid who can draw a perfect reproduction of a photo from a magazine or can play a Led Zeppelin solo note for note. You just have to teach them, you know, the arts and humanities. With computers would be nice.

But that’s what those disciplines are about.

Dan, isn’t cigotie simply going through some natural stages of learning? See, for example, some of these top-of-the-Google-list descriptions of various stages of learning:

http://snipurl.com/ec1v1

http://snipurl.com/ec1vm

http://snipurl.com/ec1w4

As you note, he may need some structured help to continue to make progress, but it seems a little early to be worried about the stage he’s currently in, no?