Notes on Supervision

I am honoured that you wish to include my “Notes on Supervision” in the issue of the Journal dedicated to Miss Parker. Re-reading them calls back the pleasure and stimulation of working with her and those of you who were supervising social work students then, and of being a part of the struggle we all were making to identify problems in field instruction and to overcome them.     

Number words in ‘her’ language,dialogism and identity-work: the case of little Mariah

Based on an ethnographic study, we explore the potential of experimenting with multiple languages for number words as part of young children’s mathematical activity. Data from a preschool classroom activity on ‘number words in “other” languages’ exemplify a complex process of discursive identity-work and dialogism amongst children, parents, teacher, and researchers. The focus is on the case of little Mariah, a Pakistani immigrant girl in Greece, who experiences participation by sharing number knowledge in her mother tongue Urdu, and highlights how gendered, racial, or language-related discourses weave her learner identity in a multilingual preschool classroom.     

Generalized weibull family: a structural analysis

A two shape parameter generalization of the well known family of the Weibull distributions is presented and its properties are studied. The properties examined include the skewness and kurtosis, density shapes and tail character, and relation of the members of the family to those of the Pear-sonian system. The members of the family are grouped in four classes in terms of these properties. Also studied are the extreme value distributions and the limiting distributions of the extreme spacings for the members of the family. It is seen that the generalized Weibull family contains distributions with a variety of density and tail shapes, and distributions which in terms of skewness and kurtosis approximate the main types of curves of the Pearson system. Furthermore, as shown by the extreme value and extreme spacings distributions the family contains short, medium and long tailed distributions. The quantile and density quantile functions are the principle tools used for the structural analysis of the family.