Some readings

Twitter has again left me with some very interesting pieces to think (and blog) about.  Here is what I've been reading this week.

"It isn't them; it's you."

An interesting blog post from the corporate world.  But it has educational implications.  The main point of the article focuses on employee monitoring software.  The bloggers take is that the need to monitor your employees isn't their problem, it's yours.  Be a better manager or boss.  Construct a more engaging environment.

Isn't this true in school too?  I was visiting with a colleague yesterday who was finishing the year with Night.  She said that it was how she wanted to end every year with her seniors.  They were engaged in the book - even if they didn't intend on reading it.  The experience and story just reeled them in.

The same is happening with my large Lit & Lang 9 class as 32 kids devour Kaffir Boy.  The text is engaging them and I have little problems with them.

I wish I could go back to my first year teaching and re-teach those kids.  I struggled so mightily to make them listen, take notes, and behave.  I realize now I was focusing on something I couldn't control: controlling them.  Instead, I should have made my lesson plans more engaging and relevant to their lives.

That's why one of my best units is when my College Comp II kids write their multi-genre essays.  Initially, the don't know what the hell is going on because they've never seen anything this crazy before.  But once they get into writing about what they really want to write about (some topics: a student's cleft pallet, divorce, celebrating a marriage, Superman, placing nationally in a free throw shooting contest, photography, a grandfather's struggle with alcohol, or remembering a loved one who has passed away, and some students even write their papers as a way of coming out).

And when they are engaged, I don't have to worry about being a drill sergeant.


Here is a great TED Talk about my favorite subject, creativity.




I hear this from colleagues and students all the time: If I only had more time in a day to get all the stuff I needed to get done.  Well, someone came up with an infograph for that:

This caught my eye: "Three Things Every Young Artist Needs to Know"

John Baldessari believes that every young artist should know 3 things:

1. Talent is cheap
2. You have to be possessed, which you can’t will
3. Being at the right place at the right time

I especially like #2.  That is how I feel a month prior to my honors faculty presentation.  I find the subject and form lurking in my mind.  At all times.  Then about a week before it is due, I find myself thinking of it before I fall asleep and even dreaming of it.  It has taken me over in many ways.

Then when it's done, as soon as I walk out of the school, it feels as if I'm about 20 pounds lighter.

Now how could an article with these two sentences  "Quit your technology job.  Get a PhD in the humanities" not grab my attention like a vice grip?

Amen to this line of thinking:

I believe humanity majors make the best project managers, the best product managers, and, ultimately, the most visionary technology leaders. The reason is simple. Technologists and engineers focus on features and too often get wrapped up in elements that may be cool for geeks but are useless for most people. In contrast, humanities majors can more easily focus on people and how they interact with technology. A history major who has studied the Enlightment or the rise and fall of the Roman Empire may be more likely to understand the human elements of technology and how ease of use and design can be the difference between an interesting historical footnote and a world-changing technology. A psychologist is more likely to know how to motivate people or to understand what users want.


This reminds me so much of what Philip Broadhead (president of Duke) and Thomas Friedmann talk so much about: get a liberal arts education.  Don't just get a degree.


Their logic: by gaining a liberal arts education you are taught to actually think.  You learn to analyze, evaluate, compare, synthesize, and create.  Do those skills transfer when you are trained in a specific filed.  Education vs. training.


I think one has to be fully educated before they can be trained.  If you can think properly, you can be trained to do just about anything.  And then problem solve as you go.


How many companies now hire people and then spend weeks training them?  Many.  For those employees who can learn and thinking, this is not difficult.  Unfortunately, under NCLB and now RTTT, the liberal arts or the humanities get cut in the name of training students in English, math, and science so we can boast higher test scores than Finland, China, Singapore, and India.  But where is the innovation in that strategy?


15 Secrets of the Most Successful Self-Learners

Yesterday I was listening to one of my favorite people in education, John Merrow, on the Bob Edwards show.

He said that in his day (and this goes for all of us over 25 years old) school used to serve three basic functions:

1. It housed the knowledge.
2. It provided social contact for children.
3. It provided daycare for the bulk of the children and young adults in the country.

Technology now, Merrow said, makes the first two functions obsolete.

1.  Any kid with access to the internet has a world of information at their fingertips.  Does it mean they'll teach themselves anything worthwhile? No.  But how many kids went through school and learned anything worth while?

2.  Social contact.  As Merrow said, "There are apps for that now."  And he's totally correct.  Facebook has totally changed how young people know each other.  It's even made the word friend more of a verb than a noun.

3.  Schools still, house the kids and keep them occupied for long stretches of the day.

This list of 15 skills are what students need to master in order to really take full advantage of all the knowledge they can access outside of school.

#14 is my favorite

“Outside-the-box” thinking

Literally thinking “outside the box.” The old cliche about creativity boasts some basis in reality, come to find out, as 2011 research conducted on NYU students proved. Those with the more unorthodox approaches to the tasks at hand usually sat outside the assigned cubicle, leading researchers to wonder if confined spaces lead to confined thinking. Not every strategy works for every self-learner, of course, but it might be one 

When I read the word "cubicle," I hate to admit it, but I thought of school.  How can we get kids to think more out-of-the-box than in the cubicle?

The days of sitting in rows and shutting up and listening to the teacher drone on about knowledge that only the teacher has is long, long gone.  Give any kid a MacBook and WiFi access, and they can find that knowledge.  Why aren't we doing this instead?

Well, we are.  It's called the "flipped classroom." On June 5th I'm taking a class on how to flip my classroom and I can't wait.

This doesn't make the teacher obsolete.  It just makes us have to be sharper and more creative.  How do we channel all the knowledge students generate?  How do we make it relevant to them?  How do we get them to make sense of what they find? How do we get them to analyze it and examine if it's reliable?

That's what we should be teaching instead of droning on and on about in class.




Here is a great vimeo on the death of the lecture. Totally fits with my previous topic.

I love it when he actually asks everyone in his audience to take out their smart phones, laptops, iPods, iPads and to log in to the website he displays.  Then he says, if someone next to you is not using their device, hit them and get them online.

Amazing.