What I've been reading

The Twitter links have been piling up. So this morning I've started to work my way through them.

A ton of interesting stories to make me a better teacher and learner. I don't know why more teachers and administrators don't hop on the Twitter bandwagon as a means of professional development. Gotta love this. How little we really know.

Here is a cartoon from the late 19th century trying to envision what the classroom of the 21st century looks like.

Here is another great story from a most interesting science blog.

How Tesla was inspired to create his famous induction motor while he was out walking and reciting his favorite lines from Faust.  Steven Johnson would be proud!

I found yet another story that I could have used for my honors speech: "Sowing Failure, Reaping Success: What Failure Can Teach You."  The longer I teach, the more I realize how we rarely allow kids to fail or make mistakes.  No wonder our learning is stagnant.  Mistakes and failures are vital to success, yet too often we insulate our students from falling flat on their faces.

I think this is one reason so many of my College Comp II kids struggle with their multi-genre research paper, for this is no right way to do one.  They don't have a recipe or formula to follow.  They learn to write a multi-genre research paper AS THEY WRITE IT.  That means a lot of mistakes and missteps, but that is the most important part of the project.

This article offers some great suggestions for teachers to introduce students to the concept of failure and then getting them to investigate it and, hopefully, to realize that it is a vital component of learning and growing.

Here is another great quote on exploration and failure --

An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail. Scientists made a great invention by calling their activities hypotheses and experiments. They made it permissible to fail repeatedly until in the end they got the results they wanted. In politics or government, if you made a hypothesis and it didn’t work out, you had your head cut off.

Polaroid inventor Edwin Land on embracing failure, among other insights on what it takes to innovate.

I couldn't agree more.

And I might just have found a new book to use in College Comp II next year.

I love this.  And how much fun would it be to use storify for an assignment.