Education Archives - Page 2 of 6

Are highlights worth it?

One of the biggest revelations I’ve had this summer doing in-depth research on Mind Body Education (thanks to the Center for Transformative Teaching and Learning and Wilson Hall for introducing me to current educational psychology research these past few months) is the value of retrieval practices in classroom learning.

A particular eye-opening part of that summer learning for me is how we process information as learners immediately and in the long-term. This quote from Willingham’s Outsmart Your Brain hit me particularly hard as someone who has been a highlighter for the last 20 or so odd years! I’ll be writing more about these topics in the next few days. Thanks to Readwise for resurfacing this quote from my readings earlier this summer!

Mr. Harrelson (Again)!

Got my classroom name plate for my new classroom and teaching position at Wilson Hall today. I’m teaching 7th grade science, Environmental Science, and Physics. All three subjects should be a blast.

I look forward to this being the last classroom name plate I collect to finish out my career here at Wilson Hall in the next few decades (I still have my others from previous schools)! So exciting!

Significant Benefits of social and Emotional Learning for Students in Yale Research

If you ask almost any of us teachers what sort of skills or attitudes we’d love to see more developed in our students, you’d hear responses such as “resiliency” and “less anxiety.” In this first large-scale study of social and emotional learning approaches in k-12 education, Yale School of Medicine lays out some great findings (emphasis mine):

Research Finds Social and Emotional Learning Produces Significant Benefits for Students < Yale School of Medicine:

Students also showed improved social and emotional skills, attitudes, and behaviors, such as student self-efficacy, self-esteem, mindset, perseverance, and optimism, among others. Furthermore, the report confirmed that students who participate in SEL programs also feel better in school, reporting less anxiety, stress, depression, and suicidal thoughts. Students were also more connected and included and had better relationships with peers and teachers.

New Classroom Setup

My classroom at Wilson Hall is coming along!

Inside a Genius Mind: Leonardo’s Notebooks

Amazing web app here (bottom link to direct Google Experiment) focused on major themes in Leonardo’s notebooks and connecting them with machine learning. I’m a huge fan of notebooks, and I use the example of Leonardo keeping his thoughts in them all the time with my own students.

If you’re like me and really into Leonardo’s “notebooking” practices and history, I highly suggest you check out the videos Adam Savage has done on his Tested YouTube channel. Wonderful and inspiring videos. May we all find something that moves us in such a way!

Leonardo da Vinci: Inside a genius mind post:

From the stages of his life to dispelling myths, and examining his masterpieces up close, everyone can delve into Leonardo’s mind as we’ve brought together for the first time 1,300 pages from his collections of volumes and notebooks. The codices, brimming sketches, ideas, and observations, offer a window into the boundless imagination of one of history’s greatest polymaths. With the aid of Machine Learning and the curatorial expertise of Professor Martin Kemp, the accompanying experiment also called “Inside a Genius Mind” unravels these intriguing and sometimes mysterious materials.

Full experiment here!

A Stoic Teacher? Lessons from Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus

Recently, I’ve been delving into a philosophy that’s been around for centuries but feels incredibly relevant to our modern times: Stoicism. In particular, I’ve been engrossed in the works of Marcus Aurelius, his ‘Meditations,’ (there are free versions out there on the web, but this Gregory Hayes version is my favorite), and Epictetus with his ‘Discourses (again, there are free versions available on the web that are easy to find, but this is a great version that I use personally).’ It’s been a transformative experience, which I am compelled to share, as it’s begun to significantly shape my perspective on parenting and teaching.

For those unfamiliar, Stoicism is a philosophy founded in Athens in the 3rd century BC but became especially popular in the first couple centuries of the Roman Empire. It teaches the development of self-control and fortitude as a means to overcome destructive emotions. The Stoic does not seek to extinguish feelings but instead transform them with a resolute ‘askēsis‘ that enables a person to develop clear judgment and inner calm.

Marcus Aurelius, a Stoic philosopher and Roman Emperor wrote ‘Meditations’ as a source of personal guidance and self-improvement. It’s a collection of thoughts, musings, and reminders to himself about the virtues he strived to cultivate—patience, humility, and understanding.

One of my favorite quotes from Aurelius is: “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.” This concept, often summarized as “the obstacle is the way,” has profoundly reframed challenges in my life. As a parent and a teacher, numerous unforeseen obstacles arise. Rather than viewing these as setbacks, I now see them as opportunities for growth and learning—for myself and the young minds I’m shaping.

Epictetus, a formerly enslaved person turned philosopher, taught that our reactions are the only things within our control. He said, “We cannot choose our external circumstances, but we can always choose how we respond to them.” This insight has shifted my approach to parenting. When my child gets upset, I can’t always control the situation causing the distress, but I can control my reaction. I can choose patience, understanding, and compassion.

In the classroom, the Discourses of Epictetus have also inspired me to shift my focus from the outcomes of my students to their effort and growth. This approach aligns perfectly with the Stoic emphasis on controlling what’s within our power. I can’t control the grades my students receive, but I can encourage their resilience, their determination, and their love of learning.

Stoicism, focusing on inner strength, self-control, and accepting what we cannot change, provides a robust framework for navigating life’s challenges. As I continue to study and incorporate these principles into my life, I’m better equipped to respond to the demands of parenting and teaching.

My journey into Stoicism is ongoing, and I’m excited to share more insights as they come. If you’re interested in exploring this philosophy, I recommend starting with ‘Meditations’ by Marcus Aurelius and ‘The Discourses by Epictetus (and pick up Pierre Hadot’s The Inner Citadel if you want a deep-dive). Their wisdom is timeless and, as I’ve found, profoundly applicable to our modern lives.

Rubik’s Cubes

I always keep a few Rubik’s Cubes in my classroom (and here on my desk at home). My son and daughters think they are fascinating and are constantly “borrowing” them. My students think they are equally entertaining and use them to stay awake during my otherwise boring lessons on Newton’s Laws or the Periodic Table.

Something about Rubik’s Cubes stimulate us and cause us to stop and think, “Hey, I could solve that!” in a way that perhaps no other trinket could do. We love magic with playing cards or juggling, but those require skill and practice.

Rubik’s Cubes, it seems, is a human puzzle that at least seems solvable. That is precisely why I love them in my classroom and on my desk… here at home. Humans love to solve puzzles when pondering the wider world around them. Go and do likewise.

Also, go watch this if you want to be blown away…

The New Rubik’s Cube World Record Is Just 3.13 Seconds:

In roughly the time it took you to read this sentence, Max Park solved a Rubik’s Cube. With his time of 3.13 seconds, Park bested Yusheng Du’s 2018 mark of 3.47 seconds. Just watch the video above…it’s ridiculous. I love how the judge comes in to preserve the scene as everyone goes bananas.

How To Remember Anything (Forever?)

I highly recommend you give this a try…

How To Remember Anything Forever-ish

I’ve long been a fan of reviewing the notecards that I take daily each night. Whether you’re running a company, teaching a subject, learning a subject, learning the guitar, or finding your way through life… you should be scribbling down notecards daily. Then review them at night. Then index and archive them repeatedly.

It’s a beautiful, easy (mostly) free system that will change you and help you change the world.

Productive Week?

Weird that I’ve gotten so much done the last few days since it’s technically “summer” for us teachers. But I find that keeping busy with consulting work, aquarium building, and taking notes on what I’m reading (to make myself a better person and teacher!) helps me keep the “I miss my students” blues at bay!

Something Funny Happened On the Way to Teaching Earth Science

I wasn’t particularly sure how my teaching year would go this year. I knew I was teaching Physics and Physical Science. Both of those are right in my wheelhouse and I enjoy teaching both of those immensely, and I’m incredibly passionate about the topics in those subject areas. However, the big question was Earth Science (and teaching 6th grade, which I’ve never done for an entire year).

Turns out, I fell in love with my 6th-grade classes and Earth Science has become something of a new passion of mine. I did not see that coming.

Lately, I’ve been reading books on geology and geologic time scales and catastrophic events and listening to audiobooks on plate tectonics and seabed composition, and subscribing to Apple News topics about geophysics, and hydrology… weird.

I’ve always been somewhat interested in Earth Science adjacent topics, obviously. I remember enjoying my own time in an Earth Science class in 8th grade and then in basic geology in college. But having to plan out an entire year and helping to motivate 11, 12, and 13-year-olds to get interested in the water cycle helped me realize just how incredible the topic can be.

Reminding young people that Earth, as we know it, is an incredibly and rapidly ever-changing system and not some static immovable rock where things have always been the same has been such a joy and a privilege. Plus, it’s a humbling reminder of our own human place in the Creation and the Cosmos!

I can’t wait to explore some of these topics with our Upper Schoolers next year in our new Earth & Space Science class that we’re launching next year at TSA!

Chalk Apocalypse

So, when Hagoromo announced that it was going out of business in 2014, it caused a rupture in the math community.”

I referred to it as a chalk apocalypse,” Conrad said. In a panic, mathematicians across America began stockpiling resources in preparation.”

I calculated how many boxes I would need to last 10 to 15 years and I bought that many boxes,” says Lieblich.Dave Bayer took things even further. “I single-handedly bought the rest of the Amazon supply in the middle of the night,” he said.

Source: How a brand of chalk achieved cult status among mathematicians – CNN

I was gifted with an old sliding blackboard in my 2nd year of teaching (and my first year of teaching Physical Science). I loved that board and was sad to leave it later in my career when I went to a new school.

There’s something special about chalk covered hands and the feel of writing on a blackboard to make a point about F=MA or the structure of an atom.

Now I want to go stock up on some Hagoromo and find a good blackboard for my children.

Stanford to cut Stanford Univ. Press

Just wow.

The Stanford press actually brings in about $5 million a year in book sales, a sum that is impressive compared to sales of many scholarly publishers. But it has also depended on support from the university, which in recent years has provided $1.7 million annually.

Provost Persis Drell told the Faculty Senate Thursday that the university was ending that funding. She cited a tight budget ahead, due to a smaller than anticipated payout coming from the endowment. (The endowment is worth more than $26 billion and is the fourth largest in American higher education.)

Stanford publishes about 130 books a year. It is particularly well-known in the fields of Middle Eastern studies, Jewish studies, business, literature and philosophy. The press has also been capable of undertaking long-term scholarly efforts, such as a 20-year project to translate the Zohar, the key work in understanding the Jewish thought of the Kabbalah.

Source: Stanford moves to stop providing funds to its university press

You’re not “addicted” to tech and why it’s dangerous to say you are

As a teacher from 2001-2006 and then from 2008-2012, I had the chance to work with dozens of young people and their parents at a time when so much we knew and thought about education and transmitting information was changing. There was a rapid cultural shift in that decade that was primarily driven by “technology” and the internet.

One theme that remained constant going back to the first time we set up a class blog in 2003 was the notion of “tech addiction”. It remained a constant question and concern of parents and education colleagues (particularly my administrators) over the years.

Since 2012 as a marketing and tech consultant primarily working with religious orgs, nonprofits, and community groups, I’ve encountered the same concerns about tech addiction and young people. From MySpace to Instant Messaging to World of Warcraft to Instagram to Facebook to Fortnite, the boogeyman of evil tech hellbent on ruining our children’s minds and attention and willingness to go outside and play stickball keeps a constant current over time.

However, tech addiction (in the mainstream cultural sense) is just that… a boogeyman. It’s much better to focus on our responsibilities and usage patterns… as adults and parents and community members… rather than blaming Zuckerberg for our lack of accepting personal agency and being responsible people with our choices.

Good piece here that says all this in a much nicer and more approachable way:

Nir says the idea that technology is “hijacking your brain” or that the general population is “addicted” to their phones is rubbish.“Yes, there’s a very small percentage of people that very much are addicted—which is a completely different conversation—but this ‘addiction to technology’ is not the generalized disorder the media and others would have you think it is.”

Source: You’re not “addicted” to tech (and why it’s dangerous to say so) – RescueTime

Defending the Liberal Arts

Long overdue…

The new statement offers a counterargument to the notion that the liberal arts are impractical, and perhaps unnecessary. The disciplines, it argues, increase students’ curiosity, prepare them to be lifelong learners, and offer a foundation for academic freedom. As a result, the associations argue, the benefits of the liberal arts should be available to “all college students and not solely a privileged few.”

— Read on www.chronicle.com/article/2-Associations-Forcefully/243544

The dangers of thinking “They’ll get it because they’re young”

So very true despite the stereotypes (spoken as a former college / high school / middle school teacher turned tech consultant). Parents have a big burden to bear in helping their young and old children make wise decisions about how and why to use the web. Just assuming “they’ll get it because they’re young” is very dangerous.

What is surprising about this data is that while education is a factor in online security literacy, age is less so. Users aged 65 and older were seemingly just as knowledgeable as users in the age range of 18-29; while online literacy bias in general is weighted toward younger users, the Pew survey suggests that overall there is a shared standard of what we know and what we don’t know.

Source: Why did we give our data to Facebook in the first place? – Scientific American Blog Network

Link: How David Bowie helped my autistic son become himself.

I’ll freely admit that I didn’t make it through this without some tears…

I don’t think it’s saying too much to suggest that Bowie helped Benj discover his humanity. Like all of us, the parents, the therapists, and teachers, he was drawing the child’s spirit out into the light of relations that could sustain it. But the opposite is true too. Bowie the wild man, the extravaganza, the extraterrestrial—he was, as he always knew, in desperate need of being humanized, of being understood as merely, fully, human. Everything he did was about its being all right to be yourself—that’s what Benj heard and, in the mirror he held to himself, allowed Bowie again to be.

Source: How David Bowie helped my autistic son become himself.

Less School

This is going to put me at odds with many of my more liberal friends, but I do see the justification for the argument here as well as “The Case Against Education.” Education is big business and we’re not educating our children (or adults) in the US in a way that best suits their future or the future of our republican democracy.

So what is really going on? Caplan offers plausible evidence that school functions to let students show employers that they are smart, conscientious, and conformist. And surely this is in fact a big part of what is going on. I’ve blogged before one, and in our book we discuss, some other functions that schools may have served in history, including daycare, networking, consumption, state propaganda, domesticating students into modern workplace habits.

Source: Overcoming Bias : Read The Case Against Education

Learning to Summize?

Take a picture of a textbook page and instantly get summaries, analyses, videos, flashcards and annotations.

Source: Summize

I’ve been playing with this new app this morning. It’s … interesting and has caused me to stop and think.

And to think… I had months (if not years) of instruction time at elementary, middle, high school, and college levels training me to summarize, analyze, annotate and make flashcards.

Remember SQ3R? I certainly do.

Survey
Question
Read (R1)
Recite (R2)
Review (R3)

We had entire classes and tests on “study skills.” Barf. If anything, SQ3R etc made me detest reading textbooks at an early age even more than I already did (which is why I rarely if ever used them as a middle school teacher). Granted, reading and processing a college textbook is much different than reading for pleasure (which is probably one of the reasons why I became a Religion major and find escape from textbooks).

Here’s an example of Summize’s “Bias Analysis” from a page I randomly took from The Practice of Adaptive Leadership:

2016-05-18 09.50.18

It doesn’t get all the words right, but come on… that’s pretty interesting when you consider anyone can do that from their iPhone. This is from the “Concept Analysis” feature, which basically gives you the rundown of a page’s main concepts for review:

2016-05-18 09.56.20

There’s also an automatic flashcard builder or you can snap your own essays and do quick grammar checks. You see where I’m going.

We thought desktops would revolutionize the classroom when I was a kid in the 80’s. Then it was CD-ROMs and laptops in the 90’s. Then it was personal digital assistants in the 00’s. Now we realize that the mobile revolution is the real instigator for substantive technological impact in education.

Mobile is just the beginning as we venture into an augmented / virtual reality world where information will, literally, be on our retinas in the blink of an eye (no fingertips needed this time).

It pains me to consider that concepts and skills such as spelling, punctuation, state capitols, multiplication tables, cursive writing (well, not really that one), lines of Shakespeare etc may not be required to be stored in our brains in the near future … if now. Or perhaps even the larger concepts of knowing how to look at a page of a textbook, get out your various colored highlighters, and go to work summarizing and finding the “main ideas” aren’t requirements for “successful” reading and processing.

Sure, they’re good things to know… but so were knowing star charts, how to hunt skin squirrels, and morse code at one time (not that all three aren’t still very valuable in certain circumstances).

Does this make post-millennials (or whatever we are going to call them) any more “lazy” than the Baby Boomers? I don’t think so. I know plenty of Baby Boomers who decry having to carry a mobile phone yet learn to love FaceTiming their family after a few weeks of doing so.

The older I get, the more I realize that conceptions of required understandings, skills, concepts etc are all in constant flux. Perhaps we benefited someway in the 20th century U.S. by having a rather sturdy monoculture that gave us a clear “common core” roadmap of things that every person of good standing should know and know how to do.

But I’ll take this evolving 21st century realization that normative culture isn’t the best path for the education of our children. Perhaps technological tools can help us rise above the barriers that very real socio-economic barriers of schools and home circumstances that previously segmented our society from the outset and didn’t give many kids the opportunity to “be all that they can be.”

By the way, the Founder of Summize is 18.