June 2013
Boy or girl? Gender a new challenge for schools →
usatoday.com
Actually less horrifying an article than I was expecting from USA Today. Notably, pronouns were correctly used the whole way through.
May 2013
Rev. Andrew Greeley, religious scholar, 1928-2013 | UChicago News →
news.uchicago.edu
Wow! Greely was a polarizer among Catholics for his tendency to see lived Catholicism as different from, and equally valid as, dogmatic Catholicism.
Worked on one of his studies at U of C.
Things to do in Milwaukee...
…when you’re done with an EdCamp in South Milwaukee and you drove 2 hours to get there?
I’m not currently in Wisconsin, but it’s a possibility for Saturday, so I thought I’d turn to my tumblr peeps.
Keeping in mind that Jack sometimes has mobility issues, ideas?
April 2013
Sick time
Apparently, my response to being really sick last night and most of today is to apply to another teaching job, finish the supplemental application to the summer teaching job, test-fold the smaller 5-petal rose, email the customer about paper choices, and work on the companion earring-sized paper crane that Jack wanted me to make.
“Is the take-home message, then, that cheating is good? Well…no. Although by conventional test-taking rules, the students were cheating, they actually weren’t in this case. Instead, they were changing their goal in the Education Game from “Get a higher grade than my classmates” to “Get to the best answer.” This also required them to make new rules for test taking. Obviously, when you make the rules there is no reason to cheat. Furthermore, being the rule-makers let students behave in a way that makes us a quintessentially unique species. We recognize when we are in a game, and more so than just playing along, we always try to bend the rules to our advantage.”
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Cheating to Learn: How a UCLA professor gamed a game theory midterm | Which Way L.A.?
When your students live the lesson, they learn better. IN this case, they also learn about learning.
Why your 8-year-old should be coding | VentureBeat →
venturebeat.com
Tynker: http://www.tynker.com/
For young kids: visual logic programming, the first step.
Treehouse: http://teamtreehouse.com/
For young adults, life-skills in an environment they get.
CodeAcademy: http://www.codecademy.com/
For everyone, learn to hack, because it’s good for you.
“Life Pieces is doing something I’ve never seen before,” Taylor Sr. says. “It’s like they take a personal interest in your child, and we have young men teaching younger men how to be men. And I love it.”
—In D.C., Art Program Turns Boys’ Lives Into ‘Masterpieces’ : NPR
Young People: Don't Be Afraid to Become a Teacher! | Edutopia →
edutopia.org
It’s not a profession to enter lightly. You won’t get the kind of professional respect that doctors or lawyers do…even if you should. It’s more of a calling. But, like a calling, it does not go easily ignored.
“What else? Well, nothing in American parenting is anything like the concept of ng’om, which is used by the Kipsigis people in rural Kenya to describe children who are especially intelligent and responsible. This concept of intelligence, as Harkness and Super have written, highlights “aspects of social competence, including responsibility and helpfulness.” These aspects, they add dryly, “have tended to be overlooked in Western formal theories of children’s intelligence.”
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Parental ethnotheories and how parents in America differ from parents everywhere else.
Y’know what? I’d like to call for a massive adoption of ng’om as a concept of childrearing in America, right f-ing now, because I keep seeing too much bullying and sexual violence among children lately.
Changing the Network to Connect the Learner Anywhere, Anytime | District Administration Magazine →
districtadministration.com
To address the needs for connectivity as more educator embrace BYOD (bring your own device) and other initiatives to lower the capital costs of connecting students, this article points out the larger-scale planning that must occurs, sometimes at county/state levels to allow cross-connecting students inside and outside of the classroom. It is all well and good if the teacher is available online all the time, and the resources exist 24/7, but if students can only connect at school, some of the benefits are lost. Good things to think about.
