The Educator's Notebook

A Fantastic Conversation About How Language (And Thought) Works
New York Review of Books - 12/27/17

"When we say we are thinking, what we are actually doing is rearranging causal relations with past events, objects that we have encountered before, to see what happens when we combine them.”
A Chance Encounter With An SAT Tutor. A Life Changed.
New York Times - 12/25/17

"He spent hours with me that day demystifying the test-taking and application process and sharing study tools that I still find useful. He taught me the tricks to multiple-choice, and how to strategically answer math questions that I didn’t recognize. He walked me through my difficulties with subject-verb agreements and showed me how to “hack” large passages of text in order to answer reading comprehension questions.”
A Surprising Provocation Against—And For—The Humanities
American Affairs - 11/1/17

"The confusion over the purpose of the humanities has nothing to do with their relevance. The humanities are no more or less relevant now than they ever were. It is not the humanities that we have lost faith in, but the economic, political, and social order that they have been made to serve.”

Persistence: The Most Rejected Books That Were Eventually Published
Literary Hub - 12/22/17

"In the end, I received 60 rejections for The Help. But letter number 61 was the one that accepted me. After my five years of writing and three and a half years of rejection, an agent named Susan Ramer took pity on me. What if I had given up at 15? Or 40? Or even 60?”

Deconstructing The Silicon Valley Narrative That STEM = Success
Long View On Education - 12/28/17

"If we step back a moment, there is no lesson about employability and technical training to draw from Google’s hiring practices here, but rather a lesson about what employees want from a good manager.”

Five Tips For Encouraging Students To Read More
School Library Journal - 12/27/17
A Ringing Tribute To Difficult Reading
Guardian - 12/23/17

"The difficulty is the point… We all want the same things now: phones, clothes, and food to photograph. We are all consumers. Teenagers don’t want to stick it to the man anymore. They are the man… I want them to find something difficult and do it anyway. Then, I want them to notice what a powerful tool literature is, to understand that without it we can’t know ourselves or the society we live in. I want them to discover that if they learn to handle language they’ll no longer be helpless, drowning in sugary gratification.”

“Scientists Are Designing Artisanal Proteins For Your Body”
New York Times - 12/26/17

"Already, his team has built proteins for purposes ranging from fighting flu viruses to breaking down gluten in food to detecting trace amounts of opioid drugs.”
An Online Tool For Anyone To Make Circular Visualizations Of Factors
Desmos - 12/24/17
Circular Visualizations Of Integer Factors
Twitter - 12/22/17
Does A CS Major Actually Mean A Higher Salary, Anyway?
Free Code Camp - 12/21/17
The Math And Science Of (Why We Lose) Carnival Games
YouTube - 10/24/17

Drones Are A New Economic Landscape. (See: China)
New York Times - 12/28/17
Video Gaming Disorder Officially Labeled By World Health Org
Chicago Tribune - 12/28/17
Gaming Community Responds To WHO Gaming Disorder Label
Kotaku - 12/27/17
"How Tech Companies Own Your Day”
Bloomberg - 12/21/17

"As tech companies mature, they’re seeking new ways to generate revenue from each customer, and the battlefield is increasingly your most finite resource: time. That battle plays out every minute from the time we wake up until we go to bed, and doesn't look the same for everyone.”

How Different Countries Use Different GIFs To Express Themselves
New York Times - 12/29/17
Audrey Watters On “The Business Of ‘Ed-Tech Trends’”
Hack Education - 12/28/17
“How The Quality Of School Lunch Affects… Academic Performance”
Brookings - 5/3/17
Former Bodleian Social Media Mgr Shares Medieval Animated GIFs
Art + Marketing - 4/11/17

"I spent just over a year at the Bodleian being sassy on social media and making GIFs out of centuries-old collections. The animation of the Bodleian’s collections lent them new life. Beautiful images painstakingly made by monks and illustrators hundreds of years ago leapt from their pages anew onto Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr feeds.”

Search thousands of curated articles from all back issues