The Educator's Notebook

9 General Tips For Talking With Kids About Racial Violence
LA Times - 8/12/17

"Mental health experts and parents discussed their experiences Saturday, and shared advice for talking to children about the violence in Charlottesville. Here are their tips:”
Howard Stevenson on How to Talk with Kids after Racial Incidents
University of Pennsylvania - 7/13/16

"Talking about race in America can be scary. People don’t want to be seen as a racist or someone trying to start a conflict. But the less prepared we are to think about race and talk about race, the scarier those conversations are when they occur. And children need tools for how to feel and speak about these issues.”

How What We Know Can Impede Our Creativity
New York Times - 8/19/17

"The explanation may have to do with a tension between two kinds of thinking: what computer scientists call exploration and exploitation. When we face a new problem, we adults usually exploit the knowledge about the world we have acquired so far. We try to quickly find a pretty good solution that is close to the solutions we already have. On the other hand, exploration — trying something new — may lead us to a more unusual idea, a less obvious solution, a new piece of knowledge. But it may also mean that we waste time considering crazy possibilities that will never work, something both preschoolers and teenagers have been known to do.”
“Design Thinking Is Bull___” Says Designer [video]
99u - 6/7/17

What Freedom of Speech Does and Doesn’t Include
United States Courts (.gov) - 8/19/17

"Freedom of speech includes the right: To use certain offensive words and phrases to convey political messages… Freedom of speech does not include the right: To incite actions that would harm others.”
Digital Humanities Analysis Reveals How the Alt-Right Coalesced
Quartz - 8/18/17

"They’re a loose collection of people from disparate backgrounds who would never normally interact: bored teenagers, gamers, men’s rights activists, conspiracy theorists and, yes, white nationalists and neo-Nazis. But thanks to the internet, they’re beginning to form a cohesive group identity. And I have the data to prove it… I used Google’s BigQuery tool, which lets you trawl through massive datasets in seconds, to interrogate a collection of every Reddit comment ever made—all 3 billion of them.”
How Do We Teach WWI From A Non-Western Perspective?
Stanford - 8/18/17

For Some Purposes, Taking Notes With Computers Can Be Better
KQED - 8/17/17

"While both of these studies make wide generalizations about the detrimental impact of technology on education, neither offers any recommendations, such as those presented below.”
When We Take Pictures, How It Affects What We Remember, Share
Wired - 8/13/17

A Burst Of Books Are Out About Boredom
New York Times - 8/10/17
Reflections On How Amateurs And Professionals Are Different
Farnam Street - 8/7/17

"Amateurs don’t have any idea what improves the odds of achieving good outcomes. Professionals do. Amateurs show up to practice to have fun. Professionals realize that what happens in practice happens in games.”
17 Essays on “Meaningful Education in Times of Uncertainty”
Brookings - 8/3/17

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