The Educator's Notebook

On The Challenge Of Teaching The “Hard History” Of Slavery
NPR - 2/4/18

"How many students chose slavery as the reason the South seceded? Eight percent… Textbooks and teachers tend to accentuate the positive, focusing on heroes like Harriet Tubman or Frederick Douglass without also giving students the full, painful context of slavery.”
"The Usefulness Of Useless Education”
Huffington Post - 7/31/17

"The quest for knowledge is best driven by intense curiosity rather than utility. It requires not only structure but also passion. And as Flexner pointed out, what seems useless today frequently turns out to be exactly what one needs tomorrow. Education is the same. Of course education provides career skills, but like research, it is more than useful facts and skills. Students need to explore because they are themselves curious. They need to develop a thirst for learning. They need to be excited and passionate about knowledge. They need to learn unencumbered by the demands of utility.”

Forget The Tests: Assess Students On Your School Values (And How)
NAIS - 1/1/18

"How do we know whether School X is living up to its values? The answer is surprisingly simple, and yet many schools fail to do it: Ask the students.”

"Shocker: Humanities Grads Gainfully Employed and Happy”
Inside Higher Ed - 2/7/18
Plagiarism Software Identifies More Of Shakespeare’s Sources
New York Times - 2/7/18

"In reviewing the book before it was published, David Bevington, professor emeritus in the humanities at the University of Chicago and editor of “The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (7th Edition),” called it “a revelation” for the sheer number of correlations with the plays, eclipsed only by the chronicles of Holinshed and Hall and Plutarch’s “Lives.””

Oxford Comma Dispute Settled For $5 Million
New York Times - 2/9/18

"Ending a case that electrified punctuation pedants, grammar goons and comma connoisseurs, Oakhurst Dairy settled an overtime dispute with its drivers that hinged entirely on the lack of an Oxford comma in state law. The dairy company in Portland, Me., agreed to pay $5 million to the drivers, according to court documents filed on Thursday.”

Some Tips For Self-Driven Growth As An Educator
Guardian - 2/10/18
“Finding Time For Collaborative Planning” [pdf]
Education Resource Strategies - 1/1/18

"We profiled four school systems that, with an intensive focus on improving the quality of instruction through professional learning, have seen above-average results with a relatively high-need student population. These systems have replaced traditional professional development efforts, such as one-off workshops and general coaching, with a more strategic model that includes…”

On Teaching In The Age Of Information
Sense and Sensation - 2/7/18

"With innovation’s unending arrival on our doorstep, I thrill at the access and stimulation that have arrived with it, but I wonder about how we cope with it, about what we learn from it... I wonder, for instance, about schools with metal detectors. I wonder about airports with liquid-free travel and computers with parental controls; and I wonder why, in so many cases like these, we keep putting the training wheels on instead of taking them off.”

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