The Educator's Notebook

On The Value Of Difficulty, The Danger Of Convenience
New York Times - 2/16/18

"Today’s cult of convenience fails to acknowledge that difficulty is a constitutive feature of human experience. Convenience is all destination and no journey. But climbing a mountain is different from taking the tram to the top, even if you end up at the same place… We need to consciously embrace the inconvenient — not always, but more of the time. Nowadays individuality has come to reside in making at least some inconvenient choices.”
“A New Idea To Promote Transfer”: Analogous Thinking
Daniel Willingham - 2/11/18

"Subjects who invented an analogous problem were more likely to successfully solve the radiation problem compared to subjects not asked to invent a problem… it's a technique that prompts people to focus attention on the deep structure, just as comparison does.”

Kids Want To Know About Love
KQED - 2/8/18

"It turns out that teens are yearning for these lessons. They’re looking for more guidance from parents on emotional aspects of romantic relationships — everything from “how to develop a mature relationship” to “how to deal with breakups.””
A Very Frank Examination Of The Effects Of Pornography On Teens
New York Times - 2/7/18

"But for around two hours each week, for five weeks, the students — sophomores, juniors and seniors — take part in Porn Literacy, which aims to make them savvier, more critical consumers of porn… Porn education is such new territory that no one knows the best practices, what material should be included and where to teach it.”

"Why ‘Black Panther’ Is A Defining Moment For Black America”
New York Times - 2/12/18

"There exists, somewhere within us, an image in which we are whole, in which we are home. Afrofuturism is, if nothing else, an attempt to imagine what that home would be. “Black Panther” cannot help being part of this.”
Prevention- And Promotion-Orientation With Men And Women
Medium - 2/11/18

"We found that 67% of the questions posed to male entrepreneurs were promotion-oriented, while 66% of those posed to female entrepreneurs were prevention-oriented.”

A Shooting At A High School. Students Engage On Social Media
Atlantic - 2/17/18

"In the wake of mass shootings that target adults, usually victims’ husbands, wives, parents, or adult children speak for them. But this is the largest high-school shooting in the social-media age—so it centers on adolescents, who can discuss and understand the tragedy as adults but who are as blameless for it as children.”
“Welcome To The Post-Text Future”: How Social Media Is Changing
New York Times - 2/9/18

"Then there’s the more basic question of how pictures and sounds alter how we think. An information system dominated by pictures and sounds prizes emotion over rationality. It’s a world where slogans and memes have more sticking power than arguments.”

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