The Educator's Notebook

Stories, Games, Case Studies: How Counterfactuals Help Learning
Literary Hub - 5/24/21

“Whether reading a book, playing a video game, or losing oneself in a daydream, these mental activities are not cognitive idling. Even a couch potato does more than just sit on the couch like a potato. As we experience and manipulate alternative realities—evaluating the universe of counterfactuals that we mentally construct—we ponder options and perhaps improve our judgment. We are training our mind and honing our skills as framers.”
Brilliant, Brutal Short Film About Algorithms, The Pandemic, And Humanity
YouTube / Financial Times - 5/21/21

“We know what you did during lockdown.”

"Why You Don’t Learn From Failure”
Character Lab - 5/23/21

“When we fail, we tune out. To avoid feeling bad about ourselves, we stop paying attention. As a result, we don’t learn from the experience. We do learn when failure is less personal. In our research, participants who struggled to learn from their own failures were able to learn from the failures of others. It can be hard to focus on our own failings, but the mistakes, recoveries, and hard-won lessons of friends and colleagues? Those are some teachable moments. Don’t magnify mistakes… Do spotlight success.”

On The Value Of Indexing In The Creative Process
Austin Kleon - 5/20/21

“No matter what you make, if you produce a lot every day, you need some sort of system for going back and figuring out what you have.”

“Five Big Ideas For Learner Centered Competency Framework Design”
Aurora Institute - 5/5/21
“Save The Humanities By Flipping The Curriculum”
James G. Martin Center - 6/22/20

“How can a humanities curriculum better serve students? First, teach grammar, logic, and rhetoric but not philosophy, literature, or other humanities courses to freshmen. Many freshmen are smart, ambitious, and motivated, but they do not yet have the intellectual capacities or the life experiences that they will bring into their junior and senior years.”

Why The Polarization Around Critical Race Theory Actually Is Mostly Fiction.
KQED - 5/28/21

“In reality, the bills many Republicans have proposed do not directly address critical race theory. Instead, many ban the teaching of concepts that educators say they don't teach anyway. A bill signed into law by Oklahoma governor Kevin Stitt bans lessons that include the concept that "one race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex," that a person's "moral character is inherently determined by his or her race or sex," or that someone should feel discomfort, guilt or distress on account of their race or sex. Nonetheless, educators say the newly adopted and proposed laws are already forcing teachers to second guess whether they can lead students in conversations about race and structural racism that many feel are critical at a time the nation is navigating an important reckoning on those issues.”

Track A Raindrop From Anywhere In The US To The Sea
Kottke - 5/24/21
“The Mystery Of Magic’s Greatest Card Trick”
New York Times - 5/23/21
"You Are A Network”
Aeon - 5/18/21

“How do you self-identify? You probably have many aspects to yourself and would resist being reduced to or stereotyped as any one of them.”

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