The Educator's Notebook

“How To Hold A Better Class Discussion” - A Deep Dive
Chronicle of Higher Education - 8/7/22

“Faculty members often assume it’s a matter of serendipity. The reality is that effective class discussions — much like effective lectures — are the result of careful planning. Students must do their part by coming to class ready to participate. But there are ways to increase the likelihood that they will be prepared, and to avoid the frustration of a sea of impassive faces.”
On Friendship, Class, And Social Mobility
Brookings - 8/2/22

“Creating more connections across class lines – either through greater economic integration of our institutions and neighborhoods or more opportunities for cross-class social engagement – looks to be the most promising route to improving rates of upward economic mobility.”

“What Biology Enables, Culture Forbids”
Farnam Street - 8/5/22

“How can we distinguish what is biologically determined from what people merely try to justify through biological myths? A good rule of thumb is ‘Biology enables, culture forbids.’ Biology is willing to tolerate a very wide spectrum of possibilities. It’s culture that obligates people to realize some possibilities while forbidding others.”
On The Relationship Between Teacher Diversity And Student Success
Brookings - 8/1/22

A Fascinating Take On How TikTok Is Unseating Facebook. For Now.
New Yorker - 7/28/22

“Both Facebook and Twitter were built on the same general model of leveraging hard-to-replicate, large social graphs to generate a never-ending stream of engaging content, a strategy that proved to be robust in the face of new competition and incredibly lucrative… This rejection of the social-graph model has allowed TikTok to circumvent the barriers to entry that so effectively protected early social-media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. By separating distraction from social connection, TikTok can directly compete for users without the need to first painstakingly build up an underlying network, link by link. By all accounts, this attention blitzkrieg is working incredibly well.”

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