Doing my usual Sunday-lesson-planning, I ran across this quote and was deeply moved by it:
"Washington taught the world to know us. Lincoln taught us to know ourselves. The first won for us our independence. The last wrought out our manhood and self respect" (The Expositor).
Somewhere in there is a connection to our our Mission and Vision. I humbly leave that as a thought for the day.
Here is a video produced on behalf of the Starkville, Mississippi, School District for their teachers and the beginning of the school year. The core message of believing is one that any teacher should ascribe to because what is belief? Mental acceptance of a claim as truth? Our theme for the year, Understanding and Living our Ignatian Mission, hints that there is more to it that mere understanding, mere acceptance - there is the living of it.
Do you believe in your students, in yourself, in your fellow teachers, in your Ignatian mission? How will you live that belief this year?
[via nctplarry]
Reading the July 2009 issue of Education Update, the monthly publication of the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD), I was struck by a brief quotation that summarizes one of the central tasks of education. From Eric Hoffer, author, philosopher, longshoreman, and Presidential Medal of Freedom awardee, and his 1973 book, Reflections on the Human Condition:
The central task of education is to implant a will and a facility for learning; it should produce not learned but learning people. The truly human society is a learning society, where grandparents, parents, and children are students together. In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.
In what ways are we teaching our students to learn? We all want to create life-long learners, but what do we do, in word and deed, to foster that or to discourage it?
The July/August issue of Scientific American Mind has an article by Emily Laber-Warren that asks the simple question, "Can you be too perfect?"
Perfectionists, research shows, can become easily discouraged by failing to meet impossibly high standards, making them reluctant to take on new challenges or even complete agreed-upon tasks. The insistence on dotting all the i’s can also breed inefficiency, causing delays, work overload and even poor results. Perfectionism can hurt health and relationships, too. It is associated with anorexia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, social anxiety, writer’s block, alcoholism and depression. Such problems may be prevalent: a 2007 study that evaluated more than 1,500 college students revealed that nearly one quarter of them suffered from an unhealthy form of perfectionism.
Perfectionism, like most things, is not inherently bad. In fact,
research conducted over the past 15 years has associated positive perfectionism with greater achievement, such as higher grade point averages and better performance in triathlons. Positive-striving perfectionism leads to better health and mood, more sociability and higher levels of life satisfaction. When Bieling and his colleagues separated positive perfectionists from unhealthy ones in their 2003 midterm-exam study, they found that the positive perfectionists felt better prepared for the exam and got higher grades than either unhealthy perfectionists or nonperfectionists. Olympic athletes also turned out to be positive perfectionists…
So, what do we do to foster healthy perfectionism? Or, at least, minimize unhealthy perfectionism?
Image:
Hair pulling stress by stuartpilbrow
Watching my "Rental Kids" surf the internet, following chains of links, tracking information backwards, I was struck by the quality of their critical consumption.
Jill Tucker has a well-developed article on high-tech cheating in today's Chronicle.
According to "a national survey released this week", more than one-third of teens report using cell phones to cheat. Some store notes on their cellphones, some send text messages during exams, and some use their smartphones (Blackberries or iPhones, for example) to browse the internet for answers during exams; the methods vary but the end results are the same. (I caught a student in World History 1 using an iPhone to cheat on a test.)
My suggestions for dealing with the issue of high-tech cheating are obvious:
The article, More high-tech cheating - and rationalizing, is worth reading; it is worth the reminder that we are not immune from cheating in our classes.
Quite a few teachers have Facebook accounts and some (though fewer than Facebook) have Twitter and Flickr accounts. There is certainly no reason for teachers to not have accounts with these services, but I know people worry about the out-of-classroom contact with students.
Dana Boyd, a researcher with Microsoft and a Fellow at the Harvard Berkman Center, wrote an article that summarizes the advantages and disadvantages of teachers and students interacting in social networks, when teachers and students connect outside school. I like her summary:
We used to live in a world where space dictated context. This is no longer the case. Digital technologies collapse social contexts all the time. The key to figuring out boundaries in a digital era is not to try to revert to space. The key is to focus on people, roles, relationships, and expectations. A teacher's role in relation to a student should not end at the classroom door. When a teacher runs into a student at a local cafe, they are still that student's teacher. When a teacher runs into a student online, they are still that student's teacher. Because of the meaning of a teacher-student relationship, that should never be relaxed; the role of teacher should always be salient...
Boyd ends the article with a simple enough question: "What do you think is the best advice for other teachers when it comes to interacting with students on social network sites?"
We will probably address many of these issues in August at a workshop on Twitter (workshop details), but here are some of my initial responses to Boyd's question.
I simply cannot keep up with the amount of material that The Economist produces on a regular basis. If you have ever subscribed to the magazine, you know how difficult it can be to actually read everything that is in it, each and every week.
By way of example, The Economist has a column, Daily charts, maps, graphs, and tables, that regularly provides simple infographics displaying a wealth of information. You can subscribe to the RSS feed, but I'd recommend just checking in to the site every few months and browsing for topics that might interest you.
For instance, the Government folks might be interested in this analysis of politicians' previous professions:
To find out why some professions are prevalent among politicians The Economist trawled through a sample of almost 5,000 politicians in “International Who’s Who”, a reference book, to examine their backgrounds. Some findings are predictable. Africa is full of military men, while lawyers dominate in democracies such as Germany, France and, of course, America. China has a fondness for engineers. But other countries have their own peculiarities. Egypt likes academics; South Korea, civil servants; Brazil, doctors.
Or this analysis of where teenage drunkenness is most prevalent:
According to a new report on substance use by teenagers in over 30 countries, Danish parents may have the most reason to fret about their children's drinking. In 2007 almost half of Danish 15-16 year olds said they had been drunk in the past 30 days, the highest proportion among the 35 countries surveyed. And around four-fifths said they had been drunk at some point. In countries that were most sober, the prevalence of drinking was also generally lower.
At last check, there were 499 such infographics available at the site.
This is not about politics but about liberal1 education. In July of 2008, prior to the existence of this blog, I had sent an email out to the English and Social Science departments an article from The Wilson Quarterly on the "burden of the Humanities" in education. McClay summarized the role of the Humanities thus:
The humanities, rightly pursued and rightly ordered, can do things, and teach things, and preserve things, and illuminate things, which can be accomplished in no other way. It is the humanities that instruct us in the range and depth of human possibility, including our immense capacity for both goodness and depravity. It is the humanities that nourish and sustain our shared memories, and connect us with our civilization's past and those who have come before us. It is the humanities that teach us how to ask what the good life is for us humans, and guide us in the search for civic ideals and institutions that will make the good life possible.
I thought of this article again while watching the President of Bennington College, Elizabeth Coleman, discuss how the curriculum of that Liberal Arts college has been completely reworked to celebrate the original ideas of an liberal education. From her introduction at TED: she "delivers a call-to-arms for radical reform in higher education. Bucking the trend to push students toward increasingly narrow areas of study, she proposes a truly cross-disciplinary education -- one that dynamically combines all areas of study to address the great problems of our day."
Think, for example, of the unintended consequences of some of the UC requirements. I remember students being able to easily try different Fine Arts while at SI. College, according to Coleman, continues this process. "The progression of today's college student is to jettison every interest except one. And within that one, to continually narrow the focus. Learning more and more about less and less. This, despite the evidence all around us of the interconnectedness of things."
I'm not sure that I would go as far as Bennington College has gone, in so far as completely eliminating academic departments within the college, but she presents a fascinating and compelling alternative to the specialization of most universities.
She breaks one of the cardinal rules of TED, "Thou shalt not read," but given the extraordinary content, I hope you will forgive her.
[In case the above embed does not work, here is the link to the talk.]
On a related note, if you missed this the first time around, you might be interested in this excerpt on Pantagruel's education from Francois Rabelais.
Michelle Obama makes an interesting plea for education at a TED Talk. Her remarks are directed more at the students, urging them to take advantage of the opportunities that they are afforded, than at anyone else.
[If the embed doesn't work, here is the link to the TED Talk.]
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