On Sunday, I was reading the New York Times (on my iPhone for free…), and I ran across a rather curious op-ed piece (in the Opinions category of the paper). This ‘opinion piece’ was written by the seemingly new Public Editor (Arthur Brisbane) for the NYT: ‘In an age of Voices, Moving beyond the Facts’. This article, which was written in a breezy, bonhomie style, was one of the most breathtakingly insulting opinion pieces I have ever read! The intent of this article seems to have been superficially an opportunity for the paper to apologize for so many of the ‘news’ articles actually being opinion pieces (advocacy journalism, or ‘interpretive journalism’). In reality it much more a seemingly friendly finger in one’s eye…
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From my situation regarding the teaching business, I have been a student for well over forty years (ahem…maybe more than a few…), and as a teacher I currently have the opportunity to look over (via my memory) the various teaching methods, lessons and curricula which I have been subjected to. Since the early 1960’s there have been some tremendous changes in curricula, classroom management techniques, and even how socialization takes place within schools…
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Since the school year is upon us, I think that this is as good a time as any to consider some of the more reasonable uses of what has become not modern, but present technology. Email has become ubiquitous enough that I can’t really see how this could be seen a bugaboo even to some of the more Luddite-prone teachers. The idea is that you could (with only a bit of initiative) take the time to connect to another teacher (in a foreign country) via email; the net result is that it might be possible to have some of your class’s trade emails.
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Posted in Work
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Tagged email, students, teachers
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Over the weekend, I have been doing a bit of surfing to see what education related articles are online. My main reason was that the school year is about to start (actually it has started in some colleges last week and even for K-12 in a few states…). I found a link on the blog FreeTech4Teachers which connected me to a Boston Globe article covering the Burlington High School (and its principal). In any case, the crux of these articles was the seemingly unending debate about whether to allow students to bring various kinds of electronics into schools (read: cell phones in schools…).
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I was sitting in a local coffee shop thinking about some of the recent posts I have written what relate to metacognition (i.e. thinking about thinking). In the midst of my navel gazing the thought came to me “is there a sensation of thinking?” If there is a sensation of thinking, where does it reside?
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Posted in Thoughts
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Tagged metacognition
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In the few years since I graduated from college, it would seem that having a laptop (or the equivalent) has gone from being a handy tool to the prime prerequisite to college life. Not too surprisingly, there is a comparable movement of students toward dealing with electronic versions of textbooks (albeit several years after this movement towards complete laptop dominance in college scholastic work). First off, I always wondered who was making all of the huge profits from the school book business (it has a similar business model to that of a drug cartel…).
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I love being surprised by events in life…In a strange way, finding out that the People’s Republic of North Korea now has a Facebook page may qualify… I found this bit of trivia as enthralling as finding out that Muammar al-Gaddafi intended to market a super car of his own design (look out Ferrari!) a decade or so ago… About the only thing left that would surprise me would be something like Hugo Chavez getting a reality TV show on MTV…
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Posted in Thoughts
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Tagged bizarre, Facebook
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Long before I got into the education business I would hear lots about critical thinking, and how there is seemingly a dearth of thought on high school and college campuses. To be honest, I imagine that there are a lot of small initiatives (by individual teachers) all over the country which are making some progress, but taken as a whole, we don’t seem to have made any real progress.
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Posted in Work
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Tagged teaching, thinking, thunks
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Yesterday I was thinking about what is most important in one’s education. That is, what did you consider to me most important then…and now. The thought came to me that learning how to think would likely trump anything else in one’s growth as a human. This brings up a number of quite complicated questions for me (as a teacher). How do you teach someone to how to think? How did I learn?
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I’ve been using the iPad more and more in the last few months. It is quite obviously a very handy way to deal with media (emails, movies, music, books, etc.). But beyond this convenience, I am slowly coming to see that there are some emergent aspects of using this Apple tablet. Since I have almost immediate access to all of my documents, photos, music, movies, and almost anything I can get online…the nature of how I deal with all of these disparate kinds of information is changing.
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Posted in Tools
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Tagged Apps, iPad
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