Those who know me may see that this title is meant as a rhetorical device… A while ago I ran across a rather interesting article (here) which presented this very thesis. I probably should refine my own title to deal with math, sciences, and engineering classes, since this was the point of the article I [...]
I have little to say about this article other than: 1. Read it! 2. Consider when this will be implemented in your school, or wonder why not! A Simple Exercise to Boost IQ http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/06/a-simple-exercise-to-boost-iq Can we make ourselves smarter? In recent decades, scientists have accumulated increasing evidence that our intelligence, at least as measured by [...]
One of the obvious subtexts of any form of teaching and learning would be to simply get all of the salient information into a student’s long term memory. If you factor in some skill acquisition and in particular how to think…you have education pretty well summed up. At least from one point of view… I [...]
I spend a lot of time trolling through a wide swath of education related sites and blogs. One of the tropes I see, over and over, is some unholy combinations of selling snake oil with throwing the baby out with the bathwater. By this, I would respectfully suggest that presenting a ‘radically new reinvisioning of…let’s [...]
I have a lot of citations form this Salon.com article (it is pretty darn well written!), and it deals with one of the underlying reasons I got into teaching in the first place. As with the author, I learned to love literature (mostly on my own…not in high school English classes). Many of my friends [...]
I’ve written about the seemingly radical idea that Rote memorization is not a terrible thing in today’s schools. One of the more obvious cases…the idea that elementary students memorize the alphabet by rote memorization techniques…have been used for centuries in education (i.e. learning the A-B-C’s)… There is a practical need to have this sort of [...]
The advantages and advancements of modern computer and internet technology are in a process of changing many of the things we do. This has changed many of the jobs we have, and much of what we do for our free time. The idea that there are comparable changes needed in education is then understandably reasonable. [...]
The term ‘deliberate practice’ relates to discipline, rigor, and memorization in that they are all ways to develop skills beyond merely understanding things. There is much related to ‘deliberate practice’ which relates to metacognitive methods (i.e. learning how to learn, and generally how to hack how you do things), and can be easily seen in [...]
I have a couple of fascinating blog posts to talk about today. They both present some aspects of the idea that traditional schools (with age cohort classes, classrooms, and scheduled weekday times for classes) may become a vestige of the past. The Jeff Thomas Tech blog presents the idea that traditional schools may be in [...]
Yesterday’s post about introducing chess into school curricula feels like a bookend to this post…instead of focusing upon inculcating valuable disciplines in young students, I have some information about the results of these types of activities later in life. Learning to play a musical instrument, as well as working through the complexities of music theory, [...]
