It has been a long time since I posted on this blog.

A lot has happened, and nothing has happened.

I November 2011 I wrote a novel for Nanowrimo. That was a great experience. I did it to unblock my chronic "I have nothing to say."

I want to blog, I want to write, to be a writer. so why am i still not?

highlighting

A friend of mine was taking a class to get her real estate license. Her instructor gave the class a text and told them to highlight the parts he told them to. If they highlighted what he said to, and they studied those parts for the real estate license test, they would pass.

My friend was highlighting what the instructor said to, and she was also highlighting what she described as other interesting things.

The instructor called her out: There's someone in the third row who is highlighting parts that I am not telling you to highlight.

My friend did not tell me what followed immediately, but she did get her license.

I saw a parallel between this instructor's behavior and attitude and the way teachers are told to teach in our test-driven, accountablility and measurability-obsessed education.

The teacher's job is to get the students ready for the test. The student's job is to do what the teacher says so the student will be prepared to pass the test.

Highlighting those useless, non-tested parts is a waste of time.


Except often those are the parts that are interesting.

And if education is not interesting to students, it's being done wrongly.


Ok, class, get out your highlighters. I think you should highlight the parts I talk about. But you need to follow your mind and heart and highlight anything you want to highlight, for whatever reason you want to.

We all need to know what we will be tested on; we need to understand immeasureably more than that.

instinct

At the core, down deep, is a willingness to act on instinct when the situation leaves no time for chewing things over or searching the memory for a textbook solution.  

I trust my instincts. They are the sum total of all I know, all I have read, all I have experienced, all I have learned.

Instinct has served me well all my life. It has permitted me to jump when others might not, and survive to tell the stories.

joe-galloway


Think of this in a teaching situation.

instinct.

I wouldn’t encourage you to remain at frustration level for very long but pushing your students past their cognitive comfort zone is our job.  Getting there may feel like pulling teeth but the good teachers keep pulling and less effective teachers just give up.

from last paragraph

"management"

No matter what incentives or punishments I throw at my students, nothing works better than a healthy class relationship.

http://blog.mrmeyer.com/?p=36#more-36

introduce a good question

from a math blog:
http://101studiostreet.com/wordpress/?p=691

Here’s what I want: I want the students to derive the equations of motion [a(t), v(t), and x(t)] from first principles. I want them to think about how the wind pushes a sailboat, and I want them to use their basic understanding of physics (F=ma) to go from there. I can’t say that aloud, though, or it has become my investigation they then have to do. I have to let it grow, otherwise all I’ll get is a picture of how well they follow my directions, not how well their mathematical intuition is developing.¹

So, I need to introduce a good question, one that is clear about what we’re doing, but not so clear that it maps the whole process out artificially. This process is the math. By using only the asinine problems from the book you are relegating math to a status of recipe following. Do you really want your kids to be the kind of people that won’t attempt to make a pizza from scratch for lack of the 1 tsp of anise seed that has little to do with the overall success of the dish? That’s the kind of math that is predominantly taught. Barf.

I am a participant in Carla Sonheim's online class, The Art of Silliness.
http://carlasonheim.wordpress.com/

I have been so in the flow of various creative activities in the past few days. This is some silliness I wrote on her blog, which I like and want to put where I can find it easily.

Joy Says:
April 3, 2010 at 4:13 pm

My Fleep list:
fleep– the universal language of silliness
plugatroid– a person who cannot resist plugging and unplugging things into other things
dofo– said (with a mix of relief and frustration) when you finally figure out what you were supposed to do instead of doing what you actually did
octify–to make 8 of anything
yerst– in Fleep, this is a preposition indicating causality. Due to the complexities of modern Fleep combined with its etymological nuances, a direct translation is not possible.

4.2 extra credit– phud is the sound your body makes when you collapse on the floor in a Fleepish excursion into laughter