KIERAN EGAN WAS A VISIONARY: Yesterday I made reference to the podcast below, which I'm embedding here. Well worth the :45 it will take to listen, especially the last half. I've also ordered a stack of Egan books for the teacher section of the library, and you might be interested to read the Substack of the podcast guest (Brandon Hendrickson at The Lost Tools of Learning)
CLASS STARTERS: Nice, practical evaluation of the Do Now Activities many teachers use to ensure a calm start to each class. I especially liked the author highlighting that one way to make them ineffective is to make them non-self-checkable for students, which is an educational pet peeve of mine. I fail to see the point in most coursework outside of assessment that's not at least partially self-verifying
TWITTER: If you're a teacher who's not on twitter, I don't know what you're doing. I find the most amazing things there, from the extremely practical to the gloriously weird. It's also a nice playground to test out ideas; I don't toot my own horn often here, but I was pretty pleased with the way I phrased my thoughts yesterday (after listening to the podcast ref'd above and thinking about my own educational journey from hard-line rules guy to extremely laid-back dude).
AUTONOMY: Teaching, like parenting, is one of the few jobs on earth where "success" is equivalent to "rendering yourself completely unnecessary." I think the good people at Let Grow are on to something, and I loved this post about how the way modern child-rearing and education sometimes gets in the way of the whole point of those endeavors.
VOLCANOS: Phenomenal photos here of the recent volcano eruption in Iceland.
LITERARY AI CHATBOTS: Utterly fascinated by both this post on a Holden Caulfield chatbot used by one teacher in a classroom, which led to the realization that there's an entire website dedicated to chatbots that speak in the style of famous literary characters (like Jay Gatsby). Have fun with that in class. My immediate take on a possible assignment: Have two students sit in a chat window you display on screen, and give one student the task of interviewing "the chatbot" while the other student acts as "the chatbot." You could even demo the task by the teacher (you!) taking the role of "the chatbot" for a character first to model what you want to see.
I, for one, would love the opportunity to spend ten minutes channeling John Kennedy Toole's Ignatius J. Reilly character as I roast student responses in real time.
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