Here we go for roundup number four. Hope you're finding them useful, and if you have something that should be on my radar, please send it my way!
ARE BOOKS DEAD?
The Atlantic has an ominous piece out this week alleging a near-total inability of incoming college freshmen to read a book-length work. The combination of the TikTokification of the American attention span, coupled with test-focused curriculum that relies on shorter excerpts like those found on standardized tests, has resulted in a generation that apparently either can't or won't wrestle with a book-length text. And when they do talk about a book they've read, it's almost always a YA fiction series like Percy Jackson.
Which wouldn't be a huge deal, I guess, except the grades aren't reflective of this paucity of intellectual development. Also linked in the piece is this report, which reveals that 79% of grades given at Harvard — Harvard! — are now apparently A-level.
I do not presume to know the solution, or how to communicate to a generation of parents that good grades aren't actually all that useful when they're so easy to acquire that everyone gets them.
It's not a book-length text, but perhaps we could start by just making everyone read and discuss Harrison Bergeron. Baby steps, you know?
THE LIBRARIAN READING LOG
I drop a short review of each book I read throughout the school year here, and last month I loved two in particular: The Many Assassinations of Samir the Seller of Dreams and BeaWolf.
DIRECTLY INTO MY VEINS
Thom Yorke is adapting Radiohead's "Hail to theThief" for a British production of Hamlet.
There are no more words necessary for this development, as they are insufficient for the near-total awesomeness of the moment.
LECTURE WELL
Harvard Business Review provides these four simple points for crafting messages that stick. Or, you could do what I've told every teacher I've hired in the past decade: Watch a metric ton of standup comedy, and emulate their pacing and tone as much as possible. (Plus, that makes tickets to see Dave Chappelle tax deductible as professional development! But maybe check with your accountant on that...)
LECTURE WELL (PART TWO)
As long as we're on the topic, I also think every teacher on the planet should read this really old Seth Godin post on Really Bad Powerpoint. It changed my career as a classroom teacher over a decade ago.
ARE WE TOO IMPATIENT TO BE INTELLIGENT?
That's the title of this excellent essay adapted from a talk by Rory Sutherland. It's a sprawling piece, covering railways and hotel check-in routines and phones at concerts, but the payoff in discussion about education and AI and the writing process is worth it IMO. This part in particular made me think of the way we break up school days into discrete chunks of time:
We also regard time as a kind of commodity, as if it’s fungible, as if 10 blocks of 10 minutes is the same as one chunk of 100 minutes. In human terms, this is absolutely not true. “The mere consciousness of an engagement will sometimes worry a whole day.” That’s Charles Dickens. In other words, if you try and break up your day into lots of little chunks of time, your productivity is massively destroyed even though the time available is pretty much notionally the same.
As with many of the things I drop here, I don't know what the solution is. But I find consideration of the problem fascinating in itself.
STUDENT CHOICE (WITH CONSTRAINTS)
John Spencer has a great post up (along with a podcast and multiple sketch videos) on what he calls a "Gradual Release" method of allowing students the freedom to choose their own learning pursuits, including a personal case study of how he got it wrong when he started.
A LESS ANXIOUS GENERATION
As we've all been reading and absorbing the Haidt book, I also appreciated this author's approach, in which he suggests that Haidt goes too far and offers simple methods for navigating phones with your children.
Comments