Getting tough

I watched a talk this morning by an economist named Tyler Cowen about the impact of stories.  Every time you tell yourself this kind of  story (good guys/bad guys good neighbor/inconsiderate neighbor, good teacher/bad teacher etc.), Cowen says, you’re lowering your own IQ.  He’s taking liberties, of course but his point is well taken nonetheless.  [...]

Uniqueness is messy.

This American Life’s recent episode on middle school mentions Maria Montessori’s belief that the appropriate environment for a child of middle school age is a farm school. What I’ve read about this idea and many other Montessori ideas sounds wonderful: young people at work and play alongside respectful adults who can teach them to do [...]

Ideas, ‘rising in crowds’

The brain needs time to be focused and time to be wandering, and it needs it when it needs it. If we get too attached to forcing kids to be creative when we think it’s a good time to be creative and to be otherwise when we think it’s a good time to be otherwise, [...]

Beyond suffering

A few weeks ago I wrote about how kids are oriented toward fun, and how adults tend to be wary of this orientation.  It’s one thing to enjoy one’s self, we think, but too much attention on fun seems like it might suggest that a child isn’t motivated to do the hard stuff in life [...]

Back

Seth Godin, yesterday, on school. Seth’s an authority on jobs and work, business and the economy, and how everything fits together.  He doesn’t talk about school and education as often as I wish he would, but when he does, he gets it really right. And interestingly, on his Facebook page which has more than 130,000 [...]

Fashion

The other day I followed an online link to a list of “surprisingly lucrative” careers.  Fashion design was on the list.  I wasn’t actually all that surprised that a career in fashion could be lucrative, but its presence on the list called to mind a chronic problem which, I believe, really holds us back as [...]

Top billing

Parents of kids who struggle with or resist traditional academic subjects (math, reading, writing, etc.) are usually encouraged to concentrate all their energy and resources on helping kids with those areas.  It makes sense, but it also doesn’t usually work.  It often has the opposite effect of what we intend.  With a few exceptions, kids [...]

Mathematician’s Lament…

I’m not sure how I didn’t know about this book already, but I’m glad I do now.  It’s called  A Mathematician’s Lament, and begins with the following quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach [...]

On great new ideas for schools

I don’t get as excited as I used to about great ideas for new schools.  I may seem  like a bit of a Grinch about the whole thing so I thought I’d clarify.  It’s not that I don’t think the ideas are great. Great people have great ideas for schools and how to make them [...]

Friends with fractions

I know lots of kids who can tell you that the top number in a fraction is called the numerator and the bottom number is called the denominator. But they don’t understand how the two numbers function or relate to each other.  The words numerator and denominator do technically describe the functions of each number, [...]