Ted Sizer on Essential Qualities of Good Schools

Inspiration, hunger: these are the qualities that drive good schools. The best we educational planners can do is to create the most likely conditions for them to flourish, and then get out of their way (221).

– Ted Sizer, Horace’s Compromise: The Dilemma of the American High School. 1984.

When Memorization Gets in the Way of Learning

When Memorization Gets in the Way of Learning

Ben Orlin urges teachers to mix memorization and meaning to build enduring understandings. 

The Digital Humanities is About Breaking Stuff

The Digital Humanities is About Breaking Stuff

The excellent “Hybrid Pedagogy” on moving beyond “building stuff’ and “sharing stuff” … 

“In fact, the course itself is one of the central texts we must consider, a collection of stories about reading and writing that can be actively hacked and remixed. Sean Michael Morris writes, “A course today is an act of composition,” an active present participle and not a static container. This is more and more true of courses that live even partially online, demanding we thoughtfully examine the digital as a frame, while recognizing that the digital does not supersede and can never unseat the work we do in the world. Kathi Inman Berens writes, “It doesn’t matter to me if my classroom is a little rectangle in a building or a little rectangle above my keyboard. Doors are rectangles; rectangles are portals. We walk through.” This is where learning happens, at the breaking point of its various containers. The semester is arbitrary. The course is breached. Canons must yield.

This is true just as well of the literary texts we analyze (and ask students to analyze) with digital tools.”

 – See more at: http://www.hybridpedagogy.com/Journal/files/Digital_Humanities_is_About_Breaking_Stuff.html#sthash.4N3D98tK.dpuf

“Twenty Little Poems that Could Save America”

In honor of National Poetry Month …

Writing in Harpers Magazine, Tony Hoagland argues that the pathway for restoring poetry to American discourse begins at the classroom door, accompanied by a willingness to part with the “old chestnuts” —  oft-anthologized mainstays like “The Road Not Taken.”

http://harpers.org/blog/2013/04/twenty-little-poems-that-could-save-america/

But largely, c’mon — you and I both know — real live American poetry is absent from our public schools. The teaching of poetry languishes, and that region of youthful neurological terrain capable of being ignited and aria’d only by poetry is largely dark, unpopulated, and silent, like a classroom whose door is unopened, whose shades are drawn.

This is more than a shame, for poetry is our common treasure-house, and we need its aliveness, its respect for the subconscious, its willingness to entertain ambiguity; we need its plaintive truth-telling about the human condition and its imaginative exhibitions of linguistic freedom, which confront the general culture’s more grotesque manipulations. We need the emotional training sessions poetry conducts us through. We need its previews of coming attractions: heartbreak, survival, failure, endurance, understanding, more heartbreak.

Good Read: Encouraging Teachers to Teach Creativity

Good Read: Encouraging Teachers to Teach Creativity

via MindShift by Tina Barseghian on 6/19/12

Something to think about: “If we want students to know 99 random facts we create a test such as the SAT II subject test. If we want students to learn to write an analytical essay, we assign an…

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Article: Nerds of the World, Unite! iTunes U Just Got Interactive

Nerds of the World, Unite! iTunes U Just Got Interactive
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/06/nerds-of-the-world-unite-itunes-u-just-got-interactive/258701/