Today, I went to the Broadway production of Tom Stoppard's Arcadia. It was amazing ( Read more... )

It seems that the best local intentions often lead to poor global outcomes.

Consider, for example, US taxes. There are often tax breaks that seem like a good idea at the time, but which multiply to create large global expenses of time and money. The IRS' Taxpayer Advocate Service reports that individuals and businesses spend about 6.1 billion ( Read more... )

Last night, I finished All Clear, the follow-up to Blackout, which together comprise one very long new book from Connie Willis that had to be split in two. The premise of these books --- and several others that she has written --- is that time travel has been invented sometime in the mid-2000s and historians from Oxford use it to travel back in ( Read more... )

With so much of my thought devoted to Learning Unlimited, I spend a great deal of time considering LU's fundamental question: how can you make students love learning?

The Teach for America book Teaching as Leadership answers that you cannot do it without also providing students with concrete, difficult goals that students must achieve. They quote ( Read more... )

Note: This is part of a series of posts about the book by Steven Farr from Teach for America called Teaching as Leadership. I plan to write my thoughts as I work my way through. I am currently on page 37.

The unusual thing about this Teach for America book is that very little of it, at first glance, is about teaching strategies. I posted ( Read more... )

I have started reading the book Teaching as Leadership from Steven Farr at Teach for America, and it is deeply insightful. Based on the study of their many teachers over the decades, they have identified what they believe to be the six major factors that the really outstanding teachers share. Their standards are high: they are looking to measure ( Read more... )

So much of a student's learning is unrelated to the things we think about when we think about teaching. Lesson plan, the flow of topics, the questions we ask students, how clearly things are explained, these are all important. But so much of a class also depends on each student's mental state, and I think much of a teacher's success comes down to ( Read more... )

I have recently begun doing a great deal of deep thinking about education and what worked in my own education, spurred on, of course, by my work, but also by listening to fascinating TED talks while driving to Binghamton and back to Boston. (Incidentally, if you want to support a fledgling but awesome nonprofit but you don't have the financial ( Read more... )

I seem to be on a posting spree lately, which is surprising since I'm practically not even reading other journals. Yet here's one where I ask LJ for help ( Read more... )

Wikipedia links following up on Slings & Arrows led me to discover that Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen recently starred together in Waiting for Godot.

I've seen Patrick Stewart on stage (as Mark Antony in Antony and Cleopatra, and as a magnificent Prospero in The Tempest), and he's amazing; I know how amazing Ian McKellen is; man, I wish I'd ( Read more... )