I know what it feels like to be an expert.
For years, I studied music—from the outside in, through learning classical charts, and from the inside out, figuring out songs by ear and writing my own.
However, I thought that the details would always elude me and I would have to build every song from the ground up, note by note, forever.
Read MoreAs a teacher of writing, I want to get students to share their ideas.
I don’t just want to give them assignments — I want to give them prompts. I want to get to know them and encourage them to share.
However, for many students, anything school-related is to be done in as cursory a fashion as possible. They’re not seeing the opportunity to sharpen their storytelling ability or their skills of self-expression; they just want to be on the other side, finished and free. Hence, on an open-ended prompt like, “Tell me about a place you’ve visited. If you can’t think of anything, make something up,” we might receive something like, “Last summer, me and my dad went to Destin. We went boogie boarding together. It was really fun.”
Read MoreIf you watch several episodes of the BBC’s Planet Earth in quick succession (I have, many times, in my role as science teacher), you will notice a couple of themes emerge.
The first is the tight balance of power in predator-prey relationships. If the prey are easy to catch, there are a zillion individuals to make up for it; if the prey is scarce, you can expect that the predator is going to have to work for its meal and may go hungry sometimes. You can clearly see the way these pairs of species have evolved together so that both can survive.
Read MoreThanks to our free pro Zoom account (thanks, Eric Yuan!), we now have some new features to manage the video conferences we run for our middle schoolers. Disabling chat, for instance, is a must-have.
Another useful feature is the ability to mute the mics of all participants with one click. However, we don’t use that unless we have to. Until the meeting officially begins, we let the students socialize; when it’s time for us to start, we politely ask them to mute their own microphones. One by one, we see the “mute” icons appear.
Read MoreMonopoly is an awful game.
It takes forever to get going and forever to end. It involves too much luck, even without “Free Parking” jackpots.
And once someone starts winning, their victory is irreversible and soon makes the game miserable for everyone, even the winner. It feels icky to be the greedy landlord, riding high on your ill-gotten gains, relentlessly collecting rents in some dystopian Atlantic City where you’ve already bled your tenants dry and sent your own siblings to jail.
Read More
