#betterteacher

[readingrereading]

Work: The Courage to Teach

The Center for Teaching summer book club selection this year is Parker Palmer’s The Courage to Teach, recently reprinted in a 20th anniversary edition (I have heard of but never read it).

So far, not a great fan of Palmer, who is too much of an essayist if humanist for me, and too devoted to large-group discussion (and its accompanying tightly regulated behaviors and postures).

I mean, I think he’s right about a lot of stuff, perhaps most stuff; it’s just that if you didn’t already agree with it, it wouldn’t be very convincing.

[rongbuk]

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[readingrereading]

Detour: Specifications Grading

Re-reading Linda Nilson’s Specifications Grading (2015). I have been thinking a lot about Asao Inoue’s model of “contract grading” and as I try out different implementations of it, I start to think that Nilson may have answers for some of the rough patches.

Also, I think having Nilson in my pocket as well as Inoue will have a kind of double-barrel effect; different kinds of arguments for different folks when talking about grading.

[readingrereading]

Detour: Payoff

Dan Ariely’s Payoff: The Hidden Logic that Shapes Our Motivations (2016). 

Reading this for a Seeley Center for Teaching Excellence reading circle. I picked it sight unseen, and perhaps wouldn’t have picked it if I had read some of the early sentences, such as the first sentence: “We are the CEOs of our own lives.”

Although written, I think for a business/managerial audience, the book nonetheless has 100 messages for teachers. For example:

We tend to overestimate the “transactional” model in trying to motivate others. 

We can de-motivate people efficiently by simply ignoring their efforts.

When people put effort into something, they tend to identify with their work and feel a sense of ownership

None of these are surprising in a general sense, but Ariely reveals a number of surprising findings. He learns, for example, that cash bonuses are actually demotivating in the longer term (executives were quick to embrace this finding as an HR policy for workers but not for themselves).

[readingrereading]

Detour: Writing Partners

Have been itching to read Laura Micciche’s Acknowledging Writing Partners... just getting to Chapter 4, on non-human companions! 

I wrote a thing about reading this book.

[readingrereading]

Detour: Percy & Olympians

Grumpy person, rarely overjoyed by reading recommendations from tweens. Have fared much better with yootüb recommendations. Yet I persist.

Interesting (for me) departure from the formula of the-loser-finds-out-he-is-uniquely-powerful: our young hero is a dyslexic ADHD kid, with inhospitable schools a battleground where teachers are always trying to kill him.

“The letters float off the page when you read, right? That’s because your mind is hard-wired for ancient Greek. And the ADHD—you’re impulsive, can’t sit still in the classroom. That’s your battlefield reflexes. In a real fight, they’d keep you alive. As for the attention problems, that’s because you see too much, Percy, not too little. Your senses are better than a regular mortal’s. Of course your teachers want you medicated. Most of them are monsters. They don’t want you seeing them for what they are.”

The story here is a little different from the Earthsea/Star Wars version, where the protege is impatient with the mystic lessons of the mentor. Instead, Percy meets a big community of similarly unique kids & basically experiences a lot of peer learning, occasionally punctuated by pleas for the value of “Western civilization.”

[readingrereading]

99 Books: 272 & ~100,000

Finished Garry Wills on the Gettysburg Address.

photo: Private Albert Davis of New Hampshire (Smithsonian)

Wills contributes over 350 words for every word of the Address. Exact figures uncertain, because 1) I didn’t count the words in Wills’s book and 2) word counts for the Address vary somewhat (did the word “here” appear six times or seven times? The answer would affect my math).

But worth every one. Or nearly every one. Let’s say that about 300 of the 350 are totally worth it.

[readingrereading]

Learning Dragons

Every book is a book about how to be a better teacher. And figuring out teaching means figuring out learning.

In Tehanu, two characters discuss the nature of dragon language:

What do we know about them? Would they teach as we do, mother to child, elder to younger? Or are they like animals, teaching some things, but born knowing most of what they know? Even that we don’t know. But my guess would be that the dragon and the speech of the dragon are one. One being.