A thick institution is not one that people use instrumentally, to get a degree or to earn a salary. A thick institution becomes part of a person’s identity and engages the whole person: head, hands, heart and soul.”
What skills do you need to be a successful adult? It turns out there are roughly 25, if you review the relevant literature. Which of these skills do schools regularly teach? Just three, as we found in a recent study… And that was in nine of the highest-rated secondary schools in Massachusetts.”
Running may be the single most effective exercise to increase life expectancy”
Reading what you hate helps you refine what it is you value”
“Find your calling… Practice smart… Think like an optimist”
Being triggered worked positively for me.”
At ten past ten each Friday morning, he would take a seat among the freshmen, who were not even a quarter his age, and join in the discussion of this old poem, an epic about long journeys and long marriages and what it means to yearn for home.”
“Somewhere at Google there is a database containing 25 million books and nobody is allowed to read them.”
It’s true that studies have found that readers given text on a screen do worse on recall and comprehension tests than readers given the same text on paper. But a 2011 study by the cognitive scientists Rakefet Ackerman and Morris Goldsmith suggests that this may be a function less of the intrinsic nature of digital devices than of the expectations that readers bring to them.”
The No. 1 reason high performers leave organizations in which they are otherwise happy is because of the tolerance of mediocrity.
Copyright
Every week I send out articles I encounter from around the web. Subject matter ranges from hard knowledge about teaching to research about creativity and cognitive science to stories from other industries that, by analogy, inform what we do as educators. This breadth helps us see our work in new ways.
Readers include teachers, school leaders, university overseers, conference organizers, think tank workers, startup founders, nonprofit leaders, and people who are simply interested in what’s happening in education. They say it helps them keep tabs on what matters most in the conversation surrounding schools, teaching, learning, and more.
– Peter Nilsson