When we say we are thinking, what we are actually doing is rearranging causal relations with past events, objects that we have encountered before, to see what happens when we combine them.”
He spent hours with me that day demystifying the test-taking and application process and sharing study tools that I still find useful. He taught me the tricks to multiple-choice, and how to strategically answer math questions that I didn’t recognize. He walked me through my difficulties with subject-verb agreements and showed me how to “hack” large passages of text in order to answer reading comprehension questions.”
The confusion over the purpose of the humanities has nothing to do with their relevance. The humanities are no more or less relevant now than they ever were. It is not the humanities that we have lost faith in, but the economic, political, and social order that they have been made to serve.”
In the end, I received 60 rejections for The Help. But letter number 61 was the one that accepted me. After my five years of writing and three and a half years of rejection, an agent named Susan Ramer took pity on me. What if I had given up at 15? Or 40? Or even 60?”
If we step back a moment, there is no lesson about employability and technical training to draw from Google’s hiring practices here, but rather a lesson about what employees want from a good manager.”
The difficulty is the point… We all want the same things now: phones, clothes, and food to photograph. We are all consumers. Teenagers don’t want to stick it to the man anymore. They are the man… I want them to find something difficult and do it anyway. Then, I want them to notice what a powerful tool literature is, to understand that without it we can’t know ourselves or the society we live in. I want them to discover that if they learn to handle language they’ll no longer be helpless, drowning in sugary gratification.”
Already, his team has built proteins for purposes ranging from fighting flu viruses to breaking down gluten in food to detecting trace amounts of opioid drugs.”
As tech companies mature, they’re seeking new ways to generate revenue from each customer, and the battlefield is increasingly your most finite resource: time. That battle plays out every minute from the time we wake up until we go to bed, and doesn't look the same for everyone.”
I spent just over a year at the Bodleian being sassy on social media and making GIFs out of centuries-old collections. The animation of the Bodleian’s collections lent them new life. Beautiful images painstakingly made by monks and illustrators hundreds of years ago leapt from their pages anew onto Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr feeds.”
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