“The study also illuminates the importance of six collegiate experiences, including how supportive relationships and relevant, engaging learning experiences are linked to long-term outcomes such as higher workplace engagement and wellbeing for college alumni nationwide. The proportion of currently enrolled students who strongly agree that they are confident they will graduate with the skills and knowledge they need to be successful in the job market rises steadily with the number of these experiences they have had.”
“Postmodern thought, with its deconstruction of everything and its emphasis on individual interpretation, leads us down a road of narcissism, cynicism, and detachment. To fix it… to feel less lonely, it’s perhaps this non-ideological pursuit of getting along, of striving to have strong communal integrity, of valuing others for their human dignity, unabashedly enjoying the things we find to be awesome. And as David Foster Wallace would say: making it okay to be unavoidably sentimental and naive and goo-prone and generally pathetic. That might help us find a greater sense of meaning and optimism in our lives.”
We closely followed the emergence of multiple social networks within a cohort of 226 undergraduate university students. They were strangers to each other on their first day at university, but developed densely knit social networks through time. We show that functional studying relationships tended to evolve from informal friendship relations. In a critical examination period after one year, these networks proved to be crucial: Socially isolated students had significantly lower examination grades and were more likely to drop out of university.”
Just as feeding more people more efficiently has led us into a feedback loop in which we constantly erode our own global supply of fish, educating more children more efficiently has yielded a shell game of metrics that have allowed us to falsely claim success (or failure), when in fact all we have been doing is eroding a different, more precious supply.”
“For tens of thousands of years, as we fanned out across the globe, we adapted to radically different niches, and created new types of societies; in the process, we developed new practices, frameworks, technologies and conceptual systems. But then, some time in the past few centuries, we reached an inflection point. A peculiar cognitive toolkit that had been consolidated in the industrialising West began to gain global traction. Other tools were abandoned. Diversity started to ebb.”
“There's something about deeply understanding and learning about another culture that's transformative.”
“The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”
To be clear, the goal is not to create inherently boring classrooms with boring teachers delivering boring lectures. Permanent or extended boredom in school can lead to lower engagement and lower motivation, which can lead to lower student achievement levels and higher truancy rates (Saeed & Zyngier, 2012). Instead, the goal is to help students use boredom strategically to increase their creative thinking. The key difference between strategic boredom and permanent boredom has to do with duration, purpose, and agency.”
“A passion for politics, particularly among teenagers and young millennials, is fueling a dramatic growth in the popularity of poetry, with sales of poetry books hitting an all-time high in 2018.”
“Once you’ve stripped away the digital chatter clamoring for your attention, your smartphone will return to something closer to the role originally conceived by Mr. Jobs. It will become a well-designed object that comes out occasionally throughout your day to support — not subvert — your efforts to live well.”
“The Covington saga isn’t fake news, strictly speaking. The events on the Mall really happened; what’s more, the surrounding story raises many questions of broad, genuine interest… It would be wrong, however, to take the moral interest of the Covington video at face value. To the extent that the video raises interesting questions, it does so in a particular way… The media theorist who best described this problem is Daniel Boorstin, whose book “The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America,” from 1962, traces the inner logic of artificially generated newsworthiness. A “pseudo-event,” in Boorstin’s telling, is any happening that exists primarily so that it can be reported upon and debated.”
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