“There are all kinds of ways that people talk about identity and diversity these days. I’ve been trying to organize them into approaches. Here’s my first crack. My goal here is to be descriptive, not judgmental. I don’t think these approaches are necessarily mutually exclusive, but I do think some people within each of these approaches are fiercely committed to their own paradigms in a way that dismisses others.”
“Academia has confused a convention with a moral rule, and this confusion is not unmotivated. We academics cannot make much money off the papers and books in which we express our ideas, and ideas cannot be copyrighted, so we have invented a moral law that offers us the “property rights” the legal system denies us.”
“For most of us, hard work makes us passionate for a field rather than the other way around. We develop passion for what we do over time, rather than starting out with a clear, defined passion for a particular career path… A well-rooted sense of purpose, in other words, gives you way more grit than passion alone ever could. And that grit is what is likely to make you successful over the long haul.”
“Eyal shares specific, actionable techniques for making “indistractability” a habit — by prioritizing the right activities, staying focused on completing goals, and staying accountable and motivated over time.”
“In a study published in the Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, researchers found that people are less likely to remember things they photograph than things they only observe… This constant connection to a device is doing our brains a disservice. Every time our smartphone diverts us from reality we pay a switch cost: an interruption in our brain’s thought processes. While this only accounts for a few tenths of a second each time it happens, the cumulative cost of our bifurcated focus can amount to 40% of our brain’s daily productivity.”
“All these new research findings don’t undermine the ethical or ideological case for trigger warnings, but they do cast serious doubt on the psychological arguments mustered by trigger-warning advocates.”
“New Zealand is hoping that by 2040, one million Kiwis will be able to speak basic te reo Māori, the Maori language. This ambitious goal is part of an official language strategy that sees the revival of New Zealand’s Indigenous language as a key part in national identity and reconciliation.”
“We see it play out every day with the viral spread of misinformation, widening news deserts and the proliferation of fake news. This collapse has much in common with the environmental collapse of the planet that we’re only now beginning to grasp, and its consequences for life as we know it are shaping up to be just as profound.”
“More than 96 percent of high school students surveyed failed to consider that ties to the fossil fuel industry might affect the credibility of a website about climate change, while more than half believed a grainy video on Facebook that claimed to show ballot stuffing (which was actually shot in Russia) constituted “strong evidence” of voter fraud in the United States.”
“If you are under 30, and you are able to think for yourself right now, God bless you.”
“Although many teens and young adults say there are payoffs to attending college, slightly more (73%) say on-the-job experience is a good way to prepare for success in the workforce compared to degrees or other educational experiences.”
“Students tend to see more value in their postsecondary education when it features coursework relevant to their jobs.”
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