“At first, Thunberg’s father reassured her that everything would be O.K., but as he read more about the climate crisis, he found his own words rang hollow. “I realized that she was right and I was wrong, and I had been wrong all my life,” Svante told TIME in a quiet moment after arriving in Lisbon. In an effort to comfort their daughter, the family began changing their habits to reduce their emissions. They mostly stopped eating meat, installed solar panels, began growing their own vegetables and eventually gave up flying—a sacrifice for Thunberg’s mother, who performs throughout Europe. “We did all these things, basically, not really to save the climate, we didn’t care much about that initially,” says Svante. “We did it to make her happy and to get her back to life.” Slowly, Thunberg began to eat and talk again.”
“Surprise discussions sprung on students can go off the rails quickly. “If the Monday morning after the Charlottesville riots a teacher just walks into her classroom and asks the students, ‘Well, what did you guys think of that?’ That’s going to be a disaster,” McAvoy said. An open discussion right after a tragic event, with questions like “how do you feel about this situation?” or “do you have questions?” allows students to process—but it’s not the time to debate free speech, or what to do about monuments.”
“Keeping the argument on track, and keeping it both civil and productive, is a key skill in critical thinking. It is helped by: making sure everyone is clear about what the point at issue actually is; bringing the conversation back to the point when it strays, or at least acknowledging that we are now talking about something else; calling out any misrepresentation of the point.”
““I think that ten years ago it was seen as anti-cerebral to do this,” [the plastic surgeon] said. “But now it’s empowering to do something that gives you an edge. Which is why young people are coming in. They come in to enhance something, rather than coming in to fix something.””
“Currently, when we ask our children about YouTube we say, “what are you doing?” or “what are you watching?” This results in an instinctive dismissal because the majority of the time, they’re watching something we don’t understand. Instead, we need to enter conversations looking to ask, “how does this video/this creator make you feel?” And, “what do you intend to do with the information you’re learning?” These questions get to the heart of YouTube’s impact on children, and they get to what children take from the platform and how they use it in their lives. This will help our children understand when they are on YouTube as a passive, entertained consumer, and not an active, informed citizen.”
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