“Some say competitive debate is a flawed model for healthy discourse, whether for domestic disputes or political disagreements. In an essay in The Dublin Review, the novelist Sally Rooney, a former champion debater, characterized formal debate as overly aggressive and possibly immoral. “For the purposes of this game, the emotional or relational aspects of argument are superfluous,” she wrote. The novelist Ben Lerner, who also spent years as a debater, an experience he drew from in his 2019 novel, “The Topeka School,” told me he had to unlearn the idea “that every conversation ended with a winner and a loser.””
“Revenge bedtime procrastination is the act of deliberately putting off sleep in favor of leisure activities — binging Netflix or scrolling TikTok, for example — that provide short-term enjoyment but few long-term life benefits. Revenge bedtime procrastination is especially likely when busy schedules and daily responsibilities prevent the enjoyment of “me time” earlier in the day.”
“This highlights one of the difficulties with determining why students do well (or do not do well) with certain material. Is it because they are more interested? More motivated? More curious? Or is it because they happen to have the background knowledge to help them make enough sense of the material in order to become curious about it? The answer is likely a combination of all those factors where prior knowledge, interest, and curiosity reinforce each other, blurring the lines between them. What I take away from this, and what I tell my students, is that the more they learn the easier it will get.”
“At the time it debuted, just a few years before America’s bicentennial, it was considered groundbreaking in the way it depicted the Founding Fathers as three dimensional, flawed, and interesting people rather than stereotyped cutouts.”
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