A weekly collection of education-related news from around the web.

Educator’s Notebook #189 (June 25, 2017)

    • New Yorker
    • 06/26/17

    Before the Internet, you’d have yawning summer afternoons when you’d flop down on one couch, then flop down on another, then decide to craft a fake F.B.I. card. You’d get some paper from your dad’s office, copy the F.B.I. logo and your signature, laminate it with Scotch tape, put it in your wallet, take it out of your wallet, look at it, then put it back in your wallet with a secretive smile.”

    • Columbia Journalism Review
    • 06/14/17

    “Being well-read is a transcendent achievement similar to training to run 26.2 miles, then showing up for a marathon in New York City and finding 50,000 people there. It is at once superhuman and pedestrian… There are only so many hours in a day, but the most common workaround for devoted readers is surprisingly uninventive. “I have yet to meet a great journalist who is not well and widely read,” Tom Lutz, editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books, told me. “In my life, the only way that happens is if one carries a book at all times, and uses the odd moments life provides to read.””

ATHENA

ATHLETICS

    • New York Times
    • 06/21/17

    And those in the meditation group, if they had practiced often, showed considerable mental resilience, with higher scores than the other athletes in either group on the measures of both attention and mood.”

    • New York Post
    • 06/19/17

    “It’s young people with injuries that weren’t common when there was a diversity of sports — three different sports and three different seasons. The variety of the stress on their body wasn’t causing it to break down to the degree we are seeing now.”

CHARACTER

    • New York Times
    • 06/24/17

    A consortium of academics soon formed to share resources, and programs have quietly proliferated since then: the Success-Failure Project at Harvard, which features stories of rejection; the Princeton Perspective Project, encouraging conversation about setbacks and struggles; Penn Faces at the University of Pennsylvania, a play on the term used by students to describe those who have mastered the art of appearing happy even when struggling.”

    • Psychological Bulletin
    • 07/01/94

CREATIVITY

DIVERSITY/INCLUSION

HIGHER ED

HUMANITIES

LEADERSHIP

LEARNING SCIENCE

    • Science Daily
    • 06/23/17

    The researchers found that participants with their phones in another room significantly outperformed those with their phones on the desk, and they also slightly outperformed those participants who had kept their phones in a pocket or bag. The findings suggest that the mere presence of one's smartphone reduces available cognitive capacity and impairs cognitive functioning, even though people feel they're giving their full attention and focus to the task at hand. We see a linear trend that suggests that as the smartphone becomes more noticeable, participants' available cognitive capacity decreases,”

    • Scientific American
    • 11/12/13

PD

READING/WRITING

STEM

TECH

VISUAL DESIGN

WORKPLACE

Z-OTHER

Issues

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

Subscribe

* indicates required