“Years ago I spoke with a 16-year-old girl who was considering the idea of having a computer companion in the future, and she described the upside to me. It’s not that the robot she’d imagined, a vastly more sophisticated Siri, was so inspiring. It’s that she’d already found people to be so disappointing. And now, for the first time, she explained me, people have options. Back then I thought her comments seemed prescient. Now I find them timely.”
We make countless choices to change how we interact with our job. Each of these choices influences how we feel about teaching. Psychologists call these choices job crafting. Job crafting, say psychologists Amy Wrzesniewski and Jane E. Dutton, is the actions employees take to redesign their work in order to foster engagement, satisfaction, resilience, and thriving. This means being intentional about how we engage with the tasks, people, and purpose that compose our careers.”
Exercise, participate in mentally challenging activities, and eat a healthful diet. The latest research suggests social connections are important as well.”
Effective communication is not simply about getting your message out. It requires you to strategically tap into what shapes people’s feelings and values. Here we share five principles pulled from social science that will help you connect your work to what people care most about.”
“Children who help more at home feel a larger sense of obligation and connectedness to their parents, and that connection helps them weather life’s stressful moments — in other words, it helps them be happier.”
I asked Mitchell scholars if there was a department or discipline that they wished they had paid more heed. Science majors mentioned humanities. Humanities majors mentioned computer science and statistics. In retrospect, if not in real time, intellectually curious people appreciate and want the benefits of balance. So incorporate it, to some degree, in your college years.”
More than a few of this generation’s bright lights found poetry first through performance, or come from communities where “spoken word” and “poetry” are not separate lanes. Other poets have shown a talent for building an audience in less embodied ways.”
“Below is a list of nine books that you can read in addition to (or, we don’t want to tell you not to do you your homework, buuuut…) the canonical texts on your curriculum. And remember, the best part of making your own curriculum is debating and amending it, so have at it in the comments.”
“One of my senior leaders, the vice president of student affairs, and I had been talking about how to make ourselves much more student-centered in every aspect of the school. He suggested it’d be good and informative for me to spend a couple of nights during orientation week with the freshmen, and it coincided with the fact that this is my first freshman class that I’ll be with for the entire year. I immediately thought, “This is a brilliant idea,” and said yes.”
Parents looking to encourage reading look out for environments that are “impoverished”—that, places where kids might be a bit bored—and fill those spaces up with books.”
“While only one-third of kids from families with higher incomes said they are on Facebook, Pew reported recently, a much larger share of teens from lower-income backgrounds… said that they still use the platform… A 2015 Pew Research Center survey also found that higher-income teens hang out with their close friends in person at a higher rate than kids from low-income households.”
Edited and filtered photos can exacerbate body dysmorphic disorder, the relentless fixation with a perceived flaw in appearance… “The pervasiveness of these filtered images can take a toll on one’s self-esteem, make one feel inadequate for not looking a certain way in the real world, and may even act as a trigger and lead to body dysmorphic disorder.”
The Department of Defense can’t save us. Technology won’t save us. Being more critically-thinking humans might save us, but that’s a system that’s lot harder to debug than an AI algorithm.”
What distinguishes her is not merely the breadth of her catalogue or the cataract force of her vocal instrument; it’s her musical intelligence, her way of singing behind the beat, of spraying a wash of notes over a single word or syllable, of constructing, moment by moment, the emotional power of a three-minute song. “Respect” is as precise an artifact as a Ming vase.”
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