“Before the pandemic, I was a parenting expert… I told worried parents about the nine signs of tech overuse, like ditching sleep for screens. I advised them to write a “family media contract” and trust, but verify, their tweens’ doings online… Now, like Socrates, I know better. I know that I know nothing… I have never, ever, spent this much time with my children, or anyone’s children, as I have over the past four months during shelter-in-place orders. Nor have I contemplated working full time, while my husband also works full time, without sufficient child care… I want to take this moment to apologize to anyone who faced similar constraints before the pandemic and felt judged or shamed by my, or anyone’s, implication that they weren’t good parents because they weren’t successfully enforcing a “healthy balance” with screens, either for themselves or their children… But on reflection, some of the ideas and principles I used to intone so confidently have actually shown their mettle in new ways in this new world. I offer them to you now, humbly. I speak softly and do not carry a mic.”
“All the men had started out together in the shared misery of detention, but then Boochani did something extraordinary: Letter by letter, pecked out on contraband telephones while locked up on Manus, he wrote his first book.”
“The biggest challenge really, and we’re seeing this as a society across the board right now, is that even though our organizations, our businesses, our government entities are becoming more data driven, we as human beings are not.”
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