“Each day of the school year we publish a Student Opinion question: an invitation for students to share their own opinions and experiences in response to New York Times stories on the news of the day. Each of these prompts is introduced with an article, interactive feature or video produced by The Times… The prompts are organized into two sections: questions that lend themselves well to persuasive writing, and questions that encourage narrative writing. We have also published a short, visual post highlighting five of the most popular questions we asked this school year.”
“Authenticity is being true to yourself, and transparency is sharing that truth through words, behaviors and actions. Highly trusted companies tend to be radically transparent.”
“When kids study music—intensively and over long periods of time—they become better readers.”
“Already we can begin to see certain themes that are related to nature’s resilience: Decentralization, Redundancy, Diversity, Adaptability. These qualities make interesting contrasts to the qualities we often see expressed in modern management and machine production: Centralize for economies of scale, Eliminate redundancy as waste, cut costs, Standardize on approach, Restrict range of motion as a source of error. Where machine production optimizes for the steady state, nature optimizes for change. Decentralization, redundancy, diversity, adaptability might be inefficient during stable periods, but together they create resilience. And it is only a matter of time before you encounter a forest fire, pandemic, or some other crisis. To be efficient is to be fragile, and to be fragile, over the long run, is to go extinct.”
“Numbers can be at their most dangerous when they are used to control things rather than to understand them.”
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