Category: Culture

I’m currently reading Stop Stealing Dreams, by Seth Godin. So far, I would recommend it to everyone, just because it will get you thinking about what schools should be. Plus it’s free.

An amusing example:

43. How not to teach someone to be a baseball fan

Teach the history of baseball, beginning with Abner Doubleday and the impact of cricket and imperialism. Have a test.

Starting with the Negro leagues and the early barnstorming teams, assign students to memorize facts and figures about each player. Have a test.

Rank the class on who did well on the first two tests, and allow these students to memorize even more statistics about baseball players. Make sure to give equal time to players in Japan and the Dominican Republic. Send the students who didn’t do as well to spend time with a lesser teacher, but assign them similar work, just over a longer time frame. Have a test.

Sometime in the future, do a field trip and go to a baseball game. Make sure no one has a good time.

If there’s time, let kids throw a baseball around during recess.

Obviously, there are plenty of kids (and adults) who know far more about baseball than anyone could imagine knowing. And none of them learned it this way.

The industrialized, scalable, testable solution is almost never the best way to generate exceptional learning.

Those that know me, know that I can be a grammar nerd. Poor writing really annoys me, and these days poor writing can be found everywhere.

So I was reading a Krugman blog this morning (and Krugman writes well, whether you like him or not) and he discussed economies moving in “synch”. I hate that spelling. It just looks wrong. I prefer “sync”. But I’d never looked up if either is actually correct. I have a colleague who consistently uses “synch” and it consistently bugs me but I can’t say anything unless I’m actually right.

Alas, both appear to be acceptable. “Sync” seems generally preferred and slightly more used. Google has come down squarely on the side of “sync” (gmail’s spell checker considers “synch” incorrect). But many folks as nerdy as me make the case for “synch”. Argh.

So I am left unsatisfied. Go ahead, synch away. But don’t get me started about double spacing…