Greener Pasture - Slideshows - Dwell
The Right Track - Slideshows - Dwell
Le Corbusier’s Cabanon | ICON MAGAZINE ONLINE
I can’t believe I haven’t seen this before. I think there’s a fun physics project in there somewhere.
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“…The traditional view is of a teacher as gatekeeper, sorting out students, not letting them to a diploma without the proper amount of effort to make it through the gate.
This does 2 things which are undesirable. First, it sets up teachers to be in an adversarial position against students, which often sets students up to feel that they have to be opposed to learning as well as the teacher. And second, it makes failure a terrible, terrible thing. I would argue that failure actually is a critical ingredient in learning (as Edison would attest).
The gardener approach flips that around, where the teacher is on the same side as the student, helping them attain measurable standards of learning, and letting students gauge their growth themselves. The student drives the data collection and assessment, looking at their learning against those standards and determining 1) how much further they have to go, and 2) how they are going to get there. The teacher encourages and facilitates learning.
The way to be a gardener instead of a gatekeeper is to ditch grading, which is teacher-centric, arbitrary, and set up for comparisons against other students for the purpose of ranking (and rejecting). In its place is to use standards-based reporting, where the standard of learning is objective and measurable, and students are not comparing themselves against anyone else but the standard….”
” —MeTA musings: It’s not ALL about standards-based reporting…
About a month ago I had this talk with my AP Physics kids. I started by saying that if I had my way I would get rid of grades altogether because they work against real learning. This quote is great, but the whole post is worth reading.
“If I ever need to remind myself what I was reading or mulling over at various points in my life I have only to look in this scrupulously researched and uncannily on-the-money book. Would that we all had references like this! It is for me a beautiful and narcissistically bizarre experience to re-experience my life through the series of ideas and the flow of connections I have made as they are reported and interpreted by Sytze Steenstra. The book is delightfully and unusually free of gossip and psychological assumptions and explanations (not that those don’t also contain some truth); instead it focuses almost exclusively on what I’ve done, said or written—and comes to some conclusions that are (to me) surprising and unexpected. Sytze finds connections I wasn’t aware of, and continuity and patterns where initially one might see randomness and chaos. This book makes me seem both smarter than I am and possibly stranger than I am.” — David Byrne’s back cover blurb for Song and Circumstance: The Work of David Bryne, which is being published next year by Continuum. Imagine for a moment that we all actually had references like this, and how many of these books would be unreadable and dull. (via perpetua)
Monday Puzzle: You Can’t Fight Density… er, Destiny - TierneyLab Blog - NYTimes.com
Is Tierney Lab listening in on my physics classes? I posed this question to my AP kids about 5 days before this was posted.
What I think Merlin means is: Pigs love to kill each other and sell the remains as a tasty food!
Pigs love sausage
This is pretty cool.