Big Journally Journal

Jun
7th

Tue

I wanted in. So I did what you might expect an over-enthusiastic suburban nitwit to do, and asked my mom to drive me to the mall to buy Ivor Horton’s 1,181-page, 4.6-pound Beginning Visual C 6. I imagined myself working montage-like through the book, smoothly accruing expertise one chapter at a time.

I remember doing this myself, except the book was SICP - Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs in 1998 or so

— How I Failed, Failed, and Finally Succeeded at Learning How to Code - Technology - The Atlantic

Whatever the process, the product is a nightmare described eloquently by Paul Lockhart, a high school mathematics teacher, in his short booklet, A Mathematician’s Lament, about the sorry state of high school mathematics. His argument applies almost beat for beat to computer programming.

— How I Failed, Failed, and Finally Succeeded at Learning How to Code - Technology - The Atlantic

Christopher Columbus by Maxine Sullivan and Her Jazz All-Stars

Found this on Monica’s WFMU show in 2009

Jun
6th

Mon

Aaron Wildavsky was famous for having meetings on the hoof, which was a good idea partly because using large muscle groups seems to be good for mentation, but also because the setting was better than sitting across a table looking at each other, and on a walk, the time to the end is implicit physically, and the meeting can’t be ended unilaterally on either side. So one knows when there’s just enough time to open the kind of difficult issue that begins with “By the way, I was thinking…

— Peripheral attention « The Reality-Based Community

Jun
5th

Sun

Screenwriting is ultimately very lonely, and at the end of a 12-hour day of writing I never knew for certain whether I’d written any good words. But making ice cream, at the end of a 12-hour day, I have a pretty good sense of whether I’ve made good ice cream or not.” Then there’s the credibility-with-the-kids factor: Mr. Smith has a 4-year-old daughter and a 2-year-old son. (His wife teaches English as a second language to students with mental disabilities.) “A 4-year-old doesn’t understand what it means to be a screenwriter,” he said, “but a 4-year-old certainly understands what it means to have their daddy make ice cream.

— Brooklyn Ice Cream Shop Overwhelmed by Success - NYTimes.com

Without the obligations of a day job, Mr. Knutzen has made himself a fixture at community meetings and municipal hearings. He recently helped win a $350,000 state-sponsored Safe Routes to School grant for the neighborhood elementary school, to encourage walking and biking. This kind of unglamorous activism makes him “tremendously happy,” he said.

— Living Large, Off the Land - Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen - NYTimes.com

May
10th

Tue

The Pipeline #51: Michael Friedman - 5by5

Mostly about editing reality tv shows, but he made a couple of interesting points.

First, that audio editing is 100x more important than most people know. The Amazing Race is essentially an audio story with pictures added on top.

Second, that there’s a great opportunity still for people to create content online. He likes 5x5 as a model. Cable, tv, and radio still are saddled with business models that don’t allow them to produce narrow-cast content of high quality.

Apr
13th

Wed

Too Cool for School

markcoatney:

Amidst all the fuss of new Tumblrs (Britney! Beasties! State!) over the past few days, we’d like to point another, ongoing effort that’s really great: Tumblr Teachers. The brainchild of Girl with a Lesson Plan, Tumblr Teachers is a self-reported listing of the hundreds of teachers and education students who use Tumblr every day, and as a listing of great Tumblrs in that field it’s second to none. Check it out, and if Tumblr should be on the list, submit it here!

Apr
12th

Tue

The Test Generation

thingsforteachers:

Trombetta and her students, 87 percent of whom come from poor families, are part of one of the most aggressive education-reform experiments in the country: a soon-to-be state-mandated attempt to evaluate all teachers — even those in art, music, and physical education — according to how much they “grow” student achievement. In order to assess Trombetta, the district will require her Chamberlin Elementary School first-graders to sit for seven pencil-and-paper tests in art this school year. To prepare them for those exams, Trombetta lectures her students on art elements such as color, line, and shape — bullet points on Colorado’s new fine-art curriculum standards.

All of this left Trombetta pretty frustrated, and on a November afternoon, she really wanted to talk. As she ate lunch (a frozen TV dinner) in her cheery, deserted classroom plastered with bright posters, she recounted the events of the past week. She liked the idea of exposing her young students, many of whom had never visited a museum, to great works of art. But, Trombetta complained, preparing the children for the exam meant teaching them reductive half-truths about art — that dark colors signify sadness and bright colors happiness, for example. “To bombard these kids with words and concepts instead of the experience of art? I really struggle with that,” she said. “It’s kind of hard when they come to me and say, ‘What are we going to make today?’ and I have to say, ‘Well, we’re going to write about art.’”

Things that struck me: 7 times a year? Teaching half truths about art?

This article is pretty long, but a worthwhile read. Other noteworthy points:

Every student in the aforementioned school spends about 25 days a year testing.

Beginning in 2013, teachers in Colorado will be let go if their students do not “grow” enough for two years in a row, and they do not successfully complete remediation.

Since the current superintendent has come into this school district, test scores have improved over the past 5 years.

Teachers in this district should expect up to 16 on the spot observations per semester to receive feedback & improve.

In Finland, South Korea, and other high achieving nations, teachers only spend 50% of their workday with students- compared to 80% in most American schools. Teachers in these other high performing countries spend the rest of the time collaborating with others on lessons, observing other teachers.

However, there are far too many points from this article to post here! Please take the time to read this, though you may need to re-visit it a couple of times.

Thanks Larry Ferlazzo for sharing this article

Mar
24th

Thu

Mother Jones magazine on Tumblr: The best journalism-job want ad ever ever.

motherjones:

You should, like, strongly consider applying to work for this guy:

We want to add some talent to the Sarasota Herald-Tribune investigative team. Every serious candidate should have a proven track record of conceiving, reporting and writing stellar investigative pieces that provoke change….

For those unaware of Florida’s reputation, it’s arguably the best news state in the country and not just because of the great public records laws. We have all kinds of corruption, violence and scumbaggery. The 9/11 terrorists trained here. Bush read My Pet Goat here. Our elections are colossal clusterfucks. Our new governor once ran a health care company that got hit with a record fine because of rampant Medicare fraud. We have hurricanes, wildfires, tar balls, bedbugs, diseased citrus trees and an entire town overrun by giant roaches (only one of those things is made up). And we have Disney World and beaches, so bring the whole family.