Annie drew a map of our house for a school assignment. I love the window into her mind.
Category: Education
What I’m evidently *doing* with my life.
is THIS bigger than infinity????
The earnest glee with which they pursue THE LARGEST NUMBER IN THE WORLD…
elderly
I think I’ve said this before, but: you know you’re getting old when you agree with David Brooks.
Austin Creative Reuse
I don’t write about it much—well, I don’t write about anything much other than wee Annie—but it’s actually rather significant life news for me that a reuse center I’ve been hammering away at since we moved to Austin three years ago opened its doors today.
After half a year of go-it-alone effort to start a branch of California’s Resource Area For Teachers (RAFT), I hooked up with a local crew I typically describe as “a very diverse group of…white…women…” And now, after another stretch of kind of insanely lengthy board meetings and planning and events and crafts and, blerg, fundraising, we signed a lease this summer and today(!) opened to the public.
So, hey! That happened. Who knows if we’ll be able to pay rent in 6 months, but we made it to opening day.
jazz data viz
One of the things I love about my job is the opportunity it affords to dabble in a lotta things I like doing. I’m no graphic designer nor statistical wizard, but I do love some good data visualization. So when we wrapped up our fabulous jazz MOOC this spring and no one asked me for any sort of outcomes or overview, I made up my own.*
Conventional in-the-media wisdom pegs MOOC completion rates at 5% and calls the enterprise frivolous. Of course the story is more complicated and interesting. This graphic was my attempt to answer the “what was your completion rate?” question in a way that was still clear but more nuanced. As so many of my plans do, it began with markers.
*Using a highly sophisticated graphic design program called “PowerPoint.” And then spamming it out to every one of my current colleagues.
absolutely NO thinking
Not that California’s education system is anything to write home about, but this sort of thing does make me a LITTLE nervous about wading back into Texas politics:
The 2012 Texas Republican Party Platform, adopted June 9 at the state convention in Forth Worth, seems to take a stand against, well, the teaching of critical thinking skills. Read it for yourself:
“We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.”
Read the rest at this edweek blog.
[Mean comment about Republicans redacted.]
essential spanish
After realizing last fall that my Spanish has atrophied completely—I have removed “Spanish minor” from my resumé, no matter how technically accurate it may be—I’m listening to Pimsleur’s first three Spanish courses on iTunes to refresh my memory. Bryan and I had good luck learning basic German from them and like their approach to language teaching: few explicit rules, lots of repetitive but realistic conversation.
Maybe a little too realistic. In the first ten lessons I have been reminded how to order beer and insist that the other person pay. A favorite exchange:
“How much time do you have?”
“Eight minutes.”
“What do you want to drink?”
“Three beers.”
“Three beers in eight minutes?!”
“I like beer.”
I may have participated in this precise conversation in real life.