Motivational Sayings (sort of)

A collection of saying for new teachers. It's billed as being anti-motivational but there are some nuggets in there.

"Absolute power corrupts absolutely. A teacher’s power isn’t nearly as cool.


One day when you realize that you’re really teaching something well to a kid who really wants to learn, you’ll feel like the hero of a story. But, if there’s a story at all, the kid is the hero.


I was hired to teach high school when I was twenty-two. The teacher I replaced had died on Thursday. She was at a restaurant alone, reading a trade paperback and collapsed right at the table. Heart attack. I came in for an interview on Friday and started on Monday. I showed up ten minutes early. The school secretary gave me a map of the campus, a key and said, “Good luck.”

Are Schools Redundant?

The (almost) always provocative Bob Cringely has a must-read post up on his site about how technology is de-legitimizing the very foundation of schooling.

"...we've reached the point in our (disparate) cultural adaptation to computing and communication technology that the younger technical generations are so empowered they are impatient and ready to jettison institutions most of the rest of us tend to think of as essential, central, even immortal. They are ready to dump our schools."

This has a ring of truth to it and ties in with an insight delivered recently by (I think) Stephen Fry: academia has been based on the notion that facts are scarce. Hence they must be memorized and otherwise preserved. But in an Internet world facts are easily copied and aren't scarce anymore. Google makes them easy to locate. As Cringely puts it farther on in his posting it's not longer a knowledge economy, it's a search economy.

The big question is (i) is this true and (ii) if it is true, what does it mean for us as teachers?

10 Rules for Creativity

Never underestimate a nun (in this case, Sister Corita Kent).

Immaculate Heart College Rules (art department):

1. Find a place you trust and then try trusting it for a while.
2. General duties of a student: pull everything out of your teacher, pull everything out of your fellow students.
3. General duties of a teacher: pull everything out of your students.
4. Consider everything an experiment.
5. Be self-disciplined. This means finding someone wise or smart and choosing to follow them. To be disciplined is to follow in a good way. To be self-disciplined is to follow in a better way.
6. Nothing is a mistake. There is no win and no fail. There is only make.
7. The only rule is work. If you work it will lead to something. It’s the people who do all of the work all the time who eventually catch on to things.
8. Don’t try to create and analyse at the same time. They’re different processes.
9. Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It’s lighter than you think.
10. “We’re breaking all of the rules. Even our own rules. And how do we do that? By leaving plenty of room for X quantities.” - John Cage.

Helpful hints: Always be around. Come or go to everything always. Go to classes. Read anything you can get your hands on. Look at movies carefully often. Save everything, it might come in handy later.

There should be new rules next week.

Courtesy of Michal Migurski

Why Nerds are Unpopular...

...is Paul Graham's take on the relationship between high school culture and being smart. He's got a lot of insightful things to say about why high school culture in the United State (and, by extension, Canada, I think) is the way it is, specifically, why it is all too often cruel and pointless if you're not at the top of the popularity hierarchy.

Consider:

"So far I've been finessing the relationship between smart and nerd, using them as if they were interchangeable. In fact it's only the context that makes them so. A nerd is someone who isn't socially adept enough. But "enough" depends on where you are. In a typical American school, standards for coolness are so high (or at least, so specific) that you don't have to be especially awkward to look awkward by comparison.

Few smart kids can spare the attention that popularity requires. Unless they also happen to be good-looking, natural athletes, or siblings of popular kids, they'll tend to become nerds. And that's why smart people's lives are worst between, say, the ages of eleven and seventeen. Life at that age revolves far more around popularity than before or after."

and

"Merely understanding the situation they're in should make it less painful. Nerds aren't losers. They're just playing a different game, and a game much closer to the one played in the real world. Adults know this. It's hard to find successful adults now who don't claim to have been nerds in high school.

It's important for nerds to realize, too, that school is not life. School is a strange, artificial thing, half sterile and half feral. It's all-encompassing, like life, but it isn't the real thing. It's only temporary, and if you look, you can see beyond it even while you're still in it."