In theory...

...there's no difference between practice and theory but in practice there is.

The tension between my high level goals and aspirations as a teacher and the down and dirty fundamentals of life in the classroom 75 minutes at a time remain. I don’t want to be a cop, to be coercive and to use reward and punishment as a mechanistic tool to get students to learn (I want to be more Alife Kohn-like) but feel that I am forced back into that mode by the day to day reality of what I’m encountering in the classroom. Students are talking about their personal stuff at the same time as I’m talking or at the same time as another student is talking and being generally so disruptive as to make them impossible to ignore. So I threaten them and occasionally follow through on my threats and occasionally lose my cool in a visible way.

The key, suggests Bob Sullo in Activating the Desire to Learn, is to make the content interesting and relevant. Then students will want to learn. Sounds right to me. But that challenge seems way, way, beyond me. I struggle just to come up with and organize the stuff to fill the time at this point. That kind of meta-effort, devoted to establishing its relevance and to making it connect to them at a personal level seems like too much when it’s 9.00 PM and the kids are finally put to bed and the supper dishes are put away and I’m sitting down to figure out what tomorrow’s class is going to look like.

How can I get out of here (Mr. MacDonald - GRRRR) and over to there (Mr. MacDonald - great class!!!!)?

The Psychology of PowerPoint

Science Fiction blog io9 reported on a presentation by cognitive scientist Stephen M. Kosslyn at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston on 15 February, 2008 about using cognitive science to improve your powerpoint presentations. There are, apparently, four basic rules:

• The Goldilocks Rule
• present just the right amount of data
• never include more information than your audience needs
  

• The Rudolph Rule
• make key information stand out like Rudolph’s nose so that you guide your audience’s attention to it
• “The human brain is a difference detector.”
  

• The Rule of Four
• Generally, the brain can hold only four pieces of information at once so limit yourself to presenting four things at a time.
  

• The Birds of a Feather Rule
• if you want to indicate that certain things belong together, group them by giving them a similar colour, shape, or location in the visual field.
  

The goofy rule names? It’s always easier to remember something unfamiliar if it’s named for something familiar.

New Yorker Does Short Fiction Podcasts

The inimitable Boing Boing reports that the New Yorker (best magazine evah!) is publishing podcasts of some of its short fiction. Each month the mag asks one authour to pick a favourite from the NYer archives and then read it.

I'll be signing up.

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

The Professional versus the Inspired Amateur

Great article by Steve Martin in February issue of The Smithsonian magazine. It occurred to me on reading it that there's a lot of overlap between stand-up comedy and teaching. Here's something surprising that he has to say about the difference between being great and being good:

The consistent work enhanced my act. I learned a lesson: it was easy to be great. Every entertainer has a night when everything is clicking. These nights are accidental and statistical: like lucky cards in poker, you can count on them occurring over time. What was hard was to be good, consistently good, night after night, no matter what the circumstances. Performing in so many varied situations made every predicament manageable, from Toronto, where I performed next to an active salad bar, to the well-paying but soul-killing Playboy Clubs, where I was almost but not quite able to go over. But as I continued to work, my material grew; I came up with odd little gags such as "How many people have never raised their hands before?"

Well, that difference between being great when inspired, when the spirit moves you, and being consistently good is precisely what it means to be a professional, isn't it? Amateurs can be great at what they do because they can be inspired but that's something that's outside your control - by definition. You have to depend on the muses to be inspired and they are...fickle. But a professional has honed his or her craft to the point where he or she is at least good pretty much all the time.

Someday, when you're really a professional, all your classes will be good and, when inspiration does strike, you'll be great.

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."

Survival Skills for Occasional Teachers

From your friendly neighbourhood (Ontario) teacher's federation comes Survival Skills for Occasional Teachers. I cant' speak to its quality. I haven't read it myself yet but I plan to in the next couple of weeks.

Link.