Manuel Lima, in this TED talk, offers a tantalizing suggestion. If he’s correct, then one of the most basic metaphors on which our thought depends, knowledge and existence as a branched tree, is being replaced by a metaphor of knowledge and existence as a network.
Artist Julian Peters has completed his 24-page graphic version of T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” And it’s all available online.Let us go and make our visit.
A post on Wise Bread tells us of “Ten Surprising Ways a College Education will Improve Your Life.” Unfortunately but not surprisingly (in our data-obsessed culture) these reasons mostly revolve around monetary benefits. You’ll earn more, be unemployed less, and so forth. I’m a bit mystified by #7. “You’re able to spend more time with your children.”
A college education may also improve your family life, giving you more quality time with your children. College Board reports that mothers with a four-year college degree spend on average about “51% more time on their children’s activities than employed mothers with only a high school education.” For those mothers with children under the age three, the amount of playtime spent with their children also increased with education.
I have four children, and I’m not altogether sure that spending more time with them is always a good thing. In fact, I’d say the evidence is definitely divided.
A 12-minute video about education and change and ADHD and stuff like that. It’s worth our time.
I am attempting something new this semester, beginning today. I aim to use Twitter to supplement my classes. If you’d like to check into this bumbling, stumbling try, you can follow @Prof_Mark_JCCC. My intention is to restrict this to class materials or items of wide interest in English.
If you’d like to follow a hashtag, here’s what I’m intending to use.
Keep in mind that nothing on the Twitter field will be absolutely essential to your success. Anything that is essential will be repeated elsewhere: email, D2L, class, etc. However, I think that this has the potential to enrich the courses as well as just reminding you of things.
A recent study performed by the Council for Aid to Education, reported that fully 40% of four-year-college graduates performed at less than a proficient level in measures of critical thinking. The graph below displays the gloomy results of this survey.
In order to explain why I think this matters, I’d like to tell you a bit about an old friend, Steve, a guy who has worked in the video-production industry for several decades. Steve has never struggled to find or keep a job. Currently he’s riding high for an outfit in Memphis, yet his success has come at least as much from his own positive personality traits as from his education.
He explains that when he went to college, he took a host of technical courses. He learned to edit video by actually cutting up and splicing together tape. Things that we can do with iMovie in just a few moments were grueling tasks in Steve’s early career. A few years into his working years, computers took over the video editing process and most of the skills he had spent so long learning were utterly useless, except as historical curiosities. Steve told me that he wished he had taken more classes in my area. As the two of us sat in front of a video-editing computer, he confessed that his technical skills are temporary while the skills I champion–things like grammar, logic, and rhetoric–are permanent, having been central in education for millennia.
When I was in college, I took the easiest road available to me to complete my required mathematics requirements. Rather than taking a math course above College Algebra, I opted for a computer programming course. Not only is BASIC not a currently used computer language, the entire paradigm of programming has moved away from that style. I’m not going to say that my course in BASIC was an utter waste, but I’m fairly certain I would have learned more about logic and rigorous thinking by going another route.
For too many students, General Education requirements in college are something “to be gotten out of the way” on the way to more important things like accounting or business law or anatomy or educational psychology. Yes, your training as an actuary, a botanist, or a civil engineer might be what will impress people with your resume, but it is your training in the liberal arts, those broad topics that transcend the techniques and technologies of today, that will make you the thinker who can impress people with your performance.
As the semester begins, we have 16 weeks ahead of us. Sixteen weeks, 112 days, four months–that’s a long time. But look ahead. At some point down the road, you’ll have a test in your sites. You’ll have two weeks to study. Two weeks, fourteen days, 336 hours–that’s a lot of time. Why, then, will you probably find yourself staring down the barrel of that test with only, say, ten hours and the need to sleep between you and an exam paper?
Most of us procrastinate at times, and many students believe that cramming is an effective strategy. For years, I’ve been advising students not to cram. Apparently research, and not just anecdotal experience, supports my position, according to this report.
Obviously, cram sessions frequently happen because students feel they don’t have time to study until the last minute. But since the idea here is that shorter sessions spaced out will be more effective, you don’t need to build up studying as a massive task. You can study a little bit every day and retain much more information.
Give it a try. You might just change your life.
A long-time friend has been posting intriguing stuff on Facebook recently. Over the last couple of days, he’s been reposting items from a website designed to tell folks from the liberal side of the world what they want to hear so that they will load a bunch of pages and hence a bunch of ads. It’s all very civic minded, of course.
Yesterday, the specific headline was this
Of course the uninformative nature of this headline forces the reader to click on it in order to discover what question the knuckle-draggers were asked. The question, unfortunately, is never clearly stated in the resulting jumbled article, although you can scan to the right and click instead on “Biggest Cheerleader Wardrobe Fails.” Apparently, the question was, “Did the U.S. find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?”
Just to the left of the add for “These 54 Hot Chicks in Yoga Pants That Will Blow You Away!” the writer, Kerry-Anne Mendoza, notes these observations from a Fairleigh Dickinson University poll:
Let’s be clear. The author claims there was a “study which asked respondents one simple question.” (That’s found near the top of the article, next to the add tagged “These smoking hot body paint pictures have readers asking, ‘Do I see what I think I see?'”) I would challenge any clever person to come up with “one simple question” that could yield all of the data listed above. Even if we grant them the demographic information as questions that don’t count, there are the separate questions regarding “an active WMD program” and that the “U.S. found WMDs in Iraq.”
Of course, as even Ms. Mendoza recognizes, the U.S. did find WMDs in Iraq. You don’t have to take my word for it or FoxNews’ word for it. That staunch conservative publication, The New York Times, reported it, and Ms. Mendoza actually links the article. Of course she buries this information deep in the article, long after she’s rambled on about climate change, probably assuming that readers would be distracted by “22 Awkward Engagement Photos…” by now. (Actually, for someone whose bio brags about her living in a tent at Occupy London, Mendoza is sure feeding the advertising beast pretty freely.)
My beef is not with a left-leaning, moderately capable writer cashing in on the appetites of others. There’s a market for propaganda, and she is proving herself to be a closet market capitalist by supplying that market. My beef is with my friend, a well educated and thoughtful man, who just can’t stop providing free circulation of that propaganda.
I am all in favor of differing opinions, but that which masquerades as civil discourse in our country is neither civil nor discourse.
What if you could go to a school where you didn’t learn information but instead learned how to process information. That’s the goal at a start-up school in California, the Minerva Project
But while there are many things that make Minerva unusual, the curriculum is what makes it truly unique. Minerva toys with the notion that in a world where information is never more than a click away, what matters most is not what you know off the top of your head, but how you analyze and interpret everything you learn.
It’s crazy, but it just might be crazy enough to work.
How to Win a Super Bowl
Was Butler just lucky? To some degree, he was, but to a much larger degree he was not. He had studied game film. He knew his assignment and he knew what plays the Seahawks might run. He came into that game prepared. If he weren’t someone who prepared, he would not have been on the field, or on the team, or in the league.
Sometimes, making the big play, whether it be as a cornerback or a musician or a lawyer or a student, comes down to preparing yourself every day to do the right thing at the right time. That’s why people learn to do CPR or to fight off an attacker or to do any of a thousand less dramatic but nearly as important tasks. What you do with your day today will dictate how well you will be positioned should you find yourself standing in the wrong end zone with the Super Bowl on the line and the ball heading into your neighborhood. Congratulations, Malcolm Butler. You got yourself ready and destiny came within your grasp.
Perhaps we can learn something from that example.