Provocative Teaching Advice
Advice for passionate instructors to give students that builds compassion, critical thinking, and character, regardless of discipline.
Provocative Teaching Advice
Benjamen Zander - Leadership on Display
youtube.comInspiring ability to make learning something difficult more rewarding. This man is a genius at making youth and learners feel great about failing.
Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.... See more
David Foster Wallace,
Nix 🕊 • carry yourself lightly
Incredible article about the state of the digital world and the necessity for kids to know who they are in the world.
What would a healthy culture and caring parents do for those kids? They would be pulled aside and told: you are you, and you will always be you; we live here, on this planet, in this culture, as this species; you live in the times you live in, and you will never live anywhere else. There’s no escape, for any of us. The world gets better and it gets worse. Your life gets easier and it gets harder. Progress happens. Happiness is possible. But the world is an irredeemably broken place, tragedy is the endowment of our bodies and our gods and our world, and you will always, always, always be you. You can hide in your room, but you’ll still be you. And you’ll still be you when you head off to college and make brand new friends, and you’ll still be you after you come out to your parents, and you’ll still be you after you get that job or that promotion or that raise, and you’ll still be you after you lose those last 10 pounds, and you’ll still be you after you fall in love, and you’ll still be you after the AI revolution or the socialist revolution or the love revolution or any other revolution. The only sensible path forward is to learn to accept the brokenness of human life, to develop resilience in the face of its petty cruelties, and to learn to live with yourself.
Remarks about where beauty can come from beyond the surface.
A frictionless, unresponsive life is simply not a human one—we are born troublemakers who need to make marks.
Why couldn’t teachers be geniuses, though, geniuses forged via passion manifested through practice?
John Warner • Genius vs. Expertise
Excerpt from the lecture referenced in the article:
It’s only by concentrating, sticking to the question, being patient, letting all the parts of my mind come into play, that I arrive at an original idea. By giving my brain a chance to make associations, draw connections, take me by surprise. And often even that idea doesn’t turn out to be very good. I need time to think about it, too, to make mistakes and recognize them, to make false starts and correct them, to outlast my impulses, to defeat my desire to declare the job done and move on to the next thing.
“All the technique in the world doesn't compensate for the inability to notice.” — Elliott Erwitt
There is a lot of evidence suggesting that students learn best and more quickly through asset-based approaches. Meyer’s expertise is in math, but the same is true in writing and I am a dedicated practitioner of working from a base of what students already know and can do, the most notable skill being thinking . Everyone can think, but a huge propor... See more
John Warner • Genius vs. Expertise
An asset-based approach to teaching asks, “What ideas do these students have ?” rather than “What ideas do these students lack?”
Dan Meyer • Is Asset-Based AI Even Possible?
Great advice for the importance of experiencing things in the world as the root of becoming a better creative.
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