High Score Education: Games, not school, are teaching kids to think

“Forty percent of students lack basic reading skills, and their academic performance is dismal compared with that of their foreign counterparts. In response to this crisis, schools are skilling-and-drilling their way ‘back to basics,’ moving toward mechanical instruction methods that rely on line-by-line scripting for teachers and endless multiple-choice testing. Consequently, kids aren’t learning how…

Fisking as a Rhetorical Construct

fisk (v): debunk via critical annotation, typically with heaping doses of contempt. Recently Jill Walker lamented that it was hard to teach her students to blog critically. Perhaps we should first teach them to fisk. Over the past month, I’ve seen the verb “fisk” pop up in weblogs discussing media coverage of Iraq. The eponymous…

BBC Screws Up Again

“With regard to the article by David Whitehouse posted Friday, 18 April, 2003, 13:45 GMT 14:45 UK: Does anyone actually read these BBC stories before they are posted? It would be polite to to spell Mr. Rutan’s name properly (‘Burt’ not ‘Bert’). Moreover, this is not the ‘world’s first manned sub-orbital space programme’. I cannot…

The End of Human Nature

“By ordering up athletics-enhanced, music-enhanced, optimism-enhanced children, you are not merely urging them in some direction – all parents do that; you are wiring your own tastes into their genes, literally twisting their minds and bodies into the shape you have chosen. And this staggering arrogance is bound to be futile because the technology will…

The 'Obliteration Phenomenon' in Science — and the Advantage of Being Obliterated!

What if “pi” were a recent discovery? How would journals publicize it, and how would the educational system absorb it? “Once the discovery had been reported in a contemporary journal, mathematicians could be expected to begin using and citing Archimedes? constant… While the term Archimedes? constant would become increasingly familiar even to school children, scientists…