I don’t expect students to be constantly after me—and I wouldn’t want them to be. I also know that what looms large for them are their friends, families, and personal lives. But I’m beginning to learn that if students at large universities are starved for personal attention and connection, students at small colleges have so…
I did propose with a diamond ring, for which I paid a substantial portion of my income, but since I was in grad school at the time, my income was very modest. The next time you look at a diamond, consider this. Nearly every American marriage begins with a diamond because a bunch of rich…
College is already pretty stressful, and journalism culture is not exactly relaxed, either. The psychological strain of trying to do justice to a newsworthy story, while also respecting the suffering of members of your own academic community, while also suffering as a member of that community, is no picnic. The stereotype of the hard-hitting journalist…
One might argue that the new emphasis on sociability is precisely what autistic spectrum students require. Don’t they, more than anyone else, need to develop their communication and collaborative skills? And in our increasingly social 21st century, aren’t these skills more important than ever before — both for life in general, and for jobs in…
Frequent smartphone use imposes significant psychological costs on the user, and negatively impacts our personal and professional lives. —Daniel Gulati – Harvard Business Review. Similar:Juror's CreedWhile researching my obligations for #ju…CultureHow important is the look 'n' feel of your website?”The look ‘n’ feel of your website is im…BusinessTwitter and the "Two Minutes Hate"Another of the…
Talk nerdy to me. You’re my type. What about old friend Helvetica, Miss Typography of 1957 (and pretty much every year after)? Coles theorizes that its universality stems from the fact that its “shapes and widths are unusually uniform.” This homogeneity makes it perfect for big display logos but “not as effective for long passages…
A hype-heavy treatment of a recent study (named vaguely as the “American Freshman Survey,” in the article, but not actually cited or dated… I found a copy of a 2011 report). While students are much more likely to call themselves gifted in writing abilities, objective test scores actually show that their writing abilities are far…
A six-year-old who was warned not to pretend to shoot his classmates with scissors later made a shooting gesture with his fingers, and has now been suspended. A parent reacting to the story told a reporter “I wouldn’t expect someone to do that to my child, and if they did, I would expect some type…
Have I mentioned lately that I have awesome students? For a “Creative Critical Presentation” in my online American Literature survey, English major Tyler Carter created A Message from Hester Prynne, a 9-minute video that explores Hester’s psychology and spirituality, through music, dance, poetry, and cinematography. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivxfKoZmF5k All the technology Seton Hill offers to its students…
I asked my 10yo why she was moping. “Because I don’t want to be a dancing mushroom,” she said, in a tone that added an unspoken “duh!” Like most of her theater friends, she is on pins and needles, waiting for Stage Right to announce the cast list for next month’s production of Annie “What…
I’m not sure “thank you” is the right way to acknowledge this painful link from Paul Crossman. “Oh, come on,” you’re probably saying. “It’s not the music that’s addictive. It’s the dance, from the goofy video. That’s what went viral.” (There’s that word again.) Well, it turns out that this programming effect could be embedded…
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Toddlers, multiple experiments have shown, can test hypotheses about how machines work—for example, they can figure out which blocks made a machine play when some but not all blocks trigger the toy. We have to be careful, though. This exploratory, quasi-scientific approach to the world doesn’t last if adults teach kids to do something else: Kids will let adult…
The reason they survive to this day, Zipes suggests, is because the classic fairy tales—such as Snow White, Cinderella, and Rapunzel, which all have analogues in cultures throughout the world—are perfect examples of “memetic” engineering. Drawing on the notion of the meme coined by Richard Dawkins, Zipes imagines the elements of fairy tales competing for…
Department of Homeland Security-funded video. Part of me hopes it’s more effective than the infamous “duck and cover” cold-war films, but that’s probably the part of me this video is carefully designed to mollify. I must say the chevon design theme looks cool, and the “Run > Hide > Fight” very nicely emphasizes the hierarchy…
When you talk today to teachers and administrators at high-achieving high schools, this is their greatest concern: that their students are so overly protected from adversity, in their homes and at school, that they never develop the crucial ability to overcome real setbacks and in the process to develop strength of character. American children, especially…
Multitasking, when it comes to paying attention, is a myth. The brain naturally focuses on concepts sequentially, one at a time. At first that might sound confusing; at one level the brain does multitask. You can walk and talk at the same time. Your brain controls your heartbeat while you read a book. Pianists can…
Fascinating… asking test subjects to think more globally (in terms of the relationships between the parts that make the whole) reduced the bias that makes people think of women as body parts. People were also better at discerning women’s individual body parts than they were at men’s individual body parts, further confirming the local processing,…
Imagination is a powerful social tool. The novel provides us with a sustained window into another world, while still exercising the creative faculties that make us co-creators of the worlds we read about. Having said all that, I am aware that there may be some confirmation bias operating, as I here introduce an article that…
As a kid, I loved the feeling of confidence that came when my mom handed me a few bucks at the pool and told me I could get what I wanted from the concession stand. Since my main responsibility for the afternoon was to keep the kids occupied, and I was in no rush to…