But what makes a good teacher? There have been many quests for the one essential trait, and they have all come up empty-handed. Among the factors that do not predict whether a teacher will succeed: a graduate-school degree, a high score on the SAT, an extroverted personality, politeness, confidence, warmth, enthusiasm and having passed the…
Coming up… we’ll tell you whether you’ll be impaled by sharp, radioactive icicles hurled by mobs of rampaging robots in your neighborhood. But first, people panicking, filling up three shopping carts of toilet paper and canned food. Hear the techno-pop pulse of our theme music, and know that you’re being conditioned to think of us…
Wisdom to keep in mind as I plan for this semester’s “History and Future of the Book.” FAIL Blog. Similar:I Quit Liking Things On Facebook for Two Weeks.She stopped liking, and started commenti…CybercultureDear daughter, let Miley Cyrus be a lesson to youI am intrigued by the possibility that M…CultureRediscovering History’s Lost First Female Video…
Violent video games have triggered substantial controversy due to highly publicized incidents of youth violence that have been allegedly inspired by the content of such games. Several jurisdictions have passed legislation penalizing the distribution of violent video games to minors and used psychological research to support the justification for such laws. However, courts have consistently…
Why did Brian Wilson use Cooper Black on the cover of Pet Sounds? Why did Obama use Gotham for his election propaganda? It has long been apparent that typefaces reflect the character of the person using them, and that type choice, as well as the words that are typed, is a powerful conveyor of meaning. At…
While reviewing proposals for a new games journalism assignment in my video game culture and theory course, I found myself thinking about Floyd the Robot, from Planetfall. Some students were commenting excitedly about the emotional impact of the airport scene in Modern Warfare 2 (you are infiltrating a terrorist cell, and the game requires you…
Do students who report enjoying a teaching style actually learn more from that style? This study suggests that there may be an optimal teaching method for a given task, and that whether students like it or not, that optimal method does a better job teaching them. (As usual, beware of any new article with “may”…
I managed to find my own refuge in acting. The stage was a far safer place for me than anything I had to live through at home – it offered escape. I could be someone else, in another place, in another time. However, whenever the role called for anger, fury, or the expression of murderous…
The space that used to belong only to men grows ever smaller. However, the statistics about who is portrayed in the media as knowledgeable “talking heads,” about who is credited with writing the most influential books and who gets bylines in the most respected intellectual magazines seem to change very little. In a year that…
X-altruists are compelled to good, even when doing so makes no sense and brings harm upon them. The cannot tolerate injustice, and go to extreme lengths to help those who have been wronged, regardless of their personal relationship to them. Now, I am not speaking of the guy who helps an old lady cross the…
My sixth-grader has scored very well on standardized tests for math, but he finds a blank page of math problems intimidating and boring. He spends hours — literally hours — wasting time at the kitchen table, not doing his long division or word problems. Yet for pleasure, he reads Death by Black Hole: And Other…
In several of my classes this week, I asked the students to estimate how many children had been poisoned by Halloween candy in the last 20 years. Guesses ranged from one per year to one, but nobody guessed zero. No child has been poisoned by a stranger’s goodies on Halloween, ever, as far as we…
Our decision to homeschool began when we moved from Wisconsin to Pennsylvania with a five-year-old, and found there was no option for half-day kindergarten. We decided the move was stressful enough, and since school attendance wasn’t mandatory until age 7, we decided to handle the afternoon naps, storytimes, and playing-with-blocks ourselves. As long as our…
Last week, I spent a little while doing the rounds, trying to drum up some advertising customers for the student paper. Ordinarily there’s a student who carries the role of business manager, but when we’re in between student workers, or outside of class time, I try to push things along. There were twenty different things…
A few years ago, I bought a wireless mouse, used it for a few days, then put it away in favor of my old mouse. Every so often, like when I’m not feeling the course-prep love and I’m desperately looking for an excuse to procrastinate, I remember that wireless mouse, but can’t remember why I…
TV news emphasizes the immediate and the emotional. This screen shot shows how the NBC news affiliate in Miami allows readers to rate stories by emotions. Notice that this mechanism does not reward stories for being fair, informative, accurate, or even newsworthy. I stumbled across this feature while reading a story about the 11-year-old reporter…
The first man on the moon doesn’t feel his life is defined by being the first man on the moon? As if the world would remember much more than Armstrong’s “one piece of fireworks”? Would his name belong beside Magellan’s or Marco Polo’s if not for Armstrong’s singular achievement? —Paul Farhi, Washington Post Similar:I just…
Post office boxes! Post office boxes! My face hurts from laughing. New Live Poll Allows Pundits To Pander To Viewers In Real Time Similar:At the Johnstown Flood Museum. (May 31 1889 the neglected dam at the South Fork Fishing an…At the Johnstown Flood Museum. (May 31 1…CultureI have two scenes in a horror film. My…
For a period of 2 million years, ending with the last ice age around 10,000 B.C., the Earth experienced a series of convulsive glacial events. This rapid-fire climate change meant that humans couldn’t rely on consistent patterns to know which animals to hunt, which plants to gather, or even which predators might be waiting around…
“What if I had a check on my desk for $5,000? And what if I rewarded the writer whose introduction most caught my attention, who most effectively made me want to continue because of a solid and clear thesis, with a check for five grand? Would your introductions improve even more?” Cries of “Absolutely!” filled…