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Category Archives: complexity

Make Your Mark Heavy and Dark

Wednesday, April 8, 2009

This is testing week, and I’ve been listening to what the kids are hearing about the tests. “Relax; just do your best.” “The tests give us information about how we can help you.” “You will not be held back or get a bad grade on your report card if you don’t do well on the [...]

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Harder vs. Smarter

Monday, December 1, 2008

Bloggers have been all over the Michelle Rhee story, lately. Mike Klonsky: Know-nothing writers like Amanda Ripley kill perfectly good trees to fill pages with crap like this: “The biggest problem with U.S. public schools is ineffective teaching, according to decades of research.” Did you get that? Decades of research? Now instead of weighing school [...]

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More is More

Saturday, August 9, 2008

Here on the edge of the edge of the continent, my family’s view of the 2008 Olympic Games is a little fuzzy since we’re too far out of town for cable service, and the rabbit ears antenna won’t pull down the local broadcast signal. We do (as of 6 months ago) have a decent wireless [...]

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What now?

Monday, March 31, 2008

Maybe I’ll have ‘What now?‘ carved into my tombstone. It’s an ever-relevant question, and someone might even smile at it if they thought it was the last thing some dead guy wanted to know. Which it would be. Now, after Doug Belshaw’s post – maybe even partly because of his question, Is Twitter Bad for [...]

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Fault Lines

Thursday, March 27, 2008

Artichoke’s post about metaphor and education, and creativity, has me thinking about the lines and tensions in teaching. She notes the contradiction for art teachers working in schools with “The emphasis of verbal communication in a subject which is often about an individual language that has nothing to do with words.” Her post was provocative, [...]

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Meme: Passion Quilt

Monday, March 10, 2008

Social Justice “All for the Common Good, each according to their abilities…” Miss Proffe linked to me from her passion quilt meme post. I don’t always respond to these things, but I liked hers so much that I decided to join it. The caption appears with the photo on flickr, but in Portuguese, and I [...]

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Herd Poisoning

Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Graham Wegner points out some problems that cropped up in the comments of a couple of education blogs. He comments on the perils of taking up heartfelt issues in blog comments, and assuming we’ll be understood. Neil Postman’s Crazy Talk, Stupid Talk has an excerpted chapter, Propaganda [pdf], in which he argues that propaganda is [...]

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Thick Description

Monday, November 5, 2007

We had parent conferences last week. They’re a time for me to learn more about my students, just as much as they give me a chance to report on their progress. For the parents who don’t make it to the meeting, I give them a call some time during the following week. But the phone [...]

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Setting the Dial on Rationality

Thursday, October 11, 2007

Davis and Sumara’s book about complexity theory in education, mentions the Santa Fe Institute, a center for complexity research, but I’d never heard of it. They also referred to a book by M. Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos, which as it turns out, tells the story of [...]

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Putting Something Back

Saturday, September 29, 2007

This coming week I begin teaching an after-school Web Tools for Teachers course. I’ve never done any professional development work, except on my own behalf, and I’m thinking about blogging and altruism today. The idea of “sharing” is central to my understanding of blogging. I suppose that out of zillions of bloggers, others are guided [...]

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