→ "Life is a game. This is your strategy guide." →

Real life is the game that – literally – everyone is playing. But it can be tough. This is your guide.

You might not realise, but real life is a game of strategy. There are some fun mini-games – like dancing, driving, running, and sex – but the key to winning is simply managing your resources.

Most importantly, successful players put their time into the right things. Later in the game money comes into play, but your top priority should always be mastering where your time goes.

I'm only about halfway through the game so far, but this strategy guide would've been useful from the start.

→ "Down With Textbooks" →

In an age where information is instantaneous, cheap and easily accessible, history teachers will need to do even more to guide students toward credible sources.

He focuses on history textbooks, but this goes for all subjects. As the distinction blurs between textbooks and apps, all of our resources should change.

→ "There's a Cheaper, More Effective Way to Train Teachers" →

Virtually all beginner teachers, in our experience, meanwhile, agree that what they need more than abstract social and pedagogical lectures are tangible techniques and granular-level coaching. They need Band-Aids, not meditations on hematology.

What made my Masters program so good was that we really did have classes focusing on how to teach high school Latin. Those courses, while still not perfect, are the ones I still refer back to daily, not the generic Education and Educational Psychology courses.

There are some really good ideas here about a less-centralized, apprenticeship model of teacher training. One example:

Fortunately for Will, he teaches at a charter school that does something innovative and different. At Will’s school, the top master teachers are given an additional free period to observe and train new teachers—not in pedagogical theory, but in tools such as how to support individual students (“Elijah’s parents are responsive”); content-specific tricks (“here’s a way to explain how to derive the distance formula from the Pythagorean theorem”); or school-specific techniques (“this is how our school manages half-days”).

My school currently does some of this, but there is probably room for more. There are a a lot of master teachers in the building, and we have to use those resources well.

→ "To Foster Your Creativity, Don't Learn To Code; Learn To Paint" →

The key to being creative, in any field, be it scientific, technical, or business, in the 21st century definitely requires a certain comfort level in technology. But the best way to harness the power of computers doesn’t reside in coding – it resides in letting computers do the grunt computational work that humans are bad at, so that humans can focus on the creative, problem solving work that computers are bad at.

And if you want to foster those creative, problem solving skills, the solution isn’t learning to code – it’s learning to paint. Or play an instrument. Or write poetry. Or sculpt. The field doesn’t matter: the key thing is that if you want to foster your own innovative creativity, the best way to do it is to seriously pursue an artistic endeavor.

[...] History seems to agree with him. Many of the world’s greatest scientists, in eras both ancient and modern, were also artists. Da Vinci, of course, is famous for his talents both artistic and scientific. Robert Fulton, the inventor of the modern steam engine, was a painter. The actress Hedy Lamarr was the co-inventor of the patent that underlies cell phones, wi-fi and GPS. Her partner in that invention? George Antheil, a composer and musician.

As good an argument as any for studying Latin: not because it's useful, but precisely because it's "useless." (via The Dish)

→ "Lavishing Kids With Praise Can Make Them Feel Worse About Themselves" →

This short article on the Atlantic was going around yesterday, and I think it complements what I wrote yesterday about grade inflation. This study implies that there's a point at which overly-inflated grades have a detrimental effect on students.