→ "How Schools Kill Creativity" →

This is eight years old, but I just now read it (I don't watch TED talks, I read the transcript). Ken Robinson makes some great points:

My contention is that creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.

I know that TED talks don't really give the presenter enough time to go into every permutation of their thesis (that's my main problem with TED talks), but still, I think it's misguided that he ties this creativity so closely with music and the arts.

Every education system on earth has the same hierarchy of subjects. Every one. Doesn't matter where you go. You'd think it would be otherwise, but it isn't. At the top are mathematics and languages, then the humanities, and the bottom are the arts. Everywhere on Earth. And in pretty much every system too, there's a hierarchy within the arts. Art and music are normally given a higher status in schools than drama and dance. There isn't an education system on the planet that teaches dance everyday to children the way we teach them mathematics. Why? Why not? I think this is rather important. I think math is very important, but so is dance.

I have nothing against art or dance (even if art class was my first B in high school, and my dancing looks like the seizure-filled fever dream of Mikhail Baryshnikov). But if we focus on "creativity" only in those fields, we are missing a lot of opportunities to teach creative skills in math class and history and Latin. John Cleese said it best:

Creativity is not a talent, it is a way of operating.

A Future Not Our Own

I wrote a dozen letters of recommendation for seniors this year, more than In years past. Fortunately, most of the students who ask me for a letter are students whom I have gotten to know well, because I taught them in multiple Latin classes over their career. And while I of course mention all their achievements in my letter, I try to keep it future-focused: why am I so confident in this young woman's future success? Yeah, she's done good work in high school, but what about her specifically makes me think she will do well in college and beyond? That can be a tough question to answer, not because of the individual student (there are plenty of nice things to say about all our students), but because sometimes I feel woefully unprepared to recommend them for a future that I can't easily imagine.

My father has spent 35 years at the same company, working his way up the corporate ladder. Lately, he has unfortunately received several reminders that the loyalty he's shown over those three and a half decades isn't reciprocated. And for my students, odds are pretty good that they will not be working at any one company for 35 years. The days of finding a job right out of college and retiring 40 years later with a pension are over, and have been for a long time. (Unless somebody gets a job at a Jesuit high school–those people tend not to leave.)

I think this uncertainty is what makes me so wary of those who push a more utilitarian approach to education, advocating for business or computer programming classes over history and Latin. In my advocating for the humanities, it's not that I'm against studying any of those more "useful" topics, I just don't have nearly the certainty that others seem to about what actually is useful, let alone what will be useful in ten, twenty, thirty years.

Given that none of us can tell the future with any certainty, many have advocated for the importance of teaching skills like problem-solving, collaboration, critical thinking, and clear communication. In my mind, those skills can be taught in a variety of ways, but a humanities education, precisely because it is so broad and all-encompassing, is better-suited for that than the alternatives. I know, I've said all this before, but as I've been thinking about my students' futures, I can't help but reaffirm that.

When I sit down to write these letters of rec, I spend a lot of time trying to imagine each girl's future. Which ones will be doctors? Teachers? Politicians? And then I go back and review the time they spent in my classes. How did I ready them for those (or any other) careers? There are always things I wish I could have done better: more time writing, perhaps, or in-depth analysis. But generally speaking, I feel comfortable that I've done what I can in Latin or World History class to prepare them, and can find stories to illustrate that.

I sometimes joke with them that I will write about the time(s) they farted in class or how annoying they were as freshmen, but fortunately for them, I can generally remember stories about when they have shown passion, grit, creativity, and humor. I feel confident they were at least as well-served practicing those traits in my classes as they would have been in a business class, but I won't really know unless they come back and tell me in twenty years.

There's a prayer that's popular among teachers in Jesuit schools, that contains the line, "We are prophets of a future not our own." As I wrote those twelve letters of recommendation, and then again at graduation as I send our seniors off to college, that line rings particularly true.

→ "Teaching Kids 'Grit' is All the Rage. Here's What's Wrong With It." →

Good counterpoint at New Republic to those advocating more formal "character education."

There are three major problems with the new character education. The first is that we do not know how to teach character. The second is that character-based education is untethered from any conception of morality. And lastly, this mode of education drastically constricts the overall purpose of education.

"Grit" may be important, but there's still a lot of work to be done researching how (and if) these traits can be taught.

→ "Multitask Masters" →

When I call out my students for being distracted in class, the most common response is, "I'm multitasking!" I generally point out that multitasking is a myth. This article from Maria Konikova at The New Yorker gives me the science to back that up.

Strayer believes that there is a tiny but persistent subset of the population—about two per cent—whose performance does not deteriorate, and can even improve, when multiple demands are placed on their attention. The supertaskers are true outliers. According to Strayer, multitasking isn’t part of a normal distribution akin to birth weight, where even the lightest and heaviest babies fall within a relatively tight range around an average size. Instead, it is more like I.Q.: most people cluster in an average range, but there is a long tail where only a tiny fraction—single digits among thousands—will ever find themselves.

I taught about 80 students this year, so according to this study 1.6 of my students are actually capable of multitasking.

→ "The 11 Defining Features of the Summer Blockbuster" →

FiveThirtyEight took my "Summer Movies" post and added actual data. Interesting read, full of pretty charts (though some charts are more enlightening than others).

On a related note, I am again running two Summer Movie Drafts, and the consensus among all involved is that this summer will be a terrible one for movies, both critically and (potentially) financially. It will be interesting to see if that ends up being true or if there are a number of surprise hits. Early returns for Amazing Spider-Man 2 aren't particularly promising...