A Guy Who Was There
I hope all is well with you and your's,
New issue of The American Bystander is out, I've got a few things in it including an extremely short riff on Yeats.
People sometimes send me books, here are three such books and something nice about each of them.
If you have any requests or ideas about what the next edu research Q&A should be about, please let me know! Things that I am considering: tutoring, grades, class size, feedback, math facts, mindset.
"The so-called box is actually a climate-controlled crib." Oh good, there's a video of a baby in a Skinner box on the internet! From 1944.
There is also this remarkable video of one of Skinner's reinforcement experiments with a toddler, from 1960. It's at turns hilarious, interminable, and finally sad when the experimenters first train the toddler to get a snack from the machine and then change the machine to see the response. The sad part is around 9:30, if you want.
I told you I was listening to a lot of J Dilla in my last email to you. That lead to relistening to D'Angelo's Voodoo (Untitled is still great, so is Chicken Grease) and The Roots' Things Fall Apart (The Next Movement). Questlove used to have an amazing personal website, here's his "review" of Voodoo from the perspective of a guy who was there making it.
A tremendously well-written book about sampling in music is Nate Patrin's "Bring That Beat Back." I skipped to the last two chapters about Madlib and Dilla, and now I'm working backwards. There's an excellent Spotify playlist Patrin created for the book.
Speaking of cool websites that I miss, novelist Michael Chabon used to have an amazing site, archived here. Listed among his upcoming works is "a live-action martial arts retelling of "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs", set in China in the late 1800s. To be directed by Yuen Wo-Ping," I wonder what happened to that.
"We examine the dynamic nature of student-teacher match quality by studying the effect of having a teacher for more than one year...High-achieving students benefit most academically and boys of color benefit most behaviorally." More evidence pointing to the value of teacher-kid relationships. (A different paper relating to this was covered on my blog.)
"Playful and happy conversation is the main focus of activity in third places, although it is not required to be the only activity. The tone of conversation is usually light-hearted and humorous; wit and good-natured playfulness are highly valued," wikipedia article on "third places."
Talk to you again soon,
Michael