Always Falling Forward
Hi!
Check out "Board and Table Games From Many Civilizations" by R.C. Bell, which is fully available online. See if you can find the pattern lurking in this spiral game board from Sudan.
"For whatever reason, YouCubed as an organization frequently produces or cites research in ways that don’t show what they claim to." It's me, kvetching about YouCubed again.
The puzzle for me is why these pieces I write are so popular within math education but nobody else writes them. And I guess it's because nobody actually cares about research very much, when you get down to it. It's all about the nice math activities and the supportive messages. If YouCubed was just that, everyone in math edu would love them.
I got curious, and it turns out "Type A personality" was originally invented to predict who is more prone to heart disease. I feel like the existence of Type A people is the one psychological theory I believe entirely, I feel it in my bones.
"I'd get to that, and then I'd go, and now what?" I've watched this short video of Tom Petty talking about writing "The Waiting" a few dozen times, I love it as a little picture into a certain kind of "and now what" way of making stuff. The initial idea is a trap.
Fans fo Jack Handey, rejoice: Django Gold has taken up the mantle. "My Platoon" is hilarious.
My daughter likes to listen to the Frozen soundtrack a few times a day, which is permanently altering my consciousness, I fear. One night I thought to myself, I hope someone has made a good screamo version of "Let it Go." I opened up my computer and, lo, my prayers verily were answered. (NSFW-ish, if you can make out the words.)
"What modular design can do is liberate the writer from linear logic, those chains of cause and effect, strings of dominoes always falling forward. Modular design replaces the domino theory of narrative with other principles that have less to do with motion (the story as a process) and more to do with overall shapeliness (the story as a fixed geometric form)." Hmm, yeah. That's Madison Smart Bell in "Narrative Design."
A month into our school year, my family hit our first quarantine. Come on FDA, you can do it, jab my children.
Alfred Soto makes the best song lists ("The best songs about education"), follow him or his blog for lots of that.
Bye!
-Michael