Exist in the Physical World
Hey everyone, I hope you're having a good week. Here's what I've put together for you this time,
"I think teacher-researcher as a label is sort of a trap for teachers. Quite obviously, classroom teachers aren’t able to visit a large variety of other teachers and make systematic observations." From my conversation with Ben Riley about "intellectual teachers."
I spoke with Kieran Mackle and Christopher Such about self-explanation on Kieran's lovely podcast. I think everyone should know that making generalizations is a huge part of learning!
"People will send me seventy dollars...and they don't know what they're getting." I thought this interview with painter Steve Keene was beautiful. Keene paints in large handmade batches and sells his work mostly online, handling the entire operation on his own. After listening to Keene the question I asked myself was, how do I make more things that exist in the physical world, not just online? I don't have an answer. Enjoy your email.
You have already heard me sing the praises of Nate Patrin's book on hip-hop sampling, and I believe I even shared the Spotify playlist he put together for the book. They're both quite good, so I'm recommending them again.
If you know who Dr. Dre is you might recognize "The Edge," a 1967 instrumental track from the oft-sampled David Axelrod. Axelrod also has an album, Song of Innocence," that riffs off of William Blake's work. Opening and closing tracks "Urizen" and "The Mental Traveler" are psychedelic and forceful with an amazing backbeat, no wonder samplers loved them so much.
"It enabled Blake, with the exception of making the paper, to be responsible for every stage in the production process." Like Keene, Blake was a DIY artist, via the British Library's YouTube page.
I watched Gary Gulman's "The Great Depresh" and found it hilarious and touching, I liked Gary on participation trophies.
Provocative education research: "The academics found that there was often a tradeoff between “good teaching” where kids learn stuff and “good teaching” that kids enjoy. Teachers who were good at raising test scores tended to receive low student evaluations. Teachers with great student evaluations tended not to raise test scores all that much," reported here, paper here.
Here's another study, I'm trying to connect the dots: "Using meta-analysis we find that, on average, sought-after schools do not improve student test scores. A potential explanation for this result is that parents value schools that improve outcomes not well-measured by test scores."
And still another study, this one in Trinidad and Tobago under very different schooling conditions than in wealthier English-speaking countries. Still: "School choices among parents of low-achieving students are relatively more strongly related to schools’ impacts on non-test-score outcomes, while the opposite is true for parents of high-achieving students."
Be good,
Michael