Ponder Over a Hamburger
Hello. This is our little bi-weekly email. It used to be whenever I remembered or had something to say, but then I decided that every two weeks was long enough to come up with something to say.
Above is an image of an old creepy board game. I do not know the rules. I do not know where 1 is. I do not know why 7 is in the center, or why a man in pajamas is dropping coins in a box. I also do not know what that clown does if he can get his hands on you, but what I'm imagining is very much not good. He is holding up 7 fingers, because of some reasons.
Anyway, onwards:
Hey so I went to Israel! There was a conference about research/practitioner stuff and I was invited to open it up. I spoke about "What It Takes for Research to Reach Teachers," and then a few days later "What is Involved in Translating Research to Practice." Not sure if those slides make any sense out of context, but there they are. It was all very special and everyone at Ben Gurion University and the Weitzman Institute was wonderful. It was fun pretending to be a person that goes places to say things and talk to people for a few days, and then to quickly zip back into the classroom.
A few times people at this conference assumed these were talks I had given many times before, or maybe talks I was planning on giving again in the future, and I so appreciated being confused for someone who speaks to adults more than once every few years.
On the flight back I very much tried to stay awake so I watched: Hitchcock's The Birds (A+); Season 12 of Archer (A-); a few episodes of 30 Rock (A); the 2nd John Wick movie (A-); the first half of The Informant (B-); possibly something else, I was fairly delirious and don't remember exactly.
Teaching resources: Jake Gordon has put together a nice collection of worked examples, and he also has a nifty practice generator.
The math department at my school was talking about kolams this week after a brilliant colleague shared a problem relating to it. Kolam is an artform whose "origin belongs to the ancient Tamil Nadu known as Tamilakam and has since spread to the other southern Indian states." I made this little worksheet to get kids drawing and starting to think about kolam. It's harder than you might think, even figuring out how to copy a finished one.
I think this is one of my favorite pieces of education research, it's from John Woodward. It's about learning multiplication facts with strategy instruction and also timed practice, and while it's documenting an "intervention" it does a lot of things that many fact-intervention studiesdon't: it measures students feelings towards the time they spent on the intervention (positive); it looks at kids with and without learning disabilities; it has reasonable ideas about instruction with lots of illustrative images. I don't know, it just feels like a paper that knows what it's about and is being smart.
I always feel weird talking about my enthusiasm for George Saunders because, like, yeah, who doesn't like him? He's probably the American contemporary author who most combines popular appeal with critical attention. But I got my hands on his new collection of stories, Liberation Day, and the first four stories are all deeply moving exercises in morality-obsessed fiction. I'm impressed and (more importantly) so in love with these stories.
It's the 50th Anniversary of Stevie Wonder's Talking Book and, hot damn, it is great. Jeremy Gordan put together a big piece on it for the New York Times. I put together a big thing where I listened to Blame it On the Sun a few dozen times in a row on my commute home.
The Leonard Bernstein Office has scripts of his Concerts for Young People and some one has posted the episodes on YouTube. I mean, look, this is all pretty delightful, Bernstein is the best kind of communicator, easygoing but enthusiastic. "If an artist sets out to depict something ugly, in notes or paints or words, and if he does it well, doesn't that make beautiful art?...There's something for you to ponder over a hamburger some time," says Bernstein on Mars, the Bringer of War. (By the way, I love The Beths' Mars, the God of War.
The perfect description of Weezer: "Herein lies the magic of “The Blue Album”: It’s an alternative rock classic engineered by a guy who is only barely acquainted with alternative rock, which requires him to imagine what alternative rock songs like by combining music (The Beach Boys and Metallica) that he actually knows and understands. That’s what Weezer is. That’s why Weezer works." Yeah, that checks out.
Best,
Michael