At the Student Center, amidst throngs of people. Her two friends consoled her.
Her test went poorly, apparently.
The next twenty minutes were spent tearily complaining about the test and the teacher and her other classes. This isn’t the first time I’ve seen this.
People pay money to feel shitty, because feeling shitty is—via masochism (or [...]
On the craziness feeling guilty about not doing homework:
B: I think I can get paid [by MIT, via scholarship] $2000 per semester to feel guilty.
Evidence over at FOUND magazine:
Note number 2. While it is disheartening, it is hard for me to imagine most parents saying that schools are the best environment possible for curiosity’s growth and satisfaction. Inevitably, pragmatic and prudential concerns intervene. Unfortunately, even that intervention is misguided.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with [...]
Grades take on undue precedence:
G: You told me a few specific things [I could improve about my paper], but like, I wasn’t sure if like, if those things would make the difference between a ‘B’ and an ‘A’.
a problem
Reform efforts exist on a spectrum spanning two extremes. One extreme feels that reform can only start outside the ailing institution. The other extreme thinks that only by working within the system can we change it. Unsurprisingly, the answer usually lies between the two extremes. Those who think that outside [...]
G: I can’t even calculate the probability of like a roll of the die. I’m just praying I didn’t fail.
Update (03.12.08): Looks like this market is doing just fine; MyHappyPlanet is actually solving the problem.
So, a recent story in the New York Times brought to mind an old idea of mine seeded by a friend’s description of a matchup service in Germany dedicated to setting up meetings between English-speakers seeking to learn German [...]
Said more carefully, the operational culture of educational institutions has more inertia than that of corporations. While it is clear that research universities innovate more than many companies, the past three decades of corporate culture and strategy have yielded many more innovations than their academic and educational counterpart.
This is not surprising: not only is [...]
G: I took a semester off last year, and it was by far the best thing I ever did. You just learn so much, actually getting out into the world.
This type of constrained-language exercise was way more successful with my analysis of opportunity, right, responsibility, privilege, and duty. But, this post has been sitting in the pipeline for weeks, clogged. It’s not clear if there’s a quick wrap-up to this, and I’m concerned that this conceit is weak. But, here it [...]
In a recent article in the New York Times, author Nancy Kalish argues for a couple changes in the school day, working from the fact1 that we work against adolescents’ Circadian rhythms when we ask them to wake up and learn early in the morning. Some of these changes make sense2 : for instance, [...]
For those of you unfamiliar with PostSecret, it’s a blog that posts postcards mailed every week from people all over the world. These postcards are creatively decorated and written upon, and all expose secrets of their authors’, ranging from the mundane to the heinous to the heartbreaking. Today, I saw this one:
Consider these [...]
Is there any way to make this1 exploratory2 ? Because man, I mean . . .
Grades get in the way.
QED.
6.470 – a web programming class/competition being held during IAP [↩]At MIT, you can take a class as “Exploratory,” which essentially allows you to switch the status of your registration of a course to Listener [...]
Don’t worry, this has nothing to do with NCLB.
I’m concerned with this article regarding the recent decision by several schools in Iowa to mitigate the consequences of failing to turn in homework.
“I have an 8- and a 10-year-old,” said parent Jodi Brown. “And as they excel through school, I would rather have them be held [...]
During an open house at the Sudbury Valley School in Framingham, Massachusetts, I listened to one of the school’s founders speak extensively about how quickly technology changes, pointing out—with a mixture of nostalgia and amazement—the rapid cycles of technological obsolescence in the past three decades. Just as I thought he was getting ready to [...]
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