DaveShearon

Everything Bad Is Good for You - Examples

This post references blog posts that demonstrate what Everything Bad Is Good for You argues:

9/30/2004 Ambivablog on "Rescue Me."  I bet if the book had been published, she would have known about it.

Everything Bad Is Good for You

This is a book note about Everything Bad Is Good for You by Stephen Johnson.  Very intersting.  Argues that popular culture has become more intellectually challenging over the past 30 years, and has made us smarter.  Click "Continue readying" to read the note.

Statistically Improbable Phrases

This Amazon feature is cool.

Amazon.com Statistically Improbable Phrases

Amazon.com's Statistically Improbable Phrases, or "SIPs", are the most distinctive phrases in the text of books in the Search Inside! program. To identify SIPs, our computers scan the text of all books in Search Inside. If they find a phrase that occurs a large number of times in a particular book relative to all Search Inside books, that phrase is a SIP in that book.

Wow!

"Acting white" and its price

Count me as not surprised

From a comment  by JennyD to this post at Up the Down Staircase:

I teach in an ed school, and I'm also involved in doing a review of what the ed school teaches. What I discovered is that a number of ed school instructors--both former teachers and academics--tell our students that teaching is not preplanned, that they don't need to learn practices, that their teaching should emerge organically from their interaction with students. I've also discovered that our instructors are not unusual, and that lots of people in ed schools say these things.

These folks teach our students that there aren't necessarily better ways to build skills, and that there aren't skills that are best taught together.

You would be surprised how many ed school faculty are entirely out of touch with what teachers do in classrooms.

Like I said, count me as not surprised.  Perhaps this is one the data indicates he teachers are overwhelmingly ineffective and take up to 10 or 12 years to reach peak effectiveness.

Parents & Schooling

Overeducation is a great blog.  So is Eric Mack Online.  But two recent posts from these two great blogs highlight an interesting quesion:  Whose kids are they?

First, Eric.  He and his wife homeschool their four children, and the 5-year-old just graduated from first grade and received a Palm IIIc as a gift from Mom & Dad.  Eric's post is on what she does with it (and a mention of plans to integrate PDA's more into their teaching).  Here's what she does:

• Games
• Handy dandy [digital] notepad
• Flash cards
• Bible & Memory verse flash cards
• Calendar
• Lists of important  things to remember
• Grandma's phone number
• eBooks

Catch that "Bible" stuff stuck in there?  Well, Jonathan Kallay has been thinking about "What are Schools For?"  He writes:

Education, then, is about creating citizens who are fully capable of exercising their right to choose freely and resist coercion. Perhaps ironically, this includes compelling people to attain this freedom.
Interestingly, this calls into question the 'libertarian' viewpoint that insists on parents' rights to decide what is best for their children. Setting aside their capacity to abuse or exploit their children, the parent-child relationship has coercive or choice-inhibiting tendencies; that is, parents are unable to give their children access to a limitless range of choices, because they are limited by their own knowledge and means, and also because they demand more of their children than they would have a right to expect of them merely as fellow citizens. This creates a gap wherein parents lose the moral right to make all choices for their children and yet where these children do not have the full capacity to choose freely for themselves. Schools occupy this gap.
This has some interesting implications, about which I plan to write more. One of these implications is the permissibility of home or private schooling. Children must be sheltered from indoctrination; that is, exposure to one viewpoint to the exclusion of all others. Home schooling sits in very dangerous territory. Another questionable but common practice is the request for permission from parents (or giving parents the right to exclude their children) before exposing students to potentially objectionable material. If education is supposed to be developing students' abilities to choose for themselves, allowing them to opt out would seem to be permitting the abridgement of their freedom.

Schools have a right to make moral choices for students that parents don't?  Parents teaching their religious values is wrong, even dangerous?  I mean, we're talking Soviet Union policies here!  I suspect there are more than a few folks for whom any attempt to enforce a policy based on these ideas would result in the exercise of Second Amendment rights!  I really like John's blog, but how he can seem to accept such wooly-headed, out-of-touch theorizing is just beyond me.