A lot of my favorite teaching strategies are like the box of building blocks that my children have. When the box gets dumped out, it’s amazing how many things my kids can make. The blocks provide a set of very basic constraints — how many there are, their shapes, their colors — but mostly there’s […]
Archives for December 2018
Improving Student Motivation via Micro-Commenting on Papers
I’ve written and spoken passionately about the need for us to think better about grading and feedback. When feedback isn’t fast, it’s a triple loss. Our quality of life decreases as we drag papers around with us for weeks. The usefulness of the feedback decreases because our kids, when they get the work back a week or […]
The Quarry Worker’s Creed
“We who cut mere stones must always be envisioning cathedrals.” The line above is the “Quarry Worker’s Creed,” as seen in Cal Newport’s Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World (p. 89). Newport explains that he first saw this line as an epigraph to The Pragmatic Programmer, a book that also has strong connections to […]
