Today as I met my students for the first time, I couldn’t help recalling an old Hebrew hymn in which the author writes, “I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.” While perhaps not many of us public school teachers share the Hebrew poet’s […]
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The Precious S’s, Part 2: Skipping
All of our tasks exist on a spectrum. On one end are the tasks that directly touch the core purpose of our jobs, and on the other end are the tasks that we ought to try skipping. But which tasks are those? Which can we not just satisfice, but skip? To have a chance of […]
The Precious S’s, Part 1: Satisficing
If you and I are going to stay sane this year — sane as in healthy, of sound mind, common sensical, practical — then we’ll need to practice what I’ve come to call the precious s’s: satisficing and skipping. Satisficing is what we do when we accept an available option as satisfactory rather than working […]
Would You Like to be a Kinder Person?
Then you’ve got to be kind to people when they’re mean or rude to you. This is how the virtues strengthen: not by doing them when they’re easy, but by doing them when they’re hard. Consider: You cannot get braver unless you do what needs to be done when what needs to be done makes […]
Using Feedback-Rich Processes to Test Whether or Not We Know Something
One of the easiest ways to be a moron is to think you know something that you actually don’t. And right out of the gate, let me just admit that I’m adept at this kind of idiocy. But it’s not just me. In 1999, social psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger formalized something that we’ve […]