It’s so easy to overlook student motivation as a serious realm of study for several reasons: So in this brief article/video combo, let me give three reasons why student motivation deserves our attention, reflection, contemplation, and professionalism. (You’ll get my gist through just reading or just viewing, but you’ll get a fuller sense of what […]
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“School is a word game”
I often remind my students that school is a word game. I specifically do this in a few situations: For these reasons and more, I was pumped when our colleague Continuing Ed sent along this three-minute video from Nature: (Not seeing a video? Click here.) Don’t have three minutes? The gist is this: knowledge of […]
Exciting News + You’re More Powerful than DALL-E 2
Dear colleague, The exciting news is below this post. If you’ve never seen DALL-E 2, you ought to take 15 minutes and head down its wormhole. I’ve done a few things in the past ten years that have felt a bit like peaking at the future — trying on my brother’s VR headset thing; test-driving […]
ChatGPT: No Thing But a Chicken Wing
Dear colleague, Recently a bunch of you have been asking, “So, Dave, what’re your thoughts on ChatGPT? Is this the end of English? The end of teaching? The end of thought!?!?!?!?” And while I’m already exhausted by all the hot takes on this in the education world, I am willing to give some lukewarm takes […]
Should Students Sit in Rows?
Engagement isn’t something you can infer from smiling faces or a classroom arrangement. Engagement is what the brain attends to. Source: Teacher-blogger Blake Harvard Should students sit in rows? In my view, there are only two silly answers to this question: The answer, as all sensible folks know, is more nuanced: it depends. In my […]