Smorgasbord: It’s Been A While

I know, I’ve mostly stopped posting. A conflux of being-really-busy at work, getting-really-sick (turns out I’m allergic to a certain type of antibiotic), and being-overwhelmed-with-information (I get way too many newsletters) and needing to just kind of hit the pause button on everything. And winter.

I guess there’s some kind of game going on, but I’m not a football person, so I’m posting this instead. So here you go:

• We’re discovering that the hippocampus is the seat of our spatial awareness, generating an internal map, and hence, perhaps the locus of memory as well. Aeon: https://aeon.co/essays/how-cognitive-maps-help-animals-navigate-the-world
• Speaking of maps, we’re getting better at mapping out the rainforest. Greg Asner mapped out the Peruvian Amazon, discovering 36 distinct types of forest, which can be crucial to monitoring for strategic interventions to conserve biodiversity. Asner wants to put his mapping machine into orbit, where “we can map the changing biodiversity of the planet every month. That’s what we need to manage our extinction crisis.” The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/01/how-a-scientist-mapped-the-chemistry-of-the-entire-peruvian-amazon-by-plane/514478/
• Let’s keep going with this mapping motif. Here’s a map of what the United States would look like if we divided our states by economic geography. RealClearScience: http://www.realclearscience.com/quick_and_clear_science/2017/01/27/what_if_us_states_were_shaped_according_to_economics.html
• Former Secretary of Education John King is moving to CEO of Education Trust. But before doing so, his federal office created a great guide to increasing student diversity: Improving Outcomes for All Students: Strategies and Considerations to Increase Student Diversity. NCSD: http://school-diversity.org/pdf/improving-outcomes-diversity.pdf
• As an accompaniment to this federal guide, for New York state-specific strategies for increasing school diversity, refer to my own suggestions from my policy fellowship with America Achieves: http://educatorvoicefellowship.org/increasing-diversity-in-new-york-schools
• I’ve always felt like we have a tendency in the world of education to over-emphasize differences between kids rather than focus on what is relatively similar. Similarly, in the world of science there’s often an outsized focus on gender differences. A recent book pushes against this narrative and stresses the social, environmental, contextual impact on creating those differences: “It’s the social circumstances that the fish find themselves in that sculpt their anatomies and their behaviors.” NPR: http://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2017/01/26/511734926/the-science-of-gender-no-men-arent-from-mars-and-women-from-venus
• This accomplished scientist became a politician. Let’s hope more are inspired to do the same. “I think the public is ready for a more bottom-up, evidence-based approach to decision-making.” The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/02/the-climate-scientist-who-became-a-politician/515328/
• Think you have what it takes to be a “superforecaster”? Put yourself to the test on Good Judgement: https://www.gjopen.com
• I wonder sometimes whether I and other ELA teachers have been teaching “argumentative” writing all wrong. We teach our kids to base their arguments purely upon evidence, as if that will be convincing to a general audience. Yet recent studies seem to strongly suggest that we will most likely shift other’s thinking by speaking to their values, rather than to objective facts. The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/02/the-simple-psychological-trick-to-political-persuasion/515181/
• So if you want to truly understand what the “other side” thinks, try this exercise. (Could be really interesting to modify and apply in a classroom). FastCompany: https://www.fastcompany.com/3066609/try-this-exercise-in-radical-empathy-to-minimize-conflict
• And while it’s easy to think most of the United States is progressive-minded, the reality is that those minds are largely confined to cities. And states and rural areas will continue to wield political power over cities. The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/03/red-state-blue-city/513857/
• Charter advocates like to say that charters cut through the quagmire of bureaucracy that traditional school districts are saddled with. But recent findings from charter-full NOLA suggest au contraire, charter increases administrative costs due to the loss of “economies of scale.” In other words, the monopoly that current school districts have may actually be more efficient. Hechinger Report: http://hechingerreport.org/study-says-new-orleans-schools-spend-administration-less-teaching-charter-transformation/
• Notice I’m deliberately not sharing links explicitly about Trump? I think we’re all getting our fill of his nonsense. But here’s a few meta-level items worth reading regarding he-who-shall-not-be-named. Pacific Standard: “Executive Privilege; American Peril”. The Atlantic: “A Clarifying Moment in American History”. The Atlantic: “How to Build an Autocracy”

 

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