📰 Read Write Respond #068

Here we are, another month. Some things changed, some things still the same.

When I was in the classroom, it was always frustrating when another class was let out to play early or given ‘free time’. It is hard to get anyone to pay attention when a perceived injustice is at play. This is what it has felt like living through Melbourne’s sixth lockdown this month, while NSW moves onto life living life with COVID. Although there maybe a ‘national plan’, it would seem the reality maybe something different. To play on Orwell, “All States are equal, but some states are more equal than others.” All in all, it has been a terse reminder of the political nature of the current pandemic. In more positive news, I was lucky enough to get my first jab of AstraZeneca.

On the work front, I have been doing my best to get ahead of the game by creating some tools to analyse the data in preparation for the rush that is the end of year. As is often said, focus on what you can control.

Personally, I have been diving into a range of books. When you are stuck at home, it is useful to break up the monotony by exploring some other world.

In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we’re done with it, we may find – if it’s a good novel – that we’re a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have changed a little, as if by having met a new face, crossed a street we never crossed before. But it’s very hard to say just what we learned, how we were changed.

Ursula K. Le Guin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Left_Hand_of_Darkness

I have read Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, George Orwell’s Animal Farm, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, Chilly Gonzales’ Enya: A Treatise on Unguilty Pleasures and Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future. I have also been listening to Halsey’s If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power, Kate Bush’s Before The Dawn, Lorde’s Solar Power, TFS’ Deep States and Damian Cowell’s Only The Shit You Love.

Here then are some of the other links and ideas that have had me thinking:

Education

Teachers use many teaching approaches to impart knowledge. Pitting one against another harms education

Alan Reid raises three flaws with the argument that inquiry-based approaches harm student learning. He argues that teachers regularly move up and down the teacher-centred and student-centred continuum, that not all inquiry is the same and that the data used to form the position is problematic.

The ‘how’ and ‘why’ of the classroom

Naomi Fisher pushes back on the ‘what works’ mantra and instead argues that how and why matter just as much.

Feedback Is Oxygen For Your Ideas — Start With A Minimum Verbal Prototype

Tom Barrett discusses the importance of developing prototypes early on in a project in order to gain feedback and give oxygen to the ideas being developed.