Disce verum

As data science becomes the latest and greatest 21st-century field, it's now available to kids. Here are free lesson plans and resources, if you're curious: Data Science Lessons --the below example presents social media data, in this case on the number of American teens who use TikTok. Last summer, I took an online education course on data analytics at Stanford, and learned about Jo Boaler.  I hit a wall with math in the 8th grade, when I went to a new, seriously more challenging school. Suddenly, I wasn't "good" at math anymore, at least compared to my classmates. It was a time and a feeling that stuck with me. I had to get a tutor at school, and remember my shame at not being able to easily rattle off answers. Things just took longer for me. I had to figure out other methods to solve things--and felt rushed, incapable.  My daughter was essentially homeschooled last year--and I was the teacher. She had been doing a Singapore math program in first grade, and befor...

As #eme6414 comes to a close, the butterfly metaphor comes to mind. Okay, I was out in my fenced garden for a little bit, to water heat-wilted strawberries, blueberries, and green beans, and let my cat wander around and chew some lemongrass.  This brown and white butterfly has been flitting around a butterfly bush and Mexican sunflower, which is especially huge this year (while veggies that did well last year are struggling along...maybe they've had enough of the pandemic, too).  But this little brown butterfly...it's deceptively plain from a distance. Close up, and it's kind of magical.  And here's my garden's first milkweed plant, a gift from my daughter's Brownie and Daisy troop leader as part of a pollinator project. It actually attracted monarch caterpillars. There were three yesterday--I didn't see them today, and checked under every leaf. I'm hoping they had their fill and are making their chrysali. 

Teachers and homeschool parents! Do you know about the  New York Times ' Learning Network?  I just discovered this--bumped into it, might be more appropriate--and it's an amazing resource that I plan to add to both my mom and teacher toolkits.  Here's their Twitter, for following purposes: @NYTimesLearning And here's a sample video from their YouTube channel, which is packed with lesson-ready videos organized by categories (English Language Arts, Social Studies, ELL & Arts, Science & Math, and Current Events): Their website features contests, like the above Reading Contest in the cover photo, as well as writing prompts, quizzes, and writing curriculum like "Writing for Podcasts," and units on Argumentative Writing and International Writing.  Since 2009, they've published a Word of the Day  column. A bit more recent is the month-by-month Vocabulary Challenge , for kids who really love their words.  Here's the Vocabulary Challenge Calendar for t...

This past week, I got a somewhat horrifying screen time report from Apple.  During the lost year of 2020, I had spent what I thought was an obscene amount of time on my phone, i.e., 3.5 hours, thanks to doomscrolling from 6am - 11:30pm, and then maybe escaping thereafter to watch Ted Lasso  Season 1, the melodrama of  The Undoing (or maybe some Bridgerton ). I thought 3.5 was a lot .  But 7!--seven! Yes, seven hours, and some change to spare....yikes. That's way too much screen time--way, way too much. Nearly a work day.  That report was pretty awful to get. But it was also pretty perplexing.  Where and how did those seven hours go? What apps Hoovered them up? And how and why did I really not notice this happening?  No binge watching this summer--the most recent show I watched was the Italia-England soccer match. That and a clip of Questlove's  Finding Your Roots episode .  No audiobooks or e-books, my love of which the pandemic bulldozed ...

A few SEL-related resources I came across on social media this past week which I thought were pretty interesting.  Burnell, Kaitlyn. (2020). How narcissism relates to social media. Character & Context: The Science of Who We Are and How We Relate. (Hall et all, Eds.) Burnell is a doctoral student in Psychological Sciences at the University of Texas at Dallas, where she studies the implications of social media on adolescent psychosocial development. This article discusses her recent research findings vis-à-vis the relationship between narcissism and social media use:  P eople who post a lot on social media may tend to be higher in narcissism, particularly in terms of higher grandiosity. But, the strength of the relationship between narcissism and social media use was small-to-moderate. So, posting a lot on social media does not necessarily mean that a person is narcissistic. In addition, our findings involving vulnerability suggest that some people who are higher in nar...

Take-the-Poll Challenge, #eme6414 ! It only takes a second.⏱️ https://t.co/jXCRtEmMfc pic.twitter.com/obj77s7ZWi — disceverum (@disceverum) July 25, 2021 Which social media toll did you you end up using and enjoying the most this summer? Which were you maybe surprised to have used and enjoyed the most these past three months?  That's my question for Week 12, this final week of Web 2.0.  N.B. that Twitter limits polls to four options. Your options on for this Twitter poll challenge are (naturally) Twitter, then Instagram, Diigo, and Pinterest.  If you found yourself really using and enjoying another social media tool, I'd love to hear your thoughts and reactions here on the blog and/or as a comment on the Tweet!  Off (or on) the record, I think I found myself enjoying Pinterest most--which was surprising, as I wasn't a Pinterest user before. So much so that I have plans to incorporate Pinterest into my future teaching.  Which tool(s) have you used this summer...

Stanford University Lytics Lab -  Links to their research (Understanding Online Learners, Evaluating Digital Instruction, Building Learning Tools), publications, and external conferences and journals. [ Stanford ] Learning Analytics 101 from NYU's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development -  Videos and hyperlinked readings help to break down LA for newbies [ NYU ] Office of Educational Technology, Learning Analytics - According to their mission, the OET "develops national educational technology policy and establishes the vision for how technology can be used to transform teaching and learning and how to make everywhere, all-the-time learning possible for early learners through K-12, higher education, and adult education."  [ tech.ed.gov ]  MIT Open Courseware, The Analytics Edge - Open-access course from MIT's Sloan School of Management on the "analytics edge" and "the key quantitative methods that created the edge (data-mining, dy...

I'm not sure if the term " emotional contagion " sounds worse than it really is. Maybe. Maybe not.  Maybe not, if you, like me, taught on Zoom this year.  I've heard people say that they had their best teaching years on Zoom.  I kind of wonder about that. Just a *little* bit. (Is that terrible to say? Maybe? ) Because the pandemic wasn't really that good for a lot of students. Not to say all students, because some students are naturally, innately resilient, and got through and even flourished. Some with anxiety disorders, such as social anxiety , found virtual school, and even "Zoom school," much more accommodating than its f2f equivalent.  But other students fell apart, as teacher Marisa Howe noted in a WBUR survey : Teachers like Howe admitted to being "crush[ed]" by having to witness their "strong kids crumble under the weight of isolation"--and it's this kind of "crumbling" that can be a sort of "emotional conta...

First, Eurovision: And now the Euro Final: Confession: I am half Italian. My Italian half downloaded the ESPN+ app and got a monthly subscription so I could watch the Euro 2020 Final this afternoon. I took what I thought would be quick 90-minute afternoon break but what actually ended up being 123-plus nailbiting minutes with overtime and a penalty shootout--and I mean "nailbiting" literally here--the Wembley Stadium cameras kept panning to various England fans (men, women, and children) chewing at their fingernails.  The match started with a crazy, unheard-of goal from England. And then things sort of fell apart from there.  You can kind of see the declension from then on, i.e., from that unique goal to the Italians' shootout victory, in the royal family's body language and facial expressions, below (the reactional divide captured here by Twitter user lily NAT IS COMING BACK!! ):  Italy had a terrible year with the pandemic . Not to say that England hasn't...

Technically the Fourth of July is over, but fireworks are still blasting away in pockets across town. There's more at stake this year, those blasts are saying--more to celebrate, more to release. (As I type, a sonicky boom just went off, somewhere to the west.)  It was rainy today. There was lightning, thunder. But we still did some Fourth of July things--not all of them, but some. (Sparklers, veggie dogs, fresh corn,  National Treasure , flags.) Before the storm, I got out a new Bosch drill, and drill bits I've had for years.  Years .  I shipped these drill bits back to the US from Rome in a cardboard box (filled with other things, too--books, linens, kitchen detritus, clothes). The plastic cylinder the drill bits live in still has its price-tag, which is inscribed with the name of a little local hardware store that still exists on Via Celimontana, in Rome. (I googled it.) Ironically or not, I learned to use a drill (and a hammer, a band saw, and a circular saw) in ...

This is kind of like a weird postscript to last week's post , which featured (in part ) the Halekulani Hotel and their (supposedly-)famous coconut cake recipe. (I still haven't made it. It's a little bit complicated.) The Halekulani, which dates back to 1907, has been closed for 18 months or so -- i.e., the duration of the pandemic. They're renovating the hotel, and I think they're set to re-open in August.  Not that I have a reservation. :( But thanks to the streaming television gods, I do have this -- a reservation with HBO Max and this new Mike White jawn:  As a huge fan of Enlightened , and pretty much all of Mike White's oeuvre, I'm hoping The White Lotus, along with the return of  Ted Lasso,  will be a temporary distraction from my dissertation-lockdown summer (read: I hope it's good). 

On Friday, I ran across this story on NPR , on Paula Zuccotti's "Lockdown Essentials" social-media-based project.  I can't remember where I stumbled upon the story--Twitter or Instagram?--but I googled the project's curator and creator, Paula Zuccotti, an ethnographer, industrial designer, and "future archaeologist."  Check out Zuccotti's work here on Instagram , on her website , and on Vimeo . Zuccotti collected digital still lifes via a call on Instagram -- last year, Zuccotti invited anyone in the world to share their personal "15 lockdown essentials" by tagging a photo with the hashtag  #EveryThingWeTouchCovidEssentialsx15.  You can find Zuccotti's curated and "catalogued" picks on lockdownessentials.org .  Before stumbling across the NPR story, I had already fleshed out a (private) Pinterest board called "Pandemic Things." So, thinking about and inspired by Zuccotti's "time capsule," I went back an...