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Did Bob Dylan Really Ruin English Class Forever? Some Say Yes (But They Are Wrong)

When Bob Dylan won a Nobel Prize, some started to decry the fall of literature--including the teaching of English. In a piece called "Pity the English teacher, now that Bob Dylan has won the Nobel Prize," one commentator argued that the kinds of lyrics put forth by the musician paled in comparison to traditional poetry. "Backed up by an amplified bassist and a hard-hitting drummer, lines might be OK yet hardly prize-winning stuff. By themselves, they lie inertly on the page. Hercules couldn't lift their dead weight." Ouch, though I appreciate the allusion. Look, it's important to remember what comprises the heart and soul of English study: examining language--in its myriad ever-evolving forms--closely and creating with it. For some students, Dylan's language--or many other artists for that matter, like Black Thought--provides a less intimidating and relatable opportunity to slow down and study an author's craft. If all English teachers taught was Bob Dylan, I'd be worried. But adding him and other popular language artists to the curriculum to provide new entries and vestibules to the discipline? Go for it.   Read the full article

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Baby and Jesus Are the Top Two Names Used in Popular Music? Go On....

Want another reason to teach computer science in humanities classes? Check this out. In their latest project, the data journalists over at The Pudding identified the most popular names used in music over the last few decades. You can search by name, frequency, and a ton more. Readers and teachers can get an awful lot out of applying some simple text mining methods to literary and cultural texts. The result might not be definitive answers, but rather new ways to ask interesting questions. Read the full article

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No One Really Cared About Shakespeare’s Work When He Died, So His Friends Did THIS

I never knew that Shakespeare's work wasn't really that popular when he died. As explained on a recent Annotated podcast, plays in his day were a form pop culture. The author's fame had fizzled when he passed on. But a few of his friends were intent on ensuring his reputation as a great playwright survived. They took a gamble to publish a dramatic "boxed set" of his work (what we know as the first folio) and lucked out when the rise of Puritanism in England created the conditions to bring the Bard's corpus back to life. It's well worth a listen. Read the full article

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I Have Learned that Smartphones Are Kind of Like Brain Candy

Technology is a double-edged sword. It might make new kinds of innovation possible, but it also can have problematic effects on the way human beings exist in the world. I have learned that I need to give myself breaks from my phone and computers, for example, and carve out time to read a book before bed. If you want to see a great little video explaining how constant communication affects the brain, the Wall Street Journal has what you need. It's an edifying watch for teachers, parents, and students alike. Read the full article

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What Incredibles Math

This clip resonates with me something fierce. As the father of an elementary age student, I can attest to the utter confusion and skepticism Mr. Incredible expresses in this scene. It goes: Dash: That's not the way you're supposed to do it, Dad. They want us to do it this way. Mr. Incredible: I don't know that way! Why would they change math? Dash: It's okay, Dad. - Math is math! I'll just wait for Mom to get back. Mr. Incredible: What? She won't understand it any better than I do... Can you relate? If so, maybe you need to reimagine the way you think about math altogether, maybe you need a map or an interdisciplinary financial literacy curriculum or just a piece of pi. via Read the full article

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Words that End with "-uck"? This Kid Handled the Obvious One with Aplomb

Well played elementary school student whom I hope to teach one day. Well played indeed. Yet another reason I love language--in all its forms.

via Read the full article

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Is Financial Literacy the Key to Math Success? This Non-Profit Thinks So. And They Have a Free Curriculum to Convince You.

Fear not, arithmophobes!  There's a new math kid on the block, and she's got swag. I recently attended an information event about FiCycle, a non-profit that is looking to re-imagine secondary math curricula by focusing on financial literacy. It was quite impressive. They have mapped a hands-on and engaging curriculum that focuses on the stories of real people to discrete math standards across subdomains. The result is an impressive--and FREE--curriculum that might very well help young people learn math in real-world contexts. Next, I'd love to see that curriculum converted into an online course--and mobile-ready at that. Learn more on their website. Read the full article

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Moving from Fiction to Non-Fiction

Oh, my sides! So much to say about this cartoon from The New Yorker. The librarian is moving the following fictional works to the non-fiction section: 1984, The Handmaid's Tale, Fahrenheit 451, A Clockwork Orange, Brave New World, The Trial, The Hunger Games, The Road, and Planet of the Apes. What books would you nominate for relocation? 

Read the full article

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'Learn' Used to Mean 'Teach' or Why We Should All Read the Dictionary

I do enjoy me strolls down etymology lane, I'm not gonna lie. Though I never considered that "to learn" actually meant the same as "to teach" for a fair chunk of English-speaking history. According to Merriam-Webster--whose Word of the Day is totally worth a subscribe--there was a good half century where it was the norm. They write: From the 13th through the end of the 18th century the use of learn to mean “teach” was fairly common, although the 1785 edition of Samuel Johnson’s dictionary (the 6th edition) labeled it as obsolete. And while Noah Webster used it in his letter writing that year, by the time he published his dictionary in 1828 this sense of the word had either taken a turn for the worse, or someone had teased him about using it thusly, as he seems to have changed his mind about it. Webster did define learn as “to teach, to communicate the knowledge of something before unknown,” but included a note at the end of the entry, “this use of learn is found in respectable writers, but is now deemed inelegant as well as improper.” Read the whole story over on M-W's website. They'll learn you something good. Read the full article

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I Need Your Advice, English Peeps: What Texts Should I Focus On for My Next Big Project?

For years now, I've been slowly bringing to life a vision for bringing computational methods to secondary English classes. I'm finally getting to the point where I've framed the work conceptually and created prototypes that I've refined based on teacher and student feedback. In the coming months, I will be taking the work to another level. Project codename: Volta.The next phase is to create a library of dozens of visualizations that chart the frequencies of 2-4 interesting words from literature. (See the example above and below from Shakespeare.) The books should be in the public domain on Project Gutenberg. What works of literature and key words would you like to see? What kinds of graphs would be useful in your literature lessons? Tell me and I'll add them to the project plan. 

THANK YOU for sharing your insights.  Read the full article

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Tolkien's Lesson on Computationality and Creativity--Whilst Smoking His Pipe

On a recent visit to the Tolkien exhibit at the Morgan Library and Museum, I was fascinated to see process documents related to Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. What most struck me was how Tolkien--who in many ways embodies the kind of creativity teachers in the humanities value--approached so much of his work with computational precision. Take his mapping of Middle Earth. When he was designing his imagined land, he did so on graph paper so he could know exactly how long a distance it was between places and, as a result, write the story more compellingly. Graph paper was essential to his storytelling, computation meets composition. (You can even spy a scorch mark where his pipe is said to have ashed on his map!)

Teachers, parents, and students would be right to pause and reflect on Tolkien's process. We cannot--or even should not--separate the worlds of the arts and the sciences so breezily. Image via Instagram Read the full article

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4 Minutes on How Food Affects Your Brain. Go!

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. I'm convinced that schools can make a significant impact on student success--whether you define it as test scores, social-emotional learning, or civic participation--if we understand nutrition as inherently intertwined with learning (and teaching, for that matter). This informative video from TED does a lovely job helping us see just how the body and mind are simply not so separable.   Read the full article

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Why Are Letters on Keyboards So Oddly Arranged? Here's a Primer on the Origins of QWERTY!

Keyboards are literally where human beings communication with computers. Considering how ubiquitous they are, it is odd that many of us don't know why keyboards are so chaotically arranged. Well, thanks to BBC, we have a very helpful primer. Here's how it starts: It isn't easy to type "QWERTY" on a qwerty keyboard. My left-hand little finger holds the shift key, then the other fingers of my left hand clumsily crab sideways across the upper row. Q-W-E-R-T-Y. There's a lesson here: it matters where the keys sit on your keyboard. There are good arrangements and bad ones. Many people think that qwerty is a bad one - in fact, that it was deliberately designed to be slow and awkward. Could that be true? And why do economists, of all people, argue about this? It turns out that the stakes are higher than they might first appear. Read the rest over on BBC. Read the full article

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Wait, You Were Serious about Using Minecraft in School?

As the father of a 9-year-old, I can attest to the seemingly supernatural power of Minecraft. My son can play it for hours, watches videos about playing it, and talks about it constantly with friends. But does Minecraft (not to mention other video games) really have educational value? One Canadian research study says yes. Here's a glimpse into what they found: With the support of a program facilitator, students worked individually and in teams to digitally build structures such as impressive houses, a soccer stadium, a space ship, a railroad track to the Titanic and the Titanic itself. Researchers also attended some sessions. We studied the main impacts on learning to investigate how gamified learning interventions may increase student engagement and enhance learning. We used a combination of data collected from surveys, interviews, “think aloud” protocols (where students speak their problem-solving strategies out loud), journals, tracking of student progress and digital footprints. Using these various methods allowed substantial data triangulation and validation. The educational impacts we found were encouraging. The students showed a heightened motivation towards school, stronger computer skills, greater problem-solving skills, expanded reading and writing skills, a development in creativity and autonomy and increased collaboration with classmates. The results of the studies we conducted confirm that Minecraft has real educational value. Notably, gaming allowed the students to fully engage in activities that were both educational and fun. As for me, I'll remain on the sidelines. But I'll be observing my son's Minecraft play with a new form of professional intrigue. Image via Read the full article

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If You're Teaching Shakespeare, You Might Want to Start with Duke Ellington

In 1957, jazz legend Duke Ellington released his album Such Sweet Thunder, which is a collection of songs written in direct response to different plays and characters by Shakespeare. Using the album with students, for which the Folger Shakespeare Library has some excellent resources, can take the kinds of conversations one has about tone, plot, characterization, intertextuality, and multimodality to a new level. In addition the music, you can also use the album's liner notes, which offers some creative context and insight. Here's an example: In paying tribute to William Shakespeare (1564-1616), unquestionably the greatest writer in the English language, Ellington and Strayhorn painted a series of finely drawn portraits of some of the Bard’s most memorable tragic, comic, and heroic figures. And as John Edward Haase notes in his essential study of The Maestro, Beyond Category – The Life and Genius of Duke Ellington: “As did Shakespeare, Ellington deployed his players like great actors on a stage. For nineteen years, Shakespeare was part owner of a repertory company, and wrote ONLY for that company. Likewise, Ellington had HIS own repertory company – for fifty years – and wrote almost exclusively for its players. Shakespeare’s plays have outlived the actors for whom they were conceived. Ellington’s music may, as the centuries pass, attain the same achievement. Give the album a listen on your favorite music app or over on YouTube. Read the full article

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228 Issues of Vogue Magazine. Can You Guess How Many Featured Women with Dark Skin? Look.

What a fascinating example of data journalism by the folks over at The Pudding. Explore trends in skin color as represented on the covers of Vogue magazine. I appreciated how they tried to carefully translate socio-cultural qualities like representations of skin with computational demands for quantitative precision. In short, read their process notes! Read the full article

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Middle-Earth at the Morgan Library? Yes, Please.

I have 18 days to get myself to the Tolkien exhibit at the Morgan Library, where they have on display artifacts from J.R.R. Tolkien's collection showing his process of drawing and writing what would become The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. These kinds of exhibits are fantastic examples of how creativity--linguistic and visual--take shape over time and serve to remind us why creating creative space in classrooms is so vital to innovation. PS: Big thanks to Kelley Krietz for the tip! Read the full article