Category: Around the Web

Do unto others as they prefer.

From MoonGirl’s Tinkergarten class

I call this month’s roundup the “Sign of the Times” roundup.

• Why It’s so Important for Kids to Travel
• Louis Armstrong Virtual Exhibit
• Virtual tour of the Keith Haring & Basquiat exhibit, “Crossing Lines,” at The National Gallery of Victoria
• Japanese-American Incarceration (Focus on the Assembly Centers) Unit by the Smithsonian Learning Lab
• How the Visually Impaired Experience Hubble Images
• The Single Most Essential Requirement in Designing a Fall Online Course

As the world becomes more and more interconnected, it’s imperative to learn how to work with, empathize, and understand others who have different viewpoints, ways of experiencing the world, and personal and collective histories.

A huge step towards this is simply to be open to listening and learning.

Man’s mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

A few of my links this month have to do with books, which are the main tools many of us use for learning.

• Short documentary on Yuri Gagarin, the first human in orbit.
• What the Hubble Telescope saw on your birthday
• The ALA’s 2019 list of the most frequently challenged books
• A Quora discussion on why Soviet math textbooks are so hardcore in comparison to US textbooks of the same time period
• Books a professor recommends to his software engineering students (and they aren’t all tech books)
• Focus 2020: Prioritize Student Choice

I often joke with my husband that if MoonGirl read half the books we own and managed to retain 25% of what she read, she would probably be more educated than many people we knew (including us).

Books are the true time machines. By reading them, we are not only instantly transported to different times and places, but within the minds of those who wrote the words we are reading, even if they have long passed away.

Perhaps that is why books are so influential to so many of us, but they can also be revolutionary and controversial as well. My general viewpoint on reading is to enjoy and understand what the author is trying to convey, to keep an open mind and set it within the context for which the book is set, but to also interrogate and investigate with a healthy dose of skepticism (when needed).

What is your viewpoint on reading? What are your favorite genres of books to read (I love speculative fiction, while my husband devours what I call informational nonfiction)?

This month we have a mishmash of links. I think the common thread that may run through them all is that it is looking at how to learn something, as opposed to what to learn.

• Finland is winning the war on fake news. What it’s learned may be crucial to Western democracy (CNN)
• Start ’em Young: Getting Your Kids Outside and Loving It (National Park Foundation)
• How I Learned French in 12 Months
• Mathematics for the Adventurous Self-Learner
• The Wonder From Home series (Atlas Obscura)

The key to learning anything is on how to approach the topic, no matter what that topic is. Every person is different, their style of learning, their interests, their approaches, so the first step to self-learning is knowing how one learns.

For instance, I’m a visual learner. Give me diagrams and charts, give me words and reference books and pictures. I can fix almost anything if I have the right diagram. When my husband tried to teach me to drive a manual stick shift, I had him draw me a flowchart of steps.

But if you stick me in a lecture hall with someone talking at me, I will retain very little. If I’m not understanding what you’re saying, then my brain starts automatically shutting down, often without me realizing it until afterwards when I’m trying to recall it.

These links may give you some interesting ideas on how to approach a subject differently from traditional methods of learning.

What is your learning style? How do you make sure information sticks in your mind?

Not sure if it’s the websites I’m frequenting lately or just the general mood, but my roundup for today has a lot of links debating the merits of formal schooling.

In this view of American educational history, the public school is not seen to be a magnificent vehicle for upward mobility, as is the traditional notion; it is viewed instead as a machine that exists to disable students, to remove them from the running for middle-class status, thereby ensuring the maintenance of exploitative social structures. [Colin] Greer wants us to understand that school identifies those who can accept a strict routinizing of their lives, points out those who can be expected to perform, to know their places. It is seen as a giant sorting operation that helps define for America those students for whom the promise of “getting ahead” will be fulfilled. Those who are slated to live lower-class lives are conditioned to accept their fate and taught how to function in their prescribed roles.

Voices of the Self: A Study of Language Competence by Keith Gilyard

• We Have Ruined Childhood (New York Times)
• Children should learn mainly through play until age of eight, says Lego (The Guardian)
• Why On Earth Do We Trap School Children Inside Four Walls to Learn? (Outdoortopia)
• Why introductory chemistry is boring: a long-term historical perspective (21st Night)
• Education Is a System of Indoctrination of the Young (Noam Chomsky, Video)

I’m not sure how I personally feel about formal schooling. I went to a private Montessori preschool and then public school all through university. My husband attended private schools for most of his early education. I’ve known people who were homeschooled that struggled to catch up and those who were homeschooled that were ahead of the game. I do think there are pros and cons for all forms of schooling from the strictest military schools to the most relaxed unschooling education, but I do also acknowledge that the American school system as it currently is has many deep flaws and struggles that don’t have any easy solutions. It bears thinking as MoonGirl emerges out of her toddler years and I’ll need to start thinking of possible options for her preschool years.

What do you think?