Items to Share: 13 April 2014

Education Focus

• Bringing the Locker Room Into the Classroom - Commentary - The Chronicle of Higher Education 'Over the past couple of years, I have come to see what a classroom dynamic of engaged participation and collaboration might have in common with the fast-paced give-and-take of a basketball game.' What academic teachers can learn from sport coaching.

• Teacher's poem blasting Michael Gove and his 'Dark Ages' curriculum hits a nerve on YouTube - Education News - The Independent 'An excoriating poem lambasting the policies and the “Dark Ages” curriculum of Education Secretary Michael Gove has become an internet sensation among teachers. 

• No Child Left Undiagnosed | Psychology Today On the pathologisation and medicalisation of childhood.

• Tom of Finland Part 2: Should Learning be Fun? - Tom Bennett - Blog - Tom Bennett - TES Community 'I'd love to find some evidence to substantiate the claims that the Fun Learning camp makes- I'm like an atheist, glumly investigating every miracle hoping to find God- but every time I put my hand out it melts away like mist. [] Can learning be fun? Of course. Is learning sometimes fun? Undoubtedly. Should it be fun? That's a whole different question. Simply saying yes damns every act of learning that isn't enjoyable, and you would have to be completely bonkers to think that everything you learn should be fun as well. Almost everything worth achieving requires sweat, grit and the ability to stick with something when it's hard- also qualities I'd like to see in my students in general. I don't want them bored, but I have no problem if something they do is boring, if it's necessary. 

• Joe Moran's blog: Fail better ''Teaching is mostly about failure, because it is based on conversation and words are always liable to fall on stony ground. Reading is about failure, because most of what we read we forget, and quite a lot of it is not as interesting as we thought it would be. Writing is about failure because, even if we manage to finish something and send it out into the world, we will mostly come up against a wall of indifference made of people who have other things on their mind and other things to read and write. [...] In other words, you just keep throwing enough mud at the wall until some of it sticks. Maybe you only have to succeed once, or at least to fail less catastrophically.

Other Business

• Ronald Blythe sees the contradictions in a funeral held in the spring What an extraordinary sensibility and what an extraordinary writer!

• Get Comic Neue The free and (a bit more) stylish successor to Comic Sans

• Antifragile: A Definition 'The classic example of something antifragile is Hydra, the greek mythological creature that has numerous heads. When one is cut off, two grow back in its place.'

• So You Think You're Smarter Than A CIA Agent : Parallels : NPR Using the wisdom of crowds to interpret international relations.

• Looking For Tom Lehrer, Comedy's Mysterious Genius [buzzfeed.com] He's performed on and off (mainly off) since the '50s. His entire repertoire is 37 very dark and very clever songs... Taught maths at Harvard but never finished his PhD. Fascinating profile.