Vanity Fair article: INSIDE TRUMP’S CRUEL CAMPAIGN AGAINST THE U.S.D.A.’S SCIENTISTS

LINK

Minds Online by Michelle Miller

Minds Online by Michelle Miller
[link to a book review and another]

Book Crunch: "On Writing Well" by William Zinsser

Key take-aways:

• WRITING WELL IS A CRAFT; ANYONE CAN LEARN IT.
• GOOD WRITING IS CLEAR, SIMPLE, CONCISE, AND HUMAN.
• GOOD WRITING GROWS FROM GOOD PROCESS.

HOW TO CLEANSE CLUTTER.

Four-Minute Books

Four-Minute Books

Summer 2017 Projects

Things I did:

• ERB results study and a follow-up study on teaching for improving reading comprehension
• Standards-based grading:
• Learned a lot more about Edline and especially for SBG (the power law is interesting)
• Wormeli article about redos
• I was especially interested in what research has to say about SBG
• Other resources here, here, here
• Webinar by Tom Schimmer on "Accurate Grading with a Standards-Based Mindset" (post)
• Advisory work: 
• compiled some resources for in a Google site (including Philosophy for Kids lessons and excerpts from Worst-Case Scenario)
• made a sample digital portfolio students could use to document goals, reflections, work samples
• Tech things:
• Found cool tech tools:  CleverPDF, Cheatography, histography.io
• Learned about vlookup (in modifying the Rubric Tabs)
• Learned about making interactive timelines with Knight Lab Timeline and interactive maps with Google My Maps
• Became a Google Certified Educator Level 1:  
• Skills checklist for L1
• Skills checklist for L2
• Hangouts, Groups, Classroom
• appointment slots in Google Calendar
• mail merge for gmail
• Google Tasks in gmail & Google Calendar
• Filter vs. Filter View in Sheets
• assign an action to someone in a comment
• Show questions based on answers in Google Forms
• Data validation and pivot charts in Google Sheets
• Creating a Grading Rubric for Easy Grading with Google Forms
• add-ons and extensions: Doctopus & Goobric, Orange Slice, Rubric Tabs (another)
• more great add-ons for Google Classroom specifically
• played around with Gooru
• Coursera:
• Chinese religions
• Ancient Greece @ Wesleyan
• BRAVE poster for classroom
• New resources for History 7
• Search ReSearch for cool Google research tips, like how you can append this string to the end of a search URL to sort results in reverse chronological order:  &tbs=cdr:1,cd_min:1/1/0,sbd:1
• Planned Getty visit, reserved date
• Learned about using Hypothes.is to make and share annotations of web content!
• Began a list of picture book resources at PVLD
• Organized electronic files and set up planning calendar for next year
• 
  

Things I watched: 

• Trimmed "Park Avenue: money, power, and the American Dream" video to my YouTube channel for History 7
• Watched and wrote Andy Taylor as a result: These Two Young Bushmen Hope for a New Life in the Modern World
• A Handmaid's Tale on Hulu

Things I read (and documented in my new Goodreads account)

• Cal Newport's book and created a cheat sheet on study skills and work habits to use next year with students (also a google doc here)
• Surviving Middle School: Navigating the Halls, Riding the Social Roller Coaster, and Unmasking the Real You by Luke Reynolds and recorded a few quotes
• Worst-Case Scenario Survival Guide for Middle School; scanned and filed excerpts for advisory use
• A Repair Kit for Grading: Fifteen Fixes for Broken Grades by Ken O'Connor (notes)
• Black Ships Before Troy and took notes on chapter themes
• Philosophy for Kids and filed each lesson individually
• About Jonathan Haidt and his moral matrix concept (TED talk); need to read The Righteous Mind!
• Re-read and took notes on Rushworth Kidder's Good Kids, Tough Choices
• 30 Lessons for Living: Tried and True Advice from the Wisest Americans by Karl Pillemer (someone else's summary)
• Augustus: The Life of Rome's First Emperor by Anthony Everitt
• Making Thinking Visible by Ron Ritchhart, Mark Church, and Karin Morrison (Google doc)
• Victor Davis Hanson, The Father of Us All: War and History (notes)
• Amanda Lindhout's memoir, A House in the Sky (terrible!)

To Do:

Marzano online course on SBG?
Marshall memo gems?

"Accurate Grading with a Standards-Based Mindset"

Webinar by Tom Schimmer on "Accurate Grading with a Standards-Based Mindset"

How to Be a High School Superstar by Cal Newport

How to Be a High School Superstar: A Revolutionary Plan to Get into College by Standing Out (Without Burning Out) – July 27, 2010 by Cal Newport

3 Laws of the "Relaxed Superstar"
1. The Law of Unscheduling: Pack your schedule with free time. Use this time to explore.
2. The Law of Focus: Master one serious interest. Don't waste time on unrelated activities.
3. The Law of Innovation: Pursue accomplishments that are hard to explain, not hard to do.

Instead of "Passion"
Passion is cliche.  You can spend a lot of time and effort on an activity, but that alone doesn't make it impressive (rather, it might seem constructed, formulated to meet some external expectations). What colleges really want are students who are interesting. Interestingness is a natural by-product of a deep interest. To become interesting, the activity is nearly irrelevant:  "it's not the activity that matters, but rather the effect the activity has on your personality.... The old definitions focused on the characteristics of the activities, not the traits of the students" (p. 21). Research by Linda Caldwell at Penn State shows that students can *learn* to be interest-prone by leaving lots of leisure time in his/her schedule, using that time to explore lots of potential things, and also leaving casual free time to reflect

Set up an ideal student workweek:  During a normal week, your work should be done by dinnertime on weekdays and require one half day on the weekend.  For this to happen, you must learn to reduce homework time.  An important insight to remember is that technique trumps effort:

Technique 1: Be organized
Technique 2:  Let your notes do the heavy lifting (QEC method, question, evidence, conclusion)
Technique 3:  Reject rote review in favor of active recall
Technique 4:  Write papers over 3 days (organize/outline, write, review/edit)
Technique 5:  Reflect on these questions -- What preparation helped?  What didn't?  What could I have done, but didn't, that would have made a big difference?  How can I prepare better next time?

Environment plays a key role:  Set up basic work rules about when, where, and how long to study.

Rule 1:  Work in isolation to avoid distractions
Rule 2:  Work in chunks (50/10, pomodoro, etc.) for greater productivity
Rule 3:  Get as much done during the school day as possible
Rule 4:  Avoid state-transition cues (aka distractions that interrupt your focus)
Rule 5:  Keep your energy levels stoked (healthy snacks)
Rule 6:  NO INTERNET!

Time management: "The key to avoiding pile-ups is to spread out your work."  Get a big calendar, write out your assessments, look two weeks ahead and then work backwards to set up a schedule for completing tasks.

When all else fails, QUIT.  The Final-Straw Effect says that you don't need to quit everything, but rather just quit the extra things that get added on and cause the whole thing to destabilize (showboat, required, cf. elective courses).

Explore to become interesting:  Tips on how (and why) to cultivate a reading habit, launch a Saturday-morning project, join communities, and using the advice-guide method for getting guidance to "crack the code" for a field of interest.

What to focus on:

Michael Silverman = the student used to illustrate the power of #2, the Law of Focus

The Superstar Effect = the idea that the most talented in a field earn disproportionally more rewards than those who are only slightly less talented:

• See also:  "The Economics of Superstars" by Sherwin Rosen (1981) for mathematical models for why the best outearn their closest rivals
• "The Winner-Take-All High School" by Paul Attewell (2001) Attewell discovered that being number one in your class provides an increase in acceptance probabilities that's equivalent to adding an extra 70 points to you SAT I scores and 60 points to your SAT II scores.

But since it's hard to be valedictorian, your chances are better in aiming to be an Extracurricular Superstar: You will receive a big impressiveness bonus for an extracurricular pursuit if you're the best at it of all applicants, even if the activity is not the most competitive. (So the reward is greatest for those who pick less competitive pursuits.)  Still, it's not enough for the pursuit to be unusual (like underwater banjo), because it must also be a marker of some kind of exceptional ability.

Robert K. Merton on the Matthew Effect (1968):  showing how, among other things, eminent scientists will often get more credit than a comparatively unknown researcher, even if their work is similar.  In other words, a small early advantage grows into something bigger.  Which leads to the Complimentary-Accomplishments Hypothesis: once you’ve accomplished something that is unambiguously impressive, you’ll begin to achieve complementary accomplishments with little effort.

The Laundry List Fallacy: Adding to your schedule an activity that could be replicated by any student willing to sign up and invest a reasonable amount of time in it can hurt your impressiveness. It follows that creating a laundry list of mediocre activities reduces your chances of the superstar effect.

How to develop a focus:  

• First, start with a deep interest.
• Don't worry if the interest doesn't coincide with what you think of as your "natural talents" because Talent is Overrated -- by Geoff Colvin (2008).
• Become good at it by accepting the Goodness Paradox: "Most people assume they know how to become good. Yet most are not good at anything." So assume you know nothing, question your assumptions, learn from others, immerse yourself in the activity to reap maximum rewards.
• Many rewards will seem to fall into your lap once you've done so -- see Leveraged-Ability Hypothesis:  "Once you pass a certain threshold of skill in a field, you’ll encounter many opportunities for related activities that will improve your perceived ability without requiring an excessive time commitment."

The Failed-Simulation Effect explains why some students are more impressive than others to college admisssion:  if you cannot mentally simulate the steps taken by a student to reach an accomplishment, you will experience a feeling of profound impressiveness (because research shows that we evaluate other people by first comparing them to ourselves). Activities that meet the generate the Failed-Simulation Effect are "innovative" -- they aren't thought up from scratch or planned, they stem from paying your dues in a closed community (vs. open or hidden),

See also:

• A SUMMARY AND BROAD POINTS OF AGREEMENT AND DISAGREEMENT WITH CAL NEWPORT’S BOOK ON HIGH SCHOOL EXTRACURRICULARS
• Someone else's notes on the book

Barbara Oakley's book recommendations

This is a website for book recommendations from Dr. Barbara Oakley, the instructor for the online course I took last summer in "Learning How to Learn." It's remarkable how many of her favorites are books that I really like!  I should check out other recommendations like these below. (Those with call numbers are available at libraries near me.)

Genghis Khan by Jack Weatherford (n/a at the library) -- ORDER THIS!  It's good!
Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff (932.02092 Cleopatra SCHIFF)
Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman (153.42 KAHNEMAN)
Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me) by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson (Malaga Cove 153 TAVRIS)
Blind Spot by Mahzarin Banajee and Anthony Greenwald
Deep Work by Cal Newport  (n/a at the library)
Smarter, Faster, Better by Charles Duhigg (158 DUHIGG)
Herding Hemingway's Cats by Kat Arney
Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon by Yong Zhao
Julius Caesar by Philip Freeman (937.0509 Caesar FREEMAN)
Alexander the Great by Philip Freeman (938.0709 Alexander FREEMAN)
Augustus by Adrian Goldsworthy (937.06 GOLDSWORTHY)
The Life of Rome's First Emperor Augustus by Anthony Everitt (937.07 Augustus EVERITT)
The Master and His Emissary by Iain McGilchrist
Wired to Create by Scott Barry Kaufman and Carolyn Gregoire
Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning by Peter C. Brown (Malaga Cove 370.1523 BROWN)
How We Learn: The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens by Benedict Carey
Gut: The Inside Story of Our Body's Most Underrated Organ by Giulia Enders (Malaga Cove 612.3 ENDERS)
War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires by Peter Turchin (327.101 TURCHIN)
Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life by Bill Burnett (Malaga Cove 650.1 BURNETT)
The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living by Ryan Holiday
Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life by Winifred Gallagher

Russell's research on MTOR and concurrent training

LINK to studies and articles

How Women Lift and Train Differently Than Men by Mark Rippetoe

How Women Lift and Train Differently Than Men by Mark Rippetoe

Key take-aways:

1. Women can do sets of 5 closer to their 1RM than men. Females can do a higher amount of reps using a higher percentage of their max than males.
2. Women can do more eccentric work (negatives) when fatigued. Even after concentric failure, women can continue doing negatives.
3. Women can PR with less than perfect technique. Even using less than optimal form, women can perform a 1RM.
4. Women require less rest between sets. Women can recover faster between sets than men.
5. Women can train heavier more frequently than men. They get less sore, they recover faster, and they can deal with more frequent exposures to a training stress.

Hiring Decisions and Cognitive Bias: What factors matter most?

Here's a meta-analysis of 85 years of research on what matters most in hiring.

"Overall, the 3 combinations with the highest multivariate validity and utility for job performance were GMA plus a work sample test (mean validity of .63), GMA plus an integrity test (mean validity of .65), and GMA plus a structured interview (mean validity of .63)."

GMA stands for General Mental Ability (or IQ).

Along the same lines . . . 

• The New York Times on "The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews" stirred up some trouble on April 8, 2017.
• Google's Secret to Hiring the Best People from Wired (2015) -- similarly, cautions against the problem of confirmation bias in interviews.  
• Don’t Blink! The Hazards of Confidence by Daniel Kahneman in the NY Times (2011) -- on how many of the things we are convinced we can predict end up being no more predictable than the roll of a dice.  He does end on a hopeful note, however:  "True intuitive expertise is learned from prolonged experience with good feedback on mistakes."  

Visual Data: Educational Attainment in America

Educational Attainment in America

The 25 Gmail Keyboard Shortcuts

The 25 Gmail Keyboard Shortcuts That Save Me 60 Hours Per Year

Andy Baker on intermediate programming

Andy Baker on intermediate programming:

Basically OLAD, rotating four movements over a 3-day-per-week schedule.  Also describes sets/reps, backoffs, etc.

The 50 Best TV Shows Ever

The 50 Best TV Shows Ever

Ones to watch:
- Game Of Thrones (7)
- Oz (8)
- The Killing, aka "Forbrydelsen" (10)
- Cracker (11)
- Sherlock (29)
- Fargo (41)
- The Bridge, aka "Broen" (42)

World's Best Life Hacks

HERE is a google preview of a few pages of this book, which would make a great book:

World's Best Life Hacks: 200 Things That Make Your Life Easier by Sara Devos

Favs to remember:

• soda can tab for doubling hangers
• coffee grounds to clean the sink disposal
• wine cork bag sealer
• "washing soda" + vegetable oil to remove labels/glue from jars
• a few drops of bleach + 1 tsp. sugar to make cut flowers last longer

How To Read Effectively In A Foreign Language

How To Read Effectively In A Foreign Language

You’ve probably heard before that reading helps you to learn language.

But why?

What are the benefits of learning a language with stories, as opposed to with a textbook?

Understanding what reading is, and why you would do it, is the first step to becoming an effective reader.

The main benefit of reading is that you gain exposure to good quality, natural language. But you can read in different ways.

If you read a lot (for pleasure or study), this is commonly known as extensive reading. You read large amounts, and are concerned with enjoying the storyor learning from the contents.

It might be natural for you to read a lot in your mother tongue, but this is very different from the kind of reading you might do in a foreign language textbook.

In your textbook, you read short passages of text, which you study in detail with the aim of understanding every word.

This is known as intensive reading.

With intensive reading, because you’re reading in so much depth, you can’t get through very much material.

Both approaches have value and are an important part of a balanced approach to language learning.

But it’s extensive reading where all the magic happens.

Twig History

If nothing else, the incident may serve as yet another example of why social studies—and history in particular—is such a tricky subject to teach, at least via textbooks and multiple-choice tests. Its topics are inherently subjective, impossible to distill into paragraphs jammed with facts and figures alone. As the historian and sociologist Jim Loewen recently told me, in history class students typically “have to memorize what we might call ‘twigs.’ We’re not teaching the forest—we’re not even teaching the trees,” said Loewen, best known for his 1995 book Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. “We are teaching twig history.”

This is in part why a growing number of educators are calling for a fundamental shift in how the subject is taught. Some are even calling on their colleagues to abandon traditional models of teaching history altogether. Instead of promoting the rote memorization of information outlined in a single, mass-produced textbook, these critics argue that teachers should use a variety of primary-source materials and other writings, encouraging kids to analyze how these narratives are written and recognize the ways in which inherent biases shape conventional instructional materials. In an essay for The Atlantic earlier this year, Michael Conway argued that history classes should focus on teaching children “historiography”—the methodologies employed by historians and the exploration of history itself as an academic discipline:

Minute Mysteries

minute mysteries

In the old West a man rides into town on Friday. He stays for three days, and leaves on Friday. How can this be?
There is a man walking down the road dressed entirely in black. There are no lights on anywhere and no moon. A car with no lights comes down the road and manages to avoid the man. How?
A father and son are in an auto accident. The father dies and the son is rushed to the hospital in critical condition. The doctor looks at the boy and says, “I can’t work on him, he’s my son.” How can this be?
You are in a cabin with four walls all facing south. There is a bear outside. What color is the bear?
You walk into a room with only one match. You must light a lantern, a gas stove, the pilot light of a water heater and a fire in a fire place. What do you light first?
ANSWERS:
1. The horse’s name is Friday.
2. It’s day time.
3. The doctor is the boy’s mother.
4. The cabin is at the tip of the North Pole. The bear is, of course, white.
5. The match, duh.

The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

• The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews from the NY Times (2017) -- trashes the predictability of interviews generally, but touts the power of structured over unstructured interviews
• Google's Secret to Hiring the Best People from Wired (2015) -- similar to the article Rob sent out, cautions against the problem of confirmation bias in interviews.  Advocates the use of a consistent, concise hiring rubric based on specific criteria.  These criteria were determined in a meta-analysis of 85 years of data.  The #1 predictor of job success is performance on a work sample (our demo lesson?).  Tied for #2 were performance on cognitive tests (maybe educational background is our proxy?) and in a structured interview.  The key is that the structured interview has a much greater predictive ability than an unstructured interview:  "Structured interviews are predictive even for jobs that are themselves unstructured. We’ve also found that they cause both candidates and interviewers to have a better experience and are perceived to be most fair. So why don’t more companies use them? Well, they are hard to develop: You have to write them, test them, and make sure interviewers stick to them. And then you have to continuously refresh them so candidates don’t compare notes and come prepared with all the answers. It’s a lot of work, but the alternative is to waste everyone’s time with a typical interview that is either highly subjective, or discriminatory, or both."
• Don’t Blink! The Hazards of Confidence by Daniel Kahneman in the NY Times (2011) -- on how many of the things we are convinced we can predict end up being no more predictable than the roll of a dice.  He does end on a hopeful note, however:  "True intuitive expertise is learned from prolonged experience with good feedback on mistakes." 

Dave Evans, Stanford Life Design Lab

Stanford's Designing Your Life

History Class and the Fictions About Race in America

LINK to full article in The Atlantic

If nothing else, the incident may serve as yet another example of why social studies—and history in particular—is such a tricky subject to teach, at least via textbooks and multiple-choice tests. Its topics are inherently subjective, impossible to distill into paragraphs jammed with facts and figures alone. As the historian and sociologist Jim Loewen recently told me, in history class students typically “have to memorize what we might call ‘twigs.’ We’re not teaching the forest—we’re not even teaching the trees,” said Loewen, best known for his 1995 book Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. “We are teaching twig history.”

This is in part why a growing number of educators are calling for a fundamental shift in how the subject is taught. Some are even calling on their colleagues to abandon traditional models of teaching history altogether. Instead of promoting the rote memorization of information outlined in a single, mass-produced textbook, these critics argue that teachers should use a variety of primary-source materials and other writings, encouraging kids to analyze how these narratives are written and recognize the ways in which inherent biases shape conventional instructional materials. In an essay for The Atlantic earlier this year, Michael Conway argued that history classes should focus on teaching children “historiography”—the methodologies employed by historians and the exploration of history itself as an academic discipline:

Currently, most students learn history as a set narrative—a process that reinforces the mistaken idea that the past can be synthesized into a single, standardized chronicle of several hundred pages. This teaching pretends that there is a uniform collective story, which is akin to saying everyone remembers events the same. Yet, history is anything but agreeable. It is not a collection of facts deemed to be “official” by scholars on high. It is a collection of historians exchanging different, often conflicting analyses. And rather than vainly seeking to transcend the inevitable clash of memories, American students would be better served by descending into the bog of conflict and learning the many "histories" that compose the American national story.

5 questions to ask at the hospital

https://medium.com/@RosenthalHealth/how-to-save-money-at-the-hospital-f5356b5ecd55

‘What Do You Think Is the Most Important Problem Facing This Country Today?’ (NY Times)

LINK

Mike Pence

The Radical Crusade of Mike Pence

"Mike Pence had once paid his mortgage with campaign funds, dragged his feet during an HIV epidemic and a lead-poisoning outbreak, signed an anti-gay-rights bill that nearly cost Indiana millions of dollars, lost his mind on national TV with George Stephanopoulos, and turned away Syrian refugees in an unconstitutional ploy laughed out of federal court."

"He became president of the Indiana Policy Review Foundation, a conservative think tank, and began publishing his thoughts online. He wrote some real doozies, like coming out as a climate-change denialist ("Global warming is a myth. ... There, I said it") and a cigarette denialist ("Despite the hysteria from the political class and the media, smoking doesn't kill"). He became a board member of the Indiana Family Institute, an anti-abortion, anti-gay organization that pronounced the protest movement that formed after the brutal 1998 murder of gay teen Matthew Shepard to be homosexual-activist "propaganda.""

"In 2000, Pence made another bid for Congress. He checked the GOP boxes for cutting taxes while increasing military spending, but he also made it clear he was a Christian warrior, stating, "Congress should oppose any effort to recognize homosexuals as a 'discreet and insular minority' entitled to the protection of anti-discrimination laws." He also argued that the AIDS resources bill, commonly known as the Ryan White Care Act, should be renewed only if resources were "directed toward those institutions which provide assistance to those seeking to change their sexual behavior." While Pence has argued that providing assistance to those seeking to change their sexual behavior meant abstinence groups, many gay activists heard code words for "conversion therapy." In 2006, he spoke in favor of a constitutional amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman, arguing that "societal collapse was always brought about following an advent of the deterioration of marriage and family."

Pence fought against the pro-choice movement with vigor rare even by right-wing standards, introducing a bill to de-fund Planned Parenthood year after year he was in the House. The death of a woman after taking an abortion pill led Pence to the House floor, where he spoke favorably of Lex Cornelia, a collection of ancient Roman laws, including one detailing how providers of abortion potions were sentenced to work in the mines.His agenda was so radical that exactly zero of Pence's bills became law."

As 2015 began, a court case legalizing gay marriage loomed before the United States Supreme Court. Sensing it might be passed, Indiana Christian-right leaders including Curt Smith, head of the Indiana Family Institute, where Pence was once a board member, got behind the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a bill that essentially would allow business-owning Hoosiers to discriminate against gay customers. It had widespread GOP support, and Pence saw it as a consolation prize, since the Supreme Court was likely to make the right's quest for an anti-gay amendment pointless. He told opponents the bill wasn't anti-gay, merely pro religious freedom.
And then the photograph came out. It featured Pence signing RFRA into law surrounded by monks and nuns in habits, and the three men of the Indiana-right apocalypse: Indiana Family Institute's Smith, Micah Clark of the American Family Association of Indiana, and Advance America's Eric Miller. The press was not allowed. Smith has said homosexuality is outlawed in the Bible, along with adultery and bestiality; Clark once was a proponent of gay conversion therapy; and Miller claimed that ministers and priests could be imprisoned for preaching against homosexuality. The photo was so egregious that when a Democratic state representative began circulating it, colleagues complimented him on his Photoshopping skills."

"The year after the RFRA debacle, Pence continued his social holy war by signing into law House Bill 1337, one of the nation's most stringent anti-abortion laws. Previously, Pence had allocated $3.5 million to Real Alternatives, a Pennsylvania company running abortion crisis centers, a.k.a. places where a woman goes for medical help and is pressured into carrying her baby to term and given no immediate medical treatment. The program had to be suspended in 2016 when Real Alternatives was investigated on billing-overcharge claims, a crime it was already under investigation for in Pennsylvania when Pence granted the contract in 2015."