I have news about online teaching and reading workload, friends.

I have experimented with REDUCING the number of readings I assign for a class. This is hard in overview courses because you always feel like they should have "the lay of the land" and master all that there is.

HOWEVER...

My students have performed BETTER with reduced reading workloads.

Undergrads focus on ONE reading per week, while having 3 more available "if they so happen to have the time to read them" (they often do try to read these extra readings).

Masters' level students have appreciated taking a "let's just take things more slowly" approach.

Doctoral level students felt somewhat weirded out that I wasn't assigning three books a week. Though they appreciated it.

What I have drawn from my experiences:
- Workshops work.

Having a section of the class that is "hands-on, let's get writing/analyzing/thinking/reading" as a workshop fulfills two goals, for me:

1) Cements my students' understanding of the method.

2) Helps them have actual time to think and read and write rather than rush through.

Depth and breadth are issues we need to compromise on.

- Do I want them to read more broadly or more deeply?
- Do I want them to become more expert in a few things or become more generalist-type people?

These choices are malleable, as is our context.

What is NOT malleable:

The problem that the ‘lets-shut-schools-for-a-couple-of-weeks-crowd’ ignore is that its much easier to shut schools than to open them. Therefore, the probability is that once schools are shut, they will be shut for months on end, just like last time.

In other words, they are engaging in wishful thinking. The probability is that schools will be shut for months on end whilst online teaching provision will likely be patchy/minimal/inadequate/non-existent like it was last time & educational inequalities will continue to widen.

We’ve learned nothing from the schools shutting for 6 months last yr. Once those schools are shut, they will be shut for months. Online learning will continue to be inadequate, meanwhile big-mouthed Twitter users with no skin in the game will continue to opine on the subject.

The average Twitter user is more likely to be parent to a cat than to a human child. No skin in the game & it shows, quite frankly. The online learning that is available for parents is inadequate & it will be left to parents to utilise their own resources, again.

Educational inequalities will widen into a chasm. It will be a disaster for children, especially primary school-aged children, & for what? Where is the evidence that school closures minimised the spread of C-19? But the average Twitter user need not worry, their cat will be fine

Dear postgraduate students

Everyone says selecting your supervisor(s) will make or break obtaining your degree with a sound mind. This is true. So here are a few of my own tips on just how to do that. I hope it helps.

(Thread)

1. Know what you need from the get-go. As people, and as students, we need different things to succeed. Ensure you know what this is for you and make your search and eventual selection of a supervisor based on that.

2. How do you know which academic does what? Either email a number of potential academics or organise a quick in-person/online meeting with them to discuss their respective research interests. You can either align yourself to these or ask if they’re willing to take you on but...

...supervise a topic outside of their own research interests. It’s not unheard of but just depends on them.

3. Ask them about their supervision style, what works for them and assess whether that sounds like it would work for you. You can love their research topics but if you feel like they won’t be a good enough supervisor, find someone else. Remember you’re going to be spending...

1-Every prof and teacher I know is having a really hard time at end of term. Everyone is overwhelmed. So are our students. So are university staff and administrators (hard to believe, right?) Everyone is working night and day, feeling inefficient, overwhelmed...

2-One way to address this, for those still having classes post-Thanksgiving, is like a friend (everyone's anonymous in this thread: they can out themselves!) who told students, if they wished, they could end their term w all the work they'd done pre-Thanskgiving and be done.

3-Another friend announced post Thanksgiving that the final exam would be "open everything" and they could work together if they wishes as long as they also submitted a signed "study/crib sheet" along w the final. They warned working together might hurt them because it slows.

4-Another friend--genius scholar and prof at an Ivy--had a "PJ day" where they came to class in flannel pjs and students did to and they played them a thank you song for their resilience and care on the guitar (their Covid hobby is learning to play guitar).

5-Another friend called off a week of class and held "open collective off hours" in those slots where anyone could ask and talk about anything--the most responsive week they've had all term and everyone learned far more than usual and it nourished them all.

Actually reading through the Ofqual/DfE consultation rather than what has been said about it by others. It's not making me feel any better.

But, but, but...! This is such an unreasonable question!

Just hold the **** exams, for God's sake!

This passage makes zero sense to me. It's like a Boris announcement on the importance of following guidance. NEA is important, but only if the kids have all done it. It's the only evidence you can use in Art, but it's ok if it's not very good. Oh, and you can just make it up.

Oh, and if all else fails, just make it up using whatever stuff you can find to justify what you want to give.

What if you could avoid competition forever?

How to Build a Personal Monopoly with @david_perell + @jackbutcher

THREAD👇

1/ What is a personal monopoly?

The intersection of...

• Curiosity: What do you care about?

• Competence: What are you good at?

• Character: Who are you?

These combinations SHRINK the area of competition.

"Competition is for losers."
@peterthiel

2/ Where to Start

"You can't connect the dots looking forward: you can only connect them looking backwards."
-- Steve Jobs

Trust your curiosity and intuition.

Only curiosity creates uniqueness.

3/ BUTCHER'S FRAMEWORK

DICE = Diverge, Converge, Emerge

DIVERGE (Collect Dots): Pursue things you're interested in

CONVERGE (Connect Dots): Find the connections among interesting things

EMERGE: You've found where to start. Now attack it everyday.

4/ "Make a single decision to eliminate 1,000 decisions."
-- @tferriss

For @visualizevalue + @jackbutcher: How do you visualize something to make it simpler?

Eliminate anything that doesn't compound towards achieving that goal.

1/ 🚨BREAKING: Lawsuit filed today against educational agencies, teachers, principal, & CEO responsible for hosting workshops requiring children to make public professions about their racial, sexual, gender & religious identities, some of which were singled out for interrogation.

2/ Educators directed the plaintiff "to reveal his identities in a controlled, yet non-private setting, to scrutiny and official labeling," and are "coercing him to accept and affirm politicized and discriminatory principles and statements that he cannot in conscience affirm."

3/ The educators "repeatedly threatened William Clark with material harm including a failing grade and non-graduation if he failed to comply with their requirements."

4/ Plaintiffs claim that the educators' "coercive and intrusive behavior compelled William Clark’s protected speech and invaded his privacy, violating his constitutional rights under the First Amendment and his due process rights under the Fourteenth Amendment."

5/ The new curriculum, based on Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality, was done stealthily: "The generic name and syllabi provided to parents remained the same," and "parents were not made aware of the ideological turn in the curriculum."

I’ve compiled 6 tips for the move online based on @AccessTCD & @SchoolofEdTCD research. During #schoolclosures last year we surveyed 1000+ students and 700+ teachers about their experience of #onlinelearning. Although it's difficult to be back here, we have learned so much. (1/N)

1. Prioritise student & staff wellbeing. Connection before content. Everyone is dealing with different circumstances at home often unbeknownst to others. Check-in with students and colleagues. (2/N)

2. A whole-school approach is needed when moving teaching and learning online. Our research suggests that schools who used a whole school approach had higher engagement from students and higher collaboration among teachers. (3/N)

3. Research suggests providing live or recorded lessons for students is important for high student engagement. Connect with each other, students don’t want double the amount of homework, they want to learn from their enthusiastic teachers and see the face behind the screen. (4/N)

4. Teacher feedback means the world to students. It helps them to improve, motivates them to keep up engagement and strengthens student/ teacher relationships. Assign a meaningful amount of work to students that you have the time to respond to. (5/N)

I got the feedback today that my views on schools were too confident

I will die on this hill; hold to me to it

School closure will be the absolute worst public policy decision for the generation to come

The most discriminatory, net neg & cruel

It will be found to have made nearly no dent in the spread of the virus

The risks to teachers and staff will be found to be modest & modifiable

But the damage to kids and the very institution of public schools will be cataclysmic

The stories of undetected child abuse will be so powerful that every person who thinks it is reasonable to close schools, in this irrational way we have done in the US, will change their tune overnight

The damage to upward mobility will fall along class and racial lines, and this country will be more feudal

The fate of the nation itself-- democracy and those who participate in it-- will be made vulnerable.

50 Common Mistakes most developers make while starting out

A thread🧵👇

⚡️1. Focusing on completing courses instead of coding (or completing projects) .

⚡️2. Skipping the fundamentals.

⚡️3. Not joining a developer community.

⚡️4. Not creating projects from scratch.

⚡️5. Skipping Data Structures.

⚡️6. Not reading the documentation.

⚡️7. Trying to learn everything in one day.

⚡️8. Blindly following the tutorial and not extending the code or making their own version of code.

⚡️9. Not asking for help when needed.

⚡️10. Never commenting the code (In required places).

⚡️11. Endlessly Planning instead of Building.

⚡️12. Learning different technologies instead of mastering one.

⚡️13. Not reading stuff (books/articles/documentation).

⚡️14. Not maintaining a balance between programming and not programming.

⚡️15. Not finishing what they started

⚡️16. Not building stuff they care about.

⚡️17. Getting overwhelmed by others' progress/headstart

⚡️18. Not knowing when to quite and start over.

⚡️19. Not practising enough.

⚡️20. Endlessly buying Udemy courses.

THREAD on the Ofqual consultation.

The exams situation is a fiasco on top of a debacle. Yes - loads of kids have missed out on schooling. That is bad. Yes - the provision across the system is the most unequal it has been in living memory. That is bad.

The solution proposed by the DfE and Ofqual is to get teachers to submit a grade that they think their students are “performing at”. Here there are a number of problems:

Problem 1: what does “performing at” a grade even mean? An exam grade is comparative - if someone has any particular grade all it tells you is where they are compared to their peers. There is NO SUCH THING as “grade 6 content” or “working at grade 6”.

This is as true in maths, where content is cumulative, as it is in something like English, where examination is much more subjective. If you ask teachers all across the country to grade, you will get substantial variability because objective criteria simply do not exist.

That’s not our fault, it’s not a training need, its not that we don’t know what we’re doing. It’s literally the way the system has been designed. You can’t train someone in a concept that does not exist.

You know what I don’t miss? Parent teacher conferences.

Most of Rocketkid’s teachers were lovely, but we had two that still stick out in my mind as sad/hilarious.

The first one, he was in elementary school. The teacher said it was ‘important’ for us to come in.

1/

So we worried about that for two days until the meeting. What could be wrong? It’s scary for parents to be left hanging like that.

So we meet his teacher, goatee and sunglasses...we live in the boonies and yet there’s something here like he’s trying to be a player.

2/

Not like a lady-player, like he’s got an image of himself in his head. We like teachers, but this guy’s manner is just weirdly kind of pushy a little bit.

Anyway, we sit does in the kid chairs, he’s behind his desk, again, weirdly focused on ‘power,’ somehow.

No idea why,

3/

We ask about our son, he acts as if he forgot that’s why we’re there, says some random stuff, all normal, nothing at all worthy of a conference. I mean, contact and communication is important, but thus just feels off-the cuff entirely.

4/

So then suddenly he gets really intense, but pretends being casual. Like it just occurred to him.

And he says to me, ‘So, I hear you’re a writer.’

What?

I tell him yes, I write comics and some animation and stuff.

He says. ‘I looked you up.’

5/

1/ THREAD. MFA in Creative Writing at Chapman University. Application deadline: February 1. That's MONDAY! Let me say a few things about our program first, and then I'll provide a CODE for an application FEE WAIVER at the end of this thread. #MFA #gradschool #creativewriting

2/ While some of our MFA students focus on one genre, many write across genres. @tryphena_yeboah published her first poetry chapbook last year with @AkashicBooks, has published stories @NarrativeMag, and is writing a thesis in fiction with thesis director Richard Bausch.

3/ Likewise, @lizharmer published her first novel with @penguinrandom while she was an MFA student here, her second novel is forthcoming in 2022, and she drafted a memoir as her thesis, with me as the thesis director. Lots of our students take a workshop in a second genre.

4/ MFA faculty work across genres too. Jim Blaylock is a steampunk fiction writers (see Homunculus), and now he writes essays (see a couple in @poetswritersinc). @TheMil10 writes plays & poems & I write poems & essays. Together, our expertise covers a broad range of aesthetics.

5/ All incoming MFA students begin with Aspects of a Writer in their first fall semester. This course focuses on sustaining a writing life, publishing, and fostering literary culture. When I teach the course, each student forms a Writing Life Plan based on their own goals.

For months, but especially after the new CDC school recs came out, supporters of reopening all schools now have been peddling the idea that schools across the country have been open all year successfully. This argument is used to push for ALL schools to be opened now.

A long 🧵

Though some schools in the U.S. are open & doing well with safety protocols, many places used as examples of opening success have profoundly unsafe schools & are neglecting covid safety. Some have been lucky not to have outbreaks and other issues--it's not that they're safe.

In the last few weeks, I've been in touch with teachers in Ohio, Florida, Texas, Wisconsin, New Jersey, Utah, and Pennsylvania.

(Thanks to @eduwonkette_jen @GeoRebekah and @saribethrose for the threads and forums that have helped me meet SO MANY teachers this year).

I collected the accounts of dozens of teachers. Obviously, this isn't an exhaustive list and it isn't a study! It's what teachers on the ground in some states are experiencing. And it's easy to see why so many in our profession are so frightened this year.

Here's the list:

There are currently open schools in the US that are being hailed as "successful" that have:

▪️no safety protocols at all besides contact cleaning, in some districts
▪️some districts with no mask mandate
▪️classes in windowless rooms, some with full classes of 20-30