Monkeymagic

Democracy and docility

Piers Young — Sat, 08 Jun 2013 14:53:25 +0000

“Why do we demand and go to war for democracy as nations, yet accept with docility that no one has the right to choose their own boss?”

- Ricardo Semler

Exhilaration, Not Passion

Piers Young — Wed, 29 May 2013 20:53:38 +0000

Am enjoying Ricardo Semler’s Seven Day Weekend at the moment. He makes the point that a number of companies position themselves as warm, nurturing “families” and look for passionate employees while restricting much of what makes them thrive with overly stringent routines and top-heavy directives. The same insight applies to schools. Paraphrasing a line from him,

Read more on Exhilaration, Not Passion…

Two points about self-esteem

Piers Young — Sun, 19 May 2013 22:15:36 +0000

From Martin Seligman’s Learned Optimism:

Point 1: Self-esteem is a symptom, not a prerequisite or cause.

“I believe that self-esteem is just a meter that reads out the state of the system. It is not an end in itself. When you are doing well in school or work, when you are doing well with the people you love, when you are doing well in play, the meter will register high. When you are doing badly, it will register low. I have scoured the self-esteem literature looking for the causality as opposed to correlation, looking for any evidence that high self-esteem among youngsters causes better grades, more popularity, less teenage pregnancy, less dependence on welfare … There is nothing of this sort to be found in the literature. Self-esteem seems only to be a symptom, a correlate, of how well a person is doing in the world.”

Gossip

Piers Young — Wed, 15 May 2013 21:25:11 +0000

Really enjoyed Doubt. This parable definitely going to be reused with students.

“A woman was gossiping with a friend about a man she hardly knew— I know none of you have ever done this—that night she had a dream. A great hand appeared over her and pointed down at her. She was immediately seized with an overwhelming sense of guilt. The next day she went to confession.

St Exupery and The Immensity of the Sea

Piers Young — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 16:43:34 +0000

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”

Negative Suggestion and the learning tightrope

Piers Young — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 11:27:04 +0000

Negative suggestion is pretty common. “Try not to fall off”, “Don’t push that button” are both examples. The problem is it seems to have pretty standard effects too. You fall off. You end up pushing that button. The suggestion to a person not to do something results in increasing the likelihood that the person will actually do it.

The problem of best practice in schools

Piers Young — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 21:36:14 +0000

The performance of a system depends on how the parts fit, not how they act taken separately. As a result, and to paraphrase Dave Gray, a best practice from one school, or from one teacher, can’t necessarily be applied successfully elsewhere.

Jack Welch and Rates of Change

Piers Young — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 21:22:08 +0000

This, from Jack Welch, makes a lot of sense:

“I’ve always believed that when the rate of change inside an institution becomes slower than the rate of change outside, the end is in sight. The only question is when.”

The Difficulty with Artificial Divides

Piers Young — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 13:12:28 +0000

I find this table a little unsettling, and I think the reason why has to do with artificial divides.

It’s part of what looks like an interesting presentation by Bonnie Stewart – and I know I am probably taking it out of context – but I’m going to assume the “academic” vs “networked” are kind of akin to “classroom” vs “social media/how Will Richardson’s son learnt Minecraft”.

21st Century Soup-Spilling

Piers Young — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 23:56:56 +0000

There’s a lot of talk about 21st century education. There are the skills that children need, the jobs that don’t exist yet, the access to learning anywhere and all the wonderful things the internet enables us to do. All of this is valuable, I think, but I wonder how much it is side-stepping the real issue?