6-Word Stories

6-Word Stories - R Enough

by Dr. Z

6-word stories could be considered eXtreme short stories. It is said that Ernest Hemmingway once proclaimed his 6-word story, "For sale: baby shoes, never worn.", as his best work.

Wired Magazine asks sci-fi, fantasy and horror writers to write their own 6-word short stories.

• The sun explodes . . . eight minutes left. - Maximus

Pete Berg launched a Six Word Stories blog in Dec, 2008. This is where he stores thousands of 6-word stories. He has these catagorized by subject and author. It is possible to submit your own and receive comments from the readers.

• For Sale: Guitar. No strings attached. - Mathijs hoitsma

Visual six-word story group project on Flickr

• Bearded pensioner held over yuletide breakins - 5/10

Writing 6-word stories is not easy. You must first envision an event or tale that you want to tell. Then you whittle away the words it would take to convey your ideas about this story. Finally, you have the true essence of your dissertation.

Lemov's taxonomy

have had friends ask me what I think of our neighborhood school, and my answer is quite simple. I tell them, "The school is only as good as the teacher your child has that year."

When Doug Lemov conducted his own search for those magical ingredients, he noticed something about most successful teachers that he hadn’t expected to find: what looked like natural-born genius was often deliberate technique in disguise. “Stand still when you’re giving directions,” a teacher at a Boston school told him. In other words, don’t do two things at once. Lemov tried it, and suddenly, he had to ask students to take out their homework only once.

It was the tiniest decision, but what was teaching if not a series of bite-size moves just like that?

Lemov’s Taxonomy. (The official title, attached to a book version being released in April, is “Teach Like a Champion: The 49 Techniques That Put Students on the Path to College.”)

The article describes the work of Doug Lemov, a teacher, principal, and charter-school founder who has written a book called Teach Like a Champion: The 49 Techniques that Put Students on the Path to College.

Nichification E. Abbey

In the classroom, teachers have thought about this issue, at least subconsciously. When teachers allow students to choose their own groups, students will pick groups that make them comfortable and that have similar interests. This can be a very productive strategy. But on the other hand, many teachers see they have a responsibility to pair students with those they don't normally visit with in order to extend their thinking.

But, have you ever had this discussion with other educators? How to get students out of their clique-boxes and learning from other students in the class? I haven't in all my experience in teaching, which makes the issue of online nichification more dire and more pressing.

What's your sentence- D. Pink

What is your sentence? (Curacao edition)

by Dan Pink

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At the International School of Curacao, teacher Danny Kinzer asked his Theory of Knowledge students to undertake the “What’s your sentence?” described in Lindsey Testolin’s remarkable video and on page 154 ofDrive. Then each participant posted his or her answer on the school bulletin board.

Money/Value

Rather than stressing about how you can get more money for money’s sake, focus instead on how you can provide more value to more people. All sorts of wealth will flow from this mindset.

Have you seen this? Prof "freezes" laptop

Professor Destroys Laptop as a Warning for Students

by Dr. Z

Popout

Talk about an ego-maniacal professor. This professor has serious issues with student-based learning. Watch thevideo above and you will see Kieran Mullen, a physics professor at the University of Oklahoma, bathe a laptop in Liquid Nitogen and then shatter the computer on the floor with the threat, "Don't bring laptops and work on them in class!"

What does this mean? Why is he scared of students bringing computers to class? Laptops in class can be a distraction, but it can also be an amazingly interactive tool that will enable the students to find new ideas to integrate with the discussion. Robin Galloway writes about how we run a backchannel in our lecture classes so that students are able to discuss the ideas that are covered in lecture.

What do you think?

• Do you allow laptops in your lectures or classes?
• Do you encourage students to use their laptops in class?
• How do you use laptops to engage your students in the classroom learning experience?

Purple Cow

Purple Cow- Seth Godin

Products with a future are those created by passionate people.

Create remarkable products that the right people seek out.

Do you have the emails of the 20 percent of your customer base that loves what you do?

Sneezers are the key spreading agents of an ideavirus. It's useless to advertise to anyone (except sneezers with influence.

Otaku- more than a hobby but a little less than an obsession- it's what gets some people to take extra efforts to try something and then tell others.

Learning and Performance - Fan impact

Fewer of the athlete’s peers are in attendance at away games.

Do young inexperienced teams play better on the road? If so, is this due to less worry by the athletes about what their peers may think of their performance?

If we use up a part of our limited attention worrying about what other people think of us, we have less attention to spend actually performing the activity.

If so, then if we can convince our student fans (the group that some athletes are most worried about) that their positive support is crucial in relieving this worry and subsequent draw on the athlete’s attention, then the athlete will feel supported and have more attention to give to his/her performance.

Carol Dweck Notes

Mindset

"To my mind, it's the balance that counts -- keeping a balance between valuing learning and performance. Let's face it, grades often matter a lot, and many students who want to go on to top graduate and professional schools need good grades. Problems arise when students come to care so much about their performance that they sacrifice important learning opportunities and limit their intellectual growth.

Problems also arise when students equate their grades with their intelligence or their worth. This can be very damaging, for when they hit difficulty, they may quickly feel inadequate, become discouraged and lose their ability or their desire to perform well in that area.

For me the best mix is a combination of (a) valuing learning and challenge and (b) valuing grades but seeing them as merely an index of your current performance, not a sign of your intelligence or worth.

Students can be taught that their intellectual skills are things that can be cultivated -- through their hard work, reading, education, confronting of challenges, etc. When they are taught this, they seem naturally to become more eager for challenges, harder working, and more able to cope with obstacles. Researchers (for example, Joshua Aronson of the University of Texas) have even shown that college students' grade point averages go up when they are taught that intelligence can be developed.

Students who are taught that their performance simply measures their current skills can still relish learning challenges, for mistakes and setbacks should not be undermining.

By the way, this stance characterizes many top athletes. They are very performance-oriented during a game or match. However, they do not see a negative outcome as reflecting their underlying skills or potential to learn. Moreover, in between games they are very learning-oriented. They review tapes of their past game, trying to learn from their mistakes, they talk to their coaches about how to improve, and they work ceaselessly on new skills.

What has intrigued me most in my 30 years of research is the power of motivation. Motivation is often more important than your initial ability in determining whether you succeed in the long run. In fact [as I mentioned earlier], many creative geniuses were not born that way. They were often fairly ordinary people who became extraordinarily motivated.

By motivation, I mean not only the desire to achieve but also the love of learning, the love of challenge, and the ability to thrive on obstacles. These are the greatest gifts we can give our students.

The Fourth Way- notes

Inclusive, inspiring and sustainable future

Making sense of the ICC- communities with teacher leadership making sense of them together in relation to the particular students we teach.

Both/and thinking --both phonics and whole language, both rigor and relevance, both unilateral and distributed leadership, both memorization and improvisation.

Everyone wants the smartest, most personable individuals to become their children’s teachers.

The ability to release strength to release. P .28

Recover the missionary spirit and deep moral purpose of engaging and inspiring all students. Put the passion back into learning and the pleasure in learning.

Tangible hope – a culture of optimism and inspiration

Greek philosopher, Heraclitus “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.”

Finland p. 52

Replace the fear factor with the peer factor.

Developing and achieving purposes in positive relationships.

It is easier to be resilient when you know that there is someone- even just one person-who is on your side.

We all long for an inspiring purpose that connects us to each other and to an ideal that is greater than ourselves.

More investment in community and family development.

Students are highly knowledgeable about the things that help them learn- teachers who know their content, care for them, have a sense of humor, and never give up on them.

Do you have a passion? Are yo good at it, or can you become so? Does it serve a compelling social need?

Meaningful learning and mindful teaching Mindful teacher project- google?

Lateral learning that celebrates persistent questioning and celebration of the art and craft of teaching.

PLC 88

Tuning protocol developed by the coalition of essential schools.

A test-centered curriculum of memorizable content crowds out more interesting areas of learning and speaks less and less to them. Narrower and less-engaging.

TSL

In his previous book, Making Schools Work, William G. Ouchi reported on school decentralization, aided by a grant from the National Science Foundation. He found that when principals were given autonomy over their schools, the performance of those schools improved measurably. Picking up where that book left off, The Secret of TSL explains what it is that autonomous principals do to improve their schools. Drawing on the author's study of 442 schools in eight urban school districts, The Secret of TSL demonstrates that there is a direct correlation between how much control a principal has over his or her budget and how much that school's student performance rises. School organization reform lone produces a more potent improvement in student performance than any other single factor.

When principals control their budgets, they tailor their expenses to fit their schools, and they invariably hire more teachers. With fewer students to teach, teachers are able to develop a stronger and more personal relationship with their students. TSL, or Total Student Load -- that is, the number of papers a teacher must grade and the number of students he or she must get to know each term -- declines, and student performance, as measured by federally mandated tests, improves, often substantially. TSL is the key to improved student performance.