Here’s an article in America’s most pedigreed repository of credulous woowoo, Wired, on the techy side of homeschooling. Homeschooling (or as I like to call it, artisanal segregation) is a really natural fit with the norms of Silicon Valley, a community that takes as its central premise that its members are smarter and better than everyone. Might as […]
Continue reading →After writing a lot about the current plight of adjuncts and how to effectively address it, I pretty much stopped for a long while. I’ve always agreed with the basic complaints as laid out by adjuncts and their allies: the university exploits them, paying them absolutely terrible wages with no benefits or job security, at […]
Continue reading →Sadly necessary preamble: please, read this post to see what it actually does and doesn’t say Long layovers make for good blogging time. So Jeet Heer has a response to Andrew Sullivan’s response to Ta-Nehisi Coates, in the form of one of his long Twitter considerations. The topic, this time, is on the legitimacy of publishing portions […]
Continue reading →Will Wilkinson has long labored to square the circle and advocate “liberaltarianism.” I’m more amenable to conditional alliances on particular issues with libertarians than your average lefty, but often these efforts amount to using progressive language to advocate for boilerplate libertarian ends. You can see that urge in this post of his guest-blogging at the […]
Continue reading →Writing about affirmative action, as I did the other day, invites some tricky questions about race and socioeconomic equality. I want to take a moment and respond to a little pushback I received along those lines. 1. As Andrew Sullivan himself notes in that piece I was reacting to, despite widespread conservative insistence, Asian Americans […]
Continue reading →One of my perpetual frustrations with Andrew Sullivan’s work is that he tends to talk about race through so many layers of abstraction that it’s impossible to see actual people and their actual, real-world needs. This frequently strikes when he is flirting with race science again, and then can’t quite understand why people get so […]
Continue reading →There are many commonplaces in teaching and pedagogy. One of these commonplaces is accessible templates or forms that students can use to gain control over complex and intimidating learning tasks. These consistent formats demonstrate the essential “moves” of particular learning tasks, which the students can apply to their own work. Ideally, they will then let […]
Continue reading →Mikhail Zinshteyn at The Atlantic: “What if U.S. students took fewer tests that measured their ability to understand academic concepts far more deeply than current tests permit?” Uh, yeah! What if! That’d be pretty sweet! Pardon me for getting all 2006 on you, but… and a pony. I’m all for calling for better assessments– especially when […]
Continue reading →In my first ever Bloggingheads appearance, I told Conor Friedersdorf that I felt the traditional notion of meritocracy — that your economic outcomes are largely or solely the product of your work ethic and your talent, whatever talent is — was becoming empirically indefensible. Take a look at this chart from this worthwhile piece by […]
Continue reading →I have been told, in all seriousness, by people who argue vociferously not only for the passage of the bill in question but that the bill in question is such an obvious good that those questioning it are deluded or acting on ulterior motives: That the bill does not at all specify explicit verbal consent but simply […]
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