Critical Thinking 101: Understanding Mutual Exclusion

November 3, 2011

(…or, Why The Drive-Through Habit Portends Terrible Critical Thinking) Since I teach high school students all over the United States, it’s pretty noticeable when they’re uniformly unfamiliar with something. For almost ten years I’ve been explaining to students from Boca to Toronto to Palm Springs the same term. I mean, every time it comes up [...]

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I Don’t Think I’m That Good

October 26, 2011

Funny how stuff jumps out at you right when you need it… This week I’ve been reading Wendy and the Lost Boys: The Uncommon Life of Wendy Wasserstein, the biography of Pulitzer Prize winner Wendy Wasserstein. If you’re a follower of my Artist Series of interviews, I’m sure this comes as no surprise: I like [...]

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Realer than Likability

September 22, 2011

This summer I’ve been reading The Corrections by one of the great writers of our time, Jonathan Franzen, so I was particularly anxious to read an excerpt from his commencement address at Kenyon College this spring, which I found in The Week. I’ve been hanging on to the following thoughts of his for a while [...]

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The Evolution of Smarter Search: A Convo With Stefan Weitz

September 21, 2011

barn owl South Florida rodent control recipe fast sweet peas artichoke pasta best tires minivan city driving If you use the web with regularity, which you probably do, you’ve likely developed fluency in Ad Hoc Searchese, that loose, disjointed language we all use to tease out search results that suit our needs. Whether you’re searching [...]

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Memorization: It Isn’t for Fools

August 17, 2011

I saw a commercial the other day in which a young man who appears to be traveling in Europe speaks some English into his cell phone, presses a button, and the phone translates to the frowning older man he’s talking to that the boy’s “grandfather is from this town.” The old man smiles and takes [...]

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Promotion, Attention, and Making Great Art

July 20, 2011

I came across an excellent post about John Mayer’s recent Master Class at his alma mater, Berklee College of Music, that resonated with me as an essayist and artist. With the advent of social media has come a new era of business expectations and new definitions of businesspeople; it’s largely considered insufficient to be only [...]

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The Closer Look: Creativity Starts with Examination

July 13, 2011

Bad news/good news. You’re not necessarily being creative if You’re doing something with “flair.” You’re being unorthodox. You used glitter. You’re painting a painting. Meanwhile, you might be doing something extremely creative if Your solution is simple. You’ve only made a slight change. You’re repairing a fence. When we want to enhance our own creativity, [...]

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Tech Alternatives Don’t Foster The Imagination of Humanness

June 8, 2011

This marks the last in a three-part installation of clips of Martha Craven Nussbaum’s 2011 Commencement address at Mount Holyoke College. Nussbaum’s commentary is incredibly timely, having come just before the announcement of Peter Theil’s pay-to-drop-out program for college students to start businesses and the heated conversation that entrepreneurs are having around education, illegal unpaid [...]

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Tech Alternative Ed is Not a Path to World Peace

June 3, 2011

In case you missed the previous post that sets the stage for the following clip, we’re taking a three-part look at Martha Craven Nussbaum’s address to the graduating seniors at Mount Holyoke College this past May. Ms. Nussbaum’s comments are timely, as we’re seeing a spate of people/orgs encouraging kids to drop out of college [...]

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Tech is Not An Education Replacement: Part 1

June 1, 2011

A few weeks ago I attended Commencement at my alma mater, Mount Holyoke College. The commencement address was given by education philosopher and theorist Martha Craven Nussbaum. Admittedly, I’m a big fan of the “go-get-‘em kids!” style commencement address, and that’s not really what we had here. However, what we heard that afternoon was probably [...]

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