The Patriot

The Marketplace of Ideas podcast has an interview with Alex Beam, author of A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books. Beam is very critical of the commercial venture of Robert Hutchins and Mortimer Adler called “The Great Books” but he appreciates the great books.

Audio

Horse sculptures made from driftwood.

Read more about the sculptures here.

Ted Dunning has posted an article yesterday entitled Students learn what they need, not what is assigned.

The last time I taught in the classroom was as a member of a two-person teaching team teaching a software engineering class on machine level programming. In the past, this had been done by lecture and assignment and was truly a stunningly boring class. On the first day, I turned the structure of the class upside-down and assigned the entire final exam. This consisted of a single question in the form of a task (to build a robot that would drive around as fast as possible following a line on the floor). I then passed out soldering irons, computer components and kits of Lego parts and told them to get to work.  … This tactic resulted, as you would expect, in panic.

The experiment was a tremendous success.

By the end of the semester, I was getting complaints from the department because my students were (voluntarily) spending so much time on my class that they were neglecting their other classes. Some were spending 40 hours or more in the computer lab and many had built remarkable contraptions little related to the impending exam.

Here’s a story about a new study that says teachers matter more than curriculum for student’s math achievements.

Makes sense to me. When I was in college, I picked my electives by who was teaching more than what they were teaching. I found out who the best teachers were and took whatever they taught.

Parchment and Pen has an article this morning about misconceptions of the first Christmas. I started not to read it because so often the same things are brought out every year: the Bible mentions three gifts from the wise men but it doesn’t say there were three wise men, etc. But the Parchment and Pen article brings up some things I’ve never heard.

For one, the article says that the word translated “inn” as in “no room in the inn” is sometimes translated “guest room.” Also, the distinction between home and stable wasn’t so clear at the time. Instead of imagining a Motel 6 with a barn in back, maybe we should think of a private home with a spare room and some animals inside.