For everyone who is hungry for new questions of and approaches to learning and education, be sure to look at these three recent resources:
Questioning Procrastination
My college freshman son recently introduced me to Study Hacks, an addictive blog that, as it states, “explores strategies for building a life that is both remarkably accomplished and remarkably enjoyable. Its primary audience is students, but at least half the content is non-student specific, and the site enjoys readers of all ages” (author’s emphases).
The most recent Study Hacks post discusses how “deep procrastination,” rather than a habit or tendency to be cured, might be a sign of “something important and perhaps even exciting.” In other words, it may be part of the kind of emotional and intellectual intensities that lead to the positive disintegration and personal growth discussed by Kazimierz Dabrowski.
Questioning College
Marketing guru Seth Godin, author of, among other books, Purple Cow, asks whether we should re-evaluate how we think of college in light of our ever-changing access to information. He reminds us that the “valuable things people take away from college are interactions with great minds (usually professors who actually teach and actually care) and non-class activities that shape them as people.” (Thanks to Hoagies Education Facebook Page for the link tip!)
A good follow-up to Godin’s piece is Maya Frost’s book The New Global Student.
Questioning How We Teach
The Eide Neurolearning Blog recently wrote about “novelty seekers”—children who are highly exploratory and look for what is new in their environment (and who may be diagnosed with ADHD):
“What these kids often need is time to explore, an animated teacher, and lessons that whet the interest—What’s unexpected, what’s extreme, what’s funny.”
They then ask, “If a novelty-seeking student has no problems learning from a teacher who teaches with a high salience approach, is it a disease?”
