As instructors and students pause for winter break, EdSurge journalists are also taking time to write and edit during the last week of 2023.
As we catch our collective breath, we're pleased to offer you some reflections on the stories we've enjoyed over the past year. Here you will find recommendations for articles, books and podcasts that have caught our attention, some related to education and others that go beyond. Enjoy!
Emily
I'll venture to guess that it's never been particularly easy being 13 years old. Bodies are changing. Hormones are changing. Friends and interests are changing.
But the experience that 13-year-olds live today makes me feel very grateful for my first year as a teenager. I had such a good time!
Nothing emphasizes this more than be 13 years old, a multimedia article by Jessica Bennett published in The New York Times in September. It deftly and artfully captures how inundated kids (specifically, three girls over the course of a year) are these days, thanks to social media and all the other byproducts of carrying a small computer in your pocket everywhere you go.
Pairs well with: The recent film adaptation of Judy Blume's 1970 (but timeless!) novel, “Are You There, God?” It's me, Margaret,” which will make you laugh, make you cry, and highlight the experience of childhood today versus that of 50 years ago.
Author John Green is best known for his young adult novels, including the bestsellers “The Fault in Our Stars” and “Looking for Alaska.” I have read them and I love them all. But somehow I missed that he published a new and different type of book in 2021: “The Anthropocene revisited”, a collection of personal, contemplative, funny and deeply human essays.
In each essay, Green examines an element or experience of being human today (the QWERTY keyboard, sunsets, Dr Pepper, Canada geese) and then rates it five stars.
The essays begin with sarcasm but become increasingly serious and reflective. In a world where literally every experience (doctor's appointments, visits to national parks, dry cleaning services) is reduced to numbers on a five-star scale, Green takes the concept and turns it on its head.
I give “The Anthropocene Reviewed” five stars.
Read more from Emily here.
Jeff
While it's not strictly about education, this year I've become an even bigger fan of the Hidden Brain Podcast, which explores the science of what motivates us. I was especially struck by the show's two-part series on “The paradox of pleasure”, which looked at the challenges of coping with the addictive lures of the Internet and other technologies.
I've also been reading more Substack education newsletters this year and have learned a lot from many of them, including Derek Newton's. The cheat sheet on academic integrity; Nick Fouriezos mile markers on rural higher education; and Ethan Mollick A useful thingwhich has included many timely news about ai in education.
The book I read this year that blew me away was “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow”by Gabrielle Zevin. The novel tells the coming-of-age story of three friends who start a video game design company. Like “Ready Player One,” it is packed with pop culture references from the early days of computers and digital culture that made me nostalgic for a simpler, more optimistic time of technology. But Zevin's book also turns out to be an unusual study of friendship, love, and how the two can intertwine in the act of collaborative creation. Although the author has said She didn't know much about the world of video games. When the project began, you'd never know it from how on-point her references are (speaking as someone who was immersed in the games she describes). And the fact that the world of technology was new to her seems to have helped her bring a new perspective that inspired me to reflect on how we got to the tech culture we all live in now.
Read more from Jeff here.
Daniel
For those who don't fit the cliché, it has always been difficult to get the education they are owed. It comes out in many ways.
That is why Sarah Carr's article on the Consequences of defective detection of dyslexia It seemed powerful to me. Carr argues that changing the way dyslexia is diagnosed (Carr criticizes the “discrepancy model,” which compares IQ to reading scores) could help improve the reading performance of many students. Of course, it would also improve their lives.
Woody Guthrie, a man of ups and downs, and more often of painful ones, composed America's unofficial anthem, “This Land is Your Land.” Despite this, Guthrie has become relatively unappreciated, although his influence on other trademark songwriters of previous generations is still noted, especially Bob Dylan. Even the last verses of Guthrie's unauthorized anthem are cut out, changing the meaning of the song by stripping it of its political message.
This summer I decided to try Guthrie's autobiography, “Bound for Glory.” It's full of outlandish stories from a man who spent his life traveling on rails. He knew better than anyone what it was like to be depressed, but his heart never stopped singing: “There's a better world coming / I'll tell you why.”
Read more from Daniel here.
Nadia
I interviewed Jen Manly in person this summer and have been following her. Strategic Classroom account on Instagram since then. (We had a great chat about why group work is terrible and how to fix it, so check out the Q&A if you haven't already.)
Manly is a college instructor, educational consultant, and former computer science professor. Although I am not a teacher, I enjoy watching her videos on all kinds of topics; Some recent uploads talk about allowing students to redo assignments and time blocking a planning period.
For me, stories like Manly's are a great way to get insight into what teachers think on a day-to-day basis, but she might have something that's really practical for you too (OK, yes, I seriously need the strategies of time management that she lists above).
If you need something inspiring or to make you cry, open any streaming service you subscribe to and add 2023. “Radical” starring Eugenio Derbez on your tail.
The film is based on the real-life story of teacher Sergio Juárez Correa and his students at one of the worst-performing elementary schools in Mexico, located on the border with Texas and a stone's throw from SpaceX's Rio Grande in Brownsville.
Juárez Correa is a passionate educator who insists that sparking a love of learning begins with letting his students follow their curiosity and essentially lead the class. Spoiler: The director and other bigwigs are not very impressed by his approach.
His young students in the impoverished community are fighting their own battles, such as facing pressure to join the neighborhood drug gang or being parentified To the extreme. Then there is Paloma, who lives in a shack next to a landfill where her father looks for scrap metal to sell.
In my favorite scene, Paloma shows her partner Nico a telescope she built out of trash near her house, and they climb a mountain of trash so they can use it to observe the SpaceX launch site being built across the river. in Brownsville. , Texas. She wants to be an aerospace engineer. Later in the film, Paloma's father confronts teacher Juárez Correa about a NASA Space Camp pamphlet and asks the educator if he will also be there to help the girl when reality sets in and her dream collapses.
You absolutely have to see the ending. I was lucky enough to be the only one in the theater when I saw “Radical,” so there was no one to judge the absolute river of tears I cried (except the teenage employee who took my empty popcorn bucket on the way out). But you won't have that problem at home!
The real-life Pigeon appeared on the cover of a 2013 issue of Wired, which inspired the film, with the headline “The Next Steve Jobs.” The online version is called “A radical way to unleash a generation of geniuses.” Did you see what they did there?
Read more from Nadia here.
Rebeca
This year I have been fascinated by the Washington Post series on the rise of homeschooling in America. Analysis of newspaper data shows that this form of education is growing rapidlyand between different groups of families than in previous years. Nowadays it is not only parents who teach their own children at home; now entrepreneurial people and companies They are instructing groups of children in a variety of settings. While some families say their children are Safer, more comfortable or more able to learn. Outside of public and private school systems, there are also dangers associated with this largely unregulated form of teaching, such as children being abused out of sight. The series also looks at the experiences of parents who grew up being homeschooled and are now Venturing back into the public education system.looking for a different type of education for their own children.
Being surprised by a great book is one of my favorite feelings. I had that experience this year reading “Whose Names Are Unknown,” a 1930s novel by Sanora Babb about the devastation of the Dust Bowl.
Some scholars argue that this literary work should not have been a revelation to me or other readers. As the Great Depression was receding, an editor at Random House was excited to publish the novel, which Babb, a journalist, wrote based on her experiences working with refugee farmers in government camps in California. But then, a writer's nightmare was discovered by none other than John Steinbeck's “The Grapes of Wrath.” So Babb's book wasn't published until 2004.
Babb's evocative descriptions of farm family life strained by isolation and dwindling finances, and of the sober beauty of the Oklahoma plains, hooked me at first, while the characters' growing class consciousness kept me turning pages. as the plot became darker.
Read more from Rebecca here.
