Man: A Course of Study (MACOS) was a social sciences educational curriculum designed in the late 1960s. The course examined the commonalities between human behavior and that of several animal species, and culminated with a series of short films documenting the lives of the Netsilik Eskimo people. Although many school systems
initially adopted MACOS, it was
largely abandoned after a campaign of opposition from conservative Christians, who saw it as a Trojan horse for the indoctrination of secular humanism and cultural relativism in the public schools. The 2004 documentary
Though These Eyes looks at creation of MACOS and the controversy surrounding it.
posted by Horace Rumpole
on Sep 25, 2011 -
17 comments
The Challenge of Teaching 9/11 "The events of September 11th are being discussed, taught, and commemorated in high school classrooms throughout the nation this week. And in many of those classrooms, the students are increasingly too young to have many actual memories of their own of that day’s events. I visited two high school classes in the San Francisco Bay Area to see how teachers are approaching the topic, what the students know and don’t know, and how they feel about the events surrounding that day."
‘Who’s Osama bin Laden?’: Teaching 9/11 to Muslim youth
"In the ten years since Sept. 11, many Muslim Americans feel they’ve had to deal with rising discrimination. Those who remember 9/11 at least understand how this started. But there’s a new generation of Muslim Americans who don’t. They were too young in 2001, or they weren’t yet born. But these children aren’t too young to perceive discrimination. At least one local Islamic school is still working through how, exactly, to teach its young students about 9/11."
posted by nooneyouknow
on Sep 9, 2011 -
84 comments
The Higher Education (Debt) Bubble - "[H]igh and increasing college costs mean students need to take out more loans, more loans mean more securities lenders can package and sell, more selling means lenders can offer more loans with the capital they raise, which means colleges can continue to raise costs. The result is over $800 billion in outstanding student debt, over 30 percent of it securitized, and the federal government directly or indirectly on the hook for almost all of it. If this sounds familiar, it probably should...
[more inside]
posted by kliuless
on May 17, 2011 -
185 comments
The Mindful Eye is a photography community: "We are here to help and inspire each other in the pursuit of our passions, happiness and the unlimited potential of our dreams as photographers and as human beings. We believe that the simple act of sharing your joy with your camera can change the world for the better." It developed from its previous incarnation as Radiant Vista into a fuller, richer site including useful teaching tools such as the
Daily Critique,
Photo of the Week,
Digital Darkroom,
Foundation Concepts, and
much more. I visit the site daily for new content and recommend it to all my photography students as a positive support system as they develop their skills.
[more inside]
posted by bwg
on Feb 10, 2011 -
2 comments
In coming months, The [Los Angeles] Times will publish a series of articles and a database analyzing individual teachers' effectiveness in the nation's second-largest school district — the first time, experts say, such information has been made public anywhere in the country. This article examines the performance of more than 6,000 third- through fifth-grade teachers for whom reliable data were available. [more inside]
posted by Anything
on Aug 20, 2010 -
61 comments
"Every pernicious practice of modern education originates from the goal of trying to segregate and control the mischievous." A teacher tries to come to grips with the contrary advice of four prominent educators in an imagined dialog.
Part I,
Part II.
[more inside]
posted by rouftop
on Aug 7, 2010 -
47 comments
"Does Professor Quality Matter? Evidence from Random Assignment of Students to Professors" by Scott Carrell and James West is the title of an interesting new study in this month's
Journal of Political Economy, a leading journal in economics. (For a summary of the paper,
see this review. An
ungated version, too). The authors are interested in determining the role of "professor quality" in student learning. They do this by exploiting an unusual institutional feature of the Air Force Academy whereby all undergraduates are randomly assigned their professors, and all professors use the same syllabus. The authors also have the professor's student evaluations, as well each student's subsequent performance in the follow-up classes. To keep it simple, they focus only on Calculus I and the follow-up courses in Calculus (which are mandatory), though they note that an earlier study that looked at Chemistry and Physics found similar things.
[more inside]
posted by scunning
on Jun 12, 2010 -
44 comments
What makes a great teacher? Analyzing more than twenty years of data,
Teach for America has found that great teachers had trained in their subject areas rather than in education, and had high "life satisfaction." They also demonstrated five tendencies: they
"constantly reevaluate what they are doing... they avidly recruited students and their families into the process; they maintained focus, ensuring that everything they did contributed to student learning; they planned exhaustively and purposefully—for the next day or the year ahead—by working backward from the desired outcome; and they worked relentlessly, refusing to surrender to the combined menaces of poverty, bureaucracy, and budgetary shortfalls."
This last trait is measured by the Grit Scale,
which has been shown to predict good outcomes in
both teachers and West Point cadets. (
Do you have grit?)
[more inside]
posted by anotherpanacea
on Jan 31, 2010 -
133 comments
The OER Commons exists to help educators "find free-to-use teaching and learning content from around the world." Thousands of primary, secondary and post-secondary activities, labs, lecture notes, assignments and other educational materials are available by searching or
browsing the OER site.
posted by cog_nate
on Oct 16, 2009 -
7 comments
Children Full of Life - grade 4 students in Kanazawa, Japan learn deep life lessons from their incredible teacher and from each other. I strongly recommend this as awesome, but one caveat: keep tissues handy. (5 parts, 40 minutes total, English)
posted by madamjujujive
on Jul 25, 2009 -
48 comments
SmARThistory is an edited online art history resource to augment or replace traditional art history texts. For a given artwork, smARThistory brings together podcasts, video clips, images, links to other resources, and
commentary, providing a rich context for the work. Indexed by timeline, artistic style, artist and theme.
posted by netbros
on Mar 21, 2009 -
8 comments
The Lecture System in Teaching Science "Meanwhile, back at the classroom, the lecture is drawing to a close. Just as the bell rings, the lecturer, if he's a really smooth operator, comes to the end of a sentence, a paragraph, a nice neat unit. He lays down his last piece of chalk — he knows exactly how many pieces the lecture will take — picks up his precious lecture notes, and goes out. The students, tired but happy, rise up and follow after him. Their heads are empty, but their notebooks are full. Their necks are a little tired; it's been like a sort of vertical tennis match: board, notebook, board, notebook. But other than that, everything is all right. Any student will tell you, "I never had any trouble with the course until the first examination."" [
via]
posted by dhruva
on Feb 6, 2009 -
63 comments
Many of us have seen or read
The Wave, but how many of us have seen
A Class Divided? It depicts
one third-grade teacher's attempts to teach Midwestern children about the civil rights movement, many of whom had never met a black person before. As part of a daring experiment, she split the class between brown-eyed children and blue-eyed children, and gave the "browneyes" special privileges. The children were told, in no uncertain terms, that the "blueyes" were inferior. What followed was a lesson in discrimination that the kids would remember for the rest of their lives.
posted by Afroblanco
on Dec 28, 2008 -
53 comments
GetBodySmart.com is a wonderful and remarkably complete resource to learn about the systems that keep our body running, including the
skeletal ,
nervous and even
urinary systems. What's more amazing is that it's all created by one man in his spare time and for no gain of his own. Read his mission statement
here.
posted by ignorantguru
on Sep 17, 2008 -
19 comments
A new study in Science claims that
teaching math is better done by teaching the abstract concepts rather than using concrete examples. From an
article by the study authors in Science Mag (requires subscription):
If a goal of teaching mathematics is to produce knowledge that students can apply to multiple situations, then presenting mathematical concepts through generic instantiations, such as traditional symbolic notation, may be more effective than a series of "good examples." This is not to say that educational design should not incorporate contextualized examples. What we are suggesting is that grounding mathematics deeply in concrete contexts can potentially limit its applicability. Students might be better able to generalize mathematical concepts to various situations if the concepts have been introduced with the use of generic instantiations.
posted by peacheater
on Apr 26, 2008 -
27 comments
Polyglot
Michel Thomas came to prominence through his work for the French resistance and the
successful interrogation of Nazis (who had formerly imprisoned him). After the war he started to develop (and eventually
patent) a method for teaching languages that eschewed notes, books, writing, memorisation and homework. Instead, words and phrases would be built up in lego-like constructions to provide “confidence in hours not years”. He gave private lessons to
a long list of A-list celebrities including Woody Allen, Natasha Kinsky, Tony Curtis and Grace Kelly. A BBC documentary from 1997 told his story and tested him out with the less exalted audience of 16 year old London school kids pre-selected to be “incapable of learning a foreign language” by their teachers [YT pt
1,
2,
3,
4]. He was secretive about how his methods worked until the end of his life when he finally made his
courses available as audiobooks.
[more inside]
posted by rongorongo
on Mar 20, 2008 -
24 comments
Open Culture's "10 Signs of Intelligent Life at YouTube" features "intellectually redeemable" channels from
UC Berkeley, @GoogleTalks, TheNobelPrize, TED Talks, FORA.tv, the European Graduate School, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, BBC Worldwide, National Geographic, PBS, UChannel, MIT, Vanderbilt, and
USC.
posted by Soup
on Dec 27, 2007 -
21 comments
Over the years millions of children have been introduced to a foreign language by
Big Muzzy [wiki], a friendly, green, clock-eating monster. Here's the complete British English version of Muzzy in Gondoland on YouTube:
1,
2,
3,
4,
5,
6,
7,
8,
9,
10,
11,
12,
13,
14,
15,
16,
17,
18,
19,
20.
posted by sveskemus
on Dec 16, 2007 -
12 comments
Want to teach the youngsters (or parents, or yourself) how to avoid
phishing scams?
Anti-Phishing Phil is an online-game that uses Phil the fish to teach just that.
Apparently it's more successful than a tutorial with the same information.
posted by dr. moot
on Sep 27, 2007 -
8 comments
Students are now using the internet to criticise their teachers behind their backs by using a popular new site called
Rate My Teachers. While some 'feedback' left at the site is relatively tame, many teachers are not spared from a flood of insults (which isn't surprising when a group of venting teenagers are involved). The owners of the site are calling it a useful teaching critique tool, but teachers groups are labelling it "
a vengeful smear campaign." The site is available in a host of international flavours, such as the
UK and
Australia, to name but two.
Hmmph. Back in my day, we used to just write our 'critiques' on the blackboard while the teacher wasn't in the room...
posted by Effigy2000
on Mar 18, 2007 -
67 comments
