Interesting observation from conservative Christian columnist David French: "In 9 years, countless Republican primary voters have moved from voting for Trump in spite of his transgressions to rejecting anyone who doesn't transgress. If you're not transgressive, you're suspicious. Decency...is seen as a rebuke of Trump."
There's a similar divergence with abortion-rights measures that are coming up for a vote in multiple states: Proponents try to prevail by offering substantive arguments in favor. Opponents use the power of the state "to keep these measures off the ballot or make them hard to pass" (NYT). This is one more example of a far-right minority imposing its will on the majority. And it's only going to get worse.
Apart from what it says about our country that the election could even be this close, notice the difference in the kinds of developments that are tilting it one way vs. the other. Toward her: strong debate performance, Taylor Swift's endorsement, etc. Toward him: stuff like this (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/sep/18/trump-election-georgia). And this:
I propose an update of Aristophanes' “Lysistrata” in which the appalled spouses and lovers of those planning to vote for Trump make it clear what the domestic cost will be.
"Ditching my rubrics freed me up to make the kind of comments that could most help my students." And in the absence of a rubric, this teacher adds, she now finds herself reading her students' essays with genuine "curiosity about what [they] had to say": https://medium.com/bullshit-ist/why-i-threw-away-my-rubrics-323e51a7aa49#.hzylpgo7c (My own take on rubrics is here: https://www.alfiekohn.org/article/trouble-rubrics/. And for comprehensive guides to moving beyond them, see Maja Wilson's books "Rethinking Rubrics in Writing Assessment" and "Reimagining Writing Assessment.")
A little disconcerted to receive this request from Beacon Press, an independent progressive publisher that I've worked with on a couple of my books. Thoughts?
From the archives: "Poor Teaching for Poor Children...in the Name of Reform," published in 2011: https://www.alfiekohn.org/article/poor/. What, if anything, has changed since then?
Call me a dreamer, but when I graduate from college I want to devote my time and talents to making very rich people even richer - and, with a little luck, leave the world just a little bit worse than I found it.
Want to predict whether someone has authoritarian or racist tendencies? Research suggests you need only ask what that person values most in children: obedience, respect for elders, and good manners? Or curiosity, independence, and considerateness?
It's tempting to say such characteristics aren't mutually exclusive, but in fact, these two distinct sets of values cluster separately, are negatively correlated, and tend to predict opposed worldviews: https://www.karenstenner.com
Doesn't much of the dispute on clearing homeless camps (in Calif. & elsewhere) really come down to whether the primary goal is to address the plight of people who don't have a place to live....as opposed to the inconvenience that their public presence poses for people who do?
1/2 Traditionalists use "feel-good" and “touchy-feely” as all-purpose epithets to disparage whatever seems suspiciously pleasurable.
In education, that includes authentic assessments (as opposed to tests and grades) and discovery-based learning (as opposed to memorizing facts). Evidence of the remarkable effectiveness of such practices is waved away: If something is enjoyable, that’s apparently reason enough to deem it insufficiently rigorous.
Every time I hear a politician sanctimoniously champion the interests of "hard-working families," I get a little closer to founding USPAL: the Unproductive Single People's Antidefamation League
Fascinating study: Lower social-class university students (& other adults) do worse than their higher-class counterparts on a reasoning task only when they've been led to focus on outperforming others. Competition, in other words, exacerbates social inequality: https://psycnet.apa.org/buy/2019-10560-001
The evidence fails to support the claim that homework is academically beneficial for students in any meaningful sense, as I showed in this chapter from my book The Homework Myth: https://www.alfiekohn.org/homework-improve-learning/.
Many HW defenders quickly pivot to claiming that it promotes self-discipline, responsibility, time management & study skills, etc. Yet over the last 20 years I've been unable to find a single study that supports this folk wisdom about HW's supposed nonacademic advantages.
author and lecturer on topics in #education, #parenting, and human #behavior....(Personal messages more likely to be read if left on http://alfiekohn.org)