3. Why is early speculation about the cause of a crash often wrong, according to the author?
4. In what ways are Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 and the Lion Air crash in October similar? How are they different?
5. When was the Boeing 737 created and when was the Max 8 model introduced? What is unique about the new model?
6. What is the safety record of the 737?
Finally, tell us more about what you think:
As public safety concerns have mounted, aviation regulators from countries around the world, including the United States, have grounded the use of the Boeing 737 Max 8. Take a look at the map “From 8,600 Flights to Zero” and answer these three questions:
President Trump announced on Wednesday that the United States was grounding Boeing’s 737 Max aircraft, reversing an earlier decision by American regulators to keep the jets flying after a second deadly crash in Ethiopia.
The order came hours after Canada’s transport minister said that newly available satellite-tracking data suggested similarities between the crash in Ethiopia and another accident last October. In a statement released after Mr. Trump’s announcement, the F.A.A. also cited “newly refined satellite data” as supporting the decision to ground the jets.
The Federal Aviation Administration had for days resisted calls to ground the plane even as safety regulators in some 42 countries had banned flights by the jets. As recently as Tuesday, the agency said it had seen “no systemic performance issues” that would prompt it to halt flights of the jet.
“The safety of the American people, of all people, is our paramount concern,” Mr. Trump told reporters in the White House.
What new information led the U.S. and Canada to ground the Boeing 737 Max 8? Do you think the Trump administration and the F.A.A. made the right decision? Or should they have waited for more information from the crash investigation?
What kind of music do you like to listen to? What have you been listening to recently? What are your favorite songs that are on the radio right now and why?
In “The Top 25 Songs That Matter Right Now,” Nitsuh Abebe writes about some of the most significant songs of the past year and what they say about this particular moment in history:
It usually takes a while — a decade or two — before we can look back at a particular era of American life and see it as something coherent, something whose every aspect is marked by one overarching mood. It takes a certain amount of hindsight to notice how all the wildly different reactions people had to the moment were still, in the end, reactions to the same thing; all the different poses they adopted were still being struck against the same backdrop.
But this era — this year, and the last one, and one or two before that — might be an exception. There’s an oddly strong in-the-moment consensus on how everyone is feeling these days, and it is not good. At some point it became a routine conversational tic for all sorts of people, of all sorts of persuasions, to express, with an incredulous gesture, that things feel a bit grueling and frantic lately, don’t they? Musicians are no exception. “Life is pretty tumultuous right now for all of us,” said the crossover country star Kacey Musgraves, while accepting a Grammy for the Album of the Year. The Swedish singer Robyn acknowledges that “pop at the moment is depressing” in an interview midway through this issue. “The music kids are listening to is heavy! Maybe it’s hard to be positive and optimistic at the moment.”
What’s amazing is that the musical expression of all this isn’t always some big swing toward darkness, or anger, or anxiety. (Though there is, in certain genres, plenty of all that as well.) Read through this list, and what you’ll often see instead is a very earnest, very serious desire to find the right reaction to a world that feels tense and high-stakes — an ambient conviction that music should be looking for ways to cope, ways to protect ourselves, moments of escape, hard reckonings with our collective responsibilities, ideas for how to make the world feel less brutal. The 25 songs and artists below include blockbuster hits, critical darlings and inescapable conversation pieces, but few of them take a direct route to the usual joys of pop — the songs about dancing and boasting and sex and love, the ones about what a fantastic night everyone’s about to have or what ecstasies they intend to find by the end of it. No, a lot of these songs seem focused on deeper challenges: How do we get to those joys in the first place? Who gets to have them, and who deserves them? And in one case: Which of them are worth the corresponding rise in sea levels?
The rest of the article includes 25 essays from writers for The Times about the one song they think encapsulates this era of American life.
For example, in her essay Amanda Hess writes about the meaning of Ariana Grande’s “Thank U, Next”:
Online, the phrase has bloomed into a deliciously ambiguous kiss-off, a usage modeled by Grande herself, directed toward anyone from a no-name rapper who covered the song to Piers Morgan, who criticized pop stars for appearing in revealing photo shoots. Like the Southern “bless your heart,” the passive-aggressive niceties that sustain the entire Midwest or the chill of the British stiff upper lip, the internet has found a discreet slight of its own in “thank u, next.”
Nikole Hannah-Jones interviews the rapper Meek Mill about how his song “Trauma” reflects his life and the lives of other black Americans today:
At the end of “Championships,” you say we had to beat the streets, beat racism, beat poverty. So much of what you write is sociological, a study of the neighborhood. Your being from Philadelphia made me think about W.E.B. Du Bois in 1899 — he did a study called “The Philadelphia Negro.” … This was known as the first sociological study of black Americans in the country. He was trying to understand why black folks lived the way they lived. And the social problems he identified — poverty, crime, illiteracy, white discrimination — are the exact same things you talk about 120 years later.
That was my life coming up, so it was normal. I always tell people, I’ve been living the life I’m living now for the last eight years, but I’ve been living in the ghetto for 23. Things we’ve been traumatized by our whole lives — we have a right to talk about it.
Jody Rosen explains how “Baby Shark” by Pinkfong exemplifies some of the most prominent features of 21st-century culture:
In other words, “Baby Shark” has completed two full transmigrations between folk and pop. It’s a folk song that became a pop song that filtered into social media to become a folk song again — a grass-roots phenomenon that propelled the pop recording to improbable heights of ubiquity. It exemplifies several features of 21st-century culture: the porous boundaries between the pop industrial complex and the amateur homespun; a globalized circulation of songs based as much on memes as on music; the popularity of unchallenging dance “challenges”; the hegemony of Drake.
Lizzy Goodman writes about the crossover country star Kacey Musgraves’s response to the current mood in her song “Slow Burn”:
What makes Musgraves such a resonant figure right now, in fact, is the way her response to a dark, anxious moment in human history is to move willfully closer to lightness, to stillness, toward the possibility of a world that comes in more colors than red or blue. When she talks about art thriving in this climate, she means it — just not in the same sense as, say, angry punks railing against the Reagan administration. What she means is that right now, the best rebellion involves turning off the hate and making space for hope. Or, as she puts it: “The [expletive] storm won’t last forever, and I want to make music that does.”
And Sam Anderson writes about how Post Malone and his song “Sunflower” perfectly encapsulate teenage life:
Post Malone, in other words, is a big roiling mess of contradictions. No wonder he is so popular with teenagers. He is the perfect avatar of adolescence: the excruciating ridiculousness of being a person caught between worlds, in transition, half-young and half-old, in possession of powers you don’t fully understand, blasting off into inscrutable realms in which mysterious things will be expected of you. This also makes Post Malone a perfect fit for Spider-Man, the canonical story of awkward adolescent empowerment. Posty’s latest No. 1 hit, “Sunflower,” is not merely featured on the soundtrack of the franchise’s newest iteration, “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse”: It is actually used, in the film, to introduce the hero. We meet the teenage Miles Morales in his bedroom, alone, doodling and bobbing his head to the bouncy hit about a dysfunctional relationship. (“Callin’ it quits now, baby, I’m a wreck,” his collaborator Swae Lee sings. “Crash at my place, baby, you’re a wreck.”) Miles sings along, straying off key, only to be interrupted by his father, who yells at him to get ready for school. The awkward teenager is called, awkwardly, out into the world. Amid all the cringiness, his unexpected superpowers will bloom. Adolescence, despite its obvious flaws, can still save the world.
Students, scroll through the 25 songs in this list and choose at least one of the essays to read in its entirety. Then tell us:
— What is your reaction to the essay you read? What struck you as interesting, challenging or particularly poignant in it? Do you agree with the author’s song choice and what he or she had to say about it? Why or why not?
— The artists and writers in this article describe the overarching mood in the United States and pop music as “tumultuous,” “heavy,” “depressing,” “a bit grueling and frantic” and “not good,” among other things. Do you agree? How would you describe the overall feeling in the country right now?
— Why do you think we are feeling this way? What circumstances — events, trends, attitudes, behaviors — are we reacting to?
— In your opinion, what one song best encapsulates the era we are in? How does it sum up or respond to the national mood? What does this song say about who we are, where we’ve come from and where we are headed as a society?
Students 13 and older are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public.
Note: Students 13 and older are invited to comment here. Adults should post their comments elsewhere on NYTimes.com.
On Tuesday, federal prosecutors charged 50 people in a brazen scheme to buy spots in the freshman classes at Yale, Stanford and other big name schools. Have you heard about the scandal?
Watch the one-minute video above to learn more about the indictment. What is your reaction to what you know so far?
A teenage girl who did not play soccer magically became a star soccer recruit at Yale. Cost to her parents: $1.2 million.
A high school boy eager to enroll at the University of Southern California was falsely deemed to have a learning disability so he could take his standardized test with a complicit proctor who would make sure he got the right score. Cost to his parents: at least $50,000.
A student with no experience rowing won a spot on the U.S.C. crew team after a photograph of another person in a boat was submitted as evidence of her prowess. Her parents wired $200,000 into a special account.
In a major college admissions scandal that laid bare the elaborate lengths some wealthy parents will go to get their children into competitive American universities, federal prosecutors charged 50 people on Tuesday in a brazen scheme to buy spots in the freshman classes at Yale, Stanford and other big name schools.
Thirty-three well-heeled parents were charged in the case, including Hollywood celebrities and prominent business leaders, and prosecutors said there could be additional indictments to come.
Also implicated were top college athletic coaches, who were accused of accepting millions of dollars to help admit undeserving students to a wide variety of colleges, from the University of Texas at Austin to Wake Forest and Georgetown, by suggesting they were top athletes.
The parents included the television star Lori Loughlin and her husband, the fashion designer Mossimo Giannulli; the actress Felicity Huffman; and William E. McGlashan Jr., a partner at the private equity firm TPG, officials said.
The scheme unveiled Tuesday was stunning in its breadth and audacity. It was the Justice Department’s largest ever college admissions prosecution, a sprawling investigation that involved 200 agents nationwide and resulted in charges against 50 people in six states.
The charges also underscored how college admissions have become so cutthroat and competitive that some have sought to break the rules. The authorities say the parents of some of the nation’s wealthiest and most privileged students sought to buy spots for their children at top universities, not only cheating the system, but potentially cheating other hard-working students out of a chance at a college education.
In many of the cases, prosecutors said, the students were not aware that their parents were doctoring their test scores and lying to get them into school. Federal prosecutors did not charge any students or universities with wrongdoing.
“The parents are the prime movers of this fraud,” Andrew E. Lelling, the United States attorney for the District of Massachusetts, said Tuesday during a news conference. Mr. Lelling said that those parents used their wealth to create a separate and unfair admissions process for their children.
“The real victims in this case are the hardworking students” who were displaced in the admissions process by “far less qualified students and their families who simply bought their way in,” Mr. Lelling said.
Students, read the entire article, then tell us:
— What is your reaction to the college admissions cheating scandal? What details in the article did you find the most shocking and why? Are you surprised that something like this happened in the United States? Why or why not?
— Who do you think should be held responsible for these crimes and how so?
— The authors write: “The charges also underscored how college admissions have become so cutthroat and competitive that some have sought to break the rules.” Do you agree? What do you think this case tells us about the college admissions process today?
— In a recent Opinion column, Frank Bruni argues that what these parents did is not all that different from the lengths to which many wealthy families will go to secure college admission for their children:
The wrinkle here is that the schemes were actually criminal and will apparently be prosecuted, and for once the colleges’ administrators were in the dark about them. But they’re versions of routine favor trading and favoritism that have long corrupted the admissions process, leeching merit from the equation.
It may be legal to pledge $2.5 million to Harvard just as your son is applying — which is what Jared Kushner’s father did for him — and illegal to bribe a coach to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars, but how much of a difference is there, really? Both elevate money over accomplishment. Both are ways of cutting in line.
It may be legal to give $50,000 to a private consultant who massages your child’s transcript and perfumes your child’s essays, and illegal to pay someone for a patently fictive test score, but aren’t both exercises in deception reserved for those who can afford them?
And while ghostwriting, whether by consultants or parents, may not be detectable or at least provable, it happens all the time and contributes to applications as bogus as the ones that came to federal prosecutors’ attention.
What is your reaction to Mr. Bruni’s claim? Do you think the college admissions process is rigged to favor the wealthy? Do you think it is fair? Why or why not?
— What message does this scandal send to high school students who intend to go to college? What is your biggest takeaway from it?
In recent years, “algorithm” has gone from a niche word relevant mostly to computer scientists to an essential term for understanding how our data-rich world works. And as the use of algorithms becomes pervasive, a firm grasp of how to use them has become a major competitive advantage.
The online Master of Computer and Information Technology (MCIT) degree from the University of Pennsylvania is tailored for non-computer science majors who want to acquire proficiency with algorithms, programming, and other computing skills. Let’s look at three examples of how algorithms covered in the program are used in the real world:
Low-cost DNA sequencing has opened up new possibilities for medicine, offering the potential to diagnose and treat the growing number of diseases with genetic components. However, merely sequencing the DNA isn’t enough to determine the genes that cause some disease. With 3 billion base pairs in the human genome, algorithms are essential for biomedical researchers making sense of today’s vast landscape of genetic data.
Dynamic programming algorithms have been deployed since the early 1970’s for critical tasks such as DNA sequence alignment, protein folding, RNA structure prediction, and protein-DNA binding. Today, biomedical researchers rely on programs like BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool) and Clustal to compare DNA sequences against relevant databases. Publications involving BLAST and/or Clustal rank among the most-cited scientific papers of all time.
Synthesizing new chemical is a similarly complicated task. How can one evaluate the trillions of synthesis pathways and millions of existing chemicals to identify those that are likely to be efficient and cost-effective?
The software program Chematica, hailed as “an internet for chemistry” upon its release in 2012, provides a solution using optimization algorithms to predict viable molecular synthesis pathways. Chemists can specify molecules using chemical names, registry numbers, or drawings of the molecule diagrams. Researchers have also demonstrated how to adapt Chematica algorithms to avoid synthesis pathways that have already been patented.This further boosts its usefulness for commercial applications.
Algorithms aren’t just for the hard sciences. We’re living in an era of unprecedented access to arts and culture that allows us to dive into archives of books, TV shows, movies, and music from all over the world in seconds.With humanity’s accumulated, cultural output now available at our fingertips, we face a new problem: how do we quickly find what we want to watch, read, or listen to at any given moment?
Providing automated and compelling cultural curation has become a huge business.ne of the best examples of a successful use of algorithms in this area is Spotify. In particular, its Discover Weekly feature is popular — it delivers listeners customized playlists of songs they haven’t heard but are likely to enjoy. Discovery Weekly and similar services rely on collaborative filtering algorithms derived from graph theory to map preferences and predict what users enjoy.
These are just three examples of how algorithms are creating new possibilities for a broad range of fields. MCIT Online will help students make high-impact contributions like the ones described, using the expertise they will acquire in dynamic programming, graph theory, optimization algorithms, and many other areas of computer science.
I started studying computer science quite late into my college career. I took a class on the subject as a sophomore, and I soon found that I enjoyed writing code and solving computational problems. I decided to enroll in another computer science class the following semester, and more after that.
Coming from a liberal arts background, studying computer science itself was not easy for me. I spent much of my time completing homework assignments over the weekends, attending office hours on a weekly basis, and revising algorithms over and over again.
Studying a hard subject is not easy, and studying a hard subject as a woman in a male-dominated field is even harder. As I enrolled in more upper-level classes, I found that there were fewer women in the classroom. It not only became harder to get called on in class, but also harder to find partners that wanted to work with me on projects. I felt the constant need to prove to others that I “belonged” in computer science.
I only started to feel less alone and more confident in myself when I sought out communities that aimed to connect women in computer science to each other.
Lean In, an organization that spans multiple chapters, helped me gain more of an official mentor and friend. As someone interested in pursuing a PhD program in speech or natural language processing, Lean In connected me to a fellow PhD student at my school who was studying the exact same thing I was interested in.
While more and more women are starting computer science coursework at the undergraduate level, graduate programs are still waiting to catch up. Seeing a woman in a higher academic position conducting work in a lab made me feel less alone, as if I could also see myself doing it one day. Though I am no longer in school, I am still in touch with my mentor.
If you are a student and hope to be a part of similar communities, I would recommend joining student clubs that have a focus on computer science. It can be tough to put yourself out there, but remember that these clubs don’t require an invitation, and they exist to help you.
Many upper-level students actively involved in these clubs were also once in your shoes. Because of that, you’ll find that a lot of events revolve around study groups, company visits, and mentorship pairings. This was the case for my Women in Computer Science club on campus.
If you find that there are no clubs on your campus that exist, you can either start one or get involved in online communities. #BUILTBYGIRLS is an official mentorship program that pairs high-school and college women with women in the software engineering industry. You can sign up as a mentee or a mentor.
If you are no longer in school, Tech Ladies is another great community to join. They not only connect you to close to 30,000 women in technology via their Facebook group, but also have a job board that forwards your resume straight to hiring managers with some of the partner engineering companies they work with.
Women Techmakers, an initiative by Google, offers free membership to women at any level in their career hoping to leverage relationships with other female technologists.
Joining a Meetup group is also a really great way to get connected with anyone about pretty much any topic or idea. I am currently a member of Women Who Code NYC, a meetup group that spans multiple chapters and cities.
WWC is run by an active community of people who work to inspire women to not only stay in technology-related careers, but also excel in them. They host a variety of events, including introductory workshops on key technologies (i.e. Git, JavaScript, etc.) and interviewing workshops to practice algorithmic development.
I really enjoy their speaker series and lightning talks, in which they invite women who are already in the industry to discuss their work. This is a networking opportunity in and of itself, and I’ve been able to connect with multiple industry women who were both speakers and attendees by attending these events.
In Conclusion
The software engineering world is slowly making progress towards creating a more inclusive community for all, but until that happens, know that many communities exist either around you or online that will help connect you to others.
Being a part of all the above communities I’ve listed has not only helped me meet new friends and mentors, but it has also encouraged me to keep studying computer science and pursueing a career in technology. If you’re looking for someone to commiserate with or help answer a question, attend an event on-campus or go to a Meetup. You have nothing to lose—only something to gain.
Codecademy’s very own Nick Duckwiler (left) and Ryan Tuck from Warby Parker (right) in our office. (📷: Mitch Boyer)
Last month, Codecademy and Warby Parker came together to work on a special Learn SQL from Scratch Capstone Project. It was during this time when I met Ryan Tuck, a Data Engineer at Warby, who played a major part in this partnership. So when he decided to drop by our office for the final QA round, I had to break out my notebook and ask some questions. Enjoy.
Hey Ryan, let’s start off with a question I’ve had for a while — what is a Data Engineer? (Is it similar to a Data Analyst or a Software Engineer?)
At Warby Parker, data engineers are responsible for creating and maintaining the plumbing required to support the data and reporting needs of the business. We use software engineering practices to automate the work of data cleaning, normalizing, and model building so that data is always ready to be consumed by data analysts in every department.
What languages/frameworks do you use at Warby?
On data engineering, we use Python as our general purpose programming language, as do most of the other teams in our Technology department. When it comes to databases, we use PostgreSQL for the majority of our SQL needs, and are beginning to use Amazon Athena and Google BigQuery for some of our larger datasets. We use Looker as our exclusive business intelligence entry point to all of this data.
What are some of the projects you worked on?
I’ve had the privilege of working with a lot of of smart people in every department at our company to help them solve their varied data needs, from reconciling financial data with the Accounting team to automating and modeling standardized performance metrics for our team of over 200 customer experience advisors.
As part of a team of five supporting the data needs of a rapidly growing company, I’ve tried where possible to focus on helping our analysts solve their own problems. This includes helping people learn Python and commit to our codebase, guiding the creation of data models in SQL, and encouraging people to submit pull requests to add features in Looker, our BI tool.
Seeing dozens of otherwise “non-technical” colleagues opening up PRs on a daily basis, and consequently being part of the democratization of tech that we value at Warby Parker, is probably the most rewarding “project” I’ve been a part of.
One project finished recently during our first annual “Hackweek” is called Pipes, which allows anyone at the company to easily move large amounts of data from wherever to wherever (Looker, Google Sheets, PostgreSQL, BigQuery, etc) on a regular cadence, or manually through a simple one-line chatbot interface. The adoption has been overwhelmingly positive and we’re looking to grow this sort of tooling out even more.
“We use software engineering practices to automate the work of data cleaning, normalizing, and model building so that data is always ready to be consumed by data analysts in every department.”
What got you into the data field?
I’ve always been drawn to analytical fields like math, and became pretty proficient in Excel during some internships in college. Once I had learned to program and learned more about data science and its applications in artificial intelligence, I knew that anything I could do to immerse myself in the world of data would be a step in the right direction.
Three and a half years ago, I landed a job as a junior software engineer at Warby Parker not fully knowing what I was in for, but am so glad I got the opportunity to help build tools to support an interesting and ever-changing data-driven culture here.
Where did you learn SQL and Python?
I had a background in C++, and was exposed to Python through an Intro to Data Science course. When Warby Parker hired me onto the Data team in 2015, I had never written a SQL query in my life, but picked it up quickly and within a few months started up internal SQL training classes, which I still teach on a monthly basis.
What does your tattoo say?
The ultimate cheatsheet.
This is Bayes’ Theorem, which is an equation that describes how to update probabilities given new evidence. Two summers ago I worked on building a tool to help predict weekly fantasy football performance. Some colleagues suggested a Bayesian approach would be appropriate, since there aren’t really enough data points in an NFL season to be able to use statistical approaches that require larger datasets, and I’d want to regularly update my predictions after each player’s latest performance.
I did a deep dive into understanding the (simple) math underlying Bayes’ Theorem and came out of that experience with a whole new worldview, understanding my entire knowledge of the world as a big and intricate probabilistic model that I was continuously updating with every experience I ever have. It was pretty transformative, and I figured that was worth a tattoo.
What is a concept in SQL/Python that’s essential to your work?
Donald Knuth said, “Premature optimization is the root of all evil.” I’ve generally found this to be true, and try to live by it in my work. For example, I’ll generally prefer to keep a data model simple by rebuilding it for all time on a daily basis using a single SQL query instead of making a more complicated model that requires iteratively adding to a table, keeping track of state, updated timestamps, when something last ran, etc.
A wise man once said, “Duplicating data makes things go fast,” but databases are already impressively fast to begin with, without implementing anything to improve performance. Ultimately, I almost always approach a problem thinking about optimizing for my time over machine time, for readability over performance, and for introducing as little cognitive overhead as is required by the problem at hand. Only once performance issues or readability issues present themselves will some code be worth a rewrite.
Last question! Since you wrote Warby Parker’s internal SQL training courses, I know there gotta be some inner Curriculum Developer in you. Can you teach a SQL concept in 2 minutes?
Sure! Have you ever written a query that yields some result set and you think, “I’d love to query the stuff I just produced like it was a table?” Enter the WITH clause.
Suppose I have a mega query that gives the transaction summaries:
select
transactions.date as transaction_date,
sum(items.price) as total_cost,
count(*) as number_of_items
from
transactions
inner join
customers
on
customers.id = transactions.customer_id
inner join
transaction_items
on
transactions.id = transaction_items.transaction_id
inner join
items
on
items.id = transaction_items.item_id
Using WITH, I can create a temporary table within my query that I can SELECT from and treat it just like a regular old table.
I will put everything from the previous query in a parentheses and use WITH to give it the name transaction_summaries.
Then I’ll apply the date and customer filtering down below for a more readable query, to separate out all the JOIN logic from the actual WHERE filters that I want to apply on that data.
with transaction_summaries as (
select
transactions.date as transaction_date,
sum(items.price) as total_cost,
count(*) as number_of_items
from
transactions
inner join
customers
on
customers.id = transactions.customer_id
inner join
transaction_items
on
transactions.id = transaction_items.transaction_id
inner join
items
on
items.id = transaction_items.item_id
)
select
*
from
transaction_summaries
where
first_name = 'beyonce'
and
transaction_date > '2018–01–01'
order by
total_cost desc
limit
5
If you’re familiar with subqueries, this does a similar thing but makes the SQL far more readable, even if your query isn’t quite as performant as it would have been. This is essentially an implementation of the mantra “Don’t Repeat Yourself” that’s common in the world of programming.
Incredible. And love the SQL styling! 😍
Huge shout out to Ryan and the whole Warby Parker team for making this partnership happen. Special hat tips for behind-the-scenes support from:
So, trust me when I say that I am all for cross-talk and communication between neuroscience and education. However, with the increasing excitement surrounding neuroscience research I feel it’s necessary to discuss some of the limitations of the ability of neuroscience to inform and influence educational practice. This digest collects a few different resources that examine this relationship between neuroscience and education.
Here is a previous blog from us, by Dr. Cindy Nebel, that covers how learning happens in the brain and addresses some of the misleading hype about “brain learning”. Be wary of any source telling you that it’s addressing “brain learning”. As Dr. Nebel explains ALL learning is brain learning.
This article gives an overview of the history, and potential future directions for, Educational Neuroscience. It emphasizes the importance of not over-extending conclusions from neuroscience, as well as the need to involve educators in the development of research questions.
This document gives an overview of some important findings from neuroscience and how they might apply to education while addressing some of the challenges that this area faces. Though it was written in 2011, they already note: “There is already a glut of books, games, training courses, and nutritional supplements, all claiming to improve learning and to be backed by science… At worst, this industry creates ‘neuro-myths’ that can damage the credibility and impact of authentic research.”
3. An additional challenge: What connections can you make between this film and your own life or experience? Why? Does this film remind you of anything else you’ve read or seen? If so, how and why?
4. Next, join the conversation by clicking on the comment button and posting in the box that opens on the right. (Students 13 and older are invited to comment, although teachers of younger students are welcome to post what their students have to say.)
5. After you have posted, try reading back to see what others have said, then respond to someone else by posting another comment. Use the “Reply” button or the @ symbol to address that student directly.
When he crossed into Northern Ireland recently, Patrick O’Reilly felt his body tense up, a feeling that was once all-too familiar but that he thought would never return. Yet now, the fear and anxiety were creeping back, like a long-lost relative suddenly appearing out of nowhere, looking for trouble.
Mr. O’Reilly blames Britain for stirring up those grievances. Its expected departure — possibly a messy one — from the European Union, known as Brexit, is reopening old wounds and resentments in Ireland against its former colonial master.
“The British,” said Mr. O’Reilly, a retired pub manager, as he wove back and forth across the barely detectable border in his car, “are about to kick us in the teeth again.”
In the tortured history between the two island nations, Brexit is just the latest in a long line of perceived slights the Irish have suffered at the hands of the British. And now, with the possible exception of Britain, no country stands to lose more from Brexit, and particularly from a damaging “no-deal” departure, than Ireland.
• Read our list of practical teaching ideas, along with responses from students and teachers, for how you can use these documentaries in the classroom.
• Our next Film Club will take place on Thursday, March 21.
1. This graph, which originally appeared in The New York Times, shows more than 500 jobs, their required skills and how likely they are to be automatable. You can enter a job in the “Find a job …” field to find where it is on the graph. You can also hover the cursor over a job title to find more information. On March 21, we will provide additional background about the graph as well as relevant statistical concepts.
After looking closely at the graph above, think about these three questions:
• What do you notice? • What do you wonder? What are you curious about that comes from what you notice in the graph? • What might be going on in this graph? Write a catchy headline that captures the graph’s main idea. If your headline makes a claim, tell us what you noticed that supports your claim.
The questions are intended to build on one another, so try to answer them in order. Start with “I notice,” then “I wonder,” and end with “The story this graph is telling is ….” and a catchy headline.
2. Next, join the conversation by clicking on the comment button and posting in the box that opens on the right. (Students 13 and older are invited to comment, although teachers of younger students are welcome to post what their students have to say or they can have their students use this same activity on Desmos.)
3. After you have posted, read what others have said, then respond to someone else by posting a comment. Use the “Reply” button or the @ symbol to address that student directly.
On Wednesday, March 20, our collaborator, the American Statistical Association, will facilitate this discussion from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Eastern Time to help students’ understanding go deeper. You might use their responses as models for your own.
4. On the afternoon of Thursday, March 21, we will reveal more information about the graph at the bottom of this post. Students, we encourage you to post an additional comment after reading the reveal. How does the original New York Times article and the moderators’ comments help you see the graph differently? Try to incorporate the statistical terms defined in the Stat Nuggets in your response.
