TUMBLR
A scrapbook of stuff I'm reading / looking at / listening to / thinking about...
Posts tagged "education"
Kio Stark, Don’t Go Back To School
I was really thrilled to read Kio’s book before it came out — if you follow my “you dont have to go to college” tag you know this is a subject near and dear to me. Here’s my blurb from the inside cover:
Not going to graduate school felt like a failure at the time, but wound up being the best choice I ever made. It set me out on a path of self-learning and discovery that led me to work I love, work that would’ve never flown in an academic setting. How I wish I’d had Kio’s book as a guide to help me along the way!
Over and over in the interviews with independent learners, what struck me was the importance of publicly sharing and teaching what you’re learning:
You need to create a feedback loop that confirms your work is worth it and keeps you moving forward. In school this is provided by advancing through the steps of the linear path within an individual class or a set curriculum, as well as from feedback in the form of grades and praise. Outside of school, people I talked to got their sense of competence from many sources. Many reported to me that they often turn around and teach what they’ve learned to others as soon as they’ve learned it. This gives them a sense of mastery and deepens their understanding. When their learning is structured around a specific project, successful completion and functioning of the project proves their progress. Projects can include making a computer program, constructing a book, making a film, writing about an unfamiliar topic, starting a business, or learning a skill. Projects give you a goal for learning skills and abstract information alike, and contribute to gaining a sense of mastery and competence as you complete them.
For me, blogging was basically my graduate school.
You can get the eBook from Kio’s site.
John Baldessari - Four Rules (1978) -ds
To-do list.
Filed under: Baldessari
Join Cartoonist Lynda Barry for a University-Level Course on Doodling and Neuroscience
Can I just stop you for a minute and note how fucking amazing it is that one of our greatest living cartoonists is not only teaching this class, but she’s letting us all follow along? Incredible.
A library without books
Stacks of books are history at Benilde library
…the tall stacks of 5,000 books that towered in the main room last school year are gone. Teachers brought a few into classrooms, but most were donated to schools in Africa. Now the room is filled with tables and chairs where students gather with their school laptops.
You know, they had a name for this kind of room when I was in high school: it was called study hall, and we held it in the cafeteria.
There’s a lot to be sad about in this article, like the student who admits, “I never really used the actual library before. I’m a senior in high school and never used a book.”
But even more terrifying to me: “This generation of kids … learning is a social experience for them.”
My learning in the library was very social, if you count socializing with dead people.
I’m a supreme extrovert, and yet I despised group work and never felt like I learned anything from my classmates, other than, you know, that I wanted to move the fuck away from home and get away from all of them. (Maybe I’m just a dick — I do believe that all art requires a certain amount of misanthropy…)
God, when I think of the hours I’ve spent in libraries, just following the scent of paper trails and wandering around, bumping into books… is my kid not going to experience this?
And as for social learning: the best formal education I got was 6 months of the tutorial system at Cambridge University, in which I read all week at the massive library or in my Raskolnikovian closet of a room, wrote a paper, emailed it to my tutor, walked over to his house and talked about it for an hour, then went off to pick up the books he gave me to read the next week. The only group work I did was play keyboards in a band and go get pissed at the pub. It was glorious.
The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. It’s to look for problems, preferably problems you have yourself.
A really great essay that could just as easily be about coming up with ideas for books, music, design, etc. (“Write the book you want to read.”)
Loved this point about not taking too much of a course load in college:
Or don’t take any extra classes, and just build things. It’s no coincidence that Microsoft and Facebook both got started in January. At Harvard that is (or was) Reading Period, when students have no classes to attend because they’re supposed to be studying for finals.
“Live in the future, then build what’s missing.”
(via @DanielPink)
I like this proposal for a college “Where the New Liberal Arts Meet the Old.”
Foundational courses will include:
- Memorization and Recitation.
- Reading: Natural and Formal Languages.
- Composition: Natural and Formal Languages.
- The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
- Mathematical Reasoning and Rhetoric
- Care of Plants and Animals.
I went to an interdisciplinary college in which we took some standard courses in-house and then were encouraged to take courses from all over the university to cobble together our own self-designed major, and I actually loved that model, but I always wished that the curriculum was less postmodern and more like a great books program instead. (In the old days, for example, I heard a whole semester was spent on Moby-Dick, talking about religion, America, the ocean, the whaling industry, etc.)
They got rid of that program, so sign me up for this one.
The chalk talks of Dr. Chevalier Jackson
When I was in the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia, my eye was caught by a chalk drawing of a larynx by Dr. Chevalier Jackson. Jackson was a laryngologist who preserved more than 2,000 swallowed objects that he had removed (often without anesthesia!) from his patients. The collection is in a bunch of flat files at the Mutter.
Even more interesting to me, Dr. Jackson was trained as a visual artist, “known during his lifetime as much for his “chalk talks”—lively lectures accompanied by visual aid of colorful illustrative sketches that he would make on the spot—as for [foreign body] removal. Copies of the sketches became coveted collectors’ items among his students.” (Indeed: while Googling, I found an original drawing on sale on Etsy. Only $850!)
Jackson’s story is recalled in Mary Cappello’s Swallow: Foreign Bodies, Their Ingestion, Inspiration, and the Curious Doctor Who Extracted Them:
Those students who attended Jackson’s famous on-the-spot ambidextrous “chalk talks” went away dazzled and changed by the rare opportunity to bear witness, in a sense, to Jackson in repeated acts of first seeing and then remaking what he saw through his scopes in the forms of many-times-magnified chalk-pastel renderings. In this way, Jackson “worked up” the bodies that he treated, but not in the sense that medicine uses that phrase now. This was not a stats-gathering procedure, a collation, or a keeping of tabs. As if by magic, he brought the body’s insides to light, as light. Jackson’s hands were his imaging technology and they made for a unique pedagogical encounter irreducible to what we now think of as proplike visual “aids.” The Jacksonian chalk talks exerted a curiously hands-on seeing-feeling identification between student and teacher that was impossible to reproduce, for its emphasis was on medical practice not simply as a way of seeing bodies or acting upon bodies, ill or well, but of making bodies.
Imagine if we could see one of those chalk talks today! In another passage in Cappello’s book, she highlights the fact that art and science were woven together in Jackson’s practice:
Jackson said the only thing that kept him from pursuing art professionally was the fear of failure, starvation, and subsequent hunger. But Jackson’s art-making was not opposed to or exclusive of his medical practice. Jackson understood the manual dexterity required by painting to be in every way commensurate with the training of the hands and eyes called for by his endoscopic work.
Sounds like an amazing mind. I look forward to reading more about him in Swallow.
UPDATE: Professor Cappello sent me this footage of Professor Jackson giving a lecture!
