Archive for the ‘Doug’s Original Work’ Category

Rather than posting my traditional eight links today, I’m posting a link to an interview with Jo Boaler from Stanford who is my favorite math(s) teacher. I’m also posting a link to my summary of her book, Mathematical Mindsets, and my notes from this interview.

While observing teachers yesterday at Chenango Forks Central Schools in Upstate New York, Ed Kozlowski, a special teacher working in math classes, told me about this interview. He warned that it was an hour and a half long but well worth it. He was correct. You can break it into segments or listen as you exercise. You might also want to check out other interviews by Lex Fridman including a two-parter with Elon Musk. Also, in honor of Jay Black of Jay and the Americans (1938-2021), I’ve also included two links below under Humor/Music/Cool Stuff.

Jo Boaler: How to Learn Math, an Interview on Lex Fridman’s Podcast – This is 1:30 long, but well worth it for math teachers and teachers of anything else. @joboaler @lexfridman

My Notes From the Interview

Parents who have math anxiety probably shouldn’t try to help their kids with math unless they can fake it.

When teaching math it’s important to make things visual when you can. When you see it visually or build it you will make more connections in your brain. We are all visual learners.

When you give feedback try to send the message that “I believe in you or I know that you can do this.”

A good way to study is to test yourself. Try to recall what you were doing in class. Try to see the main ideas. Engaging in recall does a better job of building brain connections than additional study.

Collaboration is important. Social thinking helps with brain development.

As a course moves on try to access students and give them feedback rather than a grade. Give them a rubric and have them access themselves. Have students write the questions.

Surround yourself with people who believe in you and vice versa. These will be your best mentors.

Humor, Music, Cool Stuff

Jay Black (1938-2021) – Cara Mia – It starts with a minute of humor. He is 62 here and can still sort of hit the notes. If you want to hear the younger Jay sing Cara Mia and a few more hits, click here.

Recent Book Summaries & My Podcast

180 Moving Forward past the Pandemic with Dr. Doug Green – On October 4, 2021, I was Kim Mattina’s guest on her weekly show. Please join us for a discussion on what we can gain from our pandemic experiences as educators.

The Future of Smart: How Our Education System Needs to Change to Help All Young People Thrive by Ulcca Joshi Hansen

Noise: A Flaw In Human Judgement by Daniel Kahneman, Oliver Sibony, & Cass Sunstein

Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher’s Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling by John Taylor Gatto

Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind by Judson Brewer

Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation by Steven Johnson

Listen to Dr. Doug on the “Cup of Joe” podcast. I recorded it last week. On it, I talk about the many good things I have seen in schools doing hybrid teaching. @PodcastCupOfJoe @DrDougGreen @BrainAwakes

Grasp: The Science of Transforming How We Learn by Sanjay Sarma with Luke Yoquinto

Back to School COVID Myths – It’s popular to say that hybrid learning is negatively impacting poor students who generally attend schools with lots of discipline issues. Is it possible that some poor kids who make a serious effort to learn aren’t the big winners? There may be stresses at home, but not many bullies. @DrDougGreen @mssackstein

This is my podcast on the Jabbedu Network. Please consider listening and buying my book Teaching Isn’t Rocket Science, It’s Way More Complex. Here’s a free executive summary. @jabbedu @DrDougGreen

Boys and Sex: Young Men on Hookups, Love, Porn, Consent, and Navigating the New Masculinity by Peggy Orenstein

Emotional Intelligence 2.0 by Travis Bradberry & Jean Greaves (the book can be found here)

Upstream: How to Solve Problems Before They Happen by Dan Heath

Be sure to try the bottom right translate button for your favorite language or one you are trying to learn. If you don’t see it check your adblocking software.

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Dr. Doug’s Pictures and Tips for traveling to Italy
On September 20, 2022, I left for Italy with three friends. We returned on October 4th. If you haven’t been to Italy, I strongly suggest you add it to your bucket list. You can sign up for a tour if you aren’t into vacation planning like I am. My issue with tours is that you bring the crowd with you, and they lack flexibility. Book your airfare six months in advance and your rooms at least four months out. We used Airbnb and had great success. You get a lot of space and all of the amenities of a nice apartment.

Starting in Milan

• Italy’s second-largest city is known for finance and fashion. It’s clean as big cities go and features many one-of-a-kind sites. Start with the Duomo, which is the big cathedral. Be sure to get a ticket that includes roof access. If you can, go back and see it at night. Then check out Leonardo Da Vinci’s huge iron horse, which stands 21 feet high and is 24 feet long. You can see it from the street any day and the garden it’s in is open on weekends. Next, it’s the Cimitero Monumentale di Milano, which you have to see to believe. It’s enormous and filled with amazing statues. Even if you are not a big opera fan like I am, you should catch a performance at La Scala, perhaps the most famous opera house in the world. They also do ballet.

Lake Como Region

• The towns along Lake Como are a short train ride from Milan. We got off at Varenna and took a ferry to Bellagio. For lunch, we found a restaurant that overlooked the lake, and we had the best view I ever had for a meal. Consider doing a few nights here.

On to Cinque Terra

• These five small towns on the coast south of Milan are embedded in the hillside and are rather unique. There are trails between the towns that I would say are challenging due to some uneven surfaces, elevation changes, and a lack of railings in some places. If you don’t want to walk, all towns are connected by trains and ferries. We stayed in La Spezia, which is a small city just south. It’s also a nice place to visit. From there, we took the train to Corniglia, the middle town. After walking 400 stairs to the town, we then hiked north to Vernazza (ugh). We then took a ferry north to Monterosso and trained back to La Spezia.

There is Nothing Like Rome

• Heading south, we hit Rome. I had been there before, so I planned two full days of sightseeing for the member of our party who hadn’t been there. We started at The Colosseum and went on to The Palantine Hill and the Roman Forum. They all come on one ticket, which you should purchase well in advance. We then walked by the Trevi Fountain and the Spanish Steps to the Pantheon. They are all free. On day two, we started by having breakfast at the Trevi Fountain. You can’t see this enough. We walked to the Borghese Gardens and took a tram ride around it. We saw the Borghese Gallery, which is not that big but entirely beautiful. The Bernini statues are the high point. Next, we took a pre-purchased tour of the Vatican, including the Sistine Chapel. That included dinner. when we finished, Saint Peter’s was closed, but we got to see it at night. We did see it the following morning after a 40-minute wait in line. It’s not a bad place to wait, and there are no advanced fast-track options.

Sorrento, Naples, Pompei, and Capri

• Naples is Italy’s third largest city. I found it to be crowded, as have others. We booked a tour that took us to the hot spots. Earlier in the day, we visited the ruins at Pompei, which are also amazing, with an eight-person tour. The next day we took the ferry from Sorrento, where we were staying, to Capri. This island is like nothing I’ve ever seen. It juts out of the sea with steep cliffs and crazy roads. Start by taking a boat ride around the island to see it all, including several grottos where the water is bluer than any I’ve seen. From the port, you can take the Funicular to the town of Capri if you aren’t up for a lot of stairs. You can’t see it all in one day so consider staying there if you can afford it.

Additional Tips

• Be sure to buy the intercity train tickets a month or two before you go as they will cost less and save you some hassle at the stations. There are a lot of reasonable short tours of one day or less, and we did several, including a gourmet dinner in Rome and a visit to a farm in the Sorento Hills where we made and ate our own pizza and consumed wine, olive oil, and cheese made on the property. The information at RickSteves.Com and his books that are specific to each town were a big help. All of his PBS videos are available on his website.
• In 2019, I also visited Venice, Verona, and Florence with side trips to Siena and Pisa. These places are comparable to those discussed here. Everywhere you go, there is a lot of history, beauty, and great food at very reasonable prices, especially for Americans, as the dollar is very strong now. Not everyone speaks English, so try to learn some common words. I also relied on the Google Translate app. Be ready to do a lot of walking. We averaged over nine miles a day. You could cut the mileage by using taxis and subways more. Look for subway turnstiles that offer touch-and-go access with your credit card. You will find someplace that only take cash, so be sure to have some Euros in your wallet and one Euro coins for some toilets. Each member of our group contributed to the planning and finding our way around, so be sure to team up if you aren’t going alone. There is a lot more to seen in Italy so let me know where I should go next at Doug@DrDougGreen.Com. Thanks.

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I love writing, but I’m not crazy about marketing my own work so I could use your help. If you like the Internet resources and book summaries I post, please consider sending out a tweet to promote my new book Teaching Isn’t Rocket Science, It’s Way More Complex: What’s Wrong With Education and How to Fix Some of It. In it, I take on the current reforms and their one-size-fits-all test-based accountability and standards. A lot of what is happening is bad for students and demoralizing for teachers and with your help, we can work to make things better.

Bad tests promote bad teaching and the students who suffer the most are usually those who need personalized instruction the most. We need more arts and exercise, not less. We need to give kids the help they need when they need it and expose all students to exciting hands-on, real-world, lessons and projects. We need to foster creativity and collaboration as we work on forming strong relationships. This is advice from someone who has been in this business since 1969 and who tries to live outside the box. If you are part of this fight, my book is full of ammunition. Thanks for all you do and I’ll see you tomorrow with more free resources.

Here is a sample tweet: Check out “Teaching Isn’t Rocket Science, It’s Way More Complex” by @DrDougGreen http://amzn.to/2zfOTbL Here is a summary http://bit.ly/2FdK337

Click here to buy at Amazon. Scroll down for a summary and please share.

1. Introduction

• Teaching is tricky business. If it were as easy as rocket science, which we seem to have figured out, all students would be learning as fast as their individual brains would allow. This implies that they would learn at their own individual pace, which would cause the gaps between the faster learners and the slower learners to gradually increase.
• Unfortunately, our current set of reforms driven by the corporate/ political complex gives the same tests to students each year based on their born on date, regardless of their ability. It also expects teachers to close the gaps between slow and fast learners. One way to do this is to slow down the fast learners. In this book, Dr. Green explains why the current reforms and out-dated teaching methods need to go and just where we might head.

2. Teaching Isn’t Rocket Science; It’s Way More Complex

• It’s clear that we understand how rockets work as we have sent them all around the solar system and beyond. The human brain, however, which is the learning playground for students and teachers is much more complex and less understood. Promising ideas in education spread slowly, if at all, because of a resistance to change and federally imposed standardized testing. Thanks to the media, however, the public doesn’t realize this and they think that teachers are generally doing a bad job. They also think that all students should be able to achieve at high levels, which is nonsense. We all know that some students are more capable at cognitive tasks than others.

3. The Pressure On Teachers To Get Good Test Scores Makes It Inevitable They Will Cheat

• When the government encouraged by business leaders imposes high-states tests on schools, three things can happen. First, some will cheat and many have. Second, most will try to game the system with endless test prep that brings with it a lot of bad teaching practice. Finally, some will just fail. Schools will be closed and careers will be negatively impacted or ended altogether. This chapter documents some of the cheating and explains the different ways that teachers can cheat. It also suggests that teachers work to create engaging lessons and let the tests take care of themselves. If they do, test scores are unlikely to go down and just might go up.

4. Are You Smarter Than Bill Gates?

• Bill isn’t the only member of the corporate class pushing for test-based accountability, he is just the most famous and has the most wealth to push his ideas. Dr. Green suspects that when Bill wants to cure some disease, he reaches out to experts in the field. When it comes to education, it seems that he thinks he already knows the answers. Meanwhile, it’s hard to find any real expert in the field who thinks the current reforms are a good idea.

5. Failing at the Business of Schools

• Unlike businesses, schools cannot control their raw materials. They just take the students that their parents drop off. Most are also run from the top by a school board composed of elected volunteers who for the most part lack any serious educational expertise. For these reasons, trying to hold schools to business standards makes no sense. It also makes no sense to hold all schools to the same standard as their raw materials vary.

6. Achievement Gaps and Ethnic Groups

• When advocates for blacks, Hispanics, and poor kids see that that whites and Asians perform better on standardized tests, they expect schools to work on closing the gaps. Ironically, if schools did a perfect job of letting every student learn as fast as possible, the gaps would increase. Doug maintains that the best way to close the gaps is to slow down the fast learners, which some schools do well. He also points out that the subgroups themselves are arbitrary and don’t make much sense. For example, why are Spanish speakers the only group based on the language they speak when more people speak English and Chinese? People from China and India are very different in appearance and culture, yet they are in the same group.

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Could Las Vegas Have Been Prevented? Easy – by
Douglas W. Green, EdD explains how to avoid the kind of massacre that took place in Las Vegas.

Same Old Arguments

• About all I have heard since the Las Vegas massacre is arguments from the left and right about gun control. This is all pretty reflexive and you hear the same stuff after every mass shooting. I’m not saying that the gun control debate shouldn’t go on, but it would be nice if we could also hear a more creative analysis that takes the specifics into consideration.

Hundreds of Sniper Locations

• This massacre would be easy to prevent without any change in our gun laws. What made this possible was the fact that the concert venue had hundreds of sniper locations above the scene. Last week I saw Paul McCartney at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn. There is no way anyone could get a gun in there let alone all the guns the shooter got into his hotel room.
• The lesson is, don’t set up a concert venue with so many potential sniper points above the concert that can be accessed by someone who doesn’t have to go through concert security. This isn’t difficult, but it’s up to the people who set up these concerts. I suspect the cost of setting up this outdoor concert venue with access to snipers was a lot less than the folks in Brooklyn paid for the billion-dollar Barclays Center. 

Some Outdoor Venues are Safe

• Last month I attended a Bon Jovi concert down the street at Enjoy Golf Course in Endicott, NY. Like Las Vegas, it was an outdoor venue, but if you wanted to get in and take a seat in one of the high altitude skyboxes that could serve a sniper positions, you needed to get a gun in the door through the metal detectors and you wouldn’t be alone in your skybox.
• It should be easy to prevent this kind of mayhem if you avoid setting up concert venues that can be targeted by people in neighboring buildings without the ability to prevent people from getting guns to a room with a view of the concert.

How About the Hotel?

• There are two issues here. The first relates to the two windows that the shooter broke with a hammer prior to the shooting. These are windows like many hotels have that are not designed to be opened by tenants. If they aren’t designed to be opened, there should be some way to know when they are hammered open. This would involve some expense, but if the hotel equipped the windows with sensors, the people at the front desk would know which windows have been breached immediately.
• The other thing a hotel could do, if not today but probably in the future, is to use their cameras and a bit of artificial intelligence to spot someone coming in multiple times with loads of stuff. The guns and ammo that were brought into the room took several trips. He must have used some large containers that would have been easy to spot via video and/or alert people watching the lobby or the front door.

Housekeeping’s Role

• Finally, what about the people who were visiting the room on a daily basis? I think hotels should tell their staff to take a look in closets and drawers quickly as they are making the beds. If guests say they don’t want such service, a security staff member should be sent to take a quick look at the room each day. Steven Wynn says that anytime a do not disturb sign is up for 12 hours it is investigated. His housekeeping staff also looks around. See the New York Post for more on this.
• I send my prayers and sympathy to all of the people impacted by the terrible event. I also think that this particular type of massacre is easy to prevent. If you can, please do so. Also, don’t attend any outdoor events with line of sight to places people can access without going through concert security.

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On 1/30/2022 I attended a Daniel Pick online presentation only for people who had preordered his new book “The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward.” There were about 1,300 of us. During this presentation, he gave the audience the ten most important things that he has ever learned. These all match up with my thinking. Since he did a count down, we start with the number 10. This presentation will not be available anywhere else so share this with your network.

10. How to make a decision

• Start with asking yourself “what advice would you give to a friend.” Fundamental reasons are better than instrumental reasons. Do the right thing. Less is more. Do fewer things well.

9. The best way to get things done Read

• “Bird by Bird” by Annie Lamont. This is the one step at a time approach to getting something done. The coach should tell the team, let’s go 1-0 today.

8. The best way to choose what to do

• Pick the professor more than the class. Focus on who you are doing something with. Read “The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t” by Robert I. Sutton. Here is a link to my summary. Don’t tolerate jerks for a moment. We are who we spend time with.

7. How to Persuade People

• Read “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion” by Robert B. Cialdini. The best way to persuade someone to do something is to make it easy for them to do it. Consider changing the default option. If you want to make it easy to run, put on your running outfit.

6. The best way to get a good idea and how can you tell a good idea from a bad idea

• From Malcolm Gladwell, good ideas lead to good ideas. Look for good ideas you had that have proved themselves. You need to be excited about it. Look for stories rather than topics. Put your ideas out to other people. They are likely to give you more ideas. Generate a lot of ideas without evaluating them at first. Next, capture the ideas. They can be floating. Keep a running document on your computer and cellphone so that you get an idea you can write it down. Finally, socialize your ideas and don’t worry about somebody stealing them. The more ideas you share, the more people will share there’s with you.

5. The best way to deal with hassles

• Read “Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity” by David Allen. If you have a task that can be done in less than two minutes, do it now. Use the stoic test. When confronted with a hassle reframe it as a test. Then move it from the realm of emotion to the realm of cognition.

4. The best way to liberate yourself

• Do not manage your life to impact what other people think of you as they are probably thinking about themselves. Just be a good person and do the right thing.

3. The best way to get stuff done, part two

• Step by step is the micro part. Seeing the big picture and keeping your eye on the prize is the macro part. You want to think about systems. Broaden your focus and it will be easier to see how the small parts fit. Al Gore made a guest appearance here. We always face the voice between doing the hard right thing and the easy wrong thing. Seek first to understand.

2. The best way to deal with regrets

• Dan recalls telling the head of AirB&B that his idea would never work. Process regrets inward, outward, and forward. Treat yourself with kindness. We all make mistakes. Forgive yourself. Disclose your regret. It releases the burden. Even writing about it can be helpful. Finally, extract a lesson from it.

1. The best three words to say regularly

• Please and Thank You. They are profound. Please reminds us that we are not entitled to anything. Thank you serves a similar purpose. Expressing gratitude deepens our sense of meaning and purpose. Doing so is advantageous. Here is a link to my summaries of Daniel Pink’s books.

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Today I’m doing a guest presentation at Binghamton University for Lawrence C. Stedman’s Education 680: Principles of Visualization and Data Analysis. In the process of preparing, I created this post, which you will also find linked at the left of my home page.

One Way to Use a Correlation

With an r squared of about 0.2, it means that money counts for 20% of the wins. This can make a difference, but not with every team. The teams above the line get more for their money.

Why You Can’t Trust Some Statistics

The Trouble with Averages: The Impact of Major Life Events and Acute Stress May Not Be What You Think – Anthony Mancini, Ph.D.