“It goes back to the beginning when Batman first encountered the Joker, but it’s also The Killing Joke and A Death in the Family that speak to the book and that we’re building off emotionally,” Johns says. “Barbara and Jason have gone through so much, as has Bruce, and it’s really focused on healing, on scars and wounds and what that does to somebody. If you suffer some trauma, you don’t just get over with it and move on with your life, it changes who you are. Sometimes it changes you for the better, sometimes it changes you for the worse. You can heal right, and you can heal wrong. That’s really what the book’s about: Healing right, healing wrong, and surviving.”
Month: March 2020
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DC’s Three Jokers is coming: Healing right, healing wrong, and surviving.
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Fear is an immunosuppressant
Gordon White on the Covid-19 virus:
Fear is an immunosuppressant. Sleep and fasting and cutting out alcohol and regular exercise and daily meditation and low carb/high protein all upregulate the immune system. And you can do them now. Like, right now.
But that’s less entertaining, isn’t it? It means you have to do something beyond checking a hashtag and ghoulishly firing up mainstream news sites that you know repeatedly lie to you. You like it. That is your infection. You like the fear.
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Quizzing
There’s a vogue for quizzing in all subjects at the moment. Quizzing might be of some use in embedding simple information that helps with learning, but it very much conforms to notions of ‘kind’ learning and ‘closed’ skills. Real learning, difficult learning, requires ‘generative’ forms of learning. Quizzing is not a desirable difficulty, even if it relates to a difficult text. Indeed, the ‘desirable difficulties’ in English that help generate new knowledge would most likely not link to ‘difficult’ texts per se, or writing in ‘difficult’ forms. Instead, they would involve students grappling with age-appropriate literature to come up with their own responses, and working out how to structure their writing and populate it with content for themselves.
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Cultural Capital: “Slippery and Complex”
cultural knowledge is almost without limit, that you can’t teach it all, that it depends on which texts you’re studying, that it doesn’t need to be exhaustive but just enough to illuminate the text, that many texts provide their own cultural knowledge – they are, in fact, the way in which students absorb that knowledge. If all of this is true, it has profound implications for how we teach this kind of knowledge. I’d advocate a ‘when it’s needed, along the way, light touch’ approach, along with giving students the judgement and tools to know when (and how) to find out more.
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Teacher Enthusiasm and Reading
This is something I am super-interested in.
Yesterday, I watched this video, a presentation in February to the Leonardo at 500: Boosting Creativity in Education by Andreas Schleicher, Director for Education and Skills for the OECD:
How can we foster creativity in school? The overall presentation concerns creativity in schools. Schleicher provides a great deal of data to argue that developing creativity and collaboration in young people is vital in order to prepare them for the ever-automised future we face.
Two aspects of his talk really interested me. He uses the PISA 2018 data to show that countries which emphasised collaborative approaches to learning showed better reading performance by children. The UK, which is identified as a country where competitive approaches dominate scores low comparatively.
He also presents data to show that teacher enthusiasm has a significant effect on children’s reading. He shows this table:
Enthusiastic teachers create better readers. Indeed, the third volume of the PISA report, What School Life Means for Students’ Lives, has a great deal to say about the impact that enthusiastic teachers have on children:
PISA findings reveal that, in a clear majority of countries and economies, the more enthusiastic 15-year-old students perceived their teachers to be, the higher they scored in the reading assessment, even after accounting for the socio-economic profile of students and schools (measured by the PISA index of economic, social and cultural status) (Figure III.5.2 and Table III.B1.5.5).
This volume of the report – which is over 200 pages long – is actually pretty interesting in examining the impact of teaching on children. Section 5, Teacher Enthusiasm. It argues that passionate, enthusiastic teachers have a direct impact in achieving higher scores in PISA reading tests. There’s no evidences that overly-enthusiastic teachers have a detrimental effect (which has been suggested by earlier evidence). Children do better in classes where the teacher enjoys (or appears to enjoy) the topic. Classes where teachers did not allow disruption seem to be classes where children perceived their teacher to be more enthusiastic.
Enthusiasm is identified as relating to motivation:
In every school system, teacher enthusiasm was positively related to students’ motivation to master tasks
The report has a fantastic reference section with a number of research articles on teacher enthusiasm I’m going to work my way through. I do believe that – especially for a secondary English teacher – enthusiasm lies at the heart of successful lessons and learning.
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Teaching a novel using the “Just Reading’ approach
“Meaning reveals itself gradually over an extended period of time, requiring readers to constantly think back, puzzle, make predictions, make connections, ask questions, and even change their minds. It makes sense that when this is done relatively quickly in the first instance, so that pupils can keep the whole text in mind, then overall understanding improves. Halting the reading experience too much, so that it bears little resemblance to the reading process that most of us engage in when reading a novel for pleasure, leads to the disruption of understanding itself. Such disruptions we would argue at EMC include too much time using novels to teach tangential aspects of the subject, such as vocabulary, too much detailed focus on word and sentence level analysis at an early stage, or too much attention given to social and historical context (both before and during reading). Let the novel be read as a novel, with pupils filling in gaps for themselves as the reading evolves, and assistance only being offered where it is absolutely necessary to ensure understanding. Let the pauses in the reading be about the students’ immediate responses, thoughts and ideas, allowing them to share their insights and observations, as well as their pleasure in the text. Let them focus on the important aspects of literary study, and on interrogating meaning.”