Glorified Hamster Wheels
The whole episode is worth watching on Hulu, or if that’s not available, the title is “Bart gets a Z.”
Remember, it’s the Simpsons; just a cartoon, just an amusing cartoon- no reality here. Browse along. Nothing to see here.
Related posts
George Washington on Steroids
Something simple and silly I did back in the day to emphasize the strength of the leadership of the Continental Army. Trying to make visual connections and keep people interested through humor. I’m reminiscing some about my days teaching 6th grade and as I find things that I still likeThere’s not a whole lot I still like. I look at a lot of it with disgust and sorrow. I wish I could do it again knowing what I now know, you know- and that’s half the battle. I plan to post them. Not that they’re particularly useful to others but it helps me keep track and who knows what it might inspire.
To Clarify Add Detail
I bounced from this O’Reilly post to this Edward Tufte video on the iPhone. It’s a big file but fairly short and worth listening to if just for the last few lines. To clarify add detail. Clutter and overload are not an attribute of information. They are failures of design. If the information is in chaos don’t start throwing out information, instead fix the design. This doesn’t just apply to software or visuals. I know I’ve tried to explain things to people and when I see I’m failing have over simplified. I think that’s a mistake. It wasn’t because I was giving them too much that they weren’t understanding, it was because I was giving them information in the wrong way. Communication can be designed just like a visual. I think our education system is a system that is/was in chaos. Our response has been to throw out information, to standardize everything, to make testing so ABCD simplified that we don’t really have to think about the design. The perfect example is the “sandwich” writing style that students are coming into college with. I can see it as a way to teach introductory writing but because of the way standardized writing samples are graded the style carries right over into high school. Students then end up in college writing standardized […]
The real crisis? We stopped being wise. – Barry Schwartz – TED
I loaded up a lot of TED videos for my recent trip. Here’s one which I felt had a number of educational implications. Now, this video starts a little slowly but you’ll see Mr. Schwartz start to get more comfortable and fired up as things progress. Some of these notes are close to quotes but others are rough translations. My own comments are the footnotes. Maybe I’m adulterating the message for my own ends. I’d watch it myself if I were you. Here are his (and Aristotle’s) two pieces to wisdom. the moral will to do right the moral skill to figure out what right is Things a wise person knows when and how to make an exception to every rule ow to improvise (real world problems are often ambiguous and ill defined and the context is constantly changing)- a wise person is like a jazz musician who uses the notes on the page but dances around them based on the location and the people on hand knows how to use these moral skills in pursuit of the right aims- to serve others not to manipulate them a wise person is made not born- wisdom is based on experience but not any experience time to get to know the people your serving permission to improvise try new things occasionally fail […]
Comments on this post
As much as The Simpsons gets a lot of flak for not being as good as “back in the day” it can still speak truth so well.
I don’t care what they say, I love the Simpsons.
Lalalalalaalala!
It would be hard for me to imagine a better scene than that one.