Watch this music video for Radiohead’s track, All I Need, which is as flawless a visual essay as they come.
And then watch this vodcast [3:48], in which I lay out some guiding principles for writing and shooting visual essays like this.
Radiohead, Child Labor, and Visual Literacy from Dan Meyer on Vimeo.
Alec, this one’s for you, bud.
I show two excellent photo sets and two excellent videos in my class every week. I have no idea why I haven’t made this a regular fixture around here.
Photo
Don’t deny you ever did this. Pictured here is “Emo Lincoln,” which is spot on.
Look, I don’t consider myself an emotional dude. I only the learned the spelling of “emotion” a month ago and internal reconnaissance has yet to discover any beyond “road rage.” Yet I tell you truly that “Youngme/Nowme” obliterated me. I’d like to believe I appreciate Ze Frank’s Internet icebreakers more than the average Web 2.0 fanboy/girl but I probably kid myself.
Video
Nike spot directed by Guy Ritchie, putting you first-person into the world of professional soccer . All sorts of name-brand soccer stars show up, though, as with emotions, I’m only reporting second-hand here.
via Jason Kottke, who writes “If you only watch one metronome video in your life, make it this one.” Someone please explain how this happened. ¶ I pinned the video to this study for good measure.
This is true:
It is May. Aaron has attended 20% of my classes this year. His grade is a C+.
This scenario is uncomplicated but it illustrates precisely the philosophical chasm between me and my colleagues (local, national, maybe international, too โ who knows) and how we teach math.
[Update: I’m a little less coy in the comments.]
Ken Rodoff, comment #14 on Doug Johnson’s post on Twitter etiquette, where the comments know no permalinks:
Take the origin of this comment:
- Log on to Twitter
- Click on Darren Draper
- Click on the link to his blog
- Click on his ‘hey, read this’ little blue widget
- Read your post
- Think about your point
- Read the comments (okay, only two…wanna guess?)
- Type my comment
Total time so far (Verizon Fios Internet…just thought you should know): 12 minutes.
So, what did I lose over these past 12 minutes:
- The washer to dryer exchange that my load of darks so desperately craves.
- Making lunch for work tomorrow.
- Cleaning something in this house…anything in this house (myself included).
- A chance to talk with my wife as all 4 of my children sleep.
- A peregrination
- The top of the 9th inning of the Red Sox – Twins game.
- The beauty of disconnectedness
And it’s #7 here that irks me most of all because it’s the constant addition of things that makes me realize how much I had in the first place.
Dina Strasser, with question #7 in her post, The Skeptic’s Seven Questions About Technology:
Have I sufficiently balanced the use of the tech with the things tech has inherent danger of obliterating:
- Environmental sustainability?
- An authentic human connection to the studentsโ local community: home, school, society, and ecosystem?
- A multi-sensory, diverse experience of the world?
Sometimes I guess I don’t mind the echo chamber so much.
The Law of Cosines is a beastly formula, which, yesterday, for the first time in five years, I didn’t ask my students to memorize.
I gave them my reasoning: basically, that ten years down the road, ten months, maybe ten days, they’d forget this formula. It’s inevitable. I’d rather them pour their guts into creatively operating the formula than memorizing it, since, in the Google era, that’s an appropriation of resources I could no longer defend.
At the end of my monologue, I wrote the formula on the board and started passing out tests. One student in the front held up her hand, smiling, the Law of Cosines written brazenly across it.