Feels strange, and I don’t even know this guy.
Dan Meyer
Look I don’t know where to put this:
I realize we’re all slobbering ourselves over the new iPhone ad slate but the dy/dan Advertiser of the Year Award goes to DDB, London for their so-great-it-can’t-really-be-advertising spot for Volkswagen, Night Driving.
I’ve watched it no fewer than twenty times, five of those during class-hours, during our routine show-and-tell. I only teach four classes but one asked to see it twice and I was blown backwards by their exceptional taste as they praised it, totally unbidden and unprompted …
Between the couch cushions, beneath the credenza, buried in a comment page at Joanne Jacob’s.
An excerpt of TMAO’s patient evisceration of a commenter who suggests education would improve if only we’d remove entry barriers to a creature described as “the non-certified hotshot”:
For the last three years, I’ve worked for an organization that recruits, trains, and employs those non-certified hot-shots, streamlining the process to get them into classrooms. I worked with hundreds of them, and to think that these folks, who possess tremendous knowledge in their field, would do anything other than crash and burn at a fantastic rate, absent basic training in classroom management and instructional design and delivery, is, in my experience, absurd.
Good stuff in there, and particularly heartening is his assessment of the generation gap between teachers.
Monday is our last instructional day and kind of a problem child. For reasons I can’t quite pinpoint, more final review seems out of the question. I know we’ll discuss the weighting of their final grade and why, at 10%, they shouldn’t stress about this dumb show-to-us-all-over-ag’in test. So what do I do with the hour? If I hadn’t already blown the activity Rich pitched me it’d be perfect here: tactile, fun, self-contained, age inclusive.
Got anything like that to share?
I realize that the intersection of entertainment and education is kind of an overdone theme around here. I keep flogging it, though, even past the point of flatlining, because, well, I dunno, everyone’s gotta have a niche, right? I mean, what’s yours? The successful and satisfying implementation of twenty-first-century technology in the classroom? Ha! Sorry, pal. I know these people and that’ll never fly around here.
So anyway, I was watching Zoolander the other day for reasons I’d rather not get into or even recall but I knew afterwards I had to share something that Hollywood gets so very right about education.