Because I Had to Teach It…
Movies and books are full of heroic teachers who face up to institutionalized rules, rigor, and rote learning that steamroll students’ thinking and their own inventive instructional methods (Robin...
View ArticleTeacher Appreciation Story: Remembering an Excellent Math Teacher
I just learned this week that a well-liked math teacher at my daughter’s middle school passed away as a result of pancreatic cancer. It was a shock and surprise. My daughter had his class last year,...
View ArticleAnnenberg Retreat at Sunnylands Hosts a Meeting Between East and West
This week U.S. President Barack Obama will meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Annenberg Estate Sunnylands in Rancho Mirage, California. The estate was the winter home of Ambassador Walter...
View ArticleHiggs and Our Understanding of the Atom
Bohr’s Model of the Atom © Daniel Kleppner This year’s Nobel Prize in physics was shared by Peter Higgs of Britain and François Englert of Belgium who in 1964 independently theorized the existence of...
View ArticleThe Smoking Gun of Cosmic Inflation
Young Alvy Singer got it partially right.The main character in the Woody Allen film Annie Hall explained why he gave up doing his homework: “Well, the universe is everything, and if it’s expanding,...
View ArticleLearning from the 2014 Nobel Prizes
Perhaps the Nobel Prizes recipients don’t make the same headlines as baseball’s World Series challengers, but every October the stories behind their work are just as exciting. These are discoveries,...
View ArticleVacation in Yellowstone: A lot to see, a lot to learn.
This summer my husband, teenage daughter, and I took a trip to Yellowstone National Park. The park itself is a natural wonder with majestic landscapes, and strange and smelly features, and the round...
View ArticleTeaching Collaboration: Deeper learning and interpersonal skills
In a recent TED Talk, computational geneticist Pardis Sabeti told of a tidal wave of Ebola cases coming from Guinea to a clinic in Sierra Leone. The medical team there collected samples of the virus...
View ArticleNancy Finkelstein, A Teacher Who Empowered Teachers
One often hears about teachers who were an inspiration to their students, who were beloved for their kindness and understanding, or even their toughness. Those stories are touching and true. This story...
View ArticleFood: Cooking Up a Tasty Lesson
When you think of bringing food into your classroom, go beyond birthday cupcakes and end-of-year pizza parties by using the fascinating science and history behind our food and drink on Learner.org....
View ArticleTurning Toward the New in Physics
The Meissner effect, from Physics for the 21st Century A lot has happened in the physics world since the time of Isaac Newton. Sure, the laws of thermodynamics are still in play, but we now know much...
View ArticleVera Rubin: A Woman of Science Passes On
© Bob Rubin. Vera Cooper Rubin at the Lowell Observatory. Kent Ford has his back to us. From Physics for the 21st Century. In January 2010, the American Institute of Physics and American Association of...
View ArticleWhat’s in a Statue: History vs. Memory in Monuments
As students return to school they will be aware of the recent clash in Charlottesville, VA between white nationalists protesting the removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee and...
View ArticleHi(stories): Beyond the Textbooks
It is often quoted that “history is written by the victors.” But is it still true? Today materials beyond history texts tell individual stories in new ways. Feature movies like Hidden Figures, live...
View ArticleDetective Work: Helping Students to Collect and Weigh Evidence
The master detective Hercule Poirot had a knack for sizing people up to flush out a murderer from a tight network of suspects. During his investigation, he’d propose a number of narratives based on...
View ArticleWhat’s behind the work of the 2017 class of Nobel Laureates?
Most of us would be alarmed to receive a phone call at 5:30 a.m., but if you’re a lifelong researcher every October you dream it might be your phone ringing. The call would be from the Royal Swedish...
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