Education Bookcast

This book is about shame. Shame is a taboo emotion in our culture. It is not talked about, which is part of what makes it so powerful, and part of its essence - it is an emotion of disconnection, or feeling rejected or not worthy of the group. It can affect students as well as teachers, almost always negatively. Students can experience it coming from teachers (often with good intentions), or comin...

In this episode, we will look at the article Seeing the Glass Half Full: A Review of the Causes and Consequences of Optimism by Mary Forgeard and Martin Seligman. (The name of the article was so long that I thought it might be better to give the episode a to-the-point, minimalistic title.) Since we just looked at self-esteem and at self-compassion, I thought it might be good to take a look at anot...

We've seen in the previous episode how trying to increase one's self-esteem is a dangerous proposition, and how having high self-esteem is not necessarily a good thing. Now it's time to look at another approach to the self which is a lot more promising. Self-compassion is an idea taken originally from traditional buddhist psychology, but now studied fairly extensively with the scientific method. I...

Self-esteem is a psychological concept that has penetrated everyday language. In many Western countries, it is generally understood that high self-esteem is essential to health, happiness, and success. Is this really the case? And how did this idea spread? So much was the excitement about self-esteem in the early 90's that the California state legislature set up a Task Force to Promote Self Esteem...

I spent a month in summer in Lithuania on a language course. Some events while I was there prompted me to realise something about education that I had heard before, but never quite understood. The music played in this episode is Lietuvos istorijos repas by Šventinis bunkuchenas. Enjoy the episode.

It reduces productivity, prevents learning, reduces effective IQ, disrupts relationships, undermines creative thinking, and saps self-control. It increases the risk of depression, heart disease, diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure, and ADHD.  What is it? Lack of sleep. Sleep is essential for learning. We spend around a third of our lives in this state, and yet we take up much less than one thir...

Sir Ken Robinson's TED talk Do Schools Kill Creativity is the most popular TED talk ever given, with just under 45 million views at the time of my writing this. It is so influential that Robinson has a page on his website devoted to feedback forms about how the talk changed people's lives. It is also nonsense. And yet, somehow, I was also convinced by it when I first heard it. The weakness of Robi...

I thought it was about time to cover something about books on this book-related podcast! Keith Stanovich and Annie Cunningham are two researchers who have spent their careers working together to understand the effects of reading on knowledge. Their research aims to answer a few questions in particular: 1. How much does reading matter in increasing people's knowledge? Is amount of reading irrelevan...

11% of children and 4% of adults in the US are said to have Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Dr Richard Saul has been a specialist in attention and learning problems in children and adults since the 1970's. He says that there is no such thing as ADHD.  What, then, are all these children and adults suffering from? Dr Saul answers this question very thoroughly. It could be any of the...

This continues the episode about The Geography of Thought, looking at more ways in which the cultural differences manifest themselves in differing psychologies of people from different parts of the world. Themes include: Visual perception; Descriptions and understandings of the self; Attitudes to choice; "Fitting in" versus uniqueness; Attitudes to the law and contractual agreements; Factors affec...

Unlike many books that I cover, this is one that I read recently and felt an urgent need to share its contents even before I got to the appropriate theme in a series of episodes. It hit me right where it hurts - in my fundamental assumptions about human nature. As I research the field of education and produce this podcast, I have been generally assuming that people are more or less the same everyw...

I've received a lot of messages from listeners (as well as from an author!) in the past few days. Several of these messages are things that I would like to share, and there are two in particular that I would like to talk about since I imagine there may be many listeners who have the same questions. Firstly, I talk about my interactions with the folks at Reacting to the Past, and in particular with...

The words "theory" and "fun" in such close proximity may make you suspicious. Or, they may make you curious. "Fun" is one of those ideas that is so natural and intuitive, and yet for that very reason is so hard to pin down. Raph Koster has a somewhat peculiar view of what fun is: "Fun is just another word for learning." As the head of Sony Online Entertainment, I'm inclined to believe him. If fun...

In recent episodes, we have been discussing games and play, and their relevance to education, as well as to an improved understanding of human psychology. In this episode, I approach some central questions of the field: What is a game? What is a toy? What is play? What is fun? It is by their very naturalness that play, fun, and games are hard to define. We can sense what they are, and that's exact...

This is a continuation of the episode on Minds on Fire by Mark Carnes. The main idea of this part of the episode is the effects that Reacting to the Past, and role-play in general, have on the "self", i.e. the psychological construct of our selves. Enjoy the episode.

Last episode, we looked at the various ways in which games can both improve our theoretical understanding of human psychology and of learning, and also at how they can be used practically to improve people's lives. In this episode, I want to discuss a particular practical application of games, and that is in so-called Reacting to the Past. Reacting to the Past is a type of live role-playing game w...

This episode serves two purposes. On the one hand, I want to go over some more ideas from Jane McGonigal's book, as it is so rich in fresh and original ideas (they're fresh to me, anyway). On the other hand, I would like to go through a pointed criticism of the book entitled Jane McGonigal's Mind is Broken  written by Edward Champion. Given how much I got from her book, I am surprised that there a...

Jane McGonigal is a game designer who believes that, in many ways, games bring out the best in people. The reason for their popularity, she claims, is that they satisfy fundamental human needs. This leads, for example, to the highly insightful and completely counterintuitive notion that a big reason for people playing games is that it makes them feel productive . She peppers her book with reality...

Malke Rosenfeld is the creator of Math in your Feet, a program to teach students mathematical concepts through the medium of dance. (Really!) She does school workshops and teacher trainings, and now has a new book, Math on the Move, describing her approach and the theory behind it. We talk about interdisciplinary learning, embodied learning, liking vs. hating maths, and attitudes to "alternative"...

Today we have an interview with Sargy Letuchy, a public school teacher from Chicago, who has produced some materials to help other teachers with standards-based learning. The Visual Edge is a workbook of graphic organisers for K-12 teachers in the United States. Along the way, we also discuss some other pertinent education topics. Enjoy the episode.

Depending on what counts as knowing a language, I speak anything between 7 and 12 languages, namely: English, Polish, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, French, Russian, and Persian well; Hungarian to a lesser extent; and Georgian, Armenian, Lithuanian, and Tibetan in the past, now mostly forgotten. Besides this, I have some knowledge of classical languages (Latin, classical Chinese, and ancient Greek); o...

In this episode, I review a paper from the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) about language learning and teaching. The key insights are eleven: Mature adults can learn a foreign language well enough through intensive language study to do things in the language (almost) as well as native speakers. "Language-learning aptitude" varies among individuals and affects their classroom learning success (but...

I wanted to share some things I learned from my trip to the US this summer, and what my own experience of running maths circles has been like so far. This episode includes: Discussion of the Summer Math Circle Institute; Tips and techniques learned from the Institute; My own experiences of running maths circles; Potatoes with added sugar; What you should and shouldn't assume about students; Why Ma...

Interview with Robert Kaplan, co-author of Out of the Labyrinth (the book we looked at in the previous episode), co-founder of The Math Circle, and the man behind the Summer Math Circle Institute course (which I attended this summer).  Robert Kaplan tells of his colourful background, his experiences starting and running The Math Circle, and the recent explosion of interest and growth in maths circ...

This is a book that I have more of a connection with than many of the others I cover on the podcast. I first bought a book by these authors when I was 17, and didn't read it until literally ten years later. It was a fascinating recreational maths book. I then discovered that they were involved in alternative maths education, and that they had even set up an organisation for this called The Math Ci...