Students wage war on Twitter - for organelles! Cast your vote soon...

Campaign poster by @CellWall01

Our biology students are engaged in a deadly, high-stakes battle right now, on Twitter.  They are raking muck, slinging mud, and making bold campaign promises, all in support of candidates whose jobs are vital to our national, global, and personal security -- the organelles within our cells.

In the end, only one will emerge triumphant -- the most valuable organelle, or MVO.

You can snoop on this heated contest -- and even contribute comments, or ask tough questions of the microscopic candidates.  The whole conversation is taking place on Twitter, at the hashtag #CatFootMVO.  (You can only see the thread if you have a Twitter account.)

Tech celebration: A syllabus that students actually WANT to read...

Much of life's important information is boring.

Think of it : mortgage documentation, employment contracts, bylaws, user agreements, instructions... and the humble syllabus.

We bury the small rules that govern our lives in small print, or even worse - in print that is legible, but unreadable. And this is no small matter, either - recently, several people signed away their rights to their firstborn child into eternity - so they could use free wifi.

But does it have to be this way?

Taylor Johnson, (who teaches AP English), tried something which suggests that there might be a better way.

First, she asked her kids for feedback about her official syllabus, and decided she wanted to make something more engaging. And then she began to tinker.

She had a simple goal: to make her syllabus "clear, concise, and visually appealing."

She rummaged around on her computer, eventually opened up Comic Life, and created something that looked like this:

Hello Kitty, Tony Soprano, and Authorial Intent

(image from Alyssa Rosenberg's, "From Tony Soprano to Hello Kitty.")

It's not everyday that trivial Internet scuffles can be used to demonstrate sophisticated literary concepts -- but Todd VanDerWerff, at Vox, has done a nice job of doing just that, in his article, "The Tony Soprano and Hello Kitty Stories Are About the Same Thing."

If you follow pop culture, you might be aware of the scuffle over the species of Hello Kitty (the L.A. Times reported that Sanrio, maker of Hello Kitty, claims she is a girl, not a cat), and the flap about whether or not Tony Soprano, fictional TV mobster, is fictionally dead or not.

But you might not have made the connection that VanDerWerff draws so neatly -- that in both cases, audiences are arguing about whether or not the author's intentions should be taken into account when interpreting a text.

This might be an accessible entry point for students to talk about how we create meaning from texts of all kinds.

I personally disagree with him on one point - that somehow, because we care less today about authorial intent, that we are less 'collective' and more 'individualistic' in our modes of interpretation.  I think we still tend to argue for, construct, and revise interpretations collectively.

But overall, he offers an engaging, clear, and light-hearted entry into the topic, even defining academic language like "authorial intent," and "New Criticism" without dumbing it down.

And there's something for everyone - he even includes Dumbledore, and Harrison Ford's character in Blade Runner. What's not to like?

What could be better than for students to understand how literary analysis is already an invisible and ever-present part of their lives?  And to learn how to do it more deliberately, and therefore, with more skill and delight?

Why be the only explainer?

We teachers are good at explaining.

We have spent our days, weeks, and years honing the craft of content delivery, and we often do a better job than experts of explaining complex concepts in ways that our students can understand. We can produce clear and beautiful explanations.

But what do we lose if we limit our students to only our clear and beautiful explanations of the world?

What might it mean if we exposed our students to a variety of explanations, and asked them to choose?

Maybe we make things too easy for students, we shield them from the teeming complexity of human thought and perspective.  What if we exposed them to some of that complexity, carefully curated, and helped them construct their own explanations?

An Example: Gravitational Waves

As a single example (though there are examples for every subject area out there), let's take a look at the recent evidence for "inflation" in the very early history of the universe.

You could allow students to choose among a variety of short, captivating explanations of what the recent discovery at the South Pole means:

An article from the blog, Bad Astronomy, by Phil Plait	A video produced by the journal, Nature
A video on Veritasium, by Derek Muller	A very short TED talk by physicist Allan Adams