Clear Thinking
5th October 2023
Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!
Book of the Week
Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results, by Shane Parrish. Like half the planet, it seems, we are fans of Shane Parrish’s podcast The Knowledge Project. In Clear Thinking, Shane distills the best of what he’s learned over the years, both from his high-pressure work for certain unnamed agencies and from his wide-ranging conversations with hyper-talented individuals. What we really love about this book are its personal stories of success and failure. By laying out some of his poor past decision-making, Shane invites us to engage honestly with our own personality quirks and foibles. (It’s actually quite encouraging to realize that even world-class thought leaders can be all-too-human in their thinking!) Drawing from diverse fields, including philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience, Shane provides us with an accessible yet sophisticated set of mental models and insights that can be readily applied to real-world situations.
Everything rings true with our own experiences. For example, Shane describes the value of getting accurate information, instead of as relayed through layers of management. As an enlisted woman, Barb would witness generals who might think they were being guided, for example, through a typical training classroom. In actuality, the generals were being taken to a special classroom of hand-picked students—all other classrooms in a quarter mile having been cleared to avoid any “accidental” side visits. These high-ranking officers weren’t witnessing reality—they were witnessing only what they were being allowed to see. This type of thing happens in the military, in education, in the corporate world—in fact, wherever layers of administration, as Shane describes, allow for murkiness and even subterfuge to emerge, so the bosses on high see only what’s intended instead of the existing real world.
Clear Thinking represents an empowering resource for anyone seeking to hone their judgment, cultivate self-awareness, and chart a purposeful path forward in work and life. Highly recommended!
Barb wins the McGraw Prize (sling-shotting back to New York from Santiago, Chile)
And it is indeed a Cheery Friday Greeting today as we announce that our very own Barb has won the McGraw Prize—colloquially known as the “Nobel Prize for Education.” Barb is the first winner of a newly created category of the Prize—the Life Long Learning Award—in recognition of our society’s changing need to help learners of all ages grow in and out of the classroom. Barb joins fellow award winners Debra Duardo, Superintendent, Los Angeles County Office of Education, for her work in preK-12 education, and David Wilson, President, Morgan State University, for his work in higher education. The Prize will be awarded on November 8th in New York City, at the Morgan Library and Museum. It’ll be a direct flight for Barb returning from the fantastic ResearchEd on November 21st in Santiago, Chile to New York (okay—she can’t resist a stop over on Easter Island! 🙂 )
Northwest Mathematics Conference
Barb will be headlining at the 62nd Annual Northwest Mathematics Conference on October 12-14th, 2023 with some ground breaking presentations:
- Effective Teaching & Learning: Dramatic New Insights from Neuroscience, Thursday, October 12, 1:30 p.m. – 4:30 p.m.
- Friday Breakfast Keynote: Interleaving: The Path toward Reconciliation in the Math and Reading Wars, Friday, October 13, 8:00 a.m. – 9:30 a.m.
- The Pathological Altruist’s Guide to Education: How to Help Without Hurting, Friday, October 13, 11:00 a.m. – 11:50 a.m.
If you’re in the Portland area, register now and Barb will see you next week!
Dr. Monica Aggarwal
Barb was fortunate enough to talk about learning recently on Dr. Monica Aggarwal’s podcast. Dr. Aggarwal is a cardiologist who uses common sense medical coupled with diet and lifestyle approaches to help improve your health and boost your energy. (We loved her book Body on Fire: How Inflammation Triggers Chronic Illness and the Tools We Have to Fight It).
Hat Tip to Matthew Tower from ETCH (“Ed Tech Career Home”)
If you are interested in general edtech issues, we highly recommend signing up for Matthew Tower’s ETCH Substack. As Matthew notes: “I follow the news in EdTech throughout the week and write this newsletter on Sunday afternoons. The goal of each newsletter is to give the reader an information-dense 5 minutes of reading on the edtech to start your week. It is informed by my decade of experience in the edtech world, but I try to find publicly available information to back up what I say.”
Harvard Canceled its Best Black Professor. Why?
In this thoughtful, eery 25-minute documentary, director Rob Montz explores Harvard superstar Roland Fryer’s search for truth. This search appears to have sown the seeds of his destruction.
That’s all for now. Have a happy week in Learning How to Learn!
Barb, Terry, and the entire Learning How to Learn team
- Uncommon Sense Teaching—the book and Coursera Specialization!
- Mindshift—the book and MOOC
- Learn Like a Pro—the book and MOOC
- The LHTL recommended text, A Mind for Numbers
- For kids and parents: Learning How to Learn—the book and MOOC. Pro tip—watch the videos and read the book together with your child. Learning how to learn at an early age will change their life!
