Cheery Friday e-mails
Every Friday I send a “Cheery Friday” email chock full of insights about learning and changing to a million registered learners from the massive open online course (“MOOC”) Learning How to Learn. To receive these emails, just register for the course here (it’s free, and registration takes only a few seconds). “See” you on Friday!
Patient H. M.
Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners! Mайстер-клас від Барбари Оуклі Barb’s just wrapping up her work for IE University in Madrid, Spain this week and, after a weekend visiting historic and beautiful Toledo, is off to Kyiv, Ukraine to work with and speak for Оsvitoria! Book of the Week Patient H.M. A Story of Memory, Madness, a …
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Crisis in the Red Zone
Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners! Book of the Week Crisis in the Red Zone: The Story of the Deadliest Ebola Outbreak in History, and of the Outbreaks to Come, by Robert Preston. We’ve been fans of Robert Preston ever since his gripping New York Times best-seller The Hot Zone first came out. Crisis in the Red Zone focuses on E …
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Powerful Teaching
Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners! Greetings from Moscow, where Barb is speaking about learning for Sberbank. (Fun fact: if you’re sitting in the Radisson Collection Hotel in downtown Moscow, and type in “Your location” on Google Maps, you’ll see the location showing up as 40 kilometers away, at the Sheremetyevo Airport.) Book …
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Chernobyl
Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners! Book of the Week Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster, by Adam Higginbotham. This extraordinary book tells of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster—but it is also a powerful testament to how governmental propaganda and secrecy can cause these t …
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The Great Degeneration
Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners! Book of the Week The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die, by Niall Ferguson. One experience that struck Barb when she worked as a translator on Soviet trawlers was just how easy it was to convince people to go along with certain ideas, no matter how bizarre they migh …
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Marie Antoinette and other great biographies
Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners! Book of the Week Marie Antoinette: The Journey, by Antonia Fraser. We’re used to reading history books about compelling, intelligent men and women like Catherine the Great, Peter the Great, and Queen Isabella of Spain. We’re not-so-used-to reading books about apparent intellectual lightweight …
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Your Happy First Draft/Mission Transition
Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners from beautiful Almaty, Kazakhstan! Books of the Week Your Happy First Draft: A Practical and Painless Guide to Obliterating Writer’s Block, by Daphne Gray-Grant. This is the best book we’ve ever read about getting past writer’s block. Daphne has been a writing coach for decades, and she’s see …
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How to Become a Straight-A Student
Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners! Book of the Week How to Become a Straight-A Student: The Unconventional Strategies Real College Students Use to Score High While Studying Less, Cal Newport. Oliver from Switzerland (see his inspiring email below) recommended Cal Newport’s book on studying—this book launched Cal’s authorial c …
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Grapes of Math
Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners! Book of the Week The Grapes of Math, by Greg Tang. We’ve recently become aware of Greg’s work as a math educator. He came about his calling through a circuitous path—first earning a B.A. and M.A. degrees in Economics from Harvard, and later an M.A. degree in Math Education from New York Unive …
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A story of persecution & perseverance
Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners Book of the Week The Wrong Kind of Muslim: An Untold Story of Persecution & Perseverance, by Qazim Rashid. This is a soul-searching book about one man’s attempt to discover why people would want to die for their faith. Not in the sense of being suicide bombers, but exactly the opposite: Ho …
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