Clifford J. Levy:

My three children once were among the coddled offspring of Park Slope, Brooklyn. But when I became a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, my wife and I decided that we wanted to immerse them in life abroad. No international schools where the instruction is in English. Ours would go to a local one, with real Russians. When we told friends in Brooklyn of our plans, they tended to say things like, Wow, you’re so brave. But we knew what they were really thinking: What are you, crazy? It was bad enough that we were abandoning beloved Park Slope, with its brownstones and organic coffee bars, for a country still often seen in the American imagination as callous and forbidding. To throw our kids into a Russian school — that seemed like child abuse.

If I’ve done my job, she said in the last class, you won’t be happy with anything you write for the next 10 years. It’s not because you won’t be writing well, but because I’ve raised your standards for yourself. Don’t compare yourselves to each other. Compare yourself to Colette, or Henry James, or Edith Wharton. Compare yourselves to the classics. Shoot there.

Here’s my theory: Some students struggle with economics because they do not fully understand the mathematical tools economists use. Profs do not know how their students were taught mathematics, what their students know, what their students don’t know - and have no idea how to help their students bridge those gaps.

Assignments are incomplete until one is competent. If it’s not good enough, change it. If you don’t understand the premise fully, redo it. Failing and moving on isn’t an option because every bit is important.

Ed Dante is a pseudonym for a writer who lives on the East Coast. Through a literary agent, he approached The Chronicle wanting to tell the story of how he makes a living writing papers for a custom-essay company and to describe the extent of student cheating he has observed. In the course of editing his article, The Chronicle reviewed correspondence Dante had with clients and some of the papers he had been paid to write. In the article published here, some details of the assignment he describes have been altered to protect the identity of the student.

His idea goes like this: Assign each student a single, specific topic, which he or she will study over and over again, from every possible angle, from early elementary school through high school. Egan, a professor of education at Canada's Simon Fraser University, hopes that by the time such students finish high school, they will be world-class experts on their topics - as well as more effective citizens and better people.

Easily incorporate computational thinking into your curriculum with these classroom-ready lessons, examples, and programs. For more resources, including discussion forums and news, visit our ECT Discussion Forums.

It’s hard to write well. But it may be even harder to simply keep writing; which, by the way, is the only way to write better. In the meantime, aim for five pages. Report your word counts. Track your rate of reading (and consume books ravenously). Teach math on the side if you have to. Whatever you need to do.

Fascinating. David Foster Wallace's Literary Interpretation syllabus from Spring '05: http://bit.ly/9nSA7d (via @rogre)

@rogre I can't overstate just how fantastic this post is: http://bit.ly/9r0tQa I've been reading each link over last few days. Thank you.

“What I know about writing I know from having read the work of the great writers.” More on how-to culture: http://instapaper.com/ztr0me01V

Bernadette Mayer's List of Journal Ideas:

The Secret Lives of Professors: what it really means to be a professor in the US http://bit.ly/9YzmV9 #teaching

Tom Henderson is the self-described 'mathpunk'. He argues that the world is stacked against the general public's lack of mathematical understanding. He tries to get students interested in maths and foster real understanding and awareness rather than memorisation of formulae: 'the steps'.

He discusses mathematics in the context of things that humans are likely to be interested in: social conflict, sex and beauty.

Doug Lemov strives to improve the education of children in the US by using data-driven programs to identify outstanding teachers. Will incentives such as substantial financial benefits help attract and retain the most talented individuals?

He finds that many teachers understand 2 of the main pillars of their career: their main subject(s) themselves, and 'foundations', the history and philosophy of educations. What is often missing is 'methods'; literally, how to teach.

Can a series of 49 techniques ('What To Do') help?

Stephen Strogatz explores negative numbers in his series of excellent articles teaching basic mathematical principles.

"This tale of two boys, and of the millions of kids just like them, embodies the most stunning finding to come out of education research in the past decade: more than any other variable in education—more than schools or curriculum—teachers matter. Put concretely, if Mr. Taylor’s student continued to learn at the same level for a few more years, his test scores would be no different from those of his more affluent peers in Northwest D.C. And if these two boys were to keep their respective teachers for three years, their lives would likely diverge forever. By high school, the compounded effects of the strong teacher—or the weak one—would become too great."