Steve H on node chairs

"The Nodal Classroom"

An amazing new educational paradigm! It's the Node™, brought to you by Steelcase. Ta Da! Music please.

I'll bet they can add PC docking stations with connections to the Smartboard. Oops! It's time to scoot into your new formations. Beep, beep! Ha, Ha! Now that's what I call active learning. PE across the classrooms.

Down with the Harkness Table. Up with nodal chairs. They can be so easily rearranged on the deck of the Titanic.

speaking of inequality

We haven’t been able to increase the share of our youth that completes college or high school. It’s really remarkable, and most people wouldn’t actually guess this, but in the US, the cohorts that had the highest high-school graduation rates were the ones that were graduating in the middle of the 1960s. Our high-school graduation rate has actually been declining since then. If you look at college, it’s the same thing.
Daron Acemoglu on inequality

Two words: node chairs.


disappearing act

Disappearing act

Having now spent two fall semesters in a row trawling the web for research and advice on the teaching of freshman composition, I have come to the conclusion that all useful thinking on the subject ceased in 1985.^*

Prior to 1985, people are thinking and writing all manner of helpful stuff; after 1985 you get the rise of the boss compositionists and the erasure of the sentence.

The compositionists are still busy erasing the knowledge we used to have:

Before: Campus Writing Program | Indiana University - grading; sequenced microthemes; pamphlets for students, etc. Good stuff.

Now:

After: Node Chairs Move Students to New Activity

Honest to God: this is Indiana University's Campus Writing Program, and they've devoted an entire page to a furniture purchase.

^* a proposed factoid that supports my hit-by-a-meteor hypothesis