dy/dan

Brief Encapsulating Remarks

1. Academic writing is hard, especially if you've grown accustomed for the last five years to posting whatever random 450 words pass through your head at a given moment. Writing even something as basic as a literature review was like trying to run a marathon on sixteen tabs of Benadryl.
2. Too many units. Someone on the welcome weekend panel — none of us can remember who it was — told us all to max out our units. Never again.
3. Blogiversity. I was talking to Jo Boaler last night (name drop!) and she admitted she didn't really get the whole blogging thing. I said I didn't really get the whole peer-reviewed journal thing. Then I recommended blogging in two ways. First, I showed her the time I asked you to help me identify a core practice of teaching and you came through with 100 (mostly) measured responses. Second, I showed her our ongoing soon-to-end-I-swear investigation of pseudocontext. I'm sure it would've taken me many months more to come up with my working definition of pseudocontext had you all not come through with so many examples.

Current Coursework

I'm putting in the minimum this quarter, units-wise:

• EDUC250B – Statistical Methods in Education. Eric Bettinger. Required.
• EDUC325B – Proseminar. Hilda Borko, Brigid Barron. Required.
• EDUC396X/176X – Casual Learning Technologies. Shelley Goldman. With an emphasis on iPhone apps in education. This one's candy. Here's the syllabus.

Fall Quarter #GradSkool Tweets

• Heroic student in seminar: "Are these articles purposefully obtuse?" #gradskool 4:13 PM Sep 30th, 2010
• In CS section taught by a soph. 10 yrs younger than me. I love watching
  non-pros teach. This kid is a natural. Great questioning. #gradskool 5:48 PM Oct 1th, 2010
• Over a career, it's possible to align yourself to an incentive and status
  structure that will strike laypeople as totally insane. #gradskool 6:48 PM Oct 1th, 2010
• Struggling to write like a human being. #gradskool 9:31 PM Oct 3rd, 2010
• Pigeons: Central Park :: Bicyclists : College. Fearless pests. #gradskool 5:36 PM Oct 12th, 2010
• "Known-answer question" is the awesomest term I learned in #gradskool last week. As in, "My kids hate when I ask known-answer questions." 8:03 PM Oct 16th, 2010
• "By the time you see a paper in a journal, the field has moved on." (Loeb, 2010, lecture). #gradskool 8:27 PM Oct 22nd, 2010
• The proseminar professors are bickering over the definition of a "literature review." I love when they get going like this. #gradskool 5:27 PM Nov 9th, 2010
• Jo Boaler is subbing in my professional pedagogy class. Freak out! #gradskool http://j.mp/d7ybma 10:26 PM Nov 10th, 2010
• Critiquing the professor's book in class, referring to him in the third person. Weird. #gradskool http://j.mp/cCmA3x 6:35 PM Nov 11th, 2010
• Stats HW. Find the formula. Identify the variables. Plug 'em in. Weird being on the other side of this arrangement. #gradskool 5:42 AM Nov 12th, 2010

Favorite Papers

These are the ones I gave my highest rating in my aggregator.

• Carrel. Does Professor Quality Matter? Evidence from Random Assignment of Students to Professors. NBER Working Paper No. 14081. National Bureau of Economic Research (2008)
• Gamoran Sherin and Van Es. Effects of Video Club Participation on Teachers' Professional Vision. Journal of Teacher Education (2008) vol. 60 (1) pp. 20-37
• Rothstein et al. Grading education: Getting accountability right. (2008)
• Nelson et al. A culture of collaborative inquiry: Learning to develop and support professional learning communities. The Teachers College Record (2008) vol. 110 (6) pp. 1269-1303
• Hiebert et al. A knowledge base for the teaching profession: What would it look like and how can we get one?. Educational researcher (2002) vol. 31 (5) pp. 3
• Lewis and Tsuchida. A lesson is like a swiftly flowing river. American Educator (1998) vol. 22 (4) pp. 12–17
• Grossman et al. Toward a theory of teacher community. Teachers College Record (2001) vol. 103 (6) pp. 942-1012
• Barnes et al. Teaching and the case method: Text, cases, and readings. (1994)
• Grossman et al. Teaching practice: A cross-professional perspective. The Teachers College Record (2009) vol. 111 (9) pp. 2055-2100

Winter Speaking & Workshops

• Doha, Qatar. January 28-29. Near East South Asia Council of Overseas Schools.
• Naperville, IL. February 25. DuPage Valley Mathematics Conference.
• San Diego, CA. March 7. California Charter Schools Conference.
• Calgary, Canada. March 21. Calgary Regional Consortium.
• Edmonton, Canada. March 22. Edmonton Regional Learning Consortium.