The Daily Riff - BE SMARTER. ABOUT EDUCATION.

There is No Education Without the Arts

"We're not talking about making sure that everybody has private music lessons," Read more

Author John Green: Teenagers Think the Big Questions in Life Matter

Why Do We Give Them Short-Shrift? The Teen Whisperer: How the author of "The Fault in Our Stars" built an ardent army of fans Read more

How Chicago's BAM (Becoming a Man) program works

Teaching students to identify thought patterns that contribute to depression & anxiety so they can work to replace them with healthier patterns. . . Read more

Can Messy Be A Sign Of Brilliance?

Einstein's Desk In Photo: What He & Agatha Christie May Have In Common Read more

Sleepy Teens in School: Does a later "start time" for the school day work better?

Liz Bowen, The Baltimore Sun, reports that a group of Arundel mothers deliver petition for national legislation. Caption showing high schoolers for the STEM magnet school catching a school bus at 6:15 A.M. Read more

Teaching Students to Ask Their Own Questions

Now, here were college grads looking for jobs, and not recognizing that showing curiosity and asking engaging questions could show MORE about WHO they were than reciting some resume paragraph to interviewers in a random interview. -C.J. Westerberg Read more

Wanted: Teacher, Coach or both?

"The coach is the boss of you, but they're not the boss." Read more

The Satori Generation

Enlightened or Generation Resignation? Read more

Stigliz on Education

VIDEO: "We have an education system that is very dependent on where you live, where you live is very dependent on what you can afford . . . " Read more

A Response to: Is Your Child a "Warrior" or "Worrier"?

Why Some Kids Handle Test Pressure and Others . . . Not. Read more

Am I Preparing Students for My Age or Theirs?

I can never understand how and why we expect students with far more energy, ideas, natural creativity and far more everything, to be more "contained" in their behavior than adults. Read more

How Much Do Early Years Lead to Student Success?

"The idea being that wasn't necessarily to create little engineers everywhere, though that would be great for us. The idea was to take advantage of the natural learning process and curiosity that children have at that age . . ." Tamika Lang, Boeing Read more

The New Resume

A picture is worth a thousand words. A video game-like format is worth . . . Read more

Noam Chomsky: In the news again, this time about Twitter and High Schoolers

Noam Chomsky, Professor Emeritus at MIT, "father of linguistics", political commentator.  From bio: "Besides his work in linguistics, Chomsky is internationally recognized as one of the most critically engaged public intellectuals alive today":               ... Read more

Does your school have a beehive?

"If we want children to be inventors, we have to give them opportunities to invent." - 5:00 mark, Mission Hill video Read more

7 Things I Learned in 7 Years

"The cult of productivity has its place, but worshipping at its altar daily robs us of the very capacity for joy and wonder that makes life worth living . . ." - Maria Popova Read more

Steve Jobs: Liberal Arts Essential for Innovation

"We need to revolutionize education to encourage creativity and need to teach our kids to play, take a chance and create. By not teaching our children liberal arts we will hinder their capacity to innovate." Read more

CEO: Drawing Can Help One Think and Reflect

Great video from pandodaily, my new favorite tech site, about how the CEO of Deviant Art uses his artistic expression and journaling to help him think, reflect, organize or clear his head to work better. Read more

I Forgot My Phone: Viral Video

If you missed this one, do check it out below.26 million views and counting . . . two minute run-time.... Read more

Seven Questions: Is your child a recipe-follower or a real learner?

"It may help to have in our minds a picture of what we mean by understanding . . . "-John Holt, Why Children Fail, p. 177by C.J. WesterbergI recently had a loooong conversation with a parent about whether his child... Read more