Fake News

“Fake News” is not new. Good comrades all my life have sat around analysing how the establishment has been lying to us. It was generally accepted that the news was fake, what the establishment wanted, and how we had to be careful what we believed, how we were conditioned. Sadly in my job as a …

Better than me

I met an erstwhile teacher colleague and we were discussing a student of his who was a bit of a mathematical genius – now comfortable amongst the elite of the elite in Cambridge. The colleague’s attitude was unassuming, that he could still guide the students whether they were better than him. I replied with an …

McKinsey report

LINK Finding 1 If students are motivated they work hard and do better irrespective of personal background. Earth-shattering, I’d have never guessed that. How much money did it cost to say that? OK the report is couched in “mindset” parlance, but what teacher doesn’t know that? The report does not investigate the connection between personal …

Growth Mindset Brianblog

Growth Mindset is one of a series of edufashions. Nothing new educationally except for mindset profiling. Appropriate mindset profiling in relation to the specific subject and institution might have some educational benefits. If applying growth mindset is producing good results, I would have to question what was happening before. Perseverance – if your institution is …

Assessing Growth Mindset

So far I have examined teaching practice, both my own and in general, within vague terms of “growth mindset” reference. Now I need more details of “growth mindset” so I listened to Carol Dweck’s TED talk. She claims to have a panacea for all educational ills but other than that claim she is offering little …

Teaching Practice

I have examined my first reactions to growth mindset, and other than the question of the student’s personal evaluation of the effects of a fixed or growth mindset on their motivation to learn it appears that it is just a fashion. To some extent it is of course worth having such fashions in order to …

First Reactions to Growth Mindset

My knee-jerk reaction to growth-mindset was that it was promoting cramming. Why did I have this reaction? Because as a teacher I became sick of teachers who applaud students for doing nothing. This culminated in my reaction to a pipsqueak careerist who stumbled into being the headmaster at my last school – he was 33, …

Insight – the Conditioning Moment of Maths

Teaching mathematics always had a dilemma, not huge, do you teach maths or do you teach for exams? I always favoured the latter because I was conscious that you could not teach students to be mathematicians, in my view they either were or not (growth mindset?). But the exams were sufficiently problematic that it was …

Investigating Methodology

In this recent blog I discussed phassa – the conditioning moment, it was based on a model of accumulating selves into the modular mind. Before I discuss the methodology I want to discuss this accumulation process. In this wiki, modular mind has different descriptions, I am going to add a description and place it in …

Natural Law

With the recent investigation of mindfulness and how Kabat-Zinn has got mindfulness into science, I have been looking at how Matriellez might get Buddhism in the mainstream - without calling it such. Much of this has been discussed on the mindfulness meditation page. I have recently restarted the Mandtao blog about what is knowledge and …