I had a full morning of meetings today, starting off with our weekly staff meeting from 9:00-10:00. After a half-hour break, I attended my weekly Service Planning meeting from 10:30-11:30.
Another half-hour later, I attended a lunch seminar put on by the Campus Writing and Speaking Program from 12:00-1:00, for which lunch was provided—a delicious ham sandwich from Bear Rock Cafe, which came with BBQ chips and an oatmeal raisin cookie. Here’s a description of the seminar:
| The Curse of Knowledge
This seminar will briefly discuss “the curse of knowledge”—the inability to explain things on a simple level once they have been understood at an advanced level. Examples of techniques that help overcome the curse will be presented, some of which conform to ideas presented in the recent NYT bestseller, “Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die,” by Chip and Dan Heath. |
My main takeaway from this was this mnemonic of “sticky elements”:
SUCCESs
Simple
Unexpected
Concrete
Credentialed
Emotional Story
There was nothing associated with the last s, silly.
I actually received an unexpected professional affirmation in this meeting. The other 10 or so attendees were all professors or teachers of some kind, and the one who sat down next to me, after taking the roster from me said as she was looking for her name, “And you would be…”
“I’m John Martin,” I said.
“Oh. I’ve enjoyed your postings on the TLTR list. I’m Nancy Fire.” Nancy had just defended her dissertation and “passed,” so I guess she’s now Dr. Nancy Fire.
TLTR stands for Teaching, Learning, and Technology Roundtable, and I’m a member of its listserv, where among other things discussions occur about the use of technology in classroom learning. I’m one of the few non-teachers on that list as well.
I loved these two quotes, which came out before the presentation started, while we were talking over our lunch about (a lot of) kids wanting to do just the bare minimum to get their degrees, and not really caring about taking advantage of such things as “second chances” (to improve a grade on an assignment, for instance).
A professor said he’d heard this quote recently, “Education is one of the few things people are willing to pay for and not receive.”
Another person in the room shared that when she asked one student why he didn’t really care about getting As, he responded, “Cs get degrees.”
I called it an early night tonight, and was in the bed by 9:00, asleep by 10:00.