I am reminded of this joke.

I wrote a facebook post about this last year that I think is relevant here.

"It occurs to me that one of my core beliefs as a teacher is in the value of games and game like activities for learning.

Some recent insights: I watched a student struggle with exchanging different values of money and after asking him a few questions found out that board games were not big at home. I might be about to give him my spare monopoly board if his mom is okay with it, and ask if she'll play with him as his homework: games build numeracy.

Today I had to cover for someone and we played Swap! which is like uno but with some twists. It was a social skills class, so this was a pretty appropriate activity. Not only did were the kids good sports about it, the game requires everyone to pay attention to everyone else's moves in order to succeed, and it was fun to watch them really try to do that.

The Payday game has helped kids understand additive inverses and adding positive and negative integers. We're still figuring out how to expand the metaphor to subtraction but we can add a die or a coin and do that too.

We swapped out the traditional dice in shut the box for a d4 and a d12 and changed the rules so that you can do any operation you want with the two numbers you roll. Kids are excited to play.

Kids who refuse other class activities will come up and play a math game, and will even try to learn the concept built into the game if it helps them win the game.

(Additionally) When my class at BAMS invented the game we called Duels, we made the rules work so that everybody had to have the right answer because you never knew who was being called on. This led to kids explaining things to each other and working together. (Ask me about the rules of Duels sometime. It's an ideal game if you are popsicle stick user)."

This is absolutely critical. A quick visit to any social media post of any public figure makes it obvious that we have not taught or enforced any sort of norms for interacting with new forms of media. Further, we don't seem to have any idea how to spread those norms, besides making underpaid facebook and twitter moderators give themselves PTSD looking at the scummy underbelly of society.

Ouch article, you just showed your age.

Jo Boaler is a big name in math education research and you can find one of her major premises - giving kids interesting projects and letting them solve them - is also in How to Solve It (1946),

Possibly this is nitpicky but leaving out Lestat is criminal.

The narrative of two different Americas was really clear in the conventions, I thought.

This is funny because Vonnegut's stories don't end the way you expect them to.

I think it's really important to remember the Campbell's work has a very Eurocentric, western lense, and that the patterns that appeal to us as (mostly) white teachers are not always the patterns that our learners' home cultures. There is a particular culture conflict between our focus on individualism and the work towards the collective good. Immediately Japan rises to mind, but my friend who spent half his childhood in the US and half in Israel says that the difference was there too.

I think it's really fascinating that the pattern is always about monsters.

My dad always tells me how much he likes the (much-panned) Lone Ranger movie, with Johnnie Depp, and the reason for that is that there are no monsters. Only the things inside people that are monstrous.

Monsters are our own inventions. It's like the embodiment of making an excuse.

I have a cape.