Sara Holbrook: “These test questions were just made up, and tragically, incomprehensibly, kids’ futures and the evaluations of their teachers will be based on their ability to guess the so-called correct answer to made up questions. … Stop it. Just stop it.” (includes test questions, plus annotations)
Tag: 01.04.17
How ‘Grand Theft Auto’ And ‘Pokémon Go’ Satisfy Basic Human Needs
“Self-actualization is there at the top of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, and it’s what many games deliver. That’s all people ever truly want: to be.” And they can do it with minimal consequences IRL.
Musical Theatre Students Are Becoming Quadruple Threats
It’s not just that they can sing, dance, and act – that’s no longer enough. Programs are teaching them to write their own shows.
How We Learned To Write Musicals – Seven Origin Stories
Benj Pasek, Justin Paul, Kirsten Childs, Nell Benjamin, Stew, Adam Gwon, and Kevin Del Aguila explain how they found their way into this specialized craft – one you can’t go get a degree in.
With The New Administration, Art Loans Between U.S. And Russian Museums Could Resume
“All Russian loans to the US were halted in 2011 amid fears that they could be impounded after a US federal judge’s ruling that Russia must transfer a collection of books seized by the Bolsheviks to the Brooklyn-based Chabad-Lubavitch, an Orthodox Jewish community that fled the Soviet Union. Russia refused and, as a result, major US museums stopped lending to Russia.” But that deadlock seems to be about to break.
Big Plans For Broadway’s Littlest House
The Helen Hayes Theater has fewer than 600 seats (and had half that before a balcony was added). The Off-Broadway company Second Stage bought the venue in 2015 and is renovating it. “In the process, the theater company, which focuses on work by living American writers, is trying to figure out how best to use interior design to signal the organization’s decidedly contemporary bent in a decidedly noncontemporary building.”
How The Playwright And The Director Made ‘Moonlight’ Out Of One Very Tough Miami Neighborhood
Movie writer and director Barry Jenkins grew up a year older and just a block or two away from playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney – but somehow they didn’t meet until Jenkins was working on the movie that’s rocketing through awards season and audience emotions. “They remember the same swinging tree, dancing at jams held in the amphitheater, and the annual turkey bowl.”
Translations Risk A Homogenization Of Ideas And Language
“While translations do cross borders, broadening our cultural knowledge as they present one language in the terms of another, they can also become an impediment to free communication. As a translator of contemporary Japanese fiction, I’ve seen both the flow and the congestion, and have witnessed at close range the unintended consequences—and our lack of control as translators—when it comes to the way our texts move or fail to move across borders.”
Dandyism Is An Artistic Act – And A Subversive One
“When we use the word [dandy] casually, we refer to men (it’s almost always men) who are fussy, even anachronistic. But the figure of the dandy, historically, has been far more subversive.”
‘Design Thinking’ Is The Latest Concept (Or Buzzword) In Education Circles
The problem is, as Jessica Lahey writes, figuring out what the term does (and doesn’t) mean.