NYTimes

Website Wednesday is a (mostly) weekly feature in which we highlight one (or a couple) of sites from the Billions floating around the Intertoobz that just might help you with your Herculean task of educating inquiring minds. Any and all suggestions for future editions are welcome.

So, this is less of a specific site recommendation and more of a reading highlight package from last week’s New York Times Magazine, a.k.a., the Education Issue, which was chock full of interesting stuff for reading and thinking about and forwarding to people who talk about higher education but only from the narrow perspective of their own experience, or by parroting “conventional wisdom,” or in blissful unawareness of their own ignorance (or some combination thereof). Anyway, lots of interesting stuff to poke through and ponder and argue about with other people, including:

~What is the Point of College? (by a philosopher I like a lot, Kwame Anthony Appiah)

~Are Lectures Unfair?

~New Data Gives Clearer Picture of Student Debt

~Teaching Working Students

~Is College Really Tuition Too High?

~Teaching Martin Luther King Jr. in the Age of Freddie Gray

~What the Privileged Poor Can Teach Us

Plus there’s this book review–a cautionary tale about how NOT to go about educational reform…”There is another way to approach reform, a way that includes collaboration with the teachers, instead of bullying them or insulting them. A way that involves the community rather than imposing top-down decisions. ”

Sound familiar? Happy reading!

More reading from the New York Times in one post so you can plan your incursions on the pay wall:

~The 9/11 Memorial Misuses a Quote from Virgil (featuring the best last line of an article that I’ve seen in at least 27 months:

Finding words that do justice to a momentous event is always difficult — especially so, perhaps, in the age of Internet trawling, when a wary eye needs to be kept for the bothersome baggage that may be attached to the perfect-sounding expression. There is an easy mechanism, also time-hallowed, for winnowing out what may be right from what is clearly wrong: it’s called reading.)

~Is Sugar Toxic? (This one is by Gary Taubes, who wrote the first great thing I read about food, and started me down a whole, fascinating, and still fruitful new learning path.)

~Review of David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King

~The Power of Mockery

~To Tug Heartstrings, Music Must First Tickle Neurons (one for Isabelle)

~A Better Way To Teach Math (one for Mathissexy (and Co.))

~Tales of Springfield Education Negotiations (featuring a crying CTU President)

~Joe Nocera on The Limits of School Reform (i.e., how poverty and other circumstances affect learning and teaching)

~Miami Dade College: The Model for the Rest of Us