Blog version: https://roycross.blog/
1. The latest book by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation, has attracted a lot of attention. Here’s his interview with Elise Hu, the host of TED Talks Daily https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_are_smartphones_ruining_childhood?subtitle=en
“The Anxious Generation” is shaping cultural conversations and sparking fierce debates about the role of smartphones in society. In this timely conversation, Jonathan Haidt investigates how a smartphone-based childhood, amplified by overprotective parenting, is driving the mental health crisis among young people. He also explores the push for phone bans in schools and the concrete steps we can take to improve the mental health of young people around the world.
Worth noting, though, that not everyone is 100% persuaded by the Haidt argument. Here’s two pieces from The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/apr/27/anxious-generation-jonathan-haidt
and a gift article from The New York Times, Coddling Plus Devices? Unequivocal Disaster for Our Kids https://tinyurl.com/ycx36tnh
2. Toby Litt has just republished his blog post on John Donne for The British Library (BL), which is still recovering from a catastrophic cyber-ransom-attack last October, On John Donne’s ‘Goe, and catche a falling starre’ – for GCSE and ‘A’ Level students and others https://awritersdiary.substack.com/p/on-john-donnes-goe-and-catche-a-falling
PDFs of both Toby’s post and – also possibly of interest? – the BL report on the cyber-attack, Learning Lessons from the Cyber-Attack, below.
3. It’s unusual to find unanimity on any topic in education, but on grammar schools opinion in the UK is undivided – they simply don’t work. Notwithstanding all the evidence to the contrary, however, the idea of the grammar school remains extraordinarily popular with politicians. Here’s a well-titled piece from Schools Week by John Dickens (no relation?), The ‘zombie’ grammar schools policy that refused to die https://schoolsweek.co.uk/the-zombie-grammar-schools-policy-that-refused-to-die/
4. We’ve not visited Teachers Talk Radio for a while. Here’s two interesting recent shows:
Decentering ELT: The Sunday Lunchtime Show with Graham Stanley
Decentering ELT (English Language Teaching), Action Research, and Artificial Intelligence and ELT were the main subjects me (says Graham) and my guest, Brazilian teacher Leonardo Lima spoke about on this show.
Let’s talk about CLIL: The Monday Morning Break with Khanh Duc Kuttig
Patrick de Boer joins us in this episode as we explore the intricacies of CLIL in a conversation about bilingual education in the Netherlands and Germany, training of CLIL teachers, classroom strategies and assessment.
5. And, finally, an engaging New York Times video from Eric Kim about five easy hacks with instant ramen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pFTJN1tF8A
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