This week started with a trip to the Eastern Suburbs to be measured for a suit. I am a funny shape and off-the-peg suits don’t fit me well. One of the menswear specialists in Melbourne do a halfway house between off-the-peg and made-to-measure. They start with regular suits, work out how these need to be adjusted and make a suit to order.
It was a surreal experience. I think it was the first time they had held such a session in this particular store. They locked the doors while the expert and his apprentice fitted suits to a loud man with an Eastern European accent and me. The problem was that customers still wanted to enter the store and were knocking on the door. They had not thought it through.
After some discussion between the loud man and his wife, the loud man turned to the expert fitter and told him his wife did not understand what the expert was suggesting. The expert turned to me conspiratorially and informed me that the wife understood perfectly well, it was the loud man who was under a misapprehension.
And then we went to Chadstone shopping centre — what Americans call a ‘mall’. It was absolutely heaving with people but they all hid when I decided to take a photo on my phone.
This week’s Curios include tweets, French presidents, a funny thing that happened to a researcher in Scotland and much more.
Tweets of the week
Maybe it is a change in the Twitter algorithm coupled with my blue tick status. I don’t know. What I do know is that some of my tweets have attracted far more attention over the last week or so than is usual. The top tweet was a quote reply to Naomi Fisher about punctuality:
That may be understandable because the tweet I was quoting went viral.
However, other tops tweets just involved me summarising my views. The second most popular was about the stages of belief in inquiry learning:
I am not sure how much longer Twitter is going to last. People keep prophesying its demise and urging us to join Mastodon/Threads/BlueSky etc. but it remains pretty good value at the moment.
Productive struggle of the week
You may have read my takes on supposedly ‘productive’ struggle — a strategy for intentionally causing students to struggle with problem solving in class in the belief that this will do them good. Many people confuse this with so-called ‘desirable difficulties’ — a range of micro strategies such as interleaving different question types that either work for particularly simple material or relatively more expert learners who have already been taught the relevant concepts. The difference is that productive struggle intentionally increases the difficulty of reasonably complex tasks that students don’t yet know how to solve.
The arguments I have made have drawn on examples from the domain of mathematics. Over on her own Substack, Rebecca Birch has tackled the issue of productive struggle in the English classroom:
Recommended.
Autobiographical account of the week
Sometimes, we hear a story from inside education that makes us stop and think about an issue in a new way. This week’s example is particularly enlightening.
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