Steve Martin Teaches His First Online Course on Comedy

in Comedy, Education | April 6th, 2017

FYI: If you sign up for a MasterClass course by clicking on the affiliate links in this post, Open Culture will receive a small fee that helps support our operation.

Can comedy be taught? The question has no clear answer, but if it can, Steve Martin would surely occupy the highest rank of comedy teachers. He could probably teach a fair few other crafts as well: besides his achievements as an innovator in stand-up as well as in other forms of comedy — famously appearing on Saturday Night Live so many times that even some of his fans mistake him for a regular cast member — he’s also established himself as an actor, as an essayist and novelist, and even as a respected bluegrass banjo player. Still, despite his impressive artistic Renaissance-man credentials many of us, at the mere mention of Steve Martin’s name, laugh almost reflexively.

Hence his place at the front and center of “Steve Martin Teaches Comedy,” a new online course from Masterclass, the education startup whose faculty roster, as we’ve previously featured, also includes the likes of Werner Herzog and Aaron Sorkin. “We’re going to talk about a lot of things,” says Martin in the course’s trailer above. “We’re going to talk about my specific process, performing comedy, we’re going to talk about writing.” For a cost of $90, Masterclass provides more than 25 video lessons, a downloadable workbook with supplemental lesson materials, and an opportunity to upload your own material for critiques by the rest of the class as well as maybe — just maybe — by Martin himself.

Whether or not a master comedian can pass along his knowledge as a math or a language teacher can, anyone who’s paid attention to Martin’s comedy so far, as well as his reflections on comedy, can sense how much intellectual energy he’s put into figuring it all out, even at its extremes of absurdity, for himself. Students unwilling to follow suit need not apply, nor those worried about landing agents and getting headshots, for the esteemed instructor makes it clear up front that he grapples only with the most important question in comedy, as in life: “How do I be good?” You can sign up here. Or you can purchase an All-Access Annual Pass for every course in the MasterClass catalog.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

Richard Feynman’s “Notebook Technique” Will Help You Learn Any Subject–at School, at Work, or in Life

in Education, Productivity, Science | April 3rd, 2017

Richard Feynman knew his stuff. Had he not, he probably wouldn’t have won the Nobel Prize in Physics, let alone his various other prestigious scientific awards. But his reputation for learning all his life long with a special depth and rigor survives him, and in a sense accounts for his fame — of a degree that ensures his stern yet playful face will gaze out from dorm-room posters for generations to come — even more than does his “real” work. Many students of physics still, understandably, want to be like Feynman, but everyone else, even those of us with no interest in physics whatsoever, could also do well to learn from him: not from what he thought about, but from how he thought about it.

On his Study Hacks Blog, computer science professor Cal Newport explains what he calls “the Feynman notebook technique,” whereby “dedicating a notebook to a new learning task” can provide “concrete cues” to help mitigate the difficulty of starting out toward the mastery of a subject.

Feynman did it himself at least since his graduate-school days at Princeton when, according to biographer James Gleick, he once prepared for his oral examinations by opening a fresh notebook titled “NOTEBOOK OF THINGS I DON’T KNOW ABOUT.” In it “he reorganized his knowledge. He worked for weeks at disassembling each branch of physics, oiling the parts, and putting them back together, looking all the while for the raw edges and inconsistencies. He tried to find the essential kernels of each subject.”

“At first, the notebook pages are empty,” writes Newport, “but as they fill with careful notes, your knowledge also grows. The drive to fill more pages keeps your motivation stoked.” In other, more general terms: “Translate your growing knowledge of something hard into a concrete form and you’re more likely to keep investing the mental energy needed to keep learning.” But how sure can you feel of your newly acquired knowledge if you don’t regularly test it? Feynman had to go face-to-face with the elders of the Princeton physics department, but if you don’t benefit from that kind of institutional threat, you might consider putting into practice another Feynman technique: “teaching” what you’ve learned to someone else.

In addition to being a great scientist, explains study-skills vlogger Thomas Frank, Feynman “was also a great teacher and a great explainer,” owing to his ability to “boil down incredibly complex concepts and put them in simple language that other people could understand.” Only when Feynman could do that did he know he truly understood a concept himself — be it a concept in physics, safecracking, or bongo-playing. As Frank explains, “if you’re shaky on a concept and you want to quickly improve your understanding,” try your hand at producing a Feynmanesque simple explanation, which will “test your understanding and challenge your assumptions.” Just make sure to bear in mind one of Feynman’s most quotable quotes: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.” And if you find that you have indeed fooled yourself, head right back to the drawing board — or rather, to the notebook.

Richard Feynman Presents Quantum Electrodynamics for the NonScientist

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 5 ) |

Wynton Marsalis Gives 12 Tips on How to Practice: For Musicians, Athletes, or Anyone Who Wants to Learn Something New

in Creativity, Education, Life, Music, Productivity, Psychology | April 3rd, 2017

Image by Eric Delmar, via Wikimedia Commons

Practicing for countless hours before we can be good at something seems burdensome and boring. Maybe that’s why we’re drawn to stories of instant achievement. The monk realizes satori (and Neo learns kung fu); the superhero acquires great power out of the blue; Robert Johnson trades for genius at the crossroads. At the same time, we teach children they can’t master a skill without discipline and diligence. We repeat pop psych theories that specify the exact number hours required for excellence. The number may be arbitrary, but it comforts us to believe that practice might, eventually, make perfect. Because in truth we know there is no way around it. As Wynton Marsalis writes in “Wynton’s Twelve Ways to Practice: From Music to Schoolwork,” “practice is essential to learning music—and anything else, for that matter.”

For jazz musicians, the time spent learning theory and refining technique finds eloquent expression in the concept of woodshedding, a “humbling but necessary chore,” writes Paul Klemperer at Big Apple Jazz, “like chopping wood before you can start the fire.”

Yet retiring to the woodshed “means more than just practicing…. You have to dig deep into yourself, discipline yourself, become focused on the music and your instrument.” As beginners, we tend to look at practice only as a chore. The best jazz musicians know there’s also “something philosophical, almost religious” about it. John Coltrane, for example, practiced ceaselessly, consciously defining his music as a spiritual and contemplative discipline.

Marsalis also implies a religious aspect in his short article: “when you practice, it means you are willing to sacrifice to sound good… I like to say that the time spent practicing is the true sign of virtue in a musician.” Maybe this piety is intended to dispel the myth of quick and easy deals with infernal entities. But most of Marsalis’ “twelve ways to practice” are as pragmatic as they come, and “will work,” he promises “for almost every activity—from music to schoolwork to sports.” Find his abridged list below, and read his full commentary at “the trumpeter’s bible,” Arban’s Method.

Seek out instruction: A good teacher will help you understand the purpose of practicing and can teach you ways to make practicing easier and more productive.

Write out a schedule: A schedule helps you organize your time. Be sure to allow time to review the fundamentals because they are the foundation of all the complicated things that come later.

Set goals: Like a schedule, goals help you organize your time and chart your progress…. If a certain task turns out to be really difficult, relax your goals: practice doesn’t have to be painful to achieve results.

Concentrate: You can do more in 10 minutes of focused practice than in an hour of sighing and moaning. This means no video games, no television, no radio, just sitting still and working…. Concentrated effort takes practice too, especially for young people.

Relax and practice slowly: Take your time; don’t rush through things. Whenever you set out to learn something new – practicing scales, multiplication tables, verb tenses in Spanish – you need to start slowly and build up speed.

Practice hard things longer: Don’t be afraid of confronting your inadequacies; spend more time practicing what you can’t do…. Successful practice means coming face to face with your shortcomings. Don’t be discouraged; you’ll get it eventually.

Practice with expression: Every day you walk around making yourself into “you,” so do everything with the proper attitude…. Express your “style” through how you do what you do.

Learn from your mistakes: None of us are perfect, but don’t be too hard on yourself. If you drop a touchdown pass, or strike out to end the game, it’s not the end of the world. Pick yourself up, analyze what went wrong and keep going….

Donʼt show off: It’s hard to resist showing off when you can do something well…. But my father told me, “Son, those who play for applause, that’s all they get.” When you get caught up in doing the tricky stuff, you’re just cheating yourself and your audience.

Think for yourself: Your success or failure at anything ultimately depends on your ability to solve problems, so don’t become a robot…. Thinking for yourself helps develop your powers of judgment.

Be optimistic: Optimism helps you get over your mistakes and go on to do better. It also gives you endurance because having a positive attitude makes you feel that something great is always about to happen.

Look for connections: If you develop the discipline it takes to become good at something, that discipline will help you in whatever else you do…. The more you discover the relationships between things that at first seem different, the larger your world becomes. In other words, the woodshed can open up a whole world of possibilities.

You’ll note in even a cursory scan of Marsalis’ prescriptions that they begin with the imminently practical—the “chores” we can find tedious—and move further into the intangibles: developing creativity, humility, optimism, and, eventually, maybe, a gradual kind of enlightenment. You’ll notice on a closer read that the consciousness-raising and the mundane daily tasks go hand-in-hand.

While this may be all well and good for jazz musicians, students, athletes, or chess players, we may have reason for skepticism about success through practice more generally. Researchers at Princeton have found, for example, that the effectiveness of practice is “domain dependent.” In games, music, and sports, practice accounts for a good deal of improvement. In certain other “less stable” fields driven by celebrity and networking, for example, success can seem more dependent on personality or privileged access.

But it’s probably safe to assume that if you’re reading this post, you’re interested in mastering a skill, not cultivating a brand. Whether you want to play Carnegie Hall or “learn a language, cook good meals or get along well with people,” practice is essential, Marsalis argues, and practicing well is just as important as practicing often. For a look at how practice changes our brains, creating what we colloquially call “muscle memory,” see the TED-Ed video just above.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 8 ) |

Study Shows That Teaching Young Kids Philosophy Improves Their Academic Performance, Making Them Better at Reading & Math

in Education, Philosophy | February 28th, 2017

Should we teach philosophy to children? You’d have a hard time, I imagine, convincing many readers of this site that we shouldn’t. But why? It’s not self-evident that Kant’s ethics will help Johnny or Susie better navigate playground politics or lunchroom disputes, nor is Plato’s theory of forms likely to show up on an elementary school exam. Maybe it’s never too early for kids to learn intellectual history. But it’s less clear that they can or should wrestle with Hegel.

Perhaps the question should be put another way: should we teach children to think philosophically? As we noted in an earlier post, English educators and entrepreneurs Emma and Peter Worley have answered affirmatively with their Philosophy Foundation, which trains children in methods of argumentation, problem-solving, and generally “thinking well.” They claim that practicing philosophical inquiry “has an impact on affective skills and… cognitive skills.”

Peter Worley also argues that it makes kids less prone to propaganda and the fear-mongering of totalitarians. While one reader astutely pointed out that several philosophers have had “authoritarian tendencies,” we should note that even some of the most anti-democratic—Socrates for example—have used philosophical methods to hold power to account and question means of social control.

But while this noble civic motivation may be a hard sell to a school board, or whatever the British equivalent, the idea that philosophical thinking promotes many kinds of literacy necessary for children’s success has found wide support for decades in England and the U.S. as part of a movement aptly named “Philosophy for children” (P4C), which “began with the work of Professor Matthew Lipman, who founded the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children at Montclair State University, USA in 1974.”

Inspired by an earlier American pedagogical thinker, John Dewey, Lipman and co-authors published Philosophy in the Classroom, under “the assumption,” writes Temple University Press, “that what is taught in schools is not (and should not be) subject matter but rather ways of thinking.” Lipman and his colleagues have had significant influence on educators in the UK, prompting a huge study by the Educational Endowment Foundation (EEF) that tracked nine and ten year old students in England from January to December of 2013.

As Jenny Anderson writes at Quartz, “More than 3,000 kids in 48 schools across England participated in weekly discussions about concepts such as truth, justice, friendship, and knowledge, with time carved out for silent reflection, question making, question airing, and building on one another’s thoughts and ideas.” The results were pretty astounding. “Overall,” the study concludes, “pupils using the approach made approximately two additional months’ progress in reading and maths.” This despite the fact, notes Anderson, that “the course was not designed to improve literacy or numeracy.”

Children from disadvantaged backgrounds saw an even bigger leap in performance: reading skills increased by four months, math by three months, and writing by two months. Teachers also reported a beneficial impact on students’ confidence and ability to listen to others.

The rigorous study not only found immediate improvement but also longitudinally tracked the students’ development for two additional years and found that the beneficial effects continued through that time; “the intervention group continu[ed] to outperform the control group” from 22 of the schools “long after the classes had finished.” You can read the study for yourself here, and learn more about the Philosophy for Children movement—“inspired by a dialogical tradition of doing philosophy begun by Socrates in Athens 2,500 years ago”—at the Philosophy Foundation, the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children, and the Center for Philosophy for Children at the University of Washington.

via Quartz/Big Think

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 7 ) |

Walt Disney Creates a Frank Animation That Teaches High School Kids All About VD (1973)

in Animation, Education, Health, Life, Psychology | February 24th, 2017

The comically plainspoken, tough-guy sergeant is a heaven sent assignment for character actors.

Think R. Lee Ermey in Full Metal Jacket…

Louis Gosset Jr. in An Officer and a Gentleman…

Even Stripes’ Warren Oates.

Keenan Wynn, who strove to keep America safe from “deviated preverts” in 1964’s Dr. Strangelove, was awarded the role of a lifetime nine years later, when Disney Studios was seeking vocal talent for VD Attack Plan, above, a 16-minute animation intended to teach high schoolers about the scourge of venereal disease.

Wynn (son of Ed) threw himself into the part with gusto, imbuing his badly-complected, Kaiser-helmeted germ commander with the sort of straight-talking charisma rarely seen in high school Health class.

A risky maneuver, given that Vietnam-era teens did not share their parent’s generation’s respect for military authority and VD Attack Plan was the first educational short specifically aimed at the high school audience. Prior to that, such films were geared toward soldiers. (Disney waded into those waters in 1944, with the training film, A Few Quick Facts No. 7—Venereal Disease, the same year Mickey Mouse appeared in LOOK magazine, waging war on gonorrhea with sulfa drugs.

Gonorrhea was well represented in the Wynn’s Contagion Corps. The ranks were further swelled by Syphilis. Both platoons were outfitted with paramilitary style berets.

The Sarge pumped them up for the coming sneak attack by urging them to maim or better yet, kill their human enemy. Shaky recruits were reassured that Ignorance, Fear, and Shame would have their backs.

Scriptwriter Bill Bosche had quite the knack for identifying what sort of sugar would make the medicine go down. The Sarge intimates that only a few of the afflicted are “man enough” to inform their partners, and while Ignorance and Shame cause the majority to put their faith in ineffectual folk remedies, the “smart ones” seek treatment.

Elementary psychology, but effectual nonetheless.

Today’s viewers can’t help but note that HIV and AIDS had yet to assert their fearsome hold.

On the other hand, the Sarge’s matter of fact delivery regarding the potential for same sex transmission comes as a pleasant surprise. His primary objective is to set the record straight. No, birth control pills won’t protect you from contracting the clap. But don’t waste time worrying about picking it up from public toilet seats, either.

A word of caution to those planning to watch the film over breakfast, there are some truly gnarly graphic photos of rashes, sores, and skin eruptions. Helpful to teens seeking straight dope on their worrisome symptoms. Less so for anyone trying to enjoy their breakfast links sans the specter of burning urination.

So here’s to the sergeants of the silver screen, and the hardworking actors who embodied them, even those whose creations resembled Pillsbury’s Funny Face drink mix mascots. Let’s do as the Sarge says, and make every day V‑D Day!

VD Attack Plan will be added to the animation section of our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.

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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her play Zamboni Godot is opening in New York City next week. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Slavoj Žižek Expounds on His Hatred of Teaching, Grading Papers, and Particularly Holding Office Hours

in Education | February 21st, 2017

“Those who can, do,” so we often used to hear, “and those who can’t, teach.” Nowadays the situation seems to have transformed into something more like, “Those who can, do, at least in the occasional free moments when they don’t have to teach.” At first you just take a teaching gig on the side to supplement your real career, and before you know it teaching has usurped that real career almost entirely. We’ve all heard complaints from academic friends about the seemingly unbreakable cycle of lecturing, grading, and holding office hours, but how many have put it in terms as stark as Slavoj Žižek does in the interview above?

“I hate, I hate, I hate — okay, talks are okay, but I hate giving classes,” says the Slovenian philosopher-critic-showman at a 2014 University of Cincinnati College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning conference devoted to his work. “I’m proud to say, I did teach a couple of semesters here, and all the grading was pure bluff. I even openly told the students. I told them, I remember — at the New School, for example, in New York, ‘If you don’t give me any of your shitty papers, you’ll get an A. If you give me a paper, I may read it and not like it, you can get a lower grade.’ And it worked — I got no papers.” And so he solves the problem of grading.

But what of office hours? These he calls “the main reason I don’t want to teach,” because “students, they’re like other people; the majority are boring idiots, so I cannot imagine a worse experience than some idiot comes and starts to ask you questions.” In other countries one might find a way to endure it, but “the problem is, here in United States, students tend to be so open that if you’re kind to them, they even start to ask you personal questions, like private problems, could you help them, and so on. What should I tell them? ‘I don’t care. Kill yourself. Not my problem.’ ”

These teaching experiences led Žižek’s to one conclusion: “I like universities without students.” But not everyone cheers his pronouncement: “Whenever something like this pops up, I worry that some people will see it and say, ‘You see? That’s what I’ve been saying about those ivory tower types all along,’ ” writes one anonymous academic in response. “Žižek is an outlier, in terms of both his stature and his attitude. Most working academics can’t get away with being dismissive of students, and even if we could, almost all of us wouldn’t.”

Slate’s Rebecca Schuman argues that the “real problem with Žižek isn’t that he feels this way or that he says these things aloud. It’s that he does so and people think it’s hilarious. It’s that his view is, believe it or not, a common ‘superstar’ view of students — so common, in fact, that if you work at a research university and actually like teaching, you should maybe pretend you don’t, lest you appear not ‘serious’ enough about your research.” A semi-frequent critic of Žižek, most recently of his endorsement of Donald Trump (“after all, the two thrice-married, outspoken older gentlemen do have quite a bit in common, a fact that would surely horrify them both”), Schuman knows that the fault lies never so much with the provocateur himself as it does with our tendency to take his provocations at face value.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

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Watch Mr. Rogers Persuade Congress to Stop Cutting PBS Budget in 1969

in Education, Television | January 20th, 2017

Yesterday, the news broke that the Trump administration will apparently be slashing federal spending, to the tune of $10.5 trillion over 10 years. According to The Hill, the “departments of Commerce and Energy would see major reductions in funding.” And “the Corporation for Public Broadcasting [aka PBS] would be privatized, while the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities would be eliminated entirely.”

Attempts to cut funding for the arts is nothing new. Above, we take you back to 1969, when Richard Nixon planned to reduce PBS’ funding from $20 million to $10 million. That is, until Fred Rogers, the gentle creator of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, spent six short minutes before Senator John Pastore, the chairman of the Subcommittee on Communications, and made his pitch for publicly-funded educational television. In those 360 seconds, Rogers gets the gruff senator to do a complete 180 – to end up saying “It looks like you just earned the 20 million dollars.”

It’s unlikely that Mr. Rogers could get the same traction today. Quite the contrary, his sweetness and sincerity would likely be mocked quite mercilessly, a sign of how coarse our society has become these days.

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Mr. Rogers Takes Breakdancing Lessons from a 12-Year-Old (1985)

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by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Hip 1960s Latin Teacher Translated Beatles Songs into Latin for His Students: Read Lyrics for “O Teneum Manum,” “Diei Duri Nox” & More

in Education, Language Lessons, Music | January 13th, 2017

Click here (and then click the image) to view in a larger format.

I’ve interacted with many entertaining language-learning resources in various classes—from miniseries in Spanish to comic books in French—all geared toward making the unfamiliar language relevant to daily life. Learning counterintuitive pronunciations, parsing a new system of grammar, or memorizing the genders of word after word can be laborious and intimidating in the classroom. Doing so in everyday pop cultural settings, not as much.

When it comes to the teaching of dead languages, the resources can seem less approachable. I certainly appreciate the literary and rhetorical genius of Virgil, Ovid, Horace, Cicero, and Julius Caesar. But during my high school years, I did not always find their work easy to read in English, much less in formal classical Latin. The elation I felt after successfully translating a passage was sometimes dampened as I puzzled over historical notes and glosses that often left me with more questions than answers.

Click here (and then click the image) to view in a larger format.

That’s not at all to say that students of Latin shouldn’t be exposed to cultural and historical context or read the finest exemplars of the written language. Only that a break from the heavy stuff now and then goes a long way. Might I submit to Latin instructors one ingenious tool from Eddie O’Hara, former British Labour Party MP and classics teacher? O’Hara passed away in May of last year, and just this past week, his son Terry O’Hara tweeted these translations of Beatles songs (including two Christmas tunes) his father made in the 60s for his students. At the time, these were the height of pop culture relevance, and, while a far cry from the complexities of the Aeneid, a fun way for Latin learners to relate to a language that can seem cold and imposing.

I will admit, my Latin has fallen into such a state that I can’t immediately vouch for the accuracy or elegance of these translations (“cue fierce arguments among Latin grammarians,” replies one Twitter user), but there’s no reason to doubt Mr. O’Hara knew his stuff. ““He was a born educator,” his son remembers, “He was a teacher and classicist by background and he had a strong interest in educational matters and Greek cultural heritage.” Educated himself at Magdalen College, Oxford, O’Hara taught at Perse School, Cambridge, Birkenhead School, and in the early 70s, C.F. Mott College in the Beatles’ own Liverpool.

Click here (and then click the image) to view in a larger format.

In addition to his role as a statesman, the Liverpool Echo remembers O’Hara’s many decades as “a popular teacher who brought classes to life translating Beatles lyrics into Latin.” We do not have any indication of whether he actually tried to sing the lyrics, though his students surely must have attempted it. What must the chorus of “All My Loving” sound like as “Ita totum amorem dabo, Tibi totum, numquam cessaba”? Or “She Loves You” as “Amat te, mehercle”? Singing them to myself, I can see that O’Hara was sensitive to the meter of the original English in his Latin renderings. But I’d really love to see someone set these to music and make a video. Any of our readers up to the challenge?

Finally, since early sixties Beatles lyrics aren’t as likely to engage students in 2017, what pop cultural material would you translate today—classics teachers out there—to reach the bemused, bewildered, and the bored? If you’re already hard at work using hip resources in the classroom, please do share them with us in the comments!

Note: To view the images in a larger format, please click on the links to these individuals images: Image 1 - Image 2 — Image 3. When the image opens, click on it again to zoom in.

via Ted Gioia

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 9 ) |

Steve Martin Teaches His First Online Course on Comedy

Richard Feynman’s “Notebook Technique” Will Help You Learn Any Subject–at School, at Work, or in Life

Wynton Marsalis Gives 12 Tips on How to Practice: For Musicians, Athletes, or Anyone Who Wants to Learn Something New

Study Shows That Teaching Young Kids Philosophy Improves Their Academic Performance, Making Them Better at Reading & Math

Walt Disney Creates a Frank Animation That Teaches High School Kids All About VD (1973)

Slavoj Žižek Expounds on His Hatred of Teaching, Grading Papers, and Particularly Holding Office Hours

Watch Mr. Rogers Persuade Congress to Stop Cutting PBS Budget in 1969

Hip 1960s Latin Teacher Translated Beatles Songs into Latin for His Students: Read Lyrics for “O Teneum Manum,” “Diei Duri Nox” & More

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