You admire a character for trying more than for their successes.

You gotta keep in mind what's interesting to you as an audience, not what's fun to do as a writer. They can be v. different.

Putting it on paper lets you start fixing it. If it stays in your head, a perfect idea, you'll never share it with anyone.

In truth, this conventional view relies upon imaginary facts.

Let me repeat: black elementary school students today have better math skills than white students did only twenty years ago.

“160,000 students stay home from school each day due to bullying.”

ur average scores are respectable but unspectacular because, as Farhi notes, we have such a high percentage of children living in poverty, the highest of all industrialized countries. Only four percent of children in high-scoring Finland, for example, live in poverty. Our rate of poverty is over 21%.

It means that the "problem" of American education is not ineffective teaching, not teachers' unions, not lack of national standards and tests, and not schools of education: It is poverty.

“Some people talk in their sleep. Lecturers talk while other people sleep.”

they create the illusion of teaching for teachers, and the illusion of learning for learners

Sitting passively and taking notes is just not a way of learning. Yet lectures are 99 percent of how we teach!

But I’ve had to come to the inevitable conclusion that the problem is not one that technology can hope to solve. What’s wrong with education cannot be fixed with technology. No amount of technology will make a dent.

It’s a political problem. The problems are sociopolitical. The problems are unions. You plot the growth of the NEA [National Education Association] and the dropping of SAT scores, and they’re inversely proportional. The problems are unions in the schools. The problem is bureaucracy.

You’d be crazy to work in a school today. You don’t get to do what you want. You don’t get to pick your books, your curriculum. You get to teach one narrow specialization. Who would ever want to do that?

how teachers would be trained when some already work long hours and take second jobs to make ends meet.

Giving them easy access to a wealth of facts and resources online allows them to develop critical thinking skills, he said, which is what employers want the most.

said there was no proof that the technology improved learning

Students should never use information in Wikipedia (or any other online encyclopedia) for formal purposes (such as school essays) until they have verified and evaluated the information based on external sources. For this reason, Wikipedia, like any encyclopedia, is a great starting place for research but not always a great ending place.

It is possible for a given Wikipedia article to be biased, outdated, or factually incorrect. This is true of any resource. One should always double-check the accuracy of important facts, regardless of the source. In general, popular Wikipedia articles are more accurate than ones that receive little traffic, because they are read more often and therefore any errors are corrected in a more timely fashion. Wikipedia articles may also suffer from issues such as Western bias, but hopefully this will also improve with time. For more information

Although the majority of edits attempt to improve the encyclopedia, vandalism is frequent.

A test that can determine a student’s future life chances should surely relate in some practical way to the requirements of life. I can’t see how that could possibly be true of the test I took.”

“If I’d been required to take those two tests when I was a 10th grader, my life would almost certainly have been very different. I’d have been told I wasn’t ‘college material,’ would probably have believed it, and looked for work appropriate for the level of ability that the test said I had.

“It makes no sense to me that a test with the potential for shaping a student’s entire future has so little apparent relevance to adult, real-world functioning.