Another interesting article from Carl:
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/education/2013/09/paying_attention_is_a_skill_schools_need_to_teach_it.html
Can you develop grit if you don't know how to pay attention?

Multi-tasking While Learning

This blog post reinforces what you may already believe about the distractions of technology in the learning process. It's not surprising that researchers found students were only working about 65% of the time they thought they were working hard on their homework.
Multi-tasking Research
The New York Times is on the same page with this article about distractions:
Toggling Tasks

Gender and Education

Given the conversation about gender that took place at last week's Monitors' Meeting, I found this particular Opinionator entry of real interest:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/02/the-boys-at-the-back/

I do believe it is appropriate for us to re-engage the conversation about gender at Blair. The distribution in upper-class effort marks is a good outward indicator of gendered approaches to education and community.  How can we get a dialogue on this issue going with our student body?  Do we prime our students with how we frame the conversation?  How do the great all-boys schools deal with this issue?  Can we look at programmatic approaches to improving male achievement?

How to be More Like Sherlock Holmes - The Good Parts That Is

An interesting article from Thursday's NYT's that discusses how becoming more mindful through simple meditation can improve cognitive abilities and release anxiety while at the same time helping to combat the myth of 'multi-tasking' that dominates the modern world.  Mindfulness has emotional, cognitive, and physical benefits and could move us, as the author Maria Konnikova argues, to a more Holmes-like state of achieving better results by training our ability to unitask.

The Power of Concentration