10,000 Brilliant Ideas

I think part of the secret of learning a language must be in your brain believing you are in a world where that language is sincerely spoken. When you learn french in an american classroom, it's kind of a game. And when someone says foch, you laugh. But when you're in France your brain switches on its learn-to-survive mechanism and when someone says foch you think seal. I would like to see an experiment where a mini school is constructed in the US where inside it is 100% mini France. Maybe there's a long dark tunnel to get there which serves as a psychological trick to make the mind switch. On the other end of the tunnel is France with its cafes and streets and baguettes and everything. The teachers play the roles of vendor or cop or whatever and students are free to discuss anything with them. The cop makes sure no english is spoken there with an abruptness that also causes a psychological change and makes the brain turn off English. When a kid especially a young kid ent...

I know. Creative teaching environment, blahdy blah, frrrt. The fact is while education has become more creative, it still is lacking. And even if the teaching has achieved something on the creative scale, testing is still very much not. A few truisms that made me stumble on this. - One of the reasons I tank on tests is because there's something inside of me that always wants to find a clever, innovative something. I never get rewarded for clever new ideas on tests and I sometimes get penalized. The rigid test structure is set out beforehand (that's the point) and thinking outside the box isn't encouraged. - This even happens in creative subjects. I made a film shot in reverse (people walking backwards, etc.) that my teacher barely acknowledged. True, it wasn't a very good film, but I think he was instantly turned off by my 'gimmick'. (Which of course has been done before, if it was 'creative' from his well-informed perspective he would have been al...

I'm thinking of a game where you can send out your lemmings to gather data on a population. Then it's up to you to crunch the data to estimate the factor in the population. This can then be compared with the true population numbers. Thus making statistics a little more grounded and meaningful. This could also help learn other population-based disciplines like public health or public policy. What is SIMS, but a trainer for Urban planning?