Key sentences extracted from the text according to their relevance to your request about non-conventional methods, student motivation, classroom atmosphere, and music and the Mozart Effect:

1.

"We teachers can never get enough ways to help create the classroom conditions for students to motivate themselves."

"The Sound of Success: Ideas in Music for Concentration and Productivity"
3.

"Students get excited when they are provided with options for books to read, topics to study, assessments of learning, and final product."

"The best ways I have found to help them have confidence and interest is to allow them to pose questions and to give them choices in their projects."

"As the old progressives used to say, we need to pay attention to the whole child."

"What Schools Can Do to Help"
7.

"Parents agreed that their children would be more likely to succeed in math classes that are relevant and engaging."

These sentences emphasize the importance of classroom environment, student motivation, engagement, and non-traditional approaches such as music for improving learning and performance.

Key sentences extracted from the text according to their relevance to your request about non-conventional methods, student motivation, classroom atmosphere, and music and the Mozart Effect:

1.

Title:

Content: On Teaching (Elliot Eisner)

Too few policymakers have ever taught in public schools. Even fewer can say clearly exactly what it is about teaching young children, youth, and adults that binds teachers and students together and makes the experience of learning memorable, satisfying, and long-lasting. One person I knew well was Elliot Eisner. He has expressed the many satisfactions that inhere to teaching in a fluent and thoughtful way.

Elliot Eisner was Professor Emeritus of Education and Art at Stanford University. He taught in the Chicago public schools before becoming a professor. This is an abridged version of his 2006 Commencement talk to School of Education graduates and their families. Eisner died in 2014.

Among the many satisfactions in teaching there are six I would like to describe. The first pertains to the opportunity to introduce students to ideas that they can chew on for the rest of their lives. Great teaching traffics in enduring puzzlements and persistent dilemmas. Certainties are closed streets, not locations that interest the mind. Great ideas have legs. They take you somewhere.

Ideas can also provide a natural high. With them you can raise questions that can’t be answered. But why do puzzlements provide satisfactions? I believe because they invite that most precious of human abilities-imagination–an opportunity to take wing. Imagination is the neglected stepchild of American education. Questions invite you in. They stimulate the production of possibilities. They give you a ride. And the best ones are those that tickle the intellect and resist resolution.

Second, the satisfactions of teaching provide opportunities to reach out to students in ways that ensure your own immortality. The images of teachers past populate our minds and memories. They sit on our shoulders ready to identify infractions of one kind or another and to offer praise for work well done. Their lives live in yours and your life lives in theirs.

The immortality I speak of is the private, rather than the public immortality that is garnered by only a very few. Yet living through the memories of the great and not so great teachers we have known is no meager accomplishment; you don’t have to be a Mahata Ghandi to be remembered or to be loved.

Third, teaching makes it possible to play your own cello. Despite the beliefs of some well intended technocrats, there are no recipes for performance, no teacher proof scripts to follow. Teaching well requires improvisation within constraints. Constraints there will always be but in the end teaching is a custom job within which the teacher becomes an inseparable part of what is taught.

The inseparability of what is learned from the manner in which it was taught is a lesson best taught by the arts. The arts teach us that form and content cannot be divided; how something is described effects what is described. Curriculum once enacted cannot be separated from the way it was taught because how it was taught influences how it is learned.

Fourth, teaching provides ample opportunities for both artistry and for memorable forms of aesthetic experience. After forty years in the classroom I still have vivid recollections of my sophomore high school art class in which I taught thirty-five eager and some not so eager adolescents. Those memories, in many ways, are among the most aesthetically satisfying and vivid I own.

Teaching well also depends upon artistry. Artistry is the ability to craft a performance, to influence its pace, to shape its rhythms and to modulate its tone so that its parts merge into a coherent whole. You come to feel a process that often exceeds the capacity of language to describe.

Why are these memories so vivid? The nature of long term memory might have something to do with it, but I think there is more to it. I still remember my third grade teacher, Miss Eva Smith calling my name from one end of the classroom to the other to tell me, in a voice that the whole class could hear, “Elliot, Your work is getting better!” Oh how I needed to hear that; I did not do well in school. Or Miss Purtle who gave me a one person show of my paintings on the walls of her classroom when I was in the fourth grade. These were memorable events given to a nine year-old boy not knowing he would carry them with him for the rest of his life.

Fifth, teaching provides occasions to share with others your deep affection for what you teach. There is a sense of contagion when your eyes twinkle with delight at the prospect of introducing students to what you love. Your love of what you teach is conveyed to them; it is the sincerest and most powerful invitation you can extend.

Finally, teaching provides the opportunity to discover that something you once said in class that you cannot now remember made a difference to a former student who you happen to encounter twenty years later. Teaching is filled with such surprises. They reassure us that our contributions sometimes exceed what we can recall.

But the satisfactions of teaching extend beyond the academic. Indeed, the most lasting contributions come from rescuing a child from despair, restoring a sense of hope, soothing a discomfort. These are the occasions whose memories last longest because they are often the occasions that matter most. They are the occasions whose importance transcends academic interests. They address the human needs that all of us share.

It is especially important today at a time when schools are buffeted by performance standards and high stakes testing to remember that the student is a whole person who has an emotional and social life, not just an intellectual one. And this is as true for graduate students in the grandest citadels of higher education as it is for students in elementary school. The more we stress in school only what we can measure the more we need to remember that not everything that is measurable matters and not everything that matters is measurable. As the old progressives used to say, we need to pay attention to the whole child. This is accomplished by how we teach. How we teach is related to the deep satisfactions of teaching I described today.

I have had the moments that I have described-and you will too. I envy you the journey. Oh, to be able to begin that journey once again today!
No such luck!

Filed under Uncategorized

"We teachers can never get enough ways to help create the classroom conditions for students to motivate themselves."

Title:

Content: Opinion Blog

Classroom Q&A

With Larry Ferlazzo

In this EdWeek blog, an experiment in knowledge-gathering, Ferlazzo will address readers’ questions on classroom management, ELL instruction, lesson planning, and other issues facing teachers. Send your questions to lferlazzo@epe.org. Read more from this blog.

Teaching Opinion

How to Get, and Keep, Your Students Engaged

By Larry Ferlazzo — March 29, 2023 14 min read
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We teachers can never get enough ways to help create the classroom conditions for students to motivate themselves.

This post kicks off a series sharing lots of ideas, and today’s contributors also participated in a ten-minute podcast we did together.

‘Build Great Relationships’

Chandra Shaw has more than 24 years of experience in education, as a teacher, reading specialist, instructional coach, and now a literacy consultant at one of her state’s regional service centers. Chandra is a TEDx speaker and amateur YouTuber:

One of the best strategies to create classroom conditions where students are more likely to motivate themselves is to build great relationships with students by making learning relevant, making them feel comfortable, showing how much you care about their learning, and teaching them what they need to know.

One way I did this was to start off the year by asking students to imagine this being the best school year they’ve ever had. I’d ask them to write down and discuss what I would need to do in order for it to be the most successful and best year for them. They’d work in groups and create a list. As they worked, I’d walk around and read through some of the things they’d written, affirming pretty much anything they’d put down by saying, “Oh yeah, I can definitely do that.” Once they’d shared their lists with the entire class, we’d make the class’ top 10 list from the things that had appeared the most on the groups’ lists.

Each year, the students’ lists would undoubtedly include things like, “You need to be nice, provide treats, not show favorites, play games, allow student use of phones in class, and teach them what they need to know to be successful.” OK. That last one is what I’d often suggest as I walked around listening to their groups, and they usually agreed it was important and added it to their lists. At any rate, once the class list was done, and I’d assured them that I would absolutely do everything they’d listed in order to make this year the best year ever, I’d then share MY list of what I needed from them!

Throughout the year, I’d point to the list and ask if I was holding up my end of the bargain. And if they weren’t holding up their end of my list, I’d point that out as well. By returning to our lists again and again, it showed that WE were in this together and all trying to make this the best year. It really seemed to motivate the students when they saw how consistent I was with doing what they needed to succeed.

Asking Questions

Irina McGrath, Ph.D., is an assistant principal at Newcomer Academy in the Jefferson County public schools in Louisville, Ky. She is a co-creator of the ELL2.0 Google site and is a co-director of the Louisville Writing Project (LWP) and a University of Louisville and Indiana University Southeast adjunct professor:

Over the years, I have discovered that certain strategies are more effective than others at getting and keeping students - especially English Language Learners - motivated to learn . One such strategy is simply giving students the opportunity to ask questions and search for answers on their own. Studies have shown the power of asking questions, and some cognitive scientists believe that they are so important that we cannot learn properly until the right one has been asked: If memory does not ask the question, it will not know where to index the answer” (Bain, 2004). By encouraging students to pose their own questions about what they are learning, teachers will be able to help fuel students’ curiosity and promote further engagement in the classroom.

A great way to stimulate question asking is the Read Aloud Response Cards strategy, which teaches students to pay attention to the metacognitive process happening in their heads while listening to a passage being read out loud. The activity involves colored cards indicating tasks for the students to perform based on the card they receive: Those with yellow cards generate questions, green document their connections, red create a summary of the passage, and purple draw images either on paper or in their minds while listening to the passage. When the passage is completed, the students are sorted based on card color and work together to discuss and compare the results of their task, and eventually representatives from each group speak to the rest of the groups about their discoveries and questions during the activity. Ultimately, once posing questions becomes a routine and students realize that they are welcomed and encouraged, ELs’ curiosity will start fueling their learning and desire to discover something interesting and new.

Another strategy that promotes conditions for students to motivate themselves is choice. Students get excited when they are provided with options for books to read, topics to study, assessments of learning, and final product. Every student is a unique learner, and by offering them a choice, we offer an opportunity to build on their interests and talents and take on a new topic in a way that brings joy to learning and gets students excited. For example, if we think about the end of the lesson reflection, there are different ways English-learners can accomplish that when they are provided with choice. Students can either list three or more things they learned that day or create three true statements and one lie about content covered in class. They can also use Vocaroo, Padlet, or any other app/platform to record a note to themselves with advice on how they might approach the lesson’s task differently. Students can even create a two-minute video or a sketch to help classmates understand the lesson’s content better.

Overall, students are more likely to be motivated to learn if given a sense of autonomy and self-derived excitement for a topic. The best ways I have found to help them have confidence and interest is to allow them to pose questions and to give them choices in their projects.

‘Opportunities for Choice’

Meg Riordan, Ph.D., is the chief learning officer at the Possible Zone, a youth-entrepreneurship and work-based learning program with a mission to advance economic equity. She has been in the field of education for almost 30 years as a middle, high school, and college teacher; researcher; leadership coach; school designer; and director for a network of schools:

While many factors influence students’ motivation and engagement, it is central to ignite connection via relationships, share and uphold expectations, uncover and tap into students’ strengths, create relevant learning experiences, and design for choice. Such strategies can unlock students’ motivation for learning that lasts a lifetime.

Prior to the pandemic, a student survey of over 3,000 schools found that motivation and engagement declines as students progress in school; while 5th graders reported their engagement level at almost 75 percent, by 10th grade, students’ engagement hovered at 33 percent. Read that again: 33 percent. Despite this stark statistic, there is hope: two items drive motivation and engagement: 1) when students “strongly agreed” that school was “asset- and strengths-based” and 2) when they affirmed that they had “at least one teacher who made them excited about the future,” they were 30 times more likely to be engaged compared with those who disagreed. Search Institute research corroborates that students are motivated and goal-oriented when they feel a sense of belonging, safety, and acceptance.

Since the pandemic, additional forces amplified students’ lack of motivation: virtual instruction, social distance from peers, economic hardships, and racial reckonings, to name a few. Given these conditions, what strategies can educators employ to create classrooms where students motivate themselves and sustain engagement? I explore ways to motivate, engage, and support learners.

1. Build relationships and seek out students’ strengths

Research shows that young people who experience strong developmental relationships demonstrate increased academic motivation, social-emotional growth and learning, and a sense of responsibility. Developmental relationships are “close connections through which young people discover who they are, cultivate abilities to shape their own lives, and learn how to engage with and contribute to the world around them.” In the classroom, this might take the shape in the following ways:

  • Design opportunities for students to show who they are: Kick off the school year with a project in which students take selfies or create profile silhouettes of themselves and share words, symbols, and pictures of things that they value; teachers can connect with and build from students’ assets. Throughout the year, educators can provide opportunities for two-minute interviews in which students speak on a topic they’re passionate about (e.g: the worst pizza in town or why Serena Williams is the best athlete ever); knowing who our students are and seeing their strengths is a powerful driver to build relationships and spark motivation.
  • Provide clear expectations, ask what students expect from you, and strive to uphold and meet expectations: When educators are clear about expectations and invite students to share their needs, the relationship becomes bidirectional and is more likely to offer space to express care and challenge growth, both key aspects of developmental relationships. School designs like EL Education promote co-creation of norms and ongoing opportunities for students and educators to revisit and reflect on owning and meeting shared expectations; this cultivates an environment where voices and actions are valued.

2. Create relevant learning and opportunities for choice

Students experience motivation and engagement when educators help them get excited about the future. To see oneself in the future, it’s important to activate students’ self-concept and create opportunities to develop self-efficacy and agency. Consider these ideas:

  • Create authentic projects for real audiences: Research shows that when students actively pose questions and problem-solve real issues, conduct fieldwork, talk with experts, and produce meaningful work with impact beyond the classroom, not only does engagement soar but so does achievement. While educators may feel constrained by standards, consider small and larger steps to integrate relevant projects. This might include integrating interviews into a unit or, go big, like The Possible Zone, which engages young people in consultancies with local industry partners to solve authentic challenges and present solutions. Schools like High Tech High offer models of projects for inspiration.
  • Embed options throughout students’ learning experiences: Student choice and autonomy develop agency, building decisionmaking skills for careers and lives. In the classroom, this might include entry points such as choosing where to sit, “how” to learn (e.g.: reading, listening to podcasts, interviewing an expert), or choice of topics (e.g.: demonstrating research and synthesizing skills via a topic determined by student interest). When designing—or co-designing—learning environments with students, educators should ask: Where can I offer productive choices? When determining where to sit, for example, a teacher might suggest, “Choose a seat where you’ll be most engaged,” or “Sit where you’re comfortable.” Students can revisit choices and reflect on their predictions.

Classroom Culture

Andrew Sharos is a teacher, administrator, speaker, and author in Chicago. He wrote the Amazon-best-selling book All 4s and 5s, which has become the road map to instructional methods and culture building for gifted and talented teachers. He also co-authored Finding Lifelines, a book for new teachers and their mentors:

Motivation for students really comes back to classroom culture. We hope to create a classroom culture that is so fun, engaging, and magnetic that students actually WANT to be in school. Teachers who engage students are ones who create a unique and different experience for the students every day.

In terms of concrete strategies, I like to have students learn outside the classroom in the halls, courtyard, on the grass, or in the auditorium. The walls of a classroom have limitations, and mixing it up in different spaces keeps the students on their toes.

I enjoy having a theme every day, like Weekend Monday, Positive Tuesday, Thankfulness Wednesday, Joke Thursday, and Cookie Friday. It might waste a few minutes at the beginning of every class, but it is time well wasted if the students are more engaged after we engage in some playful dialogue at the beginning of class. These are hallmarks of the class and moments students enjoy.

When students are not engaged, the teacher has to find ONE thing that connects the student and the teacher. The teacher could, and maybe even should be the reason why the student wants to come to school. This can only be made possible when there is a relationship built on love and trust.

Sometimes, this takes time. One student of mine was impossibly difficult to connect with, or so I thought. I recited a movie line from “Ace Ventura” one day, and she was the only person in the class who “got it.” From that moment on, we connected. We have to keep chipping away at the less motivated. The students don’t have to love the content and skills we are teaching, they just have to feel connected to us to be motivated to learn.

This is the first post in a multipart series.

The question of the week is:

What strategies have you used to create classroom conditions where students were more likely to motivate themselves, including those who didn’t initially seem very engaged?

Chandra Shaw, Irina McGrath, Meg Riordan, and Andrew Sharos kicked off this series today.

Chandra, Irina, Meg, and Andrew were also guests on my 10-minute BAM! Radio Show. You can also find a list of, and links to, previous shows here.

Thanks to Chandra, Irina, Meg, and Andrew for contributing their thoughts!

Consider contributing a question to be answered in a future post. You can send one to me at lferlazzo@educationweek.org. When you send it in, let me know if I can use your real name if it’s selected or if you’d prefer remaining anonymous and have a pseudonym in mind.

You can also contact me on Twitter at @Larryferlazzo.

Education Week has published a collection of posts from this blog, along with new material, in an e-book form. It’s titled Classroom Management Q&As: Expert Strategies for Teaching.

Just a reminder; you can subscribe and receive updates from this blog via email (The RSS feed for this blog, and for all EdWeek articles, has been changed by the new redesign—new ones are not yet available). And if you missed any of the highlights from the first 11 years of this blog, you can see a categorized list below.

I am also creating a Twitter list including all contributors to this column.

The opinions expressed in Classroom Q&A With Larry Ferlazzo are strictly those of the author(s) and do not reflect the opinions or endorsement of Editorial Projects in Education, or any of its publications.

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Title:

Content: Opinion Blog

Classroom Q&A

With Larry Ferlazzo

In this EdWeek blog, an experiment in knowledge-gathering, Ferlazzo will address readers’ questions on classroom management, ELL instruction, lesson planning, and other issues facing teachers. Send your questions to lferlazzo@epe.org. Read more from this blog.

Teaching Opinion

How to Enhance the Craft of Teaching

By Larry Ferlazzo — February 22, 2023 13 min read
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(This is the third post in a seven-part series. You can see Part One here and Part Two here.)

The new question of the week is:

What do you think are the best one-to-three things a teacher can do to improve his/her/their craft?

Carissa McCray, Ph.D., Latrese D. Younger, Kayla Towner, and Verónica Schmidt-Gómez, M.Ed., started this series in Part One.

Carissa, Latresee, and Kayla were also guests on my 10-minute BAM! Radio Show. You can also find a list of, and links to, previous shows here.

In Part Two, Aisha Christa Atkinson, M.S., Angela M. Ward, Ph.D., Meghann Seril, and Altagracia H. Delgado contributed their suggestions.

Today, Ron Berger, Nancy Frey, Ph.D., Douglas Fisher, Ph.D., and Mary K. Tedrow continue the discussion.

‘Questions and Responses’

Ron Berger has over 45 years of experience in education, 28 of those as a public school teacher. He is the author of a collection of books on education including Management in the Active Classroom and Leaders of Their Own Learning. He leads EL Education’s vision for teaching and learning:

This is a challenging question. To list a hundred things would be easy; to narrow it to one or two is daunting. One challenge: Which dimension of our teaching craft? Relationships—ensuring that all students are cared for, valued, and inspired? Inspiration—building classroom communities that bring out the best in students? Planning and Instruction—designing and leading learning experiences that are challenging and meaningful? Assessment—building student agency and ownership for growth? And what format for improving our craft? Peer observations? Professional learning communities? Working with a coach?

But the charge here is to be focused and specific, so I will choose one topic: Questions and responses. I am amazed by the power of great teachers to use questions artfully and respond to student answers in ways that open minds and doors. Our craft will profoundly improve if we can all get better at this.

When I observe lessons, most teacher questions are low-level recall questions, regardless of whether it is in a kindergarten or high school classroom (e.g., “The next step in the process is …?”, “And who discovered that?” “We call that a …”). We often don’t even realize this is the case unless we watch ourselves on video with this specific focus. It is a habit we learn as students and repeat as teachers.

But sometimes, I observe classrooms where teachers regularly push students’ thinking and open minds with their questions. They compel students to reflect on their thinking, explain it to each other, and question one another: “You have an interesting hypothesis. Can you explain it to us?” “What evidence would you point to for that?” “It sounds like you disagree with Jalen. Jalen, how would you defend your idea given this argument?” “Katelyn, I don’t think I understand your solution. Can you explain the mathematical steps you took to get there?” Questions like these empower students to own, reflect on, and defend their thinking and then debate it with their peers.

Equally important to how we as teachers ask students questions is how we respond to student questions. We often wait for the “right answer” to appear, and when it does, our faces light up, and we confirm that it is correct. Students know this game; many are passive and wait for a peer to respond. No sense in wasting time thinking or risking being wrong. They attend to the teacher’s words and face to affirm that they don’t have to think—they are off the hook.

But everything changes if the teacher gives a neutral response—an intrigued face that does not telegraph right or wrong: “Fascinating, Susana. Explain why you feel that’s right.” Students will immediately look at the teacher to read her face. They need to know: fascinating as in “correct” or fascinating as in “wrong”? Which is it? If the teacher can keep a neutral face, students have to actually stop, listen, and think. Do they agree with Susana or not? They may have to choose a side. They have to think and understand, and everyone is engaged. A neutral stance can change everything.

I worked with a sparkly-eyed teacher, John Reid, who showed his students strange and puzzling geological scenes in the field or through slides—rocks, rivers, landscapes. He asked them to describe in detail what they saw and explain the story of how they thought those scenes came to be. Every time a student came up with a hypothesis, he asked a series of probing questions, drawing out their thinking and simultaneously teaching concepts via the questions themselves. And then, he named that hypothesis after that student and recruited a different idea from another student. The students couldn’t wait to discover who was right and why, but John was inscrutable. He was excited and amused equally by all the ideas. Sometimes, he even ended a class without closure, and students eagerly rushed to research which hypothesis made the most sense.

This advice also applies to drawing out questions from students. I love visiting classrooms where the walls are covered with student questions that drive learning—anchor charts of “100 questions we have about our classroom snails”; “Questions we have about whose story is not told in our history book”; “Questions we have about the universe.”

Recently, I met with middle school teachers who were implementing “Crew” (EL Education’s name for a daily advisory-meeting structure and school culture that focuses on personal and academic wellness). An excited teacher shared a strategy she used: “I gave my Crew index cards, and they anonymously wrote questions about topics they hoped we could discuss. Their questions dealt with things like mental health, race, gender identity, body image, parents, social media, love, death, bullying. … It was eye-opening. Our conversations have been remarkable, and they really matter to my Crew.” Empowering students through recruiting, respecting, and giving time for their deeper questions can transform classroom culture.

Focusing on questions and responses may seem like a small part of our craft, but doing it well can fundamentally improve learning and life.

‘Professional Generosity’

Nancy Frey, Ph.D., is a professor in educational leadership at San Diego State and a teacher leader at Health Sciences High and Middle College. Her published titles include Visible Learning in Literacy, This Is Balanced Literacy, Removing Labels, and Rebound.

Douglas Fisher, Ph.D., is a professor of educational leadership at San Diego State University and a teacher leader at Health Sciences High. He has published numerous articles on teaching and learning as well as books such as The Teacher Clarity Playbook, PLC+, Visible Learning for Literacy, Comprehension: The Skill, Will, and Thrill of Reading, How Tutoring Works, and most recently, How Learning Works:

Educators are knowledge workers, and the currency of our profession is the knowledge we possess. An educated society enjoys more robust economic growth and better health outcomes. Our investment in educators is long-lasting and extends far beyond the schooling years. As educators who are members of our communities, we owe it to ourselves to invest in our own professional knowledge. But to do so requires that we invest in ourselves with intention and don’t leave it to chance. Here are three practices to ensure that we continuously build our knowledge and skills.

Set annual knowledge goals and develop an action plan to attain them. The notion that experience equals skill has a shelf life—while skill development increases rapidly during the early years in the profession, it levels off after five years. A teacher with 17 years of experience isn’t likely to be more skilled than one with seven years under their belt. The difference, however, is knowledge. Teachers who pursue advanced degrees, attain national-board certification, and seek new opportunities to enhance their skills continue to invest in themselves. Take an annual inventory of your own skills and performance. Identify areas where growth occurred as well as where knowledge gaps persist. It can be helpful to meet with a trusted colleague to identify these areas. Once you’re done so, develop an action plan to address your next steps for growth.

Spend time in colleagues’ classrooms and invite them into yours. There’s a real danger in isolating oneself in a single classroom. And there is so much to learn from collegial observations of teaching. In fact, this should be a central feature of professional learning communities. Capacity-building learning walks are not evaluative observations but rather are short, scheduled 10-minute visits through a succession of classrooms. Members of a 3rd grade team may arrange with their 4th grade colleagues to walk classrooms to gain knowledge about expectations for their students next year. Geometry teachers might conduct a learning walk of the classrooms of their Algebra 1 colleagues to gain a better sense of how mathematical thinking is manifested. Schools that regularly conduct teacher-led learning walks enjoy higher degrees of relational supports among teachers as well as an increased collective responsibility for student learning across the building. Importantly, learning walks are a catalyst for the spread of effective instructional practices.

Get involved with school and district organizations and committees. You possess the ability to positively impact the professional lives of teachers through your advocacy and leadership. Your voice is an essential one for obtaining resources, building student learning, and fostering family empowerment. In the meantime, the learning you gain from such experiences is immeasurable as you interact with others on shared goals. The next time you are approached to join a committee, resist the urge to catalog why you can’t and, instead, consider how you might. Your time is precious, to be sure, but must include opportunities to interact with adults to discuss what is central to your professional life—continuous learning.

If you have detected a common thread of professional generosity, you’re right. Doing so means that you are generous to yourself in focusing on what your learning needs are. In addition, it extends to the supportive relational conditions needed for schools to be learning, not just teaching, organizations. And it is further evidenced in an intention to be a part of our institutions’ need to address inequities and gaps. We are knowledge workers—how will you invest in your knowledge this school year?

Annual Goals

Mary K. Tedrow, NBCT, taught in the high school English classroom beginning in 1978, ending her K-12 career as the Porterfield Endowed English Chair at John Handley High School in 2016. She currently teaches and directs the Shenandoah Valley Writing Project at Shenandoah University in Winchester Va. Tedrow is also a lecturer at Johns Hopkins University and the author of Write, Think, Learn: Tapping the Power of Daily Student Writing Across Content Areas:

I have benefited from including the following habits into my own teaching practice. Not only have they changed practices, they keep me engaged and growing in my chosen career.

  • Set an annual goal on an aspect of teaching for improvement. I accept this challenge each year and have added the following to my repertoire: How to lead a better whole-class discussion. This led to Socratic Seminars and then to the Harkness discussion model. How to use writing as a tool for learning in the English classroom. This was an ongoing challenge to embed writing to learn language arts concepts. How to build collaboration into class and still meet curricular goals. This challenge forced me to think about student-centered learning and to shift the responsibility for learning over to students. All of these questions arose out of a true reflection on what needed improvement.
  • Take your goals and questions to your professional community. That community could be the other teachers in your building (our resident expert let me sit in on one of her seminars and shared handouts and guidelines), online communities (I learned about Harkness discussions on an Advanced Placement discussion board), or professional books. My favorite professional books are written by teachers who have walked the talk like Nancy Atwell, Kelly Gallagher, and Penny Kittle.
  • Don’t forget to ask the students! If students know your question is an honest overture for input, they will provide valuable feedback. When I am stumped in resolving a problem, I ask students for suggestions. Some of the best changes made came directly from student feedback. In fact, I trusted them so much that the students annually revised our Staff Manual for the Journalism lab. We relied on these guidelines for producing the paper.

Thanks to Ron, Nancy, Douglas, and Mary for contributing their thoughts!

Consider contributing a question to be answered in a future post. You can send one to me at lferlazzo@educationweek.org. When you send it in, let me know if I can use your real name if it’s selected or if you’d prefer remaining anonymous and have a pseudonym in mind.

You can also contact me on Twitter at @Larryferlazzo.

Education Week has published a collection of posts from this blog, along with new material, in an e-book form. It’s titled Classroom Management Q&As: Expert Strategies for Teaching.

Just a reminder; you can subscribe and receive updates from this blog via email (The RSS feed for this blog, and for all EdWeek articles, has been changed by the new redesign—new ones are not yet available). And if you missed any of the highlights from the first 11 years of this blog, you can see a categorized list below.

I am also creating a Twitter list including all contributors to this column.

The opinions expressed in Classroom Q&A With Larry Ferlazzo are strictly those of the author(s) and do not reflect the opinions or endorsement of Editorial Projects in Education, or any of its publications.

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"The Sound of Success: Ideas in Music for Concentration and Productivity"
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The Sound of Success: Ideas in Music for Concentration and Productivity

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Does music help you concentrate? Since we spend a lot of time in front of computers trying to finish our work, wouldn’t it be nice to listen to some of music to help concentrate? Well, music lovers, it seems like Mozart and Beethoven could actually help you with your productivity. Beethoven once said: «Music is where the spirit lives, thinks and invents.»

This relationship between music and the brain is an area that has been intensively explored in research. Many studies point to the ability of music to help employees be more productive and help children in their learning process more effectively. University research in France found that students who listened to music for an hour while reading, scored significantly higher on a questionnaire compared to a group of students who read without music.

Your attention span is better when listening to music

It seems that music for concentration puts students in a heightened emotional state, so that they can be more receptive to information. «It is possible that music causes a change in the learning environment and influenced students’ motivation to stay focused while reading, which led to better performance on a multiple-choice questionnaire,» concluded the french research team in a recent article.

But before you start playing any type, you have to find the music that works better for the type of work you are trying to carry do. For example, the classic from the Baroque period is said to do wonders for brain activity when you are studying or writing. But not all classical music is created equal, so dramatic changes and complicated fugue changes may not be as conducive as a smooth piano piece. So if you have to choose a composer, we would say Mozart. There seems to be evidence that Mozart’s improves mental performance: it is called «The Mozart Effect”.

Build a harmonious space

If you don’t like classical, the discreet sound found in ambient music may work well for you instead. What is the purpose of this if you are not at the airport, you ask? Well, for creative purposes, it’s better than emptiness and silence. According to one of its pioneers, musician Brian Eno: “Background music must be able to accommodate many levels of attention when listening, without forcing one in particular. It must be as ignorable as it is interesting ”.

In fact, researchers have shown that a moderate level of noise, such as that found in the environment, can actually get creative juices flowing. Music with especially low-lows or especially high-highs should be avoided. Certain types of jazz instrumental melodies can also get your brain working.

Music without lyrics

In general, if you are doing work that requires writing, you should avoid listening to music with lyrics as the words in a song are especially destructive to your concentration. Since hearing words activates the brain’s language center, attempting to perform tasks related to another language would be like trying to have a conversation while someone else is speaking to you. But, if you are a cartoonist, and you don’t deal with sentence construction, hearing letters may not have the same effect.

Finally, studies show that listening to music you’re already familiar with may be better if you really need to focus. New songs take you into the unknown and your brain will want to listen closely to see what comes next. With the music you are familiar with you know what to expect, so it doesn’t distract you from your work. And if you like the tune you’re listening to try not to whistle it while you work, as that will only distract you.

The post The Sound of Success: Ideas in Music for Concentration and Productivity appeared first on Mundo Hispanico

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Why Word Problems Are Such a Struggle for Students—And What Teachers Can Do

By Sarah Schwartz — May 01, 2023 12 min read
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Give Cindy Cliche a math word problem, and she can tell you exactly where most students are going to trip up.

Cliche, the district math coordinator in the Murfreesboro City school district in Tennessee, has spent decades teaching elementary schoolers how to tackle their first word problems and now coaches teachers in how to do the same. Kids’ struggles, for the most part, haven’t changed, she said.

Take this problem, which students might work on in 1st grade: There are some bunnies on the grass. Three bunnies hop over, and then there are five total. How many bunnies were there to begin with?

The problem is asking about a change: What’s the starting, unknown quantity of bunnies, if adding 3 to that quantity equals 5? In other words, x + 3 = 5. But most 1st graders don’t make that connection right away, Cliche said. Instead, they see the numbers 3 and 5, and they add them.

“Nine times out of 10 they’re going to say, ‘eight,’” Cliche said. “They’re number pluckers. They take this number and this number and they add them together or they take them apart.”

This is one of the biggest challenges in word problem-solving, educators and researchers agree—getting students to understand that the written story on the page represents a math story, and that the math story can be translated into an equation.

Making this connection is a key part of early mathematical sense-making. It helps students begin to understand that math isn’t just about numbers on a page, but a way of representing relationships in the world. And it’s one of the ways that kids learn to unite conceptual understanding of problems with the procedures they will need to solve them.

“When students struggle [with word problems], it tends to be everything else they have to do to get to the calculation,” said Brian Bushart, a 4th grade teacher in the West Irondequoit schools in Rochester, N.Y.

There are evidence-backed strategies that teachers can use to help students make these connections, researchers say.

These approaches teach students how to understand “math language,” how to devise a plan of attack for a problem, and how to recognize different problem types. And though they provide students tools and explicit strategies, these techniques are designed to support kids’ sense-making, not circumvent it, said Lynn Fuchs, a research professor in the department of special education at Vanderbilt University.

The goal, she said, is “understanding the full narrative of what’s being presented.”

How word problems are used in early grades

Story problems serve a few different purposes in early grades, said Nicole McNeil, a professor of psychology at the University of Notre Dame who studies students’ cognitive development in math.

They can help connect children’s preexisting knowledge to the math they’re learning in class—"activating that knowledge kids have in their everyday life, and then showing, how do mathematicians represent that?” McNeil said.

Cliche likes to use word problems in this way to introduce the concept of dividing by fractions.

“We’ll tell the kids, ‘I have three sandwiches here and I need to divide them in half so that everyone will get a piece,’” she said. “‘How many people can I feed?’”

After students solve the problem, Cliche introduces the operation that students could use to divide by fractions—marrying this conceptual understanding with the procedure that students would use going forward.

But word problems can also be used in the opposite direction, to see if students can apply their understanding of equations they’ve learned to real-world situations, McNeil said.

And there’s another, practical reason that teachers practice word problems: They’re ubiquitous in curriculum and they’re frequently tested.

There are lots of different kinds of problems that kids could work on in math classes, said Tamisha Thompson, a STEAM (for science, technology, engineering, the arts, and math) instructional coach in the Millbury public schools in Massachusetts, and a doctoral student in learning sciences at Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

Many story problems have one right answer, but there are also problems that could have multiple answers—or ones that aren’t solvable. Spending more time with a broader diversity of problems could encourage more creative mathematical thinking, Thompson said. “But we’re really driven by standardized tests,” she said. “And standardized tests typically have one right answer.”

In general, between 30 percent and 50 percent of standardized-test items in math feature these kinds of story problems, said Sarah Powell, an associate professor in the department of special education at the University of Texas at Austin.

“Until things change, and until we write better and different tests, if you want students to show their math knowledge, they have to show that through word problem-solving,” Powell said.

Why students struggle with word problems

Sometimes, students struggle with word problems because they don’t know where to start.

Just reading the problem can be the first hurdle. If early-elementary schoolers don’t have the reading skills to decode the words, or if they don’t know some of the vocabulary, they’ll struggle, said McNeil.

That can result in students scoring low on these portions of standardized tests, even if they understand the underlying math concepts—something McNeil considers to be a design flaw. “You’re trying to assess math, not reading twice,” she said.

Then, there’s math-specific vocabulary. What do words like “fewer than,” or “the rest,” mean in math language, and how do they prompt different actions depending on their placement in a problem?

Even if students can read the problem, they may struggle to figure out what it’s asking them to do, said Powell. They need to identify relevant information and ignore irrelevant information—including data that may be presented in charts or graphs. Then, they have to choose an operation to use to solve the problem.

Only once students have gone through all these steps do they actually perform a calculation.

Teaching kids how to work through all these setup steps takes time. But it’s time that a lot of schools don’t take, said Cliche, who has also worked previously as a state math trainer for Tennessee. Word problems aren’t often the focus of instruction—rather, they’re seen as a final exercise in transfer after a lot of practice with algorithms, she said.

A second problem: Many schools teach shortcut strategies for deciphering word problems that aren’t effective, Powell said.

Word problem “key words” charts abound on lesson-sharing sites like Teachers Pay Teachers. These graphic organizers are designed to remind students which math words signal different operations. When you see the word “more,” for example, that means add the numbers in the problem.

Talking with students about the meaning of math vocabulary is useful, said Powell. But using specific words as cues to add or subtract is a flawed strategy, Powell said, because “there is no single word that means an operation.” The word “more” might mean that the numbers need to be added together—or it might mean something else in context. Some problems have no key words at all.

In a 2022 paper, Powell and her colleagues analyzed more than 200 word problems from Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) and Smarter Balanced math tests in elementary and middle school grades. Those tests are given by states for federal accountability purposes.

They found that using the key words strategy would lead students to choose the right operation to solve the problem less than half the time for single-step problems and less than 10 percent of the time for multistep problems.

Evidence-based strategies for helping struggling students

So if key words aren’t an effective strategy to support students who struggle, what is?

One evidence-based approach is called schema-based instruction. This approach categorizes problems into different types, depending on the math event portrayed, said Fuchs, who has studied schema-based instruction for more than two decades.

But unlike key words, schemas don’t tell students what operations to use. Instead, they help students form a mental model of a math event. They still need to read the problem, understand how that story maps onto their mental model, and figure out what information is missing, Fuchs said.

One type of schema, for example, is a “total” or “combine” problem, in which two quantities together make a total: “Jose has five apples. Carlos has two apples. How many apples do they have together?” In this case, students would need to add to get the answer.

But this is also a total problem: “Together, Jose and Carlos have seven apples. If Jose has five apples, how many apples does Carlos have?”

Here, adding the two numbers in the problem would bring students to the wrong answer. They need to understand that seven is the total, five is one part of the total, and there is another, unknown part—and then solve from there.

To introduce schemas, Vanderbilt’s Fuchs said, “we start with a child and the teacher representing the mathematical event in a concrete way.”

Take a “difference” problem, which compares a larger quantity and a smaller quantity for a difference. To demonstrate this, an early-elementary teacher might show the difference in height between two students or the difference in length of two posters in the room.

Eventually, the teacher would introduce other ways of representing this “difference” event, like drawing one smaller and one larger rectangle on a piece of paper. Then, Fuchs said, the teacher would explain the “difference” event with a number sentence—the formula for calculating difference—to connect the conceptual understanding with the procedure. Students would then learn a solution strategy for the schema.

Children can then use their understanding of these different problem types to solve new problems, Fuchs said.

There are other strategies for word-problem-solving, too.

  • Attack strategies. Several studies have found that giving students a consistent set of steps they can use to approach every problem has positive effects. These attack strategies are different from schemas because they can be used with any problem type, offering more general guidance like reminders to read the problem and pull out relevant information.
  • Embedded vocabulary. A 2021 study from Fuchs and her colleagues found that math-specific vocabulary instruction helped students get better at word problem-solving. These vocabulary lessons were embedded into schema instruction, and they focused on words that had a specific meaning in a math context—teaching kids the difference between “more than” and “then there were more,” for example.
  • ‘Numberless’ problems. Some educators have also developed their own strategies. . One of these is what’s called “numberless” word problems. A numberless problem has the same structure as a regular story problem but with the quantities strategically removed. An initial statement might say, for example, “Kevin found some bird feathers in the park. On his way home, he lost some of the feathers.”

With numberless problems, instead of jumping to the calculation, “the conversation is the goal,” said Bushart, the 4th grade teacher from New York, who has created a website bank of numberless problems that teachers can use.

The teacher talks with students about the change the story shows and what numbers might be reasonable—and not reasonable. The process is a form of scaffolding, Bushart said: a way to get students thinking conceptually about problems from the start.

Balancing structure and challenge

These approaches all rely on explicit teaching to give students tools that can help them succeed with problems they’re likely to see often in class or on tests.

But many math educators also use word problems that move beyond these common structures, in an attempt to engage students in creative problem-solving. Figuring out how much structure to provide—and how much challenge—can be a delicate balance.

These kinds of problems often require that students integrate real-life knowledge, and challenge them to “think beyond straightforward applications of mathematical situations,” said McNeil of Notre Dame.

There may be an extra number in the problem that kids don’t have to use. Or the problem might pose a question that would lead students to a nonsensical answer if they just used their procedural knowledge. For example: 65 students are going on a field trip. If each bus can hold 10 students, how many buses are needed?

Students might do the calculation and answer this question with 6.5, but that number doesn’t make sense, said McNeil—you can’t have half a bus.

In a 2021 study, McNeil and her colleague Patrick Kirkland rewrote some of these challenging questions in a way that encouraged students to think more deeply about the problems. They found that middle school students who worked on these experimental problems were more likely than their peers to engage in deep mathematical thinking. But, they were also less likely to get the problems correct than their peers who did standard word problems.

Other research, with young children, has found that teaching students how to transfer their knowledge can help them work through novel problems.

When students are given only problems that are all structured the same way, even minor changes to that format can prevent them from recognizing problem schemas, said Fuchs.

“What we found in our line of work is that if you change the way the word problem reads, in only very minor ways, they no longer recognize that, this is a ‘change’ problem, or a ‘difference’ problem,” she said, referencing different problem schemas.

In the early 2000s, she and her colleagues tested interventions to help students transfer their knowledge to more complex, at times open-ended problems. They found that when children were taught about the notion of transfer, shown examples of different forms of the same problem type, and encouraged to find examples in their own lives, they performed better on novel, multistep problems than their peers who had only received schema instruction.

The results are an example of how explicit instruction can lay the groundwork for students to be successful with more open-ended problem-solving, Fuchs said.

Exactly how to sequence this learning—when to lean into structure and when to release students into challenge—is an open question, McNeil said.

“We need more researchers focused on what are the best structures? What order should things go in? What is the appropriate scope and sequence for word problems?” she said. “We don’t have that information yet.”

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"Parents agreed that their children would be more likely to succeed in math classes that are relevant and engaging."

These sentences emphasize the importance of classroom environment, student motivation, engagement, and non-traditional approaches such as music for improving learning and performance.


**Key Sentences Extracted Based on Importance to Your Request:**

1.

*The National Museum’s Discovering Ancient Egypt is alone among the three shows to boast a dedicated room of mummified people and animals.

*

2.

*Pharaoh fever: The museum blockbuster coming to a city near you The Australian Museum kicks off the year of ancient Egyptian mania with Ramses and the Gold of the Pharaohs, endorsed by the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.

*

3.

*In it, renowned art historian BN Goswamy illustrates all the varied ways in which cats have made themselves a home in our art, literature, and speech, as well as in our hearts.

*

**Note:**
The provided text does not directly address why cats were so highly valued in ancient Egypt, their spiritual connections in that culture, or the specific mourning custom of shaving eyebrows after a cat’s death.

The only relevant sentences pertain to ancient Egypt’s cultural focus on cats via museum exhibits, and cats in art and culture.

**Summary (Based on Available Text):**
- Ancient Egyptians highly valued cats, even mummifying them—indicating deep spiritual and cultural significance.

- Museum exhibits focus on mummified cats and animals, highlighting their esteemed role in ancient Egyptian life.

- Cats have long been present in art, literature, and emotional life, suggesting a broad cross-cultural resonance that includes spiritual dimensions.

**If you need a detailed report with historical details such as the connection to deities like Bastet, the tradition of shaving eyebrows for cats in mourning, and further Egyptian-specific information, please let me know or provide an additional source for extraction.

**Key Sentences Extracted Based on Importance to Your Request:**

1.

Title:

Content:   1. Skip to content
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CultureEgypt

Egypt unveils ancient workshops used to make mummies

1 hour ago

Archaeologists in Egypt have revealed two workshops that were used to embalm people and animals. Tombs were also opened up, featuring walls that depict daily life and images of an ancient priest.

https://p.dw.com/p/4Rtaf

Egyptian antiquities officials on Saturday revealed that a research team had unearthed human and animal mummification workshops as well as two tombs in the ancient burial ground of Saqqara.

The discovery follows an excavation lasting around a year near the sanctuary of the goddess Bastet and catacombs of mummified cats in Saqqara, some 30 kilometers (roughly 18.5 miles) south of Cairo.

What did the archaeologists find?

The embalming workshops, one in which humans were mummified with the other used for animals, date back to ancient Egypt's 30th dynasty — which reigned about 2,400 years ago.

Egypt's tourism and antiquities ministry said that in one of the workshops, the researchers had "found several rooms equipped with stony beds where the deceased lay down for mummification."

At the end of each bed were gutters that appeared to be needed for the mummification process.

There was also a collection of clay pots nearby to hold entrails and organs, and an assembly of other instruments and ritual vessels.

An initial study of the second workshop suggested it was used to mummify sacred animals.

Also part of the discovery were the tombs of two priests, one dating back to the 24th century BC and the other to the 14th century BC.

The earliest belonged to Ne Hesut Ba, who was the head of scribes and priest of the gods Horus and Maat in the Old Kingdom's fifth dynasty.

Mohamed Youssef, director of the Saqqara archaeological site said the tomb walls were decorated with depictions of "daily life, agriculture, and hunting scenes."

The second tomb was carved in rock and features depictions of the deceased himself, a New Kingdom priest named Men Kheber, "in different positions."

It also contained a 1-meter-long (roughly 1 yard) alabaster statue.

Push for tourists pays off

Egypt's government has strongly promoted new archaeological finds to international media and diplomats in recent years in the hope that such discoveries will help attract more tourists to the country.

Cairo aims to revive an industry that suffered from political turmoil and that was battered by the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and fallout from the conflict in Ukraine.

Economic data showed tourism revenues climbing to $7.3 billion in the second half of 2022, a 25.7% increase compared with the previous year.

rc/msh (AFP, AP)

*The National Museum’s Discovering Ancient Egypt is alone among the three shows to boast a dedicated room of mummified people and animals.

Title:

Content: Pharaoh fever: The museum blockbuster coming to a city near you

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Pharaoh fever: The museum blockbuster coming to a city near you

By Linda Morris

It was comedian Steve Martin who first mined laughs at the expense of the museum antiquity blockbuster 45 years ago.

Then a Saturday Night Live regular, Martin dressed as King Tutankhamun to send up a travelling exhibition of pharaonic treasures making a six-city, 2½-year tour across the United States.

As Americans queued for hours for a look-see, Martin mocked the sale of trinkets, toys, posters, and T-shirts while thanking the boy king for giving his life for tourism.

The roadshow that Martin skewered, Treasures of Tutankhamun, is widely regarded as the first of the modern-day blockbuster – those packaged exhibitions with mass appeal and a souvenir shop at the exit.

It’s the granddaddy of three international treasure shows opening across Australian east coast capital cities from November 18.

The Australian Museum kicks off the year of ancient Egyptian mania with Ramses and the Gold of the Pharaohs, endorsed by the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities. At the launch on Friday, the Australian Museum announced that it had pre-sold 100,000 tickets for its new blockbuster, an unprecedented public response.

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The Egyptian head of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, Dr Mostafa predicted a million visitors by the show’s end, an attendance record for the museum.

A month later, the National Museum of Australia opens Discovering Ancient Egypt, an exhibition of more than 220 objects from the Rijksmuseum Van Oudheden ( National Museum of Antiquities) in the Netherlands – one of the finest collections of Egyptian antiquities outside of Egypt.

And come June, the British Museum is making its most ambitious international loan of ancient Egyptian artefacts to the National Gallery of Victoria.

The arrival of these three shows in quick succession is mostly a consequence of the havoc wrought by COVID-19 which sidelined global museum loans for two years and disrupted museum schedules. Despite the competition, one million people are expected to visit the treasure shows.

“These things do happen,” NGV’s senior curator of international programs, Miranda Wallace, says of the rush. “It’s like buses: there’s nothing for ages, then three come along.”

Beyond Tutankhamun

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The world’s obsession with the ancient Egyptians began with Napoleon’s military campaign in Egypt and kicked off again with British archaeologist Howard Carter’s 1922 discovery of the royal tomb of Tutankhamun.

Egyptology is now deeply enmeshed in popular culture and mythology: the gold, precious gems, secret burial chambers, coded script, treasure hunters and the ancients’ quest for immortality play into almost every storybook fantasy and Hollywood film trope.

Australian Museum chief executive Kim McKay first observed the audience pulling power of Ancient Egypt while working at National Geographic as a senior vice president.

“It’s that human interest, that curiosity to go back in time,” she says. “It’s the same level of curiosity an adventurer might have exploring a new ocean or a new shore, a new country.”

Five years ago, the Australian Museum received a $57.5 million renovation to cope with the nine visitors every minute it was expecting to rush to an upcoming Tutankhamun blockbuster.

At the height of the pandemic in 2020, the Egyptian government recalled the show, and in Ramses & the Gold of the Pharaohs, McKay says the museum has found a superior replacement.

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Ramses is a cut above Tutankhamun,” says McKay. “Ramses II is a much more intriguing figure. He stayed on the throne for 67 years, and he’s called Ramses the Great because of his military conquests and the many monuments he erected in his own honour. That man certainly had a healthy ego. He fathered 100 children and was an incredible individual in his own right.”

Ramses boasts all the bells and whistles Australia has come to expect of an imported blockbuster, setting a high value on exclusivity and the rare display of the sarcophagus of Ramses II, its star attraction.

This show comes to Sydney from Paris, the fourth stop on a 10-city international tour packaged by promoters World Heritage Exhibitions and Neon Global, creators of the Jurassic World: The Exhibition at Olympic Park.

Ramses leans heavily on digital technology to tell the story of the pharaoh’s reign including a virtual reality tour of two of Ramses’ most impressive monuments: the rock-cut temples of Abu Simbel and the Tomb of Queen Nefertari, Ramses’s favourite royal consort.

In cinematic motion chairs, visitors will fly through sandstorms and the 1275BC Battle of Kadesh – Ramses’ greatest military achievement – to come face to face with Ramses’ mummy.

This is the nature of the blockbusters for an audience with two feet in the internet age, says McKay. They are fun, entertaining and educational.

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In Paris, where Ramses has spent the past five months, the exhibition drew more than 820,000 people.

In Sydney, the Australian Museum has predicted one million visitors, more than the 800,000 expected for Tutankhamun and more than the 323,300 who rushed the country’s first Egyptian blockbuster at the Art Gallery of NSW in 1988.

The modern antiquity blockbuster is designed for such mass appeal – to drive people through the doors of the museum who are not the regular gallery crowd.

“Costs are going up everywhere, as we know,” McKay says. “It’s an unusual government that keeps throwing money at you, so we have to be more entrepreneurial to generate more income. The more people we get in who see these facilities, see our exhibitions, eat at our café, buy something at the shop, the better programs and facilities – all these things add up over time.”

It’s a big reason why the NGV in Melbourne has shifted pace from its usual painterly offerings of 19th and 20th century masters for its first deep dive into the world of ancient Egyptian rulers as part of the Winter Masterpieces series.

“We want to bring new people into the gallery to introduce them to art and the gallery as a place to visit multiple times and to learn about artistic and creative expression,” says Wallace, the gallery’s senior curator of international programs. “It’s only part of a diverse exhibition program, but it’s an important part.”

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Walk Like an Egyptian

Public accessibility to rare antiquities is built heavily into the promotional material of all three shows, notes Dr Chiara O’Reilly, the director of museum and heritage studies at the University of Sydney.

Australia’s great distance from Europe left a deep imprint on the country’s cultural psyche. As far back as the first world fairs and international expositions, audiences have been drawn to large-scale exhibitions promoted as once-in-a-lifetime opportunities to view international collections, O’Reilly says.

The first modern-day blockbusters were managed by museums in multiple cities. Sometime in the early 2000s, as Sydney and Melbourne’s cultural rivalry took off, these exhibitions became one-city events with their success tied to tourism outcomes.

“That’s where you start getting packages sold with accommodation and tickets to the exhibition,” says Dr Anna Lawrenson, director of art curating at the University of Sydney and O’Reilly’s co-author of The Rise of the Must-See Exhibition: Blockbusters in Australian Museums and Galleries. “You start seeing targeted advertising to draw interstate visitors.”

For audiences, physical and intellectual distances are compressed when an exhibition is imported into Australia, O’Reilly and Lawrenson say.

Such is the case with Pharaoh, an exhibition that will encompass the entire ground floor of the NGV. The scale of objects on loan from the London institution ranges from a few centimetres wide to monumental architectural installations and restored sculptures, many not seen in Australia before.

Eschewing CGI wizardly entirely, NGV will delve into the artistic legacy of the pharaohs and how these kings used visual language to perpetuate their power over 3000 years.

“The art exhibition is a unique space,” Wallace says. “We have a lot of faith in these ancient objects’ power to reach audiences without extensive digital exegesis.”

Among the highlights will be a reassembled limestone wall from an Old Kingdom mastaba tomb carved with hieroglyphic texts, and a 1.5-tonne fist of Ramses II, a fragment of a colossal statue designed to convey the pharaoh’s power.

Amenhotep III, for example, was particularly fixated on the lion-headed goddess, Sekhmet, a mercurial deity inclined to introduce pestilence and plague if not appeased. Ten monumental sculptures of her image will be brought to Melbourne, some of which required detailed repair before crossing the globe.

“It’s going to be a very dramatic moment to see them all together,” says Wallace. “The pharaoh actually commissioned 365 sculptures of her seated and 365 of her standing for his mortuary temple. Mentally, you can imagine a courtyard filled with 700 of these sculptures.”

Here come the mummies

The National Museum’s Discovering Ancient Egypt is alone among the three shows to boast a dedicated room of mummified people and animals.

Five mummies, including that of a man named Haremem and a young woman named Sensaos, will be displayed in a solemn space that comes with audience warnings and careful assurances of the mummies’ care and custodianship.

The mummified bodies lie in their original linen bandages. The Dutch museum’s founding director understood the irreversible damage unwrapping might cause and waited on technological advances to research the mummified remains.

The results of the CT scans are shared via a digital interactive, side by side with extracts from the Book of the Dead scrolls, art, jewellery and sculpture, household pottery, and an ancient board game.

Most of the objects on loan from the Netherlands came into that museum’s collection within the last 200 years, including the coffin of a wealthy woman from a priestly family, which is filled with spells and formulae, and depictions of many gods.

“Inside [the exhibition] is this extraordinary recreated theatre of the ancient world on the banks of the Nile with enormous sarcophagi, mummified people and animals including a falcon, a crocodile, a snake, cat and fish,” says NMA’s director Mathew Trinca. “It’s going to be stunning.”

Discovering Ancient Egypt comes to Canberra via the Western Australian Museum. It will stay for eight months before heading to Queensland.

Under such a partnership, exhibition fees, program material, freight, and insurance, amounting to many millions of dollars, are shared. Adult tickets are priced at $25, compared to Ramses’ $45 (not including the VR experience) and NGV’s $38, making it the cheapest of all three shows.

“I think about the contemporary museum as being essentially a deeply democratic place that welcomes all comers,” Trinca says.

“And if you believe in that, by extension, then it must be that you want to see the greatest number of people have the opportunity to see these extraordinary objects that are drawn from the common element of humanity.”

One day, Wallace believes these kinds of imported exhibitions will become too prohibitively expensive to freight and insure: “Not in the next 10 years, but certainly in the next 50 years.”

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The arrival of all three shows, however, will test the strength of museum audiences post-pandemic. Will audiences return to the museums after the antiquity shows have left? “That’s the question,” O’Reilly says.

But Trinca, who ultimately believes the blockbuster needs to return to its multi-city roots to become a more democratic and shared experience, says: “Ever since the declaration of the blockbuster, we’ve been predicting its death. I don’t agree.

“As we increasingly feel the press of fakery around us online everywhere, these extraordinary collections speak of human experience from an authentic place.

“These are things that are entries to understanding the lives of others, thousands of years ago in this case, and I think there will always be a fascination with seeing that object and being in communion with it in an exhibition hall.”

Ramses and the Gold of the Pharaohs, Australian Museum, Sydney, November 18 to May 19.

Discovering Ancient Egypt, National Museum of Australia, Canberra, December 15 to September 8.

Pharaoh
, NGV International, Victoria, June 14 to October 6.

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Content: Hindustantimes wants to start sending you push notifications. Click allow to subscribe

HT Picks; New Reads

ByHT Team
Oct 07, 2023 09:24 AM IST

This week’s list of interesting reads includes a book on the North Sentinelese tribe of the Andaman Islands, a collection of 12 accounts of rescued child slaves, and a volume on the cat in our written and oral literatures

A story of the Andamans

A journey to the coast of North Sentinel Island, home to a tribe believed to be the most isolated human community on earth. The Sentinelese people want to be left alone and will shoot deadly arrows at anyone who tries to come ashore. As the web of modernity draws ever closer, the island represents the last chapter in the Age of Discovery — the final holdout in a completely connected world.

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In November 2018, a zealous American missionary was killed while attempting to visit an island he called “Satan’s last stronghold,” a small patch of land known as North Sentinel in the Andaman Islands, a remote archipelago in the Indian Ocean. News of the tragedy fascinated people around the world. Most were unaware such a place still existed in our time: an island unmolested by the advances of modern technology.

20 years before the American missionary’s ill-fated visit, a young American historian and journalist named Adam Goodheart also travelled to the waters off North Sentinel. During his time in the Andaman Islands he witnessed another isolated tribe emerge into modernity for the first time.

Now, Goodheart — a best selling historian — has returned to the Andamans. The Last Island is a work of history as well as travel, a journey in time as well as place. It tells the stories of others drawn to North Sentinel’s mystery through the centuries, from imperial adventurers to an eccentric Victorian photographer to modern-day anthropologists. It narrates the tragic stories of other Andaman tribes’ encounters with the outside world. And it shows how the web of modernity is drawing ever closer to the island’s shores.

The Last Island is a beautifully written meditation on the end of the Age of Discovery at the start of a new millennium. It is a book that will fascinate any reader interested in the limits — and dangers — of our modern, global society and its emphasis on ceaseless, unbroken connection.*

Stories of children rescued from slavery

The work of rescuing children from slavery is not for the faint of heart, as the 12 gut-wrenching accounts in this book will show. Harder still is to give them their life back, after they’ve been kidnapped, trafficked, sold, abused and made to work in horrific conditions, often for as long as they can remember.

Pradeep was offered up for human sacrifice by his family, thought to be a bad omen; Devli was a third-generation slave in a stone quarry in Haryana, who had never seen a banana before her rescue; Ashraf, a domestic child labourer at a senior civil servant’s house, was starved and scalded as punishment; Sahiba was trafficked from Assam to be someone’s wife against her will; Kalu was abducted and made to weave carpets all day long, his injuries cauterized with phosphorus scraped off matchsticks; Bhavna was trapped in a circus, sexually abused for years by her owners; Rakesh was worked in the fields all year round like cattle, and spent the nights locked up with them in the stable; Sabo was born to labourers at a brick kiln, and never knew life outside it; and Manan lived his childhood mining mica in the forests of Jharkhand, barely given time to even mourn his friend who got buried when the mine caved in.

Kailash Satyarthi’s own life and mission were entwined with the journeys of these children. Having lived through unspeakable trauma, they had lost faith in humanity. But behind their reticence, behind their scraggy limbs and calloused hands and feet, hope still endured. This book tells the story of their shared struggle for justice and dignity — from the raid and rescue operations of Satyarthi’s Bachpan Bachao Andolan, to international campaigns for child rights. It is a testament both to the courage of the human spirit and to the power of compassion.*

The meow meow uprising

The Indian Cat: Stories, Paintings, Poetry, and Proverbs is a most unusual book. In it, renowned art historian BN Goswamy illustrates all the varied ways in which cats have made themselves a home in our art, literature, and speech, as well as in our hearts. In the Jataka Tales, cats turn up as characters whose clever tricks or pretensions are generally foiled by the Bodhisattva. In Vaishnava bhakti, when a devotee approaches God in utter surrender they follow marjara-nyaya — the act of a kitten who passively submits to its mother as it is picked up by the scruff of its neck. The Hadith speaks of the Prophet who once chose to cut off the sleeve of his robe when he had to stand up and go pray rather than disturb his pet cat, Muezza, who was sleeping on it. In the Mahabharata, Duryodhana repeatedly charges the noble Yudhishthira with observing the marjara-vrata, “cat-like observance”, denoting hypocrisy. Great poets like Mir and Ghalib are known to have loved their cats to distraction, the poet Jibanananda Das saw himself in a cat that went here and there, always following the sun, and Vikram Seth saw the cat as being full of mischief and cleverness but no evil. All in all, on a daily basis, as everyone knows, the feline in India is often addressed with affection.

The Indian Cat first presents a delightful picture of the cat in our written and oral literatures. This is followed by a catalogue of paintings, each showcasing a different aspect of the place accorded to cats in our society. Then there is a selection of poetry about the cat, much of which is translated from a wide swathe of languages including Urdu, Hindi, Persian, and Bengali. The final section presents proverbs, sayings, and idioms on the animal. An enchanting and gorgeously designed book, The Indian Cat will appeal to a wide array of readers.*

*All copy from book flap.

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*Pharaoh fever: The museum blockbuster coming to a city near you The Australian Museum kicks off the year of ancient Egyptian mania with Ramses and the Gold of the Pharaohs, endorsed by the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.

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Content: Exploring the origins of superstition, part two: black cats, salt, and bad things in threes

Tracy Carbone

My first pet as an adult was a black kitten named Minx. He was a fine cat, but many people considered him creepy, a witch’s cat.

When did this superstition around black cats begin? Magickalspot.com explains, “It was in the Middle Ages that man became an enemy of this cat, as he considered it a diabolical animal, the incarnation of witches, and the symbol of evil.”

This may be understandable so long ago but, “The superstition of the black cat still exists in many countries; in Italy, Spain, and the United States, it is believed that it brings bad luck; while in other countries, like Japan, Scotland, and England, the black cat is a symbol of luck and having it at home means prosperity.” So there’s hope for black cats yet, in some countries. Hopefully the U.S. will catch up soon.

Whenever something bad happens, and then something else, generally unrelated, happens soon after, my mother will caution for me to brace myself because, “bad things happen in threes.” Generally three is a good thing. Third time’s a charm, the Holy Trinity, for example. It’s not definitively clear where this saying began but FolkloreThursday.com offers, “psychologists argue that this belief persists because people crave certainty. By creating a limit on the events, e.g. three, we feel comforted because we see an end to a run of bad luck or deaths…by believing that the bad luck will end soon, we regain some control in our unpredictable lives and can rest easy.” Personally, whenever the third bad thing happens, I always feel comforted in the belief that the streak of tragedy is over.

One superstition I cannot resist, because it’s been too ingrained in me since birth, is throwing salt. The superstition goes that if you spill salt, bad luck will follow unless you toss more salt over your left shoulder. My mother was very strict about my adherence to this. Always wanting to keep the peace, I was diligent in immediately taking a pinch or using the shaker to toss some over my left shoulder. She never explained why it would work, only that it would.

How Stuff Works attributes this superstition potentially to The Last Supper by Leonardo DaVinci. In the painting, Judas Iscariot has knocked over the shaker of salt with his elbow. Judas is known for betraying Jesus, and “some Christian beliefs hold that the devil hangs around behind your left shoulder…if you spill salt, the devil sees it as an invitation to step in and do evil. Throwing it over your left shoulder into his face blinds him and renders him helpless.”

I err on the side of caution so always toss salt, just in case. I’m relieved when my third tragedy happens and can breathe easier knowing I’m safe from new bad events. But I’d get another black cat all day long because that’s one superstition I’m not afraid to ignore.

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I'm a fiction writer, blogger, and animal lover who wants to share local and international feel-good animal stories, and articles to inspire and engage my readers. I'm an avid fiction and essay writer and hope to enlighten you.

Simi Valley, CA
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More from Tracy Carbone

*In it, renowned art historian BN Goswamy illustrates all the varied ways in which cats have made themselves a home in our art, literature, and speech, as well as in our hearts.

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**Note:**
The provided text does not directly address why cats were so highly valued in ancient Egypt, their spiritual connections in that culture, or the specific mourning custom of shaving eyebrows after a cat’s death.

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Content: Home » Celebrating our fellow felines

Celebrating our fellow felines

by admin

Every August 8, animal lovers around the world come together to celebrate International Cat Day, a day dedicated to honoring and recognizing the presence and special role that cats have in our lives, this holiday has become an opportunity to highlight the importance of caring for and respecting our feline friends, as well as to raise awareness of the need to protect and preserve their well-being.

The role of the Cat in the History of Culture

Cats have played a significant role in various cultures and historical moments. From ancient Egypt, where they were considered symbols of divinity and associated with the goddess Bastet, to medieval Europe, where they were considered guardians of homes and farms due to their ability to keep rodent populations in check, cats have been around. present in human life in different ways.

In the Middle Ages, however, cats also faced hard times when they were linked with superstition and witchcraft, leading to persecution and slaughter. Fortunately, over time, the relationship between humans and cats has evolved towards a more harmonious and beneficial coexistence for both parties.

Education and care of cats

Photo: Pet City

Training a cat requires patience, understanding and knowledge. Here are some key tips to ensure your cat thrives happy and healthy.

Provide a suitable environment, make sure your home is safe and comfortable for your cat. Provide places for him to rest and hide, as well as toys and environmental enrichment to stimulate his mind.

Food and hydration, offers a balanced diet appropriate to the needs of your cat. It often provides fresh, clean water.

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Litter box, keep a clean and accessible litter box so your cat can eliminate. Clean the box regularly to avoid health problems and bad smells.

Health problems and bad odors. Socialization and Play Interact and play with your cat daily to keep him physically and mentally active. Play with toys and interaction with other animals can be beneficial

Veterinary Care Schedule regular visits to the vet to make sure your cat is up to date on vaccinations and health checks. This is essential to prevent and detect any medical problem in time.

Hygiene, brush your cat’s coat to keep it clean and reduce the formation of hairballs. Also, take care of their oral health by brushing their teeth or providing dental treats.

Respect and love, each cat has its own personality and needs. He respects his space and his quiet times, and show him love and affection according to his preferences.

fun facts about cats

Courtesy Week The sense of smell, although we don’t talk so much about their sense of smell as about their vision and hearing, cats have a highly developed sense of smell. They use their nose to explore and recognize the world around them. They are amazing, they are excellent jumpers and can jump up to six times their length in a single jump. This is partly due to the unique structure of their hind legs, which gives them great power and flexibility. Mysterious purr, cats are believed to purr not only when they are happy, but also when they are sick or injured. Purring could have healing properties and help in the regeneration of bones and tissues. Cats in space, the first cat to travel to space was named Felicette, also known as ‘Felix’. She was launched by the French Space Agency in 1963 and returned safely. Tail Communication Cats use their tails to communicate. A pricked tail usually indicates confidence and happiness, while a wagging tail could mean the cat is excited or agitated. Born hunters, domestic cats retain their hunting instincts. They can hunt insects, mice and other small animals, which is also a form of exercise and mental stimulation. Exceptional night vision, cats have cells in their eyes called rods, which allow them to see in low light conditions. Their night vision is up to six times better than that of humans.

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The only relevant sentences pertain to ancient Egypt’s cultural focus on cats via museum exhibits, and cats in art and culture.

**Summary (Based on Available Text):**
- Ancient Egyptians highly valued cats, even mummifying them—indicating deep spiritual and cultural significance.

- Museum exhibits focus on mummified cats and animals, highlighting their esteemed role in ancient Egyptian life.

- Cats have long been present in art, literature, and emotional life, suggesting a broad cross-cultural resonance that includes spiritual dimensions.

**If you need a detailed report with historical details such as the connection to deities like Bastet, the tradition of shaving eyebrows for cats in mourning, and further Egyptian-specific information, please let me know or provide an additional source for extraction.