Tag: news

Things I Know 334 of 365: Earth might have a partner for twin day during the next spirit week

If your first instinct it to tell me all the reasons this isn’t exciting or give the statistics regarding little chance there is of anything coming of this, I’ll see you at 335 of 365.

For the rest of you, I’ve been consuming information about Kepler-20e and Kepler-20f.

This is what I learned about when I watched Star Trek as a kid. It’s what excited my imagination when watching the short-lived Earth 2, and it’s what makes looking at the stars on a clear night while I’m home in Illinois so exciting.

Though the first two earth-sized planets to be orbiting a sun like ours existed long before the discovery was published in Nature, there’s something different now. Though the likelihood of life as we know it existing on the planets is almost inconceivable, there’s a reduced sense of aloneness attached to knowing they’re there.

This is the value of STEM in schools, the ability to incite wonder in the world and beyond.

We noticed a dimming of the sun using a satellite Galileo would have swooned over and then measured wobble of the star caused by the gravity of the planets.

And we haven’t even seen them.

We think they’re there.

The evidence says it’s likely they’re there and they’re planets..

It’s as close as scientists get to faith.

It’s beautiful.

Though we haven’t seen them, exactly, humanity cannot help but try to imagine what these distant neighbors look like.

I’m going to go get some butcher block paper and my crayons.

Things I Know 200 of 365: I trust Liz Dwyer

Just once in a while let us exalt the importance of ideas and information.

– Edward R. Murrow

Liz Dwyer has given me some of the best and worst news I’ve ever received about education.
She’s pushed my thinking on as many issues around teaching and learning as any one other person in my life.
When I can’t sleep at night, she’s there to help keep my mind busy. When I need to make a point to friends, she’s got my back.
She even helped me raise money for college.
And we’ve never met.
Dwyer is the Education Editor at GOOD.IS.
Though I knew I was head-over-heels for Good’s print mag when I picked up their first issue, it took me a while to realize how much Dwyer’s online work meant to me.
I’ve got it now.
While every other online education writer is stuffed comfortably into the “EDU” folder of my feed reader, Dwyer sits in her own thread.
I needed to shut down my browser the other day. Rather than waiting for each of the dozens of tabs I had open across two monitors to find their ways back to their respective pages, I shut each one and decided what to bookmark and what to send into the ether of the Interwebs.
As I shut down, I started to take account of how many tabs marked content Dwyer had created or shared.
Final tally – 16.
No other online writer owned as much of my browser space.
With all of the world and its information at my disposal, this one writer had caught my attention at least 16 times in the last week to the extent that I felt the need to keep open and share what she had written.
I am reminded of visits to my grandparents when I would sit down to lunch and my grandmother would hand me a stack of newspaper clippings from stories she thought I would be interested in.
I’d inadvertently done the same with Dwyer’s work on the chance someone would ask me a relevant question, and I’d be able to share.
My generation will never have an Edward R. Murrow. Anderson Cooper might be as close as we get.
Tom Brokaw and the later Peter Jennings belong to my parents and grandparents.
Finding a voice or two in the din of neo-journalism’s protean nature that serve a reliable and constant purveyors of understanding and information is grueling.
I’m glad I’ve found Liz Dwyer.