Bright reads this week

I hope you’re enjoying Maker Month so far! We have a lot more in store in the coming weeks to both celebrate and critique project-based learning. In the meantime, here are five education pieces to brighten your weekend. Enjoy!

For Silicon Valley Hopefuls, Is College Irrelevant?

By Kathryn Joyce in Bright/Medium

This might be my favorite long form piece Bright has run to date. It’s a fascinating look at Silicon Valley’s latest effort to have students bypass college and focus on the skills that will get them ahead in today’s market. Make School, which has created a two-year “college replacement” program, believes the app is “the new resume.” They’ve done away with theoretical classes and get students to build apps from day one.

What do you think? Is college outdated for Silicon Valley hopefuls? Will efforts like Make School produce a generation of app developers without transferable skills?

Why Civics Is About More Than Citizenship

By Alia Wong in The Atlantic

Can we change how young Americans engage with civics by making them all take a U.S. citizenship test? Incredible, if controversial, effort.

Color Palettes: Growing Up Brown and Nerdy in the South

By Vijith Assar in The Message/Medium

Ahmed Mohamed, the clock-making Texas teen who was wrongly arrested this week, has made the rounds on the Internet this week. I hope that kids of all backgrounds who want to build new things — in line, coincidentally, with Bright’s Maker Month —will soon be seen with the admiration they deserve.

On that note, this piece in The Message resonated with me:

If the cruelty does not abate, we’ll need to rewire our understanding of the universe. Broadly speaking, we understand it all as a sequence of hierarchies, all the way down to particles so small that their physics can be only theoretical at best. Images are made from colored pixels. We build our countries from our children, and we build our children from days like the one Ahmed just suffered through.

The Machines Are Taking Over

By Annie Murphy Paul in The New York Times Magazine

Can a machine ever replicate a human tutor? Annie Murphy Paul chronicles an effort to do just this. Not gonna lie, it terrifies me a little.

“The first thing we had to do is identify which emotions are important in tutoring, and we found that there are three that really matter: boredom, frustration and confusion,” D’Mello said. “Then we had to figure out how to accurately measure those feelings without interrupting the tutoring process.

A Haircut with a Side of Harry Potter

By Ruben Brosbe in Bright/Medium

Black boys, says Barbershop Books’ founder Alvin Irby, receive a litany of messages that reading is not for them. This piece describes a novel response to this problem: put books in spaces that feel distinctly male, namely neighborhood barber shops.

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Reach out to me on Twitter (@sarika008) with any thoughts or questions! Otherwise, catch you on the Bright side.