Gary Ackerman @garyackerman@qoto.org

Your daily reminder that if you are the smartest person in the room, you are in the wrong room... and you are probably wrong.

“Make all plans in pencil,” is really sound advice right now.

“If you’re going to mandate it, at least own it.” Is the best leadership advice I have read in a long time.

Yeah... I just ignore business people who complain they can’t hire qualified people in one sentence, then say “ the market won’t allow higher wages” in the next.

Data is fine... in just isn’t that interesting. Explaining data... that’s the interesting (but overlooked) bit.

When a see/ hear an educator with all of the answers, I walk the other way.

Curriculum and content are different.

Sometimes you just don't what to hear the IT support technician's answer to "Why do I have to do it that way?"

"If you are not challenging others' understanding, it isn't worth doing," is the most encouraging comment I heard when completing my dissertation.

“Deep”, “active,” “collaborative” are words that should describe the learning in your classroom.

“denied, delayed, distracted, and derailed” are too often the actions of those in leadership positions

A blog post on preprint research:
http://hackscience.education/2025/07/22/preprint-research/

Cyril Burt's "honest" error—the unwavering belief in intelligence as a reified, innate factor—had a profound and lasting impact throughout the 20th century, affecting millions and appearing in later works like The Bell Curve.

Stephen Jay Gould argues Cyril Burt's "real error" was not just later fraud, but his "reification of intelligence" as a single, measurable, innate entity through factor analysis.

Language moves human from a perceptual world to a conceptual one.

Students often learn what is taught, but they acquire the sense it is irrelevant.

Lewis M. Terman believed that intelligence was a measurable, genetically fixed, and unitary quantity. His ideas were and continue to be very popular and wildly wrong.

Authors of books on corruption have so many new cases to use.

So much reality spoils our best-laid plans.

If you stop with data, you never get to knowledge, understanding, or wisdom.