Being a Great Explainer

You listen to NPRs This American Life, right? It's a great radio show/podcast. I am always behind in listening (I always have a half-dozen or so on my iPod) so didn't get to this amazing episode until late in the summer. It's called "The Giant Pool of Money" and it explains, so that even an elementary teacher can understand, the whole sub prime mortgage lending debacle. It's fantastic and I'm clearly not the only one to think so. Norm linked to this today and it led me to this great dissection of why it's so great by Jay Rosen. He's writing for journalists but I think there's something there for my fellow educators and skeptics alike: people who want to truly explain things, give them context and engage critical thinking. That's us, right?