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EDUCATION AND LEARNING

LEARNING FROM LITERATURE: WHAT?

September 9, 2016
EDUCATION AND LEARNING, LITERARY CRITICISM, READING, THINKING AND THOUGHT
2 Comments

“A great work of art may provide us the opportunity to feel more profoundly and more generously, to perceive more fully the implications of experience, than the constricted and fragmentary conditions of life permit.”  –Louise M. Rosenblatt, Literature as Exploration (Noble, 1968)

. . .

Underlinings and Notes from A Literary Education by Joseph Epstein (Axios, 2014)

“Apart from those people trained as professional scholars or scientists, we are all finally autodidacts [self-taughts[, making our way on our own as best we can, with our real teachers being the books we happen to read.”

“…the best that any university can do is point its students in the right direction: let them know what the intellectual possibilities are and give them a taste of the best that has been thought and written in the past.”

“…literature, largely though not exclusively imaginative literature, provides the best education for a man or woman in a free society.”

“While novelists may have a plenitude of ideas, or deal with complex ideas in their work, it is rarely their ideas that are the most compelling things about their work.”

“A literary education establishes a strong taste for the endless variousness of life; it teaches how astonishing reality is–…”

“…a literary education teaches the limitation of the intellect itself, at least when applied to the great questions, problems, issues, and mysteries of life.”

“A literary education teaches that human nature is best, if always incompletely, understood through the examination of individual cases [and] those cases that…prove no rule–the unique human personality.” 

“…  [I]t provides an enhanced appreciation of the mysteries and complexities of life that reinforce the inestimable value of human liberty…”

. . .

Epstein quoting Marcel Proust: “Our intellect is not the most subtle, the most powerful, the most appropriate instrument for revealing truth.  It is life that, little by little, example by example, permits us to see that what is most important to our heart, or to our mind, is learned not by reasoning, but through other agencies.  Then it is that the intellect, observing their superiority, abdicates its control to them upon reasoned grounds and agrees to become their collaborator and lackey.”

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“CORE CURRICULUM! GET RID OF IT!” “PLEASE BUILD ME A NEW CURRICULUM!” FINAL EXAMINATION EDF 3417

May 27, 2016
EDUCATION AND LEARNING, IDEAS, SCHOOL/SCHOOLING, THINKING AND THOUGHT
10 Comments

“There is no generally agreed upon definition of curriculum.”  [Wikipedia]

Using the statements below, design a curriculum–core, common, or otherwise–that will satisfy at least ONE school board, one school district’s parents, one k-12 faculty, one state board of education, one k-12 regional accrediting agency, or ONE NATIONAL STANDARD. 

Note the following: Curriculum can be envisaged from different perspectives.  What societies envisage as important teaching and learning constitutes the intended curriculum.  Since it is usually presented in official documents, it may be also called the written and/or official curriculum.  

However, at classroom level, this intended curriculum may be altered through a range of complex classroom interactions, and what is actually delivered can be considered the implemented curriculum.

What learners really learn (i.e. what can be assessed and can be demonstrated as learning outcomes/learner competencies) constitutes the achieved or learned curriculum.  In addition, curriculum theory points to a hidden curriculum (i.e. the unintended development of personal values and beliefs of learners, teachers, and communities; unexpected impact of a curriculum; unforeseen aspects of a learning process).

Those who develop the intended curriculum should have all these different dimensions of the curriculum in view.  While the written curriculum does not exhaust the meaning of curriculum, it is important because it represents the vision of the society.  The written curriculum is usually expressed in comprehensive and user-friendly documents, such as curriculum frameworks; subject curricula/syllabuses; and in relevant and helpful learning materials, such as textbooks, teacher guides, and assessment guides. [Wikipedia notes]

BEGIN THE EXERCISE IN YOUR BLUE BOOKS.  YOU HAVE 40 HOURS.

The Naming of the Parts

What I Learned in School Today

Using a Typewriter/Keyboard

Why My Signature Is Important

Righty Tighty, Lefty Loosey

Making Change, Counting Money

My Handwriting Tells about Me

Rules for Capitalization

Cursive to Be Read

How to Take a Bath or Shower

Eating Well So I Don’t Get Fat–or Throw Up

How to Use Crayolas without Breaking Any

Drawing Trees and People–and Showing the Difference

Columbus Was Here–Somewhere

Add, Subtract, Multiply, and Baseball Diamonds

I Know Where Babies Come From–and Why

Is WISK Better Than TIDE?

Coarse or Fine

Hitler, the Pope, and Abraham Lincoln

The WHO Sing Beethoven’s Ninth

Input, Output, Shotput

“O Say Can You See?”

Domes, Arches, and Spires: What’s the Point?

Sometimes a Dictator Helps the World

R&D

When My Food Enters My Stomach

Do Rainbows Matter?

I Turn the Key; the Engine Starts

“The Play’s the Thing,” He Wrote.

Biology.  Reading.  History.  Chemistry.–Just Words?

Who Really Was Bernoulli?

NATO.  USO.  UFO.  CEO.  CFO.  MAYO.

Apples Fall from Trees–on Earth

The Man in the Moon Just Smiled at Me

Sometimes I Can’t Breathe When It’s Cloudy

Under Water Scares Me

Condors, Penguins, and Koalas

“Congress Shall Make No Law….”

Is There a Use for Poetry?

Another Plane Crashed in Russia Yesterday

A Hundred-Yard Universe, a Hundred-Meter Dash

“Mind the Gap!”

Whites, Lights, and Darks

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SENTENCE COMPLETION QUIZ #1

April 7, 2016
EDUCATION AND LEARNING, PHILOSOPHY-ETHICS, THINKING AND THOUGHT
7 Comments

“An APHORISM is a short pithy or terse saying expressing or embodying a general truth; a maxim; an astute observation.”

Power tends to corrupt . . .  absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Be not the first by whom the new are tried . . .  nor yet the last to lay the old aside.

Fools rush in . . .  where angels fear to tread.

An ounce of prevention . . .  is worth a pound of cure.

Better safe . . . than sorry.

Measure twice . . .  cut once.

The devil you know . . .  is worse than the devil you don’t.

The love of money . . .  is the root of all evil.

If the gold rusts . . .  what will the iron do?

Time and tide . . .  wait for no man.

Neither a borrower . . .  nor a lender be.

Keep your friends close . . .  and your enemies closer.

The early bird . . .  gets the worm.

De gustibus . . .  non disputandum est.

Ignorance is bliss . . .  where tis folly to be wise.

What goes around . . .  comes around.

[All] good things . . .  come to those who wait.

You get what you deserve . . .  deserve what you get.

Never look a gift-horse . . .  in the mouth.

Nihil . . .  ex nihilo fit.

A rolling stone . . .  gathers no moss.

Beware the green-eyed monster . . .  jealousy.

Hell hath no fury . . .  like a woman scorned.

Haste . . .  makes waste.

Birds of a feather . . .  flock together.

Familiarity . . .  breeds contempt.

Waste not . . .  want not.

Absence makes the heart . . .   grow fonder.

Spare the rod . . .   spoil the child.

Don’t throw the baby out . . .  with the bathwater.

Bonum ex integra causa . . .  malum ex quocumque defectu.

Stick and stones may break my bones . . .  but names will never hurt me.

A bird in the hand . . .  is worth two in the bush.

The enemy of my enemy . . .  is my friend.

[Ed. note: in 2016: Sometimes the enemy of my enemy is still my enemy.]

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“WHO IS LEWIS H. LAPHAM?” “SHOULD I CARE?”

March 25, 2016
EDUCATION AND LEARNING, PEOPLE, READING, THINKING AND THOUGHT
3 Comments

Lewis H. Lapham (1935- ), former editor of the American monthly Harper’s Magazine from 1976 until 1981, and from 1983 until 2006.  He is the founder of Lapham’s Quarterly, a quarterly publication about history and literature, and has written numerous books on politics and current affairs. 

“As many as six out of ten American adults have never read a book of any kind…”

Some things about education (1989):

“Schools serve the wishes and expectations of the society to which they belong.”

In the spirit of re-arranging the American system of education, “citing the authority of Thomas Jefferson…I can imagine Jefferson’s purpose translated…that would train…students…  [with] curricula…directed toward two fairly modest tasks: the teaching of languages, history, and mathematics; and the instilling of intellectual confidence.”

“The study of languages and mathematics provides the student with the tools to work at the trade of learning.”

“A student reads the classical texts because they induce the habit of thought.”

”A thorough knowledge of a few writers instills in the student the confidence that he cannot derive from selected passages printed, usually in bad translation,  in an anthology chosen by a committee of pedants.”

“All students should learn the rudiments of writing, reading, history, and arithmetic…ceaseless reading (literature)…writing (letters, explanations, narratives)…calculations (bills, rates, balances)…ceaseless study of historical chronologies.”

“Jefferson assumed that roughly 90 percent of the population was ineducable: he meant that most people were not suited to the atmospheres of the higher learning.  Certainly everybody has a right to go somewhere, but not necessarily to academia.”

“Too often it is thought that an education can be acquired in the way that one acquires a suntan or an Armani suit, as if it were an object instead of a turn of mind.”

“An education begins with two or three teachers and six or seven texts (maybe books, maybe equations or fossils or trees) that introduce the student to the uniqueness of his or her own mind.  After that it’s a matter of educating oneself.”

“The best American minds, or at least the most generous and imaginative of American minds (I think of Lincoln and Melville and Edison), tended to be self-taught.  Expressing a sentiment that Jefferson probably would have seconded, St. Augustine observed that it is possible to learn only what one already knows.”

LHLaphamLewis Lapham

 

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