cultivating..........................

 

Our great mistake in education is, as it seems to me, the worship of book-learning — the confusion of instruction and education.  We strain the memory instead of cultivating the mind.

-from this master cultivator

In all my years of schooling....................

 

...............I had maybe four teachers on par with Rob Firchau - but they made all the difference, 

On the importance.......................

 

................................of schools teaching writing.

Writing for an audience is a completely different cognitive exercise than writing for yourself. When you write for yourself, you can skip the hard parts. You already know what you mean when you say something, you don’t have to explain your logic, and you can be as elliptical and associative as you want. When you write for an audience, you have to think about what they need to understand. You have to structure your argument so it actually lands. You have to use a sentence that communicates, not just a sentence that feels right in your head.

flourishing.........

 

We have sold ourselves into a fast-food model of education, and it's impoverishing our spirit and our energies as much as fast food is depleting our physical bodies. . . . human talent is tremendously diverse.  People have very different aptitudes. . . . Human flourishing is not a mechanical process.  It's an organic process. . . . You cannot predict the outcome of human development.  All you can do is create the conditions under which they will begin to flourish,

-Sir Ken Robinson, the link goes to a 2010 TED talk that is well worth watching.

Teachers.....................

 

     Everyone loves to teach, but rarely do any of us take unsought advice well, and even more rarely are we truly teachable.  Being teachable means being open to learn.  In order to learn, one must listen, and we learn to listen only if we know the most important thing—that we do not know everything, that we do not have "all the answers." . . .

In the long history of spirituality, those recognized as somehow spiritually "great" have consistently been called "Teacher"—they help others to learn, to become teachable.  Spiritual teachers (who are never "experts") do three things:  First and foremost, they listen.  Second, they ask questions.  Third, they tell stories.  Each practice reflects the acceptance of not having all the answers, and each teaches the essential truth of spirituality's open-endedness.

-Kurtz and Ketcham, The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning

found.....................

 

The Master gave his teaching in parables and stories, which his disciples listened to with pleasure—and occasional frustration, for they longed for something deeper.

The Master was unmoved.  To all their objections he would say, "You have yet to understand, my dears, that the shortest distance between a human being and the Truth is a story."

Another time he said, "Do not despise the story.  A lost gold coin is found by means of a penny candle; the deepest truth is found by means of a simple story."

-Anthony de Mello, One Minute Wisdom

Teaching the concept..............

 

...........................................of "one more."

I didn't much like college philosophy either.....

 

     Santayana took to teaching as a swan to ping-pong.  He disliked the idea of being thought "essentially" a professor.  As for teaching philosophy, he found the enterprise quite hopeless: "I can't take the teaching of philosophy seriously in itself, either as a means of being a philosopher or of teaching the young anything solid."  As a teacher, his interest, he tells us in his autobiography, "was never in facts or erudition, but always in persons and ideas."  He seems never to have viewed teaching philosophy mare than a "decent means of livelihood," to which he was never fully committed.  Not difficult to sympathize.  College philosophy is dry bones; it teaches that this is nominalism, that materialism, the other naturalism; that Plato thought this, that Aristotle thought that, and that Descartes came along and thought very differently.  Not much to do with genuine thinking here.

-Joseph Epstein, from his essay on George Santayana in Essays in Biography

teach yourself...................

 

36.  Observe how all things are continually being born of change; teach yourself to see that Nature's highest happiness lies in changing the things that are, and forming new things after their kind.  Whatever is, in some sense the seed of what is to emerge from it.  Nothing can become a philosopher less that to imaging that seed can only be something that is planted in the earth of the womb.

-Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book Four

parenting...........................

 

     My dad and I fished together when I was young, and those are among my most treasured memories of him.  He taught me first to fish with a worm on a bobber, and then to cast a spinning rod.  He was not a fly fisherman, but I wanted to be.  Around the age of twenty-five, I bought myself a rod and reel and began to try to teach myself—a pattern by which, unfortunately, I have learned most of what I've learned in life.  We often speak of a man who's done this successfully as a "self-made man."  The appellation is usually spoken with a sense of admiration, but really it should be said in the same tones we might use of the dearly departed or of a man who recently lost an arm—with sadness and regret.  What the term really means is "an orphaned man who figured how to master some part of life on his own."

-John Eldredge, Fathered by God

The art.....................................

 

.............................................of teaching.

On the art of living.............

      According to Epictetus, the primary concern of philosophy should be the art of living:  Just as wood is the medium of the carpenter and bronze is the medium of the sculptor, your life is the medium on which you practice the art of living.  Furthermore, much as a master carpenter teaches an apprentice by showing him techniques that can be used to build things out of wood, Epictetus taught his students the art of life by showing them techniques that could be used to make something of their life.  The techniques in question were quite practical and completely applicable to students' everyday lives.  He taught them, among other things, how to respond to insults, how to deal with incompetent servants, how to deal with an angry brother, how to deal with the loss of a loved one, and how to deal with exile.  If they could master these techniques, Epictetus promised, they would experience a life that was filled with purpose and dignity, and more important, they would attain tranquility.  Furthermore, they would retain their dignity and tranquility regardless of the hardships life might subsequently inflict on them.

-William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life (the ancient art of stoic joy)

processes.........................

 Success in education seems to mean only that a child leaves the classroom with more information in his or her head than when he or she walked in.  That crude way of thinking about what teachers do is exemplified in the (comprehensively misleading) documentary Waiting for "Superman," where learning is visualized as a teacher simply opening the brains of students and pouring knowledge in.  This is a ridiculous way to portray the work of schooling, even setting aside the fact that sharing knowledge is in fact a very small part of teaching.  (Facts can be Googled; it's learning processes, skills, that make education valuable.)  No one who has ever taught would agree that teaching children is a straightforward affair, or that all children are equally easy to teach.  

-Fredrik deBoer, The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice

watering the arid wastelands..........

  The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts.  The right defence against false sentiments is to inculcate just sentiments.

-C. S. Lewis, from The Abolition of Man

Fathers........................

 “I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren't trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.”

-Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum

via and via

becoming friends with the eminent dead.....

 I am a biography nut myself. And I think when you're trying to teach the great concepts that work, it helps to tie them into the lives and personalities of the people who developed them.  I think you learn economics better if you make Adam Smith your friend.  That sounds funny, making friends among "the eminent dead," but if you go through life making friends with the eminent dead who had the right ideas, I think it will work better for you in life and work better in education.  It's way better than just giving the basic concepts.

-Charlie Munger

Giving evangelism a good name.................

      I'm an evangelist for Mozart, Caravaggio, and Stevenson.  Missionary work takes perseverance and patience, key to conversion being experience, which leads to dialog, which leads to exploration, which leads to choice, which leads to understanding and growth. . . . Kids need to be told stories, not by appeasers, but by crusaders who care about their hearts and souls, by those willing to use courage and take the time to read to kids, sing to kids, dance to Mozart with kids; showing the not only The Way, but the purpose and the benefit of The Way.

-Rob Firchau, from this forever post

Hey, it could happen...................

 

On mentoring............................

Go lead, teach, coach, and model the behaviors and actions that your customers, clients, and community desire. Make this week about working hard to become better than you were last week.

-Sean Carpenter, from here

In praise of stress...................

But teaching kids that failures, insults, and painful experiences will do lasting danger is harmful in and of itself.  Human beings need physical and mental challenges and stressors or we deteriorate.

-Lukianoff and Haidt,  The Coddling Of The American Mind:  How Good Intentions And Bad Ideas Are Setting Up A Generation For Failure