Pattern-Building When Learning a New Word

Words are fundamentally conceptual—although they are physical objects, they represent something ideational. Just giving students definitions of words or having them evaluate the context of word use does not fully use the brain’s patterning style of identifying information. Th e value of word pattern sorting extends beyond their defi nition to relating words to the pattern of categorization where they fi t. Students attend to how words relate to other words through a number of types of cat...

 The Destiny of Earthseed

The Destiny of EarthseedIs to take root among the stars.It is to live and to thriveOn new earths.It is to become new beingsAnd to consider new questions.It is to leap into the heavensAgain and again.It is to explore the vastnessOf heaven.It is to explore the vastnessOf ourselves.   We are Earthseed.We are flesh—self aware, questing, problem-solving flesh.We are that aspect of Earthlife best able to shape God knowingly.We are Earthlife maturing,Earthlife preparing to fall away from the pare...

 Against Mindfulness

It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.

 How Giving Nouns Genders Affects Thought

In Spanish and other Romance languages, nouns are either masculine or feminine. In many other languages, nouns are divided into many more genders ("gender" in this context meaning class or kind). For example, some Australian Aboriginal languages have up to sixteen genders, including classes of hunting weapons, canines, things that are shiny, or, in the phrase made famous by cognitive linguist George Lakoff, "women, fire, and dangerous things." What it means for a language to have grammatical...