Adult Participation in Children's Worldplay

In The Brightening Glance: Imagination and Childhood (2006), the art theorist Ellen Handler Spitz argues that "[t]he topic of adult participation in children's play is delicate, complex, and controversial," largely due to the overwhelming influence a parent or a teacher or even adult-generated entertainment media can have. Adults must work hard not to impose their owti interests, methods, or judgments upon play activity. The act of modeling and encouraging can, indeed, be fi-aught with miss...

 Removing Prepositions in Defining Thought

Having turned my back on propositions, I thought, what am I going to do about this? The area where it really comes up is when you start looking at the contents of consciousness, which is my number one topic. I like to quote Maynard Keynes on this. He was once asked, “Do you think in words or pictures?” to which he responded, “I think in thoughts.” It was a wonderful answer, but also wonderfully uninformative. What the hell’s a thought then? How does it carry information? Is it like ...

 Most current-events-related conversations are just people...

“Because it helps you participate in everyday conversations!” is a weak but at least meaningful answer to the “What is accomplished” question. But when you quit playing the current events game, and observe others talking about them, you might notice that almost nobody really knows what they’re talking about. There is an extraordinary gulf between having a functional understanding of an issue, and the cursory glance you get from the news. If you ever come across a water-cooler conve...

 Mastery-Based Learning

Also known as mastery learning, competency-based learning is a growing focus of education conversations. The premise is that students learn best by mastering a particular learning goal before moving on to new material that builds on that goal. Instead of a group of students all moving from one topic to the next with varying degrees of understanding, each student continues to work on a topic until he or she has mastered the content. Because students of the same age advance through the curricul...

 Example of Lexical Context

A duct-less split can produce the exact amount of energy needed to temper an envelope. When I first read this sentence, my mind started to try to make connections to envelopes and wondered if tempering had something to do with getting or keeping the glue on the flap. If you are an engineer, you probably know that the sentence above refers to equipment and its capability of cooling a room. As with any topic, the more you know about heating and cooling, the easier it is to learn and understa...

 Expanding the Scope of School Subjects

We should not retreat to a curriculum advisory committee and ask, “Now where should we fit this topic into the already overloaded curriculum?” Although we cannot discard all the fragmented subjects in our present school system and start from scratch, we can and should ask all teachers to stretch their subjects to meet the needs and interests of the whole child. Working within the present subject-centered curriculum, we can ask math and science teachers as well as English and social studie...

 Ask Nature Many Questions at Once

No aphorism is more frequently repeated . . . than that we must ask Nature few questions, or ideally, one question at a time. The writer is convinced that this view is wholly mistaken. Nature, he suggests, will best respond to a logically and carefully thought out questionnaire; indeed if we ask her a single question, she will often refuse to answer until some other topic has been discussed.

 Research, Like Learning, Requires Practice

People who are unused to learning, learn little, and that slowly, while those more accustomed do much more and do it more easily. The same thing also happens in connection with research. Those who are altogether unfamiliar with this become blinded and bewildered as soon as their minds begin to work: they readily withdraw from the inquiry, in a state of mental fatigue and exhaustion, much like people who attempt to race without having been trained. He, on the other hand, who is accustomed to r...

 Religion is a Solution to a Non-Problem

At the 2005 World Religions Conference, I was asked to represent atheism, sitting on the stage with a Buddhist, Muslim, Christian, Jew, Sikh, Hindu, and Native American spiritualist. (I accepted the invitation only after making it clear that atheism is not a religion, and they agreed to include it as a “world philosophy.”) The theme of the conference was “salvation,” and each of us was asked to summarize our respective positions on that topic. After pointing out that “sin” is a re...

 Rationalism is Preferable to Atheism

I prefer rationalism to atheism. The question of God and other objects-of-faith are outside reason and play no part in rationalism, thus you don't have to waste your time in either attacking or defending.