I’m playing around with coding a simple site that pulls in various “of the days” - word of the day, historical happening of the day, quote of the day, joke of the day etc. - so that I can put it up at morning registrations for children to look at (and hopefully discuss).
The only UK English spelling word of the day feed I’ve found is the OED. And their word of the day today is lubricous. I had to look it up. It means:
smooth and glassy; slippery; lewd, wanton, salacious or lecherous
Sheesh. Back to the drawing board. Might have to add things manually.
Comments(1) | Life on I’ve been thinking about brain research and teaching again, specifically in the light of an article about the seductive allure of neuroscience. I’d felt at a bit of a dead-end. My gut feeling was that there was a lot to learn from cognitive science, but I was (and am) very aware that I’m a very poor layman when it comes to assessing its value.
So I was chuffed to learn that William James had sorted it out for me a long time ago. He comments that
“You make a great, a very great mistake, if you think that psychology, being the science of the mind’s laws, is something from which you can deduce definite programmes and schemes and methods of instruction for immediate school-room use. Psychology is a science, and teaching is an art; and sciences never generate arts directly out of themselves. An intermediate inventive mind must make that application, by using its originality.
A science only lays down lines within which the rules of the art must fall, laws which the follower of the art must not transgress; but what particular thing he shall positively do within those lines is left exclusively to his own genius. … To know psychology, therefore, is absolutely no guarantee that we shall be good teachers. To advance that result we must have an additional endowment altogether, a happy tact and ingenuity to tell us what definite things to say and do when that pupil is before us. That ingenuity in meeting … the pupil, that tact for the concrete situation, . . . are things to which psychology cannot help us in the least. [My emphasis]
As David Berliner says,
“James did, however, see the study of psychology as useful in three ways: to provide the underpinnings for beliefs about instruction, to prohibit teachers from making certain egregious errors, and to provide intellectual support to teachers for some of their pedagogical decisions.”
Bingo.
This is inspirational stuff. Reminded me of the grid thinking idea (outsourcing brain cycles rather than CPU cycles), albeit in a much more practical, fabulous way. Wonder where a London chapter of 826 Valencia could work…
Frank Worrell was a pretty special character. I knew he was an inspirational leader, and focused on the team as a whole. e.g. from Cricinfo:
“Before that wonderful tour of Australia in 1960-1, Barbadians would tend to stick together and so would the Trinidadians, Jamaicans and Guyanans. Worrell cut across all that. Soon there were no groups, just one team.
He told his batsmen to walk if they were given out. When Gary Sobers appeared to show his dissent with a decision, he reprimanded him. After that, everyone walked as soon as the umpire’s finger went up.”
What I like more, though, is this from his friend C. L. R. James. While the tour started badly, Worrell lectured nobody on cricket itself.m Instead,
“If something was wrong, I told them what was right and left it to them”
Genius.
From Beyond the Boundary (again):
“A sample poll can investigate only what the pollsters know, and it cannot do even that properly”
From Beyond the Boundary:
“A man’s unstated assumptions, those he is often not aware of, are usually the mainspring of his thought”
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