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Rising bread
Yesterday, one of our experimental loaves of bread failed to rise, so re-tried it today and had a discussion about all the things we can do encourage it to rise. Since yeast is an organism, and we...
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Boredom in a fractal world
Brazilian butterfly Doxocopa laurentia (from Wikipedia) A few of my students have been complaining that we don’t do enough different things from week to week for them to write a different newsletter...
View ArticleSelf-respect rather than self-esteem
[S]elf-esteem is but a division of self-importance, which is seldom an attractive quality. That person is best who never thinks of his own importance: to think about it, even, is to be lost to...
View ArticleSelf-respect, self-knowledge and character
To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, … counting up the sins of commissions and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gifts...
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Seasons wheel
A beautiful intersection of art, science and abstract thinking. An assemblage of photos compressed into a circular graph by Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg. Citing this post: Urbano, L., 2010....
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Corinth Mississippi in the Civil War
Stream of American History at the Corinth Civil War Interpretive center. The Memphis to Charleston line was the only railroad that linked the East Coast of the Confederacy to the fertile Mississippi...
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Finding meaning in video games
If we can use music videos as a shorter proxy for introducing literature responses, then what about other types of media. On The Media had an interesting interview with the Tom Bissell, the author of...
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Socratic Dialogue: The God in the Machine
Synthesizing Cycle 1′s theme of, “What is Life”, I’ve given the students the option of choosing a personal novel where the question of life and sentience are important themes. Frankenstein and Feet of...
View ArticleEthos, Portos, and Logos
No, not the three musketeers. These are the three things you need to persuade people: credibility, emotion and logic (Aristotle in On Rhetoric). EV, in a comment on my post on Critical Reading, pointed...
View ArticleExtending Thinking with Calvin and Hobbes
My students have been asking to write “book” reports on movies or Dr. Seuss picture books instead of novels. I am not theoretically opposed. Our theme this cycle is literary essays, with a focus on...
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The Spirit of the Law
A You are the Ref strip by Paul Trevillion. Every week, artist Paul Trevillon poses, in text and cartoon form, some truly idiosyncratic situations that might come up in a soccer match in his You are...
View ArticleCreativity, Depression and Anger
[A]nger … triggers a less systematic and structured approach to the creativity task, and leads to initially higher levels of creativity. … [However] creative performance should decline over time more...
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