Tag Archives: Reading Around
Learning Like Magic
It makes a sensational, controversial headline: A Harry Potter-centered curriculum boosts a failing school into the top 5 percent. Students must recite a spell (“numerus subtracticus”) when answering math questions.
But on closer inspection, this turns out not to be just a school carried off into frightening conformity to the current fad. Whatever [...]
Of Lists and Learning
At their best, the lists are intended to be guiding abstractions of something deeper and much more complex than any list: the collected wisdom and practice of a whole community, whether of mathematicians, writers, historians, or scientists. That knowledge is fully present only in the community itself, and distilling it into a list is a deeply self-reflective exercise for practitioners in any field of human activity.
Posted in Reading Around Also tagged Community, Education, History, school systems, University of Wisconsin, William Cronon 3 Comments
Beowulf: Behold the Man