Archive for September 2008

Love goes, Tolerance remains

September 30, 2008

Tolerance is just a makeshift, suitable for an overcrowded and overheated planet. It carries on when love gives out, and love generally gives out as soon as we move away from our home and our friends.(E. M. Forster)

Technology, Green and Gray

September 29, 2008

Throughout history, people have used technology to change the world. Our technology has been of two kinds, green and gray. Green technology is seeds and plants, gardens and vineyards and orchards, domesticated horses and cows and pigs, milk and cheese, leather and wool. Gray technology is bronze and steel, spears and guns, coal and oil [...]

everybody was finally equal

September 28, 2008

THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and [...]

’tis the school boys that educate my son.

September 27, 2008

I pay the school master, but 'tis the school boys that educate my son.(Ralph Waldo Emerson)

Explanation is not Teaching

September 26, 2008

We teachers – perhaps all human beings – are in the grip of an astonishing delusion. We think that we can take a picture, a structure, a working model of something, constructed in our minds out of long experience and familiarity, and by turning that model into a string of words, transplant it whole into [...]

the kids are doing absolutely nothing

September 25, 2008

I urge people working on issues of instruction to pay attention to the work students are actually doing. In many classrooms where the teachers are working very hard, the kids are doing absolutely nothing because their job is to sit and listen quietly. (Richard Elmore, from Teacher Magazine, 5/15/2007)

Quiet Revolution in Algeria

September 24, 2008

In Algiers there is a whole class of young men referred to as hittistes — the word is a combination of French and Arabic for people who hold up walls.(Michael Slackman)

Children are the living messages

September 23, 2008

Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see.(Neil Postman)

Again, what we would like and what is

September 22, 2008

Einstein on Common Sense

September 22, 2008

Common sense is nothing more than a deposit of prejudices laid down by the mind before you reach age 18.(Albert Einstein)