Now that the triumph of Barak Obama at the polls is a little more than a week behind us, I have sufficiently come down from the adrenaline high of the election to think clearly about what this could mean for … Continue reading
Category Archives: Education
My spouse Denise is an enthusiastic and skilled nature photographer. She does not do this for a living (although she probably could), but out of the pleasure it gives her to catch bits and pieces of the real world in … Continue reading
Get some educators or instructors into a room and before long you will get an earful about good teaching practices, pedagogy, learning, and so forth. You’ll hear all the latest info about how best to get kids to pay attention, … Continue reading
I caught a very interesting opinion piece in the 27 February issue of the Providence Journal about how, once again, Finnish 15-year old students were rated the best in the world in math and science by the Program for International … Continue reading
Anti-intellectualism is an American tradition; for whatever reasons, the knowledgeable individual, the brilliant thinker will have their detractors who are not so much in disagreement with what they think or believe, but with their presence. Religious dynamics have driven much … Continue reading
When starting one’s private intellectual journey the question often come up: what shall I study? Sometimes it isn’t even clear which subject area a person wants to pursue. Generalists like Your Humble Correspondent find this a persistent, nagging, and fiendishly … Continue reading
When I was in grade school, I had the good fortune to benefit from the fact that the Russians, via Sputnik, had scared the bejesus out of America, prompting our leaders to the very sensible conclusion that we needed more … Continue reading
Publishing is one of the big barriers that face independent scholars and amateur scientists. In years past, people who didn’t have a Ph.D. or some other kind of institutional affiliation didn’t have a snowball’s chance of getting published in a … Continue reading
Every once in awhile when you get a bunch of intellectual types “talking shop”, the subject turns to the matter of intellectual objectivity. The journalist and broadcast majors will go on and on about the problems of maintaining objectivity and … Continue reading
Every once in awhile we start hearing–again–about how poorly American kids are doing in school, how they lag behind just about every other industrialized country in pretty much everything (or so it seems). I submit that one way to alleviate … Continue reading