Category: Teaching
-
Teaching Versus Conducting Classes
At a gathering of Boston academicians some years back, by way of a conversational opener, I said to Professor X, "I understand you teach at the University of L." The good professor replied, "I conduct classes at the University of L." I found that to be a very good distinction, one borne out by my…
-
Khan Academy
60 Minutes last night did a segment on the Khan Academy, an online source of short tutorials in mathematics, science, and other subjects. A wonderful resource for homeschoolers and anyone interested in filling in the gaps in his education. I viewed a couple of algebra and a couple of probability lectures last night and found them…
-
The Overeducated
I once had a graduate student with whom I became friends. Ned Flynn, to give him a name, one day told me that after he finished high school he wanted to follow in his father's footsteps and get a job with the railroad. His mother, however, wanted something 'better' for her son. She wanted him…
-
On Used Books, Marginalia, Underlining, and Teaching
My library extends through each room of my house, except the bathrooms. (I suspect that in the average household, where the only purpose of reading could be to inspire excretion, it is the other way around.) If I weren’t pro-Israel I would say that my library commits territorial aggression against my wife’s ‘Palestinian’ books; her…
-
A Memory of Teaching
I am enjoying teaching quite a bit now that I no longer do it. With some things it is not the doing of it that we like so much as the having done it. One day in class I carefully explained the abbreviation ‘iff’ often employed by philosophers and mathematicians to avoid writing ‘if and…
-
Two Nuns Discuss Teaching
An eager young nun and a wise old nun were discussing teaching over lunch. The young nun was waxing enthusiastic over the privilege, but also the responsibility, of forming young minds. The old nun took a glass of water, inserted her forefinger, and agitated the water. Suddenly she removed her finger and the water immediately…
-
Infinity and Mathematics Education
A reader writes, Regarding your post about Cantor, Morris Kline, and potentially vs. actually infinite sets: I was a math major in college, so I do know a little about math (unlike philosophy where I'm a rank newbie); on the other hand, I didn't pursue math beyond my bachelor's degree so I don't claim to…
-
Glenn Reynolds on the Higher Education Bubble
Read it.
-
Whitehead on Education and Information
Alfred North Whitehead's The Aims of Education and Other Essays (Macmillan, 1929) begins with this paragraph: Culture is activity of thought, and receptiveness to beauty and humane feeling. Scraps of information have nothing to do with it. A merely well-informed man is the most useless bore on God's earth. What we should aim at producing…
-
Theodor Haecker on the Teaching of Latin and Greek
The following is from Theodor Haecker's Tag-und Nachtbücher 1939-1945, translated into English by Alexander Dru as Journal in the Night (Pantheon Books, 1950), pp. 114-115.) I have made a couple of corrections in the translation. The following entry was written in 1940 in Hitler's Germany. The National Socialists seized power in 1933 and their 'one…
-
Unbelievable if True: Illiteracy and Innumeracy
David K. Shipler, The Working Poor: Invisible in America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), p. 139: Some 37 percent of American adults cannot figure a 10 percent discount on a price, even using a calculator. (Emphasis added.) The same percentage cannot read a bus schedule or write a letter about a credit card error.…