Facts, Stories & Brain Scans
“We tend to use the word story casually, as if stories and narratives were ephemeral decorations for some unchanging underlying reality. The deeper neurological truth is that stories do not cloak reality but create it, triggering cascades of perception and motivation. The proof is in brain scans: When we hear a fact, a few isolated...
Life Lessons from Bergson
My dogears from Michael Foley’s excellent “Life Lessons from Bergson” Time “Time” is now the most-used noun in English, whereas many primitive peoples, for instance the Amondawa tribe of the Amazon and the Australian Aborigines do not have a word for it. (p.24) Chance The corollary of predictability as...
The Dynamo and the Social
Thought this was an interesting piece at Slate based on Paul David’s paper. There are some obvious parallels with personal or mobile computing and education and the difficulties we have with using it well. “Electric light bulbs were available by 1879, and there were generating stations in New York and London by 1881. Yet a...
Blessed Unrest
There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. If you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not […]
What to avoid when teaching
Durham University, the Sutton Trust and CEM published an interesting report called “What Makes Great Teaching” in October 2014. It’s an overview of what research appears to be telling us at the moment. While it would be wonderful to think there is a simple, step-by-step formula to a perfect lesson, I’m not at all...
An Open Letter From One Patient To Another
[A friend asked me for advice for her brother, who’d been recently diagnosed. So I opened a bottle of wine.] Dear W, I’m so sorry to hear the news – good luck with the operation. A has asked me to write to you with some advice. I’m not a big fan of giving advice, I’m […]
Reasonable Doubt
I like this story to explain reasonable doubt. (From Sam Leith’s wonderful “You talkin to me?“) “A man is in the dock, accused of murdering his wife. Although the body was never recovered, all the evidence points to the defendant: his car boot was filled with baling twine, bloodstained hammers, torn items of his...
Intelligence has nothing to do with speed
Love this, from Laurent Schwartz‘s ‘A Mathematician Grappling with his Century’ [via Jo Boaler] “I was always deeply uncertain about my own intellectual capacity; I thought I was unintelligent. And it is true that I was, and still am, rather slow. I need time to seize things because I always need to understand them fully....
Too much “Tuck that shirt in”
Interesting article in the Independent called The Politics of the School Uniform. While there are no legal requirements to have uniforms, a 2007 report by the Department for Education found that almost 98 per cent of schools chose to have one. Compared with much of the rest of Europe, where uniforms are relatively rare, we […]
Workspace, Learnspace, Brainspace
I’ve just been watching Channel 4’s The Secret Life of Buildings. The presenter’s an acquired taste but there are some fascinating bits to it. The main take-aways for me are : buildings and spaces actually change the way the human brain works. (more complex, interactive spaces make for more engaged brains. Fred...