When learning doesn’t fade away
Our tutoring consultant has an encouraging experience with his own memory.
Remembrance of things past
Articles Tagged with learning
A surfeit of features
No one uses them all
Digital cameras, like calculators, have an immense menu of features. It’s certainly rare, and possibly unknown, for anyone to use them all. Why have them, then?
The John Henry moment
Old technology triumphant
A mathematics teacher is not much like a nineteenth-century railroad worker–but there are parallels. Our consultant who tutors High School math and science continues to learn from it; sometimes, his students do also.
Classes of classes
What is the aim of school?
A recent comment on one of our posts raises the question of what teachers are trying to achieve in school. The answer varies.
It’s simpler than that
Teachers can know too much
High School chemistry rests on a base of sophisticated quantum mechanics. Fortunately, it’s not necessary to master the advanced subject in order to use its results.
Ways of learning and of avoiding it
Life is not a word problem
Our tutoring consultant continues to gain insights from his students.
Interpreting French Oast
The complicated business of reading signs
Even simple daily tasks can involve very sophisticated thinking.
Plato’s fallacy
Education is good, but it has its limits
A scientist cautions against the idea behind the philosopher-king.
On textbooks
Learning and re-learning
Textbooks are to learn from, of course. But who is doing the learning, and when?
Hard problems and easy ones
What’s difficult is not always clear
Humans have accomplished some pretty amazing things, from putting men on the Moon (with old technology!) to sequencing their own heredity. But stubborn problems that look much easier persist.