A previous blog entry listed several types of thinking, including the common analytical and intuitive. Reflection on ones’ thinking, and learning about learning are important and useful activities. They can lead to a valuable kind of self-understanding with pragmatic applications (like what jobs you should avoid and what hobbies or pastimes may be more gratifying).
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Every once is a while someone asks how I manage to post a blog entry every day. My canned response is, “I try to have a thought every day, then, I write it down.” Blogging is a good exercise for aspiring writers who strive to live into the axioms, “A writer writes,” and, “the only way to learn to write is to write.” For those of us not born with the gift for words, writing is a learned craft, and, like any craft, you just have to observe the discipline of daily practice if you want to get good at it.
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Even though I have become dependent on the personal computer for both work and play I retain a fondness for typewriters (at this point one of my kids would say, “Typewriter? What’s that?”). Much of that has to do with the physicality of them as objects. Typewriters were a part of my growing up. My father was, for a good portion of his life, what was then refered to as an office machine repairman (before the terms “technician” or “engineer” were tagged onto just about any job description). His business spread between shop and home, and at times we had dozens of typewriters and office calculators (the huge metal hand-crank-levered pre-digital kinds) around the house.
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Last week I had two interesting conversations with familiar strangers. These were those people that we have become comfortable around because of propinquity yet don’t really know. You know them, people at work we see every day but only say “Hi” and “See your tomorrow.” Or, those people at church we greet every week because they sit near our pew to whom we’ve passed the peace but could not tell the names of their children or what they do for a living if asked.
As often happens, those familiar strangers can turn out to be very interesting people with life stories that verge on the adventuresome. Such was the case with my two conversations. Both left me saying to myself, “Wow. You never know.”
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I was a hospice chaplain for about five years. It was a great job, despite the obvious need to redefine professional competence and success that comes with the territory. Nothing I was able to do would help the patient “get better.” And every one of our patients died. Over six hundred patients died under my ministry. That’s not something I put on the resume.
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While learning is a natural innate human ability, becoming a good learner is not. In whatever context of learning, whether in a graduate studies classroom, university, or Sunday school class effective teachers understand that part of their job is to help students become good learners. Researcher William Perry has identified nine stages of a student’s development. He grouped these stages into four substages.
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I finally got around to watching a DVD from Netflix that’s been sitting on the coffee table for about a month (thank goodness for that “no late fees” policy!). The movie was House of D. In the movie a thirteen-year-old comes of age through loss, grief, and escape. As an adult, and a father, he returns to the place of his childhood in order to reconnect and move on.
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An advantageous reminder is that while we are blessed with the power of cognition, we remain biological creatures often at the mercy of our phylogeny. This is advantageous when we recognize it, and, when the instinctual, non-rational part of our brain does its job in ensuring the survival of our little puddle of the gene pool. The problem comes in that our instinctual brain lacks discernment and will veto our rational cortex when it perceives a threat.
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Once a month I try to take a reading day at the library, either at my local neighborhood library or the seminary library across campus. Most of my reading on that day consists of pulling journals and periodicals off the shelf to catch up on the most current writing and thinking on areas of interest.
Here are periodicals I’ve found worth consulting to keep up in the field of education:
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One of the things my wife asked for Christmas was the missing volumes to her series of Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, that outrageously (and refreshingly) “dark†children’s books. While many adults enjoy the wry humor in Snicket’s prose, the more significant aspect is children’s response to a cycle of stories that have no happy ending and exploits children’s worst fears (the children in the story are orphaned in the first book, and then it gets worse from there). Kids are eating up this series of stories.
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