Yes, I too found the solar eclipse thrilling, and a little spooky. The summer sunshine grew dim and a chill settled over the garden. Curved bites appeared in the dappled shadows of leaves. Like many others, we peered at light falling through the pinholes of a homemade cardboard box to see the image of the […]
Read more Today I offer you morsels from a book I’m reading as a delectable snack for your mind. Beautifully written, it reminds me that, in our course, we look at areas of knowledge not just for their description and analysis but also for their wonder. In many ways, I feel TOK to be a celebration of […]
Read more It’s not true to say that all teaching’s better with stories – but there’s enough truth in this exaggeration that I feel like saying it anyhow, and I hope that even TOK teachers will forgive me my hyperbole. Stories can catch student interest, illustrate points, and open up lots of questions. I’ve just read one […]
Read more As a PS to my previous post on creativity and ways of knowing, I’d like to add a short (3:44) video clip of scientist Neil de Grasse Tyson speaking of the importance of the arts. In context of defending the arts from funding cuts, his appreciation of creativity and culture, embodied in the arts, gains […]
Read more Where do new ideas come from? Is it inevitable, I wonder, that in trying to talk with students about using ways of knowing creatively I’m inclined to turn to individual stories of “getting ideas”? Today I’d simply like to share two or three resources for raising discussion of creativity in class. The first is a very short […]
Read more On this fine day in May, most Theory of Knowledge students in the northern hemisphere are surely preoccupied with only a certain aspect of knowledge: how well to demonstrate it, in relevant forms, on examinations. So today let me suggest that tired students deserve to be invited away from exam stress through their senses and […]
Read more “Metaphors, as we all by now know, aren’t just ornamental linguistic flourishes—they’re basic building blocks of everyday reasoning. And they’re at their most potent when they recast a difficult-to-understand phenomenon as something familiar.” So writes cognitive scientist Kensy Cooperrider. In giving the backstory of Darwin’s choice of “natural selection” for evolution, he provides a short article for any Theory of Knowledge […]
Read more Stories have power. In the scams of con artists, they have the power to “get you emotionally transported enough that you stop asking questions, or at least the questions that matter.” So warns Maria Konnikova, whose recently published book The Confidence Game prompted my post last week, and this week. At the same time, however, […]
Read more What an excellent summary of how science works! You’ll be missing out on a splendid resource if you don’t read these two articles on “Real Scientific Literacy” offered just last week (free, on his blog) by neurologist and science writer Dr. Steven Novella: Real Scientific Literacy , The Ness, Neurologicablog, January 12, 2016. Real Scientific Literacy, Part II , The Ness, Neurologicablog, January […]
Read more Scientific agreement, ethical agreement, and political agreement are entirely different. They’re not justified by the same means, not shared through the same process of communication, not brought to a conclusion through the same process of validation. But when they converge – when the political representatives of the world accept scientific knowledge as the basis for […]
Read more
