Trying to make a quick chart for kids to use to identify their feelings. Let me tell you — there are too many possible emotions. Here’s what I’ve seen on posters so far:

• Happy
• Sad
• Angry
• Frightened
• Cheeky
• Sneaky
• Shy
• Sleepy
• Excited
• Afraid
• Guilty
• Tired
• Jealous
• Loved
• Hopeful
• Bored
• Proud
• Sorry
• Embarrassed
• Surprised
• Enraged
• Lonely
• Confused
• Smug
• Hopeless
• Frustrated
• Worried
• Confident
• Depressed
• Concerned
• Exhausted
• Shocked
• Frightened
• Hopeful
• Ecstatic
• Suspicious
• Cautious
• Composed
• Tearful
• Love Struck
• Jealous

I feel fairly certain that a simple, quick choice of expressions works better than fine-grained grid that compels children to distinguish between “embarrassed” and “guilty.”

Rats are omnivores. To keep from eating poison, the black rat (Rattus Rattus) only eats food its has eaten before. But Rattus Norvegicus, the brown rat, will eat food it has eaten and which it smells on the breath of other rats. This is a brilliant adaptation. A breathing rat is a living rat; a living rat probably did not die from poisoning.

In other words, rat’s breath imparts information to the scent of a food. This is an example of an environmental heuristic. Something in the surroundings becomes an approving (or monitory) signal which triggers a rapid decision.

I suspect that all kinds of information which is otherwise inert gains extra information by being transmitted through peer groups. Perhaps we should feel urgent about letting children use newly-learned information to each other. At the very least we should think about uncrossing our signals as teachers.

teachussomethingplease:

I saw this post of people trying to see if there was any corrolation between Harry Potter House and MBTI personality type.  

So I’m kind of curious.

If you are a teacher, what is your MBTI personality type?  I’m wondering if there is a particular type that is more prevalent…

(Obligatory ?)

I wanted to leave a good long note arguing against the whole MBTI deal as elaborate nonsense in the style of the medieval bestiaries, but I’ll just boil it down: It’s hooey. We all have access to different cognitive faculties, most of which do not correspond to one of the spaces in the Myers-Briggs grid. And we all use these faculties, in varying degrees of isolation, in different settings.

It’s the same thing as the “learning styles” nonsense. We go from “visual thinking” to “visual thinker” and something insidious happens. Step away from it, people.

world-shaker:

I’d say this is a pretty significant development:

An entire industry has sprouted based on learning styles. There are workshops for teachers, products targeted at different learning styles and some schools that even evaluate students based on this theory.

This prompted Doug Rohrer, a psychologist at the University of South Florida, to look more closely at the learning style theory.

When he reviewed studies of learning styles, he found no scientific evidence backing up the idea. “We have not found evidence from a randomized control trial supporting any of these,” he says, “and until such evidence exists, we don’t recommend that they be used.”

Uh-oh. If schools revised, this would be a big one.

Interesting quote of a translation of a quote here, with Carlos Fuentes discussing Latin American literature: ”The most varied and fervorous literature of spanish speaking America is the Argentinian. The most sui generis (like the country itself) is the Chilean.”

This is an accidental mis-translation of sui generis. He means to say that Chilean literature, like Chile itself, is sui generis. But the alternate reading is that sui generis means “like the country itself,” or, more generally, “true to its own origin.”

I wonder if there is such a phrase. Works or ideas which are like the settings that generated them would fit the idea. I would make a recursive version meaning: Like itself.

Some things cannot fail or succeed at this because they have no plan, implicit or otherwise. Some can fail because their seeming outcomes are so different from their inward processes that they seem to fail themselves, or at least misrepresent themselves. But in some things we can recognize their own self-correspondence and take it as a sign of integrity. Latinates, get moving.

This looks like the whole book. A simple thought experiment with profound implications for how we interpret the behavior of volitional beings. Spoiler: We’re usually wrong by overestimation.

Teaching deep-level physics with the face and feeling

The world is the totality of facts, not things. I should leave Wittgenstein for those qualified to misunderstand him. But this is on my mind. The world, the one coterminous with our language, is composed of facts. It divides into facts. Facts are propositional. They can be true or false. (The truly atomic facts, for  can be true or false and leave all the other atomic facts unchanged.)

An analogy: Wittgenstein read a newspaper account of a trial over an auto accident. The lawyers presented a little model version of the accident scene, with cars and pedestrians and streets and so on. What was the model made of? What was the substance of it? It was not the models; they could have been blocks or dice or pieces of fruit. It was the facts of their relationship to one another. If any of those facts had falsely corresponded to the facts of the case, it would have ceased to be a picture of the scene. (The jury might have accepted it anyway, but no matter.)

Sentences model the world and have a special power to do so. The set of possible valid sentence forms is also the set of everything that could be the case. So we can look into language to learn all that could be.

The very real stuff of our world, the stuff to which language has a truth-relationship (oh, for the correct long German word), is not stuff as we usually think it. It is not a collection of objects to which facts could be assigned. It is facts about objects which are themselves almost incidental.

Something odd happens in school. Well, at least two things I can think of:

1. Facts can lapse into nothingness. They become things and lose their capacity to model the world. Style enters here: A fact about physics can seem to say nothing or everything, depending on the skill and engagement of the teacher and student.
2. What if we compared school to the model of the accident? Do the facts of school effectively model the world?

N.B.: Later Wittgenstein — well, all bets are off. At the very least, language lost its special ability to depict the nature of reality. Language became an infinitely nested and mutable set of games, the rules of which self-referred. Bertrand Russell was disappointed and thought Wittgenstein had just come up with a way to avoid thinking seriously.