The Patriot

Why sloth is the most subtle of the seven deadly sins.

See this blog post: Spurgeon: Yet He Want’s Books. Justin Taylor comments on Charles Spurgeon’s sermon on 2 Timothy 4:13. In that passage, Paul asks Timothy to bring him his books.

He is inspired, and yet he wants books!

He has been preaching at least for thirty years, and yet he wants books!

He had seen the Lord, and yet he wants books!

He had had a wider experience than most men, and yet he wants books!

He had been caught up into the third heaven, and had heard things which it was unlawful for a men to utter, yet he wants books!

He had written the major part of the New Testament, and yet he wants books!

I’m teaching a graduate class in statistics. The semester is almost over and I’m teaching a topic not included in our textbook. I wanted to use a book that I believe is one of the best on the subject, but it’s too hard for the students to read on their own. I thought about using a more accessible text, but instead I decided to guide them though the difficult book.

I copied the first few pages of the advanced book and passed them out. We’re going through these pages line-by-line the way a literature class might go through a difficult passage from Milton. I provide lots of commentary. We have discussions. We go on tangents. But we have a text to return to that keeps us on track. So far I believe this experiment in applying classical pedagogy to advanced statistics is working well.

Quote from Andrew Kern:

A book isn’t great because of what it tells you, but because of what it makes you think about.

From Twyla Tharp’s book The Creative Habit.

I tend to read “archaeologically.” Meaning, I read backwards in time. I’ll start with a contemporary book and then move on to a text that predates that book, and so on until I’m reading the most ancient texts and the most primitive ideas.

Horse sculptures made from driftwood.

Read more about the sculptures here.

Ted Dunning has posted an article yesterday entitled Students learn what they need, not what is assigned.

The last time I taught in the classroom was as a member of a two-person teaching team teaching a software engineering class on machine level programming. In the past, this had been done by lecture and assignment and was truly a stunningly boring class. On the first day, I turned the structure of the class upside-down and assigned the entire final exam. This consisted of a single question in the form of a task (to build a robot that would drive around as fast as possible following a line on the floor). I then passed out soldering irons, computer components and kits of Lego parts and told them to get to work.  … This tactic resulted, as you would expect, in panic.

The experiment was a tremendous success.

By the end of the semester, I was getting complaints from the department because my students were (voluntarily) spending so much time on my class that they were neglecting their other classes. Some were spending 40 hours or more in the computer lab and many had built remarkable contraptions little related to the impending exam.

Here’s a story about a new study that says teachers matter more than curriculum for student’s math achievements.

Makes sense to me. When I was in college, I picked my electives by who was teaching more than what they were teaching. I found out who the best teachers were and took whatever they taught.

Parchment and Pen has an article this morning about misconceptions of the first Christmas. I started not to read it because so often the same things are brought out every year: the Bible mentions three gifts from the wise men but it doesn’t say there were three wise men, etc. But the Parchment and Pen article brings up some things I’ve never heard.

For one, the article says that the word translated “inn” as in “no room in the inn” is sometimes translated “guest room.” Also, the distinction between home and stable wasn’t so clear at the time. Instead of imagining a Motel 6 with a barn in back, maybe we should think of a private home with a spare room and some animals inside.

Cancer researcher Judah Folkman gave a talk where he explained how he learned to think big, to see connections. In the audio file below, he explains how he came to realize that chemistry and physics were connected even though they were taught by different teachers on different floors of his high school. His epiphany was “Nature is not arranged like schools are.”

Audio