The Patriot

This summer I’m helping teach a course in medical statistics. There are a few dozen students in the classroom in Houston, and several other students in two remote locations. The remote students see me via a camera pointed at my podium. The Houston students and I see the remote students projected on a screen at the front of the room.

The classroom suppresses spontaneity. I can’t run over to a marker-board and answer a question because the remote students couldn’t see what’s going on. Not that there are many questions. The students attending live don’t have microphones. If they do ask a question, either someone runs up to them with a microphone as if they were in the audience of a talk show, or I repeat the question into my microphone. I encourage questions, but the classroom discourages them. The classroom usually wins. As much as I would prefer to engage students in discussion, the room was designed for PowerPoint presentations.

Although I’m frustrated by the technology, I realize that without it students outside major cities would have fewer opportunities. I’m learning to adjust to my limitations. (It’s interesting how adding teleconference equipment to a room decreases its functionality.) I wonder what kinds of dialogs Plato would have with his students if they had been in scattered locations talking into web-cams.

Tom Ziglar, son of the famous speaker and author Zig Ziglar, gave an interview recently on the Startup Story Radio podcast. One of the things that struck me about the interview was Tom’s respect and affection for his father. Rather than seek to make a name for himself, he seemed unashamed, even proud, to quote his father.

Tom Ziglar has been working for over 20 years in the company his father founded. He describes in the interview how his father teaches people to follow simple biblical principles. When asked whether these principles are common sense, he gives examples of how people may think they’re following these principles but are not carrying them through to their logical conclusions.

Our school’s web site now includes a custom search engine by Google to allow visitors to search the site.

http://www.covenantacademyhouston.org/search.html

Ben Dunlap told tells the remarkable story of Holocaust survivor Sandor Teszler here. Toward the end of his long life, Teszler told Dunlap that he believed people are basically good and exhorted Dunlap to believe the same.

Christianity teaches two fundamental truths about humanity: we are created in the image of God, and we are fallen. Because we are fallen, we are not basically good. We are born rebels against God, sinners in need of a Savior. But we are also created in the image of God. The fall distorted that image, but did not destroy it. It is inspiring to learn of people like Sandor Teszler who believe in the good in people and work to draw it out.

The May 3/10 issue of World Magazine carries a story about pastor and author Eugene Peterson. When newcomers asked what activities his church offered, he replied “if you’d let me be your pastor I’d help you learn not to want so much activity.”

Because of record enrollment, Covenant Academy is planning to open new classes in grades 1, 2, 4, and possibly Kindergarten. If you would be interest in teaching for our school for the 2008-09 school year, please contact us.

Update: We are opening a new Kindergarten class.

The May issue of Wired magazine carries a story entitled The Memory Master. The article portrays Piotr Wozniak as radically self-absorbed man obsessed with memorization, hardly a role model for classical education. However, Wozniak has discovered some principles that ring true and have empirical support.

One of Wozniak’s principles is that the optimal time to review something is just as you are about to forget it. (Reviewing something while it’s fresh on your mind is not as effective in committing that item to long-term memory. And once you’ve forgotten something, you’re starting over.) It follows that review sessions should not be evenly spaced. After each review, the item is more firmly in your memory, and so it will take longer to reach the next point of nearly forgetting it. After a few such cycles, the item is committed to memory.

A related principle is that the struggle to recall something causes that item to be strengthened in your memory. Reviews that come too quickly and too easily build confidence but do not accomplish as much as exercises that are more challenging. The optimal strategy for memorization does not feel optimal.

See a related article on confusion.

Venture capitalist Paul Graham recently posted an essay entitled Be Good. His advice to start-up companies is

Make something people want. Don’t worry too much about making money.

He realizes this this is ”a description of a charity.” So to be a successful company, it pays to be like a charity. It also goes the other way around:

… it was surprising to realize there were purely benevolent projects that had to be embodied as companies to work.

I don’t know that Graham is coming from a biblical worldview, but he has discovered some biblical principles. Note that these principles are like what we find in Proverbs: general statements about how the world often works, not universal laws. Doing good can, and often does, lead to financial success. But doing good can also lead to suffering.

From John W. Gardner:

Much education today is monumentally ineffective. All too often, we are giving young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them how to grow their own plants.

Paul Graham recently posted an essay How to Disagree. The essay proposes standards for logic and behavior when expressing disagreement in online communities.