Bird Droppings June 30, 2010 Learning and teaching are inevitable – if we try “In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but how many can get through to you.” Dr. Mortimer J. Adler Dr. Adler founded the Center for the Study of…

Bird Droppings June 29, 2010 Researching Education a bit With the bulk of education in the early 1900’s following closely the Industrial Revolution and mass production, a few great thinkers took the concept of the individual child in psychology and education in new directions as to its relationship to children. How children were viewed became…

Bird Droppings June 28, 2010 Pondering the idea of faith “Modern technology advanced in such tiny increments for so long that we never realized how much our world was being altered, or the ultimate direction of the process. But now the speed of change is accelerating logarithmically. It is apparent that developing a language and…

Bird Droppings June 27, 2010 Should we be trying to fill a liter bottle The current educational trends are analogous to trying to pour five gallons of material into a liter bottle using a funnel. As you try obliviously a large portion of material spills out and is discarded or lost. I use a liter…

Bird Droppings June 26, 2010 Finding Foxfire in the Kalahari I was walking about the yard and along the side of our nearby dirt road taking pictures of wildflowers and grasshoppers among other things I found a few days ago. I spent several minutes trying to photograph a seed from a broom sage plant floating…

Bird Droppings June 25, 2010 What we know “The world cares very little about what a man or woman knows; it is what a man or woman is able to do that counts.” Booker T. Washington Yesterday I received an email containing a letter from a well known professor of education at the University of…

Bird Droppings June 24, 2010 Is there a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow? “Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.” Abraham Lincoln Perhaps in the scheme of things there are people who are inherently grouchy and or by Lincolns view they simply want to…

Bird Droppings June 23, 2010 Why we do what we do? “Our task is to make our children into disciples of the good life, by our own actions toward them and toward other people. This is the only effective discipline in the long run. But it is more arduous, and takes longer, than simply “laying…

Bird droppings June 22, 2010 Translating and communicating “Scientific management is always on guard against people who don’t fit securely into boxes, whether because of too much competency, too much creativity, too much popularity or what have you. Although often hired, it is with the understanding they must be kept on a short leash and…

Bird Droppings June 21, 2010 A new journey revisited Nearly three years ago and a week my father passed away. It was in May of that same year my wife’s father passed away and that entire summer was much of a blur. I spent the better part of this year’s father’s day driving to and…