Bird Droppings July 11, 2012 Is religion what you make of it?   “A poor devotee points to the sky and says, ‘God is up there.’ An average devotee says, ‘God dwells in the heart as the Inner Master.’ The best devotee says, ‘God alone is and everything I perceive is a form of God.’”…

Bird Droppings July 10, 2012 Why are there two Standing Bears?   I was going through my library of books over the weekend looking for additional references for my dissertation and found this copy from 1972 of The Ponca Chiefs. The following quote is from a court room dialogue of the first time legally Native…

Bird Droppings July 8, 2012 Can we be about healing?   “People cannot know how sacred power, or medicine truly works, bit almost every Native American knows something of its ways. Often seen as a mysterious force that is fluid, transmissible and important malleable, sacred power can be manipulated by those who possess it –…

Bird Droppings July 7, 2012 Some might think that curriculum is sacred   I took a one day respite from writing and electronic devices yesterday traveling to Bennettsville SC., to see my son, daughter in law and future grandbaby. Getting back I needed to shift gears and get back into my academic mindset and on…

Bird Droppings July 5, 2012 What is normal?   “Normality in fact has nothing to do with statistics. It refers to a norm, a model of perfection, an example to be followed. It indicates what we should be. Normality is therefore something to strive for, something at which to aim, it is not what most…

Bird droppings July 4, 2012 Do we learn from a ripple or a wave?               I will spend most of the morning digging and planting, transplanting and repotting various flowers and herbs in our yard and also cutting grass now that we have had some rain. I have several in dire need of planting…

Bird Droppings July 3, 2012 Can we really be who we are?   It has been nearly ten years since I was directly involved in Foxfire teaching at Piedmont College. I sat through my own training program which at the time was an experimental approach in the Piedmont Specialist program. One of the reasons I…

Bird Droppings July 2, 2012 A reflection on a pond or window of two   I boxed up a couple of boxes of junk from my class room Saturday. All have been teachable moment items for some time or other collected from my father and mother’s house. My mother had been getting his things sorted…

Bird Droppings July 1, 2012 Learning and teaching are inevitable if we really 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…

Bird Droppings June 29, 2012 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…