3 March 2011
A student provided me with a PERFECT example of why it’s important not to use the word “you” in formal writing.
I’ve been looking for the perfect example for years and years, and I’ve finally got one. Here it is, ready for teachers the world over to use.
3 March 2011
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/11/the-cognitive-cost-of-expertise/
I’m mostly putting this here as a link so that I can find it again when I need to. But it turns out that many of the parts of the brain which are wired for understanding the natural world, may in fact be the parts of the brian which get re-wired for learning to read and write.
If this is so, then there’s a clear reason why our highly-literate society is so disrespectful of nature — we’ve literally re-purposed the parts of our brain designed to interact with and recognize discrete parts of the natural world, to the point where it is merely an unrecognizable backdrop to our own merely-human drama.
3 March 2011
Media, Teaching europe, european history, how-to, manorial, manors, medieval, middle ages, Video, YouTube 4 Comments
I think that manorial living doesn’t get enough credit for raising the standard of living in Europe. We tend to focus on the Renaissance as the real economic miracle, and then the Industrial Revolution. But as I hope this video shows, it was the alliance between noble women and interested Church leaders that slowly, ever-so-slowly, raised standards of living by adding new skills and new industries to the manorial system. It certainly wasn’t perfect, and the serfs who lived under this system lived hard lives. Yet by 1200 AD, the average serf was still better off than his ancestors 400 years before.
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