Semisensical ramblings by David W. Rick
“Our brains are engaged full time in real-time (risky) heuristic search, generating presumptions about what will be experienced next in every domain. This time-pressured, unsupervised generation process has necessarily lenient standards and introduces content-not all of which can be properly checked for truth-into our mental spaces. If left unexamined, the inevitable errors in these vestibules […]
“The incidence of play is not associated with any particular stage of civilization or view of the universe. Any thinking person can see at a glance that play is a thing on its own, even if his language possesses no general concept to express it. Play cannot be denied. You can deny, if you like, […]
“This renegade line of thought values rhetoric not as ‘formulaic discourse’ or pure technique, but rather as the activity of learning and wondering; a process that eschews the constraints of a singular ‘purpose or end or stance’ and cultivates instead a ‘suppleness of mind’ well-suited to address continuously evolving social contexts.” — T. R. Johnson […]
“What is fun? If you dig into the origins of the word, it comes either from ‘fonne,’ which is ‘fool’ in Middle English, or from ‘fonn,’ which means ‘pleasure’ in Gaelic. Either way, fun is defined as ‘a source of enjoyment.’ This can happen via physical stimuli, aesthetic appreciation, or direct chemical manipulation.” — Raph […]
“It is feminist thinking that empowers me to engage in a constructive critique of Freire’s work (which I needed so that as a young reader of his work I did not passively absorb the worldview presented) and yet there are many other standpoints from which I approach his work that enable me to experience its […]
This is a sort of amalgam post in which I discuss three texts that will not be directly considered for my comps questions. Rather, in the cases of Covino and Gardner, they will serve as supportive or framing pieces for other texts. In the case of Freud, I have determined that he will not be […]
“The creative individual is a person who regularly solves problems, fashions products, or defines new questions in a domain in a way that is initially considered novel but that ultimately becomes accepted in a particular cultural setting.” — Howard E. Gardner Key Terms: Intrinsic Motivation, Fruitful Asynchrony, Affective/Cognitive Support Howard E. Gardner’s Creating Minds: An […]
“A plethora of critiques currently focuses on what has been lost in, or sacrificed to the gains of, Philosophic thinking. The past few decades have been noisy with complaints about the damage done by ‘the scientific world view,’ ‘technical rationality,’ and so on. The main loss stems from the Philosophic tendency to embrace a narrow, […]
“Teachers and students (leadership and people), co-intent on reality, are both Subjects, not only in the task of unveiling that reality, and thereby coming to know it critically, but in the task of re-creating that knowledge. As they attain this knowledge of reality through common reflection and action, they discover themselves as permanent re-creators. In […]
“For I am so confident of the potentialities of education when it is treated as intelligently directed development of the possibilities inherent in ordinary experience that I do not feel it necessary to criticize here the other route nor to advance arguments in favor of taking the route of experience.” — John Dewey Dewey’s Experience […]