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One of those sneaky days...
Sep. 26th, 2011 10:59 pmSneaky, as in "gone without realizing it," only faster.
I did get invoices out, to date, which is always a good thing.
While waiting for something resembling a late breakfast to cook, I turned on the television, and the only watchable channel I could find was a showing of the movie Stand and Deliver, with Edward James Olmos in the role of Jaime Escalante, a math teacher who was instrumental, back in the 80s, in bringing calculus to students at Garfield High School in East Los Angeles.
I caught a line in the segment that I watched that, I would guess, doesn't register with most people. It's a scene where one of the students is at the board, solving a problem, and struggling. Escalante urges him to "try the shortcut" and cajoles him with "this is easy... baby stuff for Boy Scouts," to which the frustrated student answers, "my mind don't work this way!"
I wish I had a yellow highlighter that worked on movie lines, because there, in one line, in a nutshell, is the precise reason for making the effort to learn anything, i.e., it gets your mind to think "this way." It is in many ways analogous to the acquisition of a physical skill or a set of such skills, say, to play a sport.
In my own adolescent experience, for example, I had a natural talent—whatever that means—for hitting balls with bats and running fast. But I never was able to master the art of fielding, which is why, when it came to choosing up sides, I was never picked ahead of those boys who could hit and field, and always before those boys who could neither hit nor field very well and thus, whose purpose in life was to "fill out" a team.
The more skills you have, the more choices you have available to you, and the easier it is to acquire new skills (and hence, new choices).
There are few things in life sadder than "not having any choice" in some matter, or having choices taken away. Avoidance of such things is, in my opinion, the true value of an education.
Cheers...
I did get invoices out, to date, which is always a good thing.
While waiting for something resembling a late breakfast to cook, I turned on the television, and the only watchable channel I could find was a showing of the movie Stand and Deliver, with Edward James Olmos in the role of Jaime Escalante, a math teacher who was instrumental, back in the 80s, in bringing calculus to students at Garfield High School in East Los Angeles.
I caught a line in the segment that I watched that, I would guess, doesn't register with most people. It's a scene where one of the students is at the board, solving a problem, and struggling. Escalante urges him to "try the shortcut" and cajoles him with "this is easy... baby stuff for Boy Scouts," to which the frustrated student answers, "my mind don't work this way!"
I wish I had a yellow highlighter that worked on movie lines, because there, in one line, in a nutshell, is the precise reason for making the effort to learn anything, i.e., it gets your mind to think "this way." It is in many ways analogous to the acquisition of a physical skill or a set of such skills, say, to play a sport.
In my own adolescent experience, for example, I had a natural talent—whatever that means—for hitting balls with bats and running fast. But I never was able to master the art of fielding, which is why, when it came to choosing up sides, I was never picked ahead of those boys who could hit and field, and always before those boys who could neither hit nor field very well and thus, whose purpose in life was to "fill out" a team.
The more skills you have, the more choices you have available to you, and the easier it is to acquire new skills (and hence, new choices).
There are few things in life sadder than "not having any choice" in some matter, or having choices taken away. Avoidance of such things is, in my opinion, the true value of an education.
Cheers...
