Why failure is not a bad thing-J K Rowling

J.K. Rowling, author of the best-selling Harry Potter book series, delivers her Commencement Address, “The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination,” at the Annual Meeting of the Harvard Alumni Association. It is a wonderful, inspiring speech for anyone who is feeling stuck in the rat race.
You can hear the first part by clicking on this link as I only included the second part:

School should not replace home and community

At a recent graduation I attended one would imagine from all the fanfare that the best years of one's life happen on school grounds; "All the happy memories-tra la la."
Most people, on closer reflection, would beg to differ.
I think it is a shame that life is forced to revolve around the school scene-such a limited experience.
The school experience has become so ingrained in our day to day that it may be the only common ground kids (and adults to kids) have in which to communicate through. Even amongst kids of the same age, if you do not attend the same school, then you are a perceived as a threat at the worst, 'not in' or 'other' at the best.

Kids are engaged in many different pursuits ; music, art, books, movies, sports, and they talk about these things, yet the taste of school is palpable across the board, contaminating speech and thought.

And where family and community neighbourhoods should hold the strongest position, school has taken a death grip. School has replaced both home and community. And this has produced a debilitating effect on what should be the most important links.

Why do we settle for so little? Kids spend more of their waking hours at school than at home with the family or out in the community.
But young kids especially need to spend more time in the presence of those who care about them; who like them who want to be with them. And they need this more than the company of peers.

Imagine if there was a body of such people in the community, a pool from which to draw from; people who had the time to mentor the young?
We need to begin to prioritize families and community. Mentoring and learning made available to everyone at all times as well as a tailored education (as opposed to 'one size fits all') should be every person's right.

"We have time and again missed the lesson of the Congregational principle: people are less than whole unless they gather themselves voluntarily into groups of souls in harmony. Gathering themselves to pursue individual, family and community dreams consistent with their private humanity is what makes them whole;only slaves are gathered by others.
And these dreams must be written locally because to exercise and larger ambition without such a base is to lose touch with the things which give life meaning: self, family, friends, work and intimate community."

John Taylor Gatto

The Congregational Principle, Dumbing us Down

bike powered fun

A friend's nephew helped create this interactive sculpture in England:

Einstein thought in pictures

Logic will take you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.
Einstein

"Einstein thought in curious pictures, then in fictional "thought experiments," then got some math and a Laputan raft of scientists to do the experiments. That we can work back from some imaginings and thought experiments to mathematics and physical experiments might be the most important thing we do as a species. Before anything can be done, it must first be imagined howerever imperfectly. In a sea of photons the waves can be as long as a universe."
George Zebrowski, "After the Stars are Gone." From the book Year Million: Science at the Edge of Knowledge.

Creativity and Flow Psychology

I found this article that talks about the perfect state conducive to optimal experience and functioning. I have edited it but you can read it in it's entirety at http://talentdevelop.com/articles/Page8.html

Creativity and Flow Psychology

by Douglas Eby

"The best moments usually occur when a person's body
or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort
to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile."
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

The author of "Flow - the Psychology of Optimal Experience" and a number of related books, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced me-high chick-sent-me-high) says we can facilitate the conditions for this quality of optimal functioning, and that it may be found in a wide range of careers and activities.

For his doctoral thesis on "how visual artists create art" he studied photos taken every three minutes as artists created a painting. He says he was "struck by how deeply they were involved in work, forgetting everything else. That state seemed so intriguing that I started also looking for it in chess players, in rock climbers, in dancers and in musicians.

"I expected to find substantial differences in all their activities, but people reported very similar accounts of how they felt. Then, I started looking at professions like surgery and found the same elements there ­ a challenge which provides clear, high goals and immediate feedback... They forget themselves, the time, their problems," he says........

Athletes call flow experience being in the "zone" - an optimal psychological and physiological climate for peak performance. Brazilian soccer player Pele has described days when everything was going right, and feeling "a strange calmness I hadn't experienced in any of the other games. It was a type of euphoria; I felt I could run all day without tiring, that I could dribble through any of their teams or all of them, that I could almost pass through them physically. I felt I could not be hurt."

Basketball players, when they experience being "in the zone" report that the basket seems bigger, and feeling an almost mystical connection to it. The legendary hitter Ted Williams has said that sometimes he could see the seams on a pitched baseball. Gymnast Carol Johnson found that on some days she experienced the balance beam as wider, so "any worry of falling off disappeared."

Football quarterback star John Brodie told Michael Murphy (author of "The Psychic Side of Sports") that he found periods in every game when "time seems to slow down, in an uncanny way, as if everyone were moving in slow motion. It seems as if I had all the time in the world to watch the receivers run their patterns, and yet I know the defensive line is coming at me just as fast as ever."

This time dilation experience may relate to studies of psychologist Robert Ornstein in which increased information processing by the brain can result in a "stretching" or slowing down of the experience of time.

Sports psychologists and trainers use a range of techniques such as progressive muscle relaxation, concentration exercises and meditation to help access this "zone". One of the consistent themes of these approaches is the need to "get around" the conscious mind.

The winner of the 1988 Olympics in archery was a 17-year-old Korean young woman whose training included meditation for two hours a day.

Archer Tim Strickland has noted that conscious intervention is the great enemy: "Your conscious mind always wants to help you, but usually it messes you up." Csikszentmihalyi has warned "You can't make flow happen. All you can do is learn to remove obstacles in its way." He says the effort to recapture the high of a perfect run down a ski slope, for example, will rarely succeed because "you're splitting your attention from what's happening now."

Acting teacher and consultant Jennifer Lehman notes how that quality of mind can interfere: "It's difficult to achieve a consistent openness, letting things flow through you, without your own judgments, your own personal history, or how you think it should be, interfering with that. I also have a feeling that our thinking mind is different than our feeling mind, and that if we start thinking, we shut down creative expression.

"Thinking is very linear and one dimensional, and we get attached to it and its 'should' and 'ought to' and 'let me go in there and fix it'.....

...A related concept has been developed by Diane Ackerman, a poet, essayist and naturalist who teaches creativity at Cornell. In her book "Deep Play" she talks about being able to "play anywhere that is set off from reality, whether it be a playground, a field, a church or a garage.

"Deep play doesn't have to do with an activity, like shallow play. It has to do with attitude or an extraordinarily intense state...

"Swept up by the deeper states of play, one feels balanced, creative, focused... Deep play is an absence of mental noise -- liberating, soothing, and exciting. It means no analysis, no explanation, no promises, no goals, no worries. You are completely open to the drama of life that may unfold."

.....Susan K. Perry, PhD affirms that flow is not a state of 'no mind' or meditativeness as such. "I don't believe that when you get into a creative place, you're giving up thinking," she says. "You're super-thinking -- better and with more parts of your mind than you do normally."

But having a 'busy mind' can also mean being fragmented, unfocused, distracted. "You want to get to a place which is both loose, relaxed, and focused," she notes. "What I found in my studies of flow are that two things you need to do to get to this place where time stops and you can be most creative, are to loosen up, and focus in.

"It's a paradox, obviously, to be loose and focused at the same time. And they overlap, and one may come before the other." She also thinks we "choose not to get into flow, which means we aren't able to access our deepest creativity. We choose not to because, perhaps, it's more stimulating to be surrounded by overflowing in-boxes."....

Knowing is the Natural State of Being

"The natural state of being is to be creative. In the creative state we are authentic and original.
To be authentic and original means to be in touch with the source knowledge, to be true to our nature, to be discovering all the time. Our knowledge comes from our first hand experience. Our senses are our tools that connect us to the nature outside as well as our inner nature."

Jinan

www.re-cognition.org

Society for the Diffusion of Useful Ignorance

I quite enjoy this excerpt from Henry David Thoreau's essay Walking from The Portable Thoreau

We have heard of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. It is said that knowledge is power, and the like. Methinks there is equal need of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Ignorance, what we will call Beautiful Knowledge, a knowledge useful in a higher sense: for what is most of our boasted so-called knowledge but a conceit that we know something, which robs us of the advantage of our actual ignorance?
What we call knowledge is often our positive ignorance; ignorance our negative knowledge. By long years of patient industry and reading of the newspapers-for what are the libraries of science but files of newspapers?-a man accumulates a myriad facts, lays them up in his memory, and then when in some spring of his life he saunters abroad into the Great Fields of thought, he, as it were, goes to grass like a horse and leaves all his hardness behind in the stable.
I would say to the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, sometimes,go to grass. You have eaten hay long enough. The spring has come with it's green crop. The very cows are driven to their country pastures before the end of may; though I have heard of one unnatural farmer who kept his cow in the barn and fed her on hay all the year round. So, frequently, the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge treats it's cattle.
A man's ignorance sometimes is not only useful but beautiful-while his knowledge, so called, is oftentimes worse than useless, besides being ugly.
Which is the best man to deal with-he who knows nothing about a subject, and, what is extremely rare, knows that he knows nothing, or he who really knows something about it but thinks that he knows it all?

Students learn K-6 math in less than 20 weeks

Daniel Greenberg works at Sudbury Valley School, and wrote an article about the kids begging him to teach math. (Sudbury Schools are also called democratic schools, they function much like unschooling, with the kids deciding how to spend their time.)

He says at the end of his article that:

"In twenty weeks, after twenty contact hours, they had covered it all. Six years' worth. Every one of them knew the material cold."

(http://www.scribd.com/doc/14389275/And-Rithmetic-by-Daniel-Greenberg

Free at Last (excerpts)
By Daniel Greenberg
The Sudbury Valley School And 'Rithmetic

Sitting before me were a dozen boys and girls, aged nine to twelve. A week earlier, they had asked me to teach them arithmetic. They wanted to learn to add, subtract, multiply, divide, and all the rest.
"You don't really want to do this," I said, when they first approached me.
"We do, we are sure we do," was their answer.
"You don't really," I persisted. "Your neighborhood friends, your parents, your relatives probably want you to, but you yourselves would much rather be playing or doing something else."
"We know what we want, and we want to learn arithmetic. Teach us, and we'll prove it. We'll do all the homework, and work as hard as we can."
I had to yield then, skeptically. I knew that arithmetic took six years to teach in regular schools,and I was sure their interest would flag after a few months. But I had no choice. They had pressed hard, and I was cornered.
I was in for a surprise.
My biggest problem was a textbook to use as a guide. I had been involved in developing the "new math," and I had come to hate it. Back then when we were working on it -- young academicians of the Kennedy post-sputnik era -- we had few doubts. We were filled with the beauty of abstract logic, set theory, number theory, and all the other exotic games mathematicians had played for millenia. I think that if we had set out to design an agricultural course for working farmers, we would have begun with organic chemistry, genetics, and
microbiology. Lucky for the world's hungry people that we weren't asked.
I had come to hate the pretensions and abstruseness of the "new math." Not one in a hundred math teachers knew what it was about, not one in a thousand pupils. People need arithmetic for reckoning; they want to know how to use the tools. That's what my students wanted now.
I found a book in our library, perfectly suited to the job at hand. It was a math primer written in 1898. Small and thick, it was brimming with thousands of exercises, meant to train young minds to perform the basic tasks accurately and swiftly.
Class began -- on time. That was part of the deal. "You say you are serious?" I had asked, challenging them; "then I expect to see you in the room on time -- 11:00AM sharp, every Tuesday and Thursday. If you are five minutes late, no class. If you blow two classes -- no more teaching." "It's a deal," they had said, with a glint of pleasure in their eyes.
Basic addition took two classes. They learned to add everything -- long thin columns, short fat columns, long fat columns. They did dozens of exercises. Subtraction took another two classes.
It might have taken one, but "borrowing" needed some extra explanation.
On to multiplication, and the tables. Everyone had to memorize the tables. Each person was quizzed again and again in class. Then the rules. Then the practice.
They were high, all of them. Sailing along, mastering all the techniques and algorithms, they could feel the material entering their bones. Hundreds and hundreds of exercises, class quizzes, oral tests, pounded the material into their heads.
Still they continued to come, all of them. They helped each other when they had to, to keep the class moving. The twelve year olds and the nine year olds, the lions and the lambs, sat peacefully together in harmonious cooperation -- no teasing, no shame.

They came at 11:00 sharp, stayed half an hour, and left with homework. They came back next time with all the homework done. All of them.
In twenty weeks, after twenty contact hours, they had covered it all. Six years' worth. Every one of them knew the material cold.
We celebrated the end of the classes with a rousing party. It wasn't the first time, and wasn't to be the last, that I was amazed at the success of our own cherished theories. They had worked here, with a vengeance.
Perhaps I should have been prepared for what happened, for what seemed to me to be a miracle. A week after it was all over, I talked to Alan White, who had been an elementary math specialist for years in the public schools and knew all the latest and best pedagogical methods.
I told him the story of my class.
He was not surprised.
"Why not?" I asked, amazed at his response. I was still reeling from the pace and thoroughness with which my "dirty dozen" had learned.
"Because everyone knows," he answered, "that the subject matter itself isn't that hard. What's hard, virtually impossible, is beating it into the heads of youngsters who hate every step. The only way we have a ghost of a chance is to hammer away at the stuff bit by bit every day for years. Even then it does not work. Most of the sixth graders are mathematical illiterates. Give me a kid who wants to learn the stuff -- well, twenty hours or so makes sense."
I guess it does. It's never taken much more then that ever since.

Sudbury Valley School

Sudbury Valley School (founded in 1968 in Framingham, Massachusetts, United States) practice a form of democratic education in which students individually decide what to do with their time, and learn as a by-product of ordinary experience rather than through classes or a standard curriculum. Students are given complete responsibility for their own education and the school is run by a direct democracy in which students and staff are equals.
There are now over 30 schools based on the Sudbury Model in the United States, Denmark, Israel, Japan, Netherlands, Belgium and Germany.