Author: Bruce McMenomy
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Summertime, and the Learning is Easy
The traditional school year in the United States and much of the rest of the world has been faulted for inefficiency: surely we could get more learning done, or do the same amount in less time, by simply continuing throughout the year, and not taking the summer off for what the English call the “long…
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November 14: Moby-Dick
“Call me Ishmael.” Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick begins with a three-word imperative — one of the most famous openings ever written for a novel. That is it the product not of the late twentieth century, but of the mid-nineteenth, is especially remarkable. Whereas most novels of its day ease the reader into the unfolding story by stages, this…
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Answers and questions
Questions are the raw stuff of education. It behooves us to understand them and how they work. The general assumption is that a question is subordinate to its answer. A question by nature seeks an answer, after all: that’s its point. But the relation is not so simple. The value of a question is not…