Category: Education
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Autonomy of Means Again: “Best Practices”
When our kids were younger and living at home, they also frequently had dishwashing duty. Even today we haven’t gotten around to buying a mechanical dishwasher, but when five people were living (and eating) at home, it was good not to have to do all that by ourselves. But as anyone who has ever enlisted…
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Socrates’ Argumentation — Method, Madness, or Something Else?
Many in the field of classical education tout the use of the Socratic Method, by which they seem to mean a process that draws the student to the correct conclusion by means of a sequence of leading questions. Whether it’s valid pedagogically or not, however, we mustn’t claim that it’s Socratic.
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Getting Started Asking the Right Questions
Recently on a homework assignment for my Natural Science course, I asked students to identify which solar system planets it would be possible to explore from Earth-based telescopes, which from space-born but Earth-orbit telescopes (like the Hubble), and which would require space probes sent to the planet. The results were fairly telling about the approaches…