Rethink. Reconsider. Ponder.
True education begins when one takes personal responsibility for it.
Find out why by reflecting on our Truth in Two (full text below).
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Picture Credit: Josh Collingwood, Snappy Goat
FULL TEXT
“You make my brain hurt!” I wish I had a dollar bill for every time a student has said this about my teaching. The point is not that my classes are hard, it is the hard thinking I make my students do. Often, I will give students questions to reflect on. “Reflection” is not a small matter. Taken seriously, reflection is very difficult to do because it requires a person to dig deep in their own thinking, to actively pursue a process of evaluating their own thought processes.
You can’t see an attitude. You can’t touch an emotion. You can’t taste a mindset. But I can certainly experience attitude, emotion, and mindset in a person’s body language, tone of voice, or facial expression. In education we call this kind of learning “affective.” Learning that reaches to one’s thought process, that works to transform someone’s spirit, is “affective learning.” You can’t see someone’s spirit, but you can see someone’s spirit. Confused? Maybe a quote will help. Denzel Washington is famous for saying,
“It is easy to spot a red car when you’re always thinking of a red car. It is easy to spot opportunity when you’re always thinking of opportunity. It is easy to spot reasons to be mad when you’re always thinking of being mad. You become what you constantly think about.”
Simply, if you’re only reading one way, if you only think one way, you will not consider other ways. I’m not suggesting you give up your baseline beliefs. I am suggesting your beliefs need to be carefully considered. Yes, I still make my student’s brains hurt. But it their reflection on ideas, answering questions for themselves, that will save them from a lifetime of real hurt.
For Truth in Two, this is Dr. Mark Eckel, President of the Comenius Institute, personally seeking truth wherever it’s found.