Question: Define the purpose of guttering on a house. Answer: Choose the response that represents your thinking. a. to catch rain water coming off the roof b. to catch and direct rain water deflected by a roof out away from a vulnerable foundation c. to correct an imposition d. to protect a preconception We have [...]
Tag Archives: thinking
Listening to Literature, or Hearing Hard Words
I believe I’ve said somewhere else that I really only discovered a “fecundity” of thinking in myself* when I started listening to audiobooks while walking. You know how you need to justify reading to yourself as an activity that isn’t just “wasting time” (stupid American “values”)? Maybe you don’t, but something in me, still, even [...]
Where Be Your Tygers?
Let this serve as a kind of literary addendum to yesterday’s post. And let us first mark out some territory. Perhaps there are two ways that humans MEAN as beings. 1. The animal that may become a god. 2. Animate matter that will decay. That’s broad, sure, and I know there are other ways to [...]
Melville On Mind
…it has the savor of analogical probability. Chapter 73: STUBB AND FLASK KILL A RIGHT WHALE; AND THEN HAVE OVER HIM The boats were here hailed, to tow the whale on the larboard side, where fluke chains and other necessaries were already prepared for securing him. “Didn’t I tell you so?” said Flask; “yes, you’ll [...]
The Clarity of Thinking in Motion
I’ve been pondering trying to offer something more thorough on walking and thinking (and talking and thinking, but that for another time) and had imagined we have yet to improve on Aristotle’s method of philosophizing and walking–termed the Peripatetic School (teaching by talking about stuff while walking). This is not necessarily an historically factual idea [...]
How We Learn: How We Don’t Learn
It’s possible that if I even hint at the name “Melville” to begin a piece anyone who sojourns here will click the “close” button and be well on their merry way. (Though surely there are intrepid adventurers among us willing always to hear more of the greatest American writer–yes, I said that.) But, all I’m [...]
Think On’t
Here’s an issue for the mind awash in the digital image and it corresponding “emotional” content: As the mind receives this content it is acted upon by it and it responds in kind. There is no deliberation. We have no time to think but instead we are thought. In the time before writing and speech [...]
This is a Test
1) “A road map that helps us easily find our way from one side of the continent to the other owes its great utility to its exceptional existential poverty.”* Please describe what you think is meant by “utility” and “existential poverty.” 2) Can you apply your elucidation to current social practices and systems of learning? [...]
Well, What Would Jesus Do?
As a reader and writer, talker and walker I “do” mostly with my mind with a little work for those reliably real metas, carpal and tarsal. Those actions largely comprise the me that comes to this space and pecks at keys; the me that makes pancakes for kids in the a.m.; the me that squats [...]
Walking and Talking: Wilco’s One Sunday Morning
Yesterday, Wednesday morning, I walked the dogs, as usual, uphill on 1st street (east) around 8 a.m. It seemed a perfect morning. A chill air balanced by a warming sun; a blue sky with long intermittent clouds; no traffic (spring break in a college town). I thought, Here is a possible eternity. Here is a [...]
