The Hammock Papers: Gladwell

Showing posts with label Gladwell. Show all posts

03 July 2025

Thinking.

Mr. Wade always gets me thinking ...

It lacks arguments and hence there is the club (administrative disconnect and overreach), the prison (strict conformance to intellectual product expectations and standardization), the concentration camp (age-based leveling), and insane asylums (complete absence of time devoted to peace and quiet) with forced confinement (inflexible bell schedules).

Lest we forget, it's not getting better.

The answer:

Teachers should cultivate a culture that allows them to develop human, not just academic, relationships with kids. Nothing is more important; not grading, not curriculum, not planning.
Teachers should invite government leaders, school board members, school district administrators, even parents, to spend regular, purposeful time in their classrooms, beyond routine, truly observing and participating in its culture.
Students MUST be given choices in the direction their education takes. They are the highest stakeholders, yet have the least say in its direction.
Too often public education makes and connects expectations of ability based on physical maturity. This isn't little league. See Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers.
The "woo-woo" connotations of mindfulness are unfortunate. For millennia, poets, philosophers, artists, and entrepreneurs have point to the importance of silence and stillness and its role in physical, mental, and spiritual life. Timed allowed for this pays off exponentially in school. So much time is wasted by doing something instead of the time well-spent in just sitting there.
Schools should adopt of a workshop model. Studies have shown this to have positive outcomes in student engagement, depth of understanding, and independence.

02 August 2022

Standouts.

If you haven't heard the Broken Record series yet, do yourself a favor.

A few standouts ...

Henry Rollins

Lindsey Buckingham

Sonny Rollins

Robert Plant

Micheal Stipe

Flea with Macolm Gladwell

16 April 2022

That’s your responsibility as a person, as a human being — to constantly be updating your positions on as many things as possible. And if you don’t contradict yourself on a regular basis, then you’re not thinking.

Malcolm Gladwell

17 May 2020

Regular.

10 September 2019

Generalists.

What’s the surest route to success? Specializing early, focusing intently, racking up as many hours of deliberate practice as possible? Wrong!

According to bestselling author David Epstein—who has studied the world’s most successful athletes, artists, musicians, inventors, forecasters, and scientists—it’s the generalists, not specialists, who are primed to excel.

Epstein discusses his book, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, with Malcolm Gladwell ...

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

"When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer – say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep – it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence, and how, they come I know not ; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this dainty morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it. That is to say, agreeable to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of various instruments etc. All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised, and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it like a fine picture or a beautiful statue at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is, I cannot tell."

WALT WHITMAN

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering. I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. The last scud of day holds back for me, It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadow’d wilds, It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk. I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun, I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags. I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles. You will hardly know who I am or what I mean, But I shall be good health to you nevertheless, And filter and fibre your blood. Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged, Missing me one place search another, I stop somewhere waiting for you.

MARCUS AURELIUS

"Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, 'Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?' neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility."

VINCENT van GOGH

"What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest. Very well — assuming that everything is indeed like that, then through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge. As time passes, other things are increasingly excluded, and the more they are the faster my eyes see the picturesque. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation."

DAN CAMPBELL