Wonder.

What I wanted to hear from my teachers on my first day of school.

What would I have wanted to hear from my teachers on my first day of school, or what would I want them to tell me if I became a student again?

Tales about my vacations? No. Those of my classmates? No. I would already know everything. You have to study? This is going to be difficult? We’re going to have to make more of an effort? No, no thank you. I know. This is why I’m here, and besides I’m deaf from the ear of duties. Tell me something different, something new, so that I don’t start getting bored already, but rather that I might feel even just a slight desire to start this school year. From the ear of passion, I can hear perfectly.

Show me that it’s worth my while to stay here for a whole year listening to you. Tell me please that all this will be relevant to my everyday life, that it will help me better understand the world and myself, that it’s worthwhile for me to be here. Show me, most of all through your own lives, that the effort you demand of me will fill my own life the way it fills yours. You have dedicated studies, efforts and dreams to teach me your subject, now show be that it’s all true, that you are conveyors of something desirable and indispensable, something that you own and that you wish to impart upon me as a gift. Show me that you lose sleep to teach me these things that — you say — are worth my efforts. I want to look into your eyes and if they’re not shining I’m going to get bored, I’m telling you now, and I’m going to do something else. You can’t lie to me. If you don’t believe it, then why should I? And don’t tell me about your salaries, about the union, about [Italian education minister] Gelmini, about your family and relationship troubles, about your failures and your obsessions. No. Tell me about how much you love the force of the sun that has burned for 5 billion years and transforms hydrogen into light, life and energy. Tell me how this happens, this miracle that will continue for at least another 5 billion years. Tell me why the moon always shows me her same face and teach me how to interrogate her like Leopardi’s shepherd did. Tell me how it’s possible that a rose has petals arranged according to a divine and infallible proportion and why the heart is a muscle that beats involuntarily and how the eye transforms light into images.

There are so many things in this world that I don’t know and that you could teach me, with eyes shining, because only wonder knows.

And tell me about the mystery of humans, tell me how the Greeks built their temples that you feel like you’re in contact with the gods, and how the Romans managed to combine beauty and utility like nobody else. Tell me how Leonardo da Vinci did it, how Magellan did it. Tell me the secret of Einstein, Gaudi’, or Mozart. If you know it, tell me.

Tell me, how am I supposed to decide what to do with my life, if I don’t know about the lives of others? Tell me, how am I supposed to find my own story, if I have not a bit of passion for those that left their mark? Tell me what I should gamble my life for. Or no, don’t tell me. I will decide for myself. You show me the possibilities. Help me discover my passions, my talents, and my dreams. And remember that you will only succeed if you yourself have dreams, projects and passions of your own. Otherwise how am I supposed to believe you? And remind me that my life is not repeatable, that it’s made for greatness, and help me not to settle for small pleasures, real and virtual, that may satisfy me in the moment, but that deep down just bore me…

Challenge me, put my best qualities to the test, and write them on your register along with all those grades that are always the same. Help me not to believe illusions, not to live on dreams filled with air, but at the same time teach me to dream and to have the patience to realize these dreams, turning them into projects.

Teach me to reason, such that I may not derive my beliefs from common cliches, from the dominant thought, from unreasoned thought. Help me to be free. Remind me of the unity of knowlegde and don’t tell me about the unity of Italy, but be united among each other: don’t talk ill of one another, I beg you. And remind me of how beautiful this country is, talk about it, make me want to discover everything it is hiding before I begin to long for a tropical vacation.

And please, one last favor, keep your cynicism to yourselves. Don’t hide your battles from me, but give me the strength to bear them and don’t poison my hopes even before I have conceived them.

For this, one day, I will remember you.

Thank you, Prof. 2.0.

Infinite.

An infinite question is often destroyed by finite answers. To define everything is to annihilate much that gives us laughter and joy.

Madeleine L'Engle, from A Circle of Quiet

Happy Birthday, Nicolaus Copernicus

Anonymous, Nicolaus Copernicus, The "Toruń Portrait", 1580

Nicolaus Copernicus was born this week in 1473 and his thoughts provided our Creative Writing class with some of the year's best discussion so far ...

To be intelligent is to be able to see the hidden connections between things.  To know that we know what we know, and to know that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge ... I am not so enamoured of my own opinions that I disregard what others may think of them.

Eli, The Insightful, said, "Mr. Firchau, he said this a long time ago and people still haven't figured it out." 

A conversation about the importance of putting your name on your paper was had based on the painting's attribution.

Copernicus and His World ...

Unsophistications.

Wyeth, N.C., Self-Portrait, 1920

The sheep-like tendency of human society soon makes inroads on a child's unsophistications, and then popular education completes the dastardly work with its systematic formulas, and away goes the individual, hurtling through space into that hateful oblivion of mediocrity. We are pruned into stumps, one resembling another, without character or grace.

N. C. Wyeth

Hats matter.

Sustenance.

Sustenance from a seventh-grade student (who has decided to name his Chromebook "Charles Clickens") ...

From Stephen Leacock's "Merry Christmas"...

I was silent. Father Time had moved across the room and stood beside the fireplace, leaning on the mantelpiece. The little wreaths of smoke from the fading fire seemed to mingle with his shadowy outline.

"Well," he said presently, "what is it that is wrong with Christmas?"

"Why," I answered, "all the romance, the joy, the beauty of it has gone, crushed and killed by the greed of commerce and the horrors of war. I am not, as you thought I was, a hundred years old, but I can conjure up, as anybody can, a picture of Christmas in the good old days of a hundred years ago: the quaint old-fashioned houses, standing deep among the evergreens, with the light twinkling from the windows on the snow; the warmth and comfort within; the great fire roaring on the hearth; the merry guests grouped about its blaze and the little children with their eyes dancing in the Christmas fire- light, waiting for Father Christmas in his fine mummery of red and white and cotton wool to hand the presents from the yule-tide tree. I can see it," I added, "as if it were yesterday."

"It was but yesterday," said Father Time, and his voice seemed to soften with the memory of bygone years. "I remember it well."

"Ah," I continued, "that was Christmas indeed. Give me back such days as those, with the old good cheer, the old stage coaches and the gabled inns and the warm red wine, the snapdragon and the Christmas-tree, and I'll believe again in Christmas, yes, in Father Christmas himself."

 Thank you, Eli.  Merry Christmas!

Rather.

EPIGRAM 

You say their Pictures well Painted be, 

And yet they are Blockheads you all agree, 

Thank God, I never was sent to School 

To be Flogg’d into following the Stile of a Fool. 

The Errors of a Wise Man make your Rule 

Rather than the Perfections of a Fool.

William Blake

Happy Birthday, François Boucher

Boucher, The Triumph of Venus, 1740

François Boucher was born on this day in 1703.

I swear that one of my professors in college used to repeatedly lecture on Boucher's paintings just to be able to quote Diderot's criticism that, "He does not paint a single nude woman without her bottom being made up as faces." His giggle was priceless and a lasting reminder ("... to this day, growing strong and growing strange") of the importance of humor and joy in learning.

Thanks to Dr. Herban, a fellow crooked tree, for joyously introducing me to Boucher and Diderot ...

Depends.

Doisneau, L'écolier puni, 1956

“Why aren't you in school? I see you every day wandering around."

"Oh, they don't miss me," she said. "I'm antisocial, they say. I don't mix. It's so strange. I'm very social indeed. It all depends on what you mean by social, doesn't it? Social to me means talking to you about things like this." She rattled some chestnuts that had fallen off the tree in the front yard. "Or talking about how strange the world is. Being with people is nice. But I don't think it's social to get a bunch of people together and then not let them talk, do you? An hour of TV class, an hour of basketball or baseball or running, another hour of transcription history or painting pictures, and more sports, but do you know, we never ask questions, or at least most don't; they just run the answers at you, bing, bing, bing, and us sitting there for four more hours of film-teacher. That's not social to me at all. It's a lot of funnels and lot of water poured down the spout and out the bottom, and them telling us it's wine when it's not. They run us so ragged by the end of the day we can't do anything but go to bed or head for a Fun Park to bully people around, break windowpanes in the Window Smasher place or wreck cars in the Car Wrecker place with the big steel ball. Or go out in the cars and race on the streets, trying to see how close you can get to lampposts, playing 'chicken' and 'knock hubcaps.' I guess I'm everything they say I am, all right. I haven't any friends. That's supposed to prove I'm abnormal. But everyone I know is either shouting or dancing around like wild or beating up one another. Do you notice how people hurt each other nowadays?”

Ray Bradbury, from Fahrenheit 451

Social.

Caley, Untitled, 1960

“Why aren't you in school? I see you every day wandering around."

"Oh, they don't miss me," she said. "I'm antisocial, they say. I don't mix. It's so strange. I'm very social indeed. It all depends on what you mean by social, doesn't it? Social to me means talking to you about things like this." 

She rattled some chestnuts that had fallen off the tree in the front yard. 

"Or talking about how strange the world is. Being with people is nice. But I don't think it's social to get a bunch of people together and then not let them talk, do you? An hour of TV class, an hour of basketball or baseball or running, another hour of transcription history or painting pictures, and more sports, but do you know, we never ask questions, or at least most don't; they just run the answers at you, bing, bing, bing, and us sitting there for four more hours of film-teacher. That's not social to me at all. It's a lot of funnels and lot of water poured down the spout and out the bottom, and them telling us it's wine when it's not."

Ray Bradbury, from Fahrenheit 451

Abnormal.

Doisneau, L'écolier puni, 1956

“Why aren't you in school? I see you every day wandering around."

"Oh, they don't miss me," she said. "I'm antisocial, they say. I don't mix. It's so strange. I'm very social indeed. It all depends on what you mean by social, doesn't it? Social to me means talking to you about things like this." She rattled some chestnuts that had fallen off the tree in the front yard. "Or talking about how strange the world is. Being with people is nice. But I don't think it's social to get a bunch of people together and then not let them talk, do you? An hour of TV class, an hour of basketball or baseball or running, another hour of transcription history or painting pictures, and more sports, but do you know, we never ask questions, or at least most don't; they just run the answers at you, bing, bing, bing, and us sitting there for four more hours of film-teacher. That's not social to me at all. It's a lot of funnels and lot of water poured down the spout and out the bottom, and them telling us it's wine when it's not. They run us so ragged by the end of the day we can't do anything but go to bed or head for a Fun Park to bully people around, break windowpanes in the Window Smasher place or wreck cars in the Car Wrecker place with the big steel ball. Or go out in the cars and race on the streets, trying to see how close you can get to lampposts, playing 'chicken' and 'knock hubcaps.' I guess I'm everything they say I am, all right. I haven't any friends. That's supposed to prove I'm abnormal. But everyone I know is either shouting or dancing around like wild or beating up one another. Do you notice how people hurt each other nowadays?”

Ray Bradbury, from Fahrenheit 451

On.

At the end of each grading period , I ask my students to complete a grade card on my performance as their teacher.  This came from a sixth-grader ...

Thank you, Avery.

Quick.

WHAT the BIRD SAID EARLY in the YEAR

I heard in Addison’s Walk a bird sing clear:

This year the summer will come true. This year. This year.

Winds will not strip the blossom from the apple trees

This year, nor want of rain destroy the peas.

This year time’s nature will no more defeat you,

Nor all the promised moments in their passing cheat you.

This time they will not lead you round and back

To Autumn, one year older, by the well-worn track.

This year, this year, as all these flowers foretell,

We shall escape the circle and undo the spell.

Often deceived, yet open once again your heart,

Quick, quick, quick, quick!—the gates are drawn apart.

C.S. Lewis

Aqua.

Spartan.

The Critic looks at the magical monotony of C.S. Lewis' Oxford ...

Much of Lewis’s years at Oxford will be recognisable to those who know the university today, though modernity has intruded into aspects of Oxford life that were still familiar in the late twentieth century. The sheer level of spartan discomfort, for instance, that university denizens were expected to endure is now mostly a thing of the past.

When elected to his first teaching position at Magdalen in 1925 on the princely salary of £500 a year, Lewis was allocated unheated rooms without a lavatory. He held tutorials in a dressing gown with a heavy cardigan underneath, and students recall him occasionally leaving tutorials to use a chamber pot in the bedroom. 

In winter the bedroom was so cold that he slept wearing two pullovers and trousers over his pyjamas. Mice were regular nocturnal visitors; Lewis wrote with characteristic humour to a correspondent that they would poke their heads out as if to say “Time for you to go to bed. We want to come out and play.” 

Squibs.

Squibs arrive today ...

... well, maybe a slight bit.

Search.

Logical activity is not the whole of intelligence. One can be intelligent without being particularly logical. The main functions of intelligence, that of inventing solutions, and that of verifying them, do not necessarily involve one another. The first partakes of imagination, the second alone is properly logical. Demonstration, search for truth, is therefore the true function of logic. 

Jean Piaget, from Judgment and Reasoning in the Child

Curious.

I am quite certain that some day we will take a subject such as Einstein’s theory of relativity, and with the “Einstein” of the subject and his colleagues working on it for a year, we will finally get it reduced down to what is “net” in the subject and enthusiastically approved by the “Einstein” who gave the original lecture. What is net will become communicated so well that any child can turn on a documentary device, a TV, and get the Einstein lucidity of thinking and get it quickly and firmly. I am quite sure that we are going to get research and development laboratories of education where the faculty will become producers of extraordinary moving-picture documentaries. That is going to be the big, new educational trend.

Buckminster Fuller, born yesterday in 1895, from Education Automation: Freeing the Scholar to Return to His Studies (1961)

Whatley warned that a man unaware of his ignorance will be led astray by his knowledge.  The public education model is like this, it's passive.  But, learning is infinitely active.  YouTube culture has created a shallow sense of expertise in kids who are seeking increasingly smaller soundbites ([sixth-grader moaning] "Mr. Firchau, too many words.")

Betrand Russel said, "One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision."

Stay curious, my friends.

Learn.

Manners.

Timely reminders concerning lunchroom manners ...

Happy Birthday, Piaget

The principle goal of education is to create men who are capable of doing new things, not simply of repeating what other generations have done—men who are creative, inventive, and discoverers.

The second goal of education is to form minds which can be critical, can verify, and not accept everything they are offered. The great danger today is of slogans, collective opinions, ready-made trends of thought. We have to be able to resist individually, to criticize, to distinguish between what is proven and what is not.

So we need pupils who are active; who learn early to find out by themselves, partly by their own spontaneous activity and partly through material we set up for them, and who learn early to tell what is verifiable and what is simply the first idea to come to them.

Jean Piaget, born on this day in 1896