timelets

“The school was in a sad state. Red Guards had trashed much of its equipment, which symbolized old ideas and old customs. Most of the desks and chairs had gone missing. Teachers had tried to hide cartloads of the school’s books, but these had been found and burned. Around half the teachers, some thirty instructors, had been denounced and persecuted. Two math teachers had been killed, and a history teacher had died of illness during forced labor.”

--- Eva Dou. “House of Huawei.”

“Deng held the nation’s first National Science Conference in March 1978...
In a rousing speech, Deng told the scientists that they were not part of the bourgeoisie, as they had been previously labeled, but part of the working class. “Everyone who works, whether with his hands or with his brain, is part of the working people in a socialist society,” Deng declared".

ibid.

I think it’s not a coincidence, for instance, that so many kids really want to do music and sports, even though we all say, “No, learn how to code. That’s the thing that will actually be helpful to you.” Because music and sports are among the few examples where we actually do this kind of apprenticeship. You do the thing, you get feedback, you try and do the thing again.

One of the things I say is, imagine if we tried to teach baseball the way that we teach science. How do we teach science? What we would do is, we would tell everybody about great baseball games when they were little. Maybe when they were in high school, they could throw the ball a lot to second base. When they were in college, they could reproduce great baseball plays, but they wouldn’t actually get to play the game until they were in graduate school. If you taught baseball that way, you wouldn’t think that people would be as good at baseball.
...
I think the current way that we do schooling is a good example of Goodhart’s law. We teach kids — because kids are so good at wanting to be skilled — we teach them how to be good at school, which we think is going to be correlated with the ability to do a wide range of things as an adult. Then it ends up being a separate kind of skill.

...we know and we just take for granted that little kids like two-year-olds — we say that they don’t pay attention, but what we really mean is that they don’t not pay attention. They’re paying attention to everything at once. That’s why two-year-olds are really distractible.

Then, as we get older, we get this more and more focused kind of attention. People vary in how much they end up within that state of focused attention. I think there’re lots of reasons to believe that an industrial schooled society really pushes people in the direction of having very focused attention. We really want people to have very focused attention.

Because the epistemic value of drawing in science is generally understood in terms of the drawing as an object and not, as is argued at various points in this volume, in the drawing process itself, the unique epistemological value of drawing has become increasingly under-appreciated (Anderson 2014; Tversky 2010; Wittmann 2011). Educationally, this has had costs in terms of student engagement, a deeper understanding of the conventions of scientific representations, and the development of ‘creative reasoning’ (Ainsworth et al. 2011).... A unique advantage of drawing is its double nature as a tool for deepening understanding and for communication. Drawing helps to consolidate ideas, clarify concepts and bring visibility to thought. Drawing can extract and highlight salient information from what is discussed, observed and witnessed, and can be used to communicate and analyze an idea or a concept within a research team or to the broader public.

Drawing Processes of Life, 2024.

https://x.com/RepStefanik/status/1732138663608271149


Presidents of harvard mit and penн REFUSE to say whether “calling for the genocide of Jews” is bullying and harassment according to their codes of conduct. Even going so far to say it needs to turn to “action” first. As in committing genocide.