Dr. C.’s Learning Web

I’m too tired tonight to do any justice at all to this story, but I would like to note it and perhaps return to it another time.
Today in the 11:00 section of my Introduction to Literary Studies class the discussion was particularly rich and intense. At one point I was asking one student a series of questions about some of her own cognitive states as she was grappling with the indirection of parts of the discussion.  As I was trying to weave her own answers into the responses other students were offering to related questions, suddenly yet another student, two rows back, made a quick joke about “author-function,” recalling our discussion of Foucault. In that instant, I could see that the student two rows back had made a huge cognitive leap. It was quite a thrill to witness. The joke was an aside, not a formal contribution to the argument, [...]

Original post by Gardo

As a postscript to “Structures and Emergence,” I offer a recent story in the New Yorker about intensive care, checklists, executives and practitioners, and a stubborn practical expert visionary. (The story is also about nearly intractable institutional and professional dysfunction, but neither of those qualifies as news or deserves more than a sad acknowledgement followed by the next several steps in the long trek onward and upward.) It’s not the first time I’ve been inspired by Atul Gawande, the article’s author. Gawande gave me the idea for an APGAR for class meetings, and I see from a random spam trackback (a kind of shuffle-playback for the blog?) that my first Gawande reference came way back in December, 2004, when he wrote about the “focus, aggressiveness, and inventiveness” that characterize the pursuit and achievement of excellence, even more than skill or knowledge.
Once again Gawande’s exploring the idea of excellence, and [...]

Original post by Gardo