A good bad day
I'm all disappointed, because the money for the laptop didn't arrive on my bank account in time for us to go shopping today, so we'll have to do it on Monday instead (or tomorrow, if by a miracle the bank accounts do electronic transfers during the weekends *facepalm*. Anyway, I've not had such a bad day in all, because I decided to make the best of it. I did an insane amount of pinning on Pinterest again (maybe I should look into group therapy sessions?), made tea with my new brewing pan (I've used it every day since I bought it, it's really good), and even got some translating done. I like that I can call and consult my friends about translations, since they work in the field I translate in. I even find myself getting interested in the issues of childcare and listening to what children think about society. They can't comprehend the more complex issues yet, of course, but they understand things in their own way, and they should definitely have a say in how they are treated.
I pinned this today. It's an essay by Dorothy L. Sayers, who wrote the whodunits about Lord Peter Wimsey. I've never read any of them, I've pretty much stuck to Agatha Christie, making only a few excursions into other crime novels. The essay was written in 1947, and it concerns the "lost tools of education". Sayers proposes that the medieval tradition of teaching trivia, the three branches of learning, should be brought back. Trivia included grammar, dialectics and rhetoric, with arithmetic arising from the basic teaching of logic, which started with the grammar of Latin. Dialectics was divided into Logic and Disputation. To put it very simply, the idea of education in the Middle Ages was to A) acquaint the student with the basic rules of grammar and arithmetic, both of which of course go by logic for the most part, B) teach the students to apply this logical approach to other subjects, and C) teach the students to spot fallacies in their thinking, and to present their thoughts clearly and persuasively.
I don't know about you, but I must say I see the merits in this. As Sayers points out, it's necessary to learn how to learn, and I don't think the schools I went to were very good at teaching that. We had some teachers, who made us learn things by heart, even on high school levels, and our history teacher taught us to write key words in the margins of each chapter, a technique I've used ever since. I read that there are still some schools, apparently especially in the U.S., that adhere to the trivia, but I think they are all colleges, which is a shame. Anyway, that's my two cents. What do you think?
Have a nice weekend, and I hope to see you tomorrow!
I pinned this today. It's an essay by Dorothy L. Sayers, who wrote the whodunits about Lord Peter Wimsey. I've never read any of them, I've pretty much stuck to Agatha Christie, making only a few excursions into other crime novels. The essay was written in 1947, and it concerns the "lost tools of education". Sayers proposes that the medieval tradition of teaching trivia, the three branches of learning, should be brought back. Trivia included grammar, dialectics and rhetoric, with arithmetic arising from the basic teaching of logic, which started with the grammar of Latin. Dialectics was divided into Logic and Disputation. To put it very simply, the idea of education in the Middle Ages was to A) acquaint the student with the basic rules of grammar and arithmetic, both of which of course go by logic for the most part, B) teach the students to apply this logical approach to other subjects, and C) teach the students to spot fallacies in their thinking, and to present their thoughts clearly and persuasively.
I don't know about you, but I must say I see the merits in this. As Sayers points out, it's necessary to learn how to learn, and I don't think the schools I went to were very good at teaching that. We had some teachers, who made us learn things by heart, even on high school levels, and our history teacher taught us to write key words in the margins of each chapter, a technique I've used ever since. I read that there are still some schools, apparently especially in the U.S., that adhere to the trivia, but I think they are all colleges, which is a shame. Anyway, that's my two cents. What do you think?
Have a nice weekend, and I hope to see you tomorrow!