Perfect yet not?

Today we had an interesting exercise where we tried focusing on the glory of God for a few minutes. I had difficulty concentrating, but I figured imagining living things could work, because the glory of God is in all (or at least most) living things. I wish I could have this perspective more often, because often I get frustrated or bored with people, classes, books, etc.

We also talked about a two dichotomies - obedience vs. autism and loving vs. putting others second. It's interesting how we move through the different hemispheres in the learning process - capture (lecture learning) is obedience, a trust in the teacher and an opening of the mind to what s/he has to offer. Expansion is more autistic, in the sense that it is done independently, without having to obey a teacher to learn. The problem with assigned homework is that it makes the process of expansion a factor of obedience as well as autism/independence. Teaching requires love, and evaluation... would you say that evaluation requires some sort of egocentricity? Evaluation itself requires some criticism, but some would say that someone who really loves you will discipline you (various verses in Proverbs, don't know them off the top of my head). This is also called the "Medicine Wheel" in Cheyenne tradition.

The idea that really stood out to me about this lecture though, was our professor talking about his son. We'll call the son Nate. Nate was the successful perfectionist in high school - taking 10 AP classes one year and graduating with a 4.0, remaining wildly successful and popular throughout his years (I imagine). But our professor worried that he was "too good" - that, having so much success, he would be unable to empathize with those who weren't as fortunate, that "a person that has failed a few times in life is a lot richer than one who has not." This struck me, because while I'm not quite that successful, I do face the danger of being hard-hearted to those who don't deserve contempt.

Another idea was that sin comes from the Greek "hamartia," which means "to miss the mark." Therefore, repenting of a sin is to get back on the mark - to turn back to the light (this goes against the idea that sin is like a scar that sticks around forever). I like this idea. Also amusing was, "Many people in our culture think it's a sin to have a sin." I think it's meant to be funny, and to help us/me realize that we all sin, and that by sinning/making mistakes, we learn and grow. Yeah, sounds trite, but that's the message.

The Sun

In today's lecture we reviewed a lot again (sometimes I wish we would go a little faster... maybe our professor just doesn't remember what we've already covered). We did have a neat reading in Heaven and Hell by Swedenborg - about how all of heaven is truth and love. Like the sun is a flame and its heat gives us energy, love is a burning which radiates truth. I like that metaphor. I wanted to find the Piercian Semiotics thesis in the library this morning, but it was already checked out (sadness). I asked my professor if he knew about Piercian semiotics, and he mentioned familiarity with both Pierce and semiotics, and said that semiotics would be good to study. So, I checked out Signs: An Introduction to Semiotics today. I've also been reading Parkinson's talk "We Have Received, and We Need No More" as part of the expansion assignment.

Simplest Cases

I forgot to mention, but I was also looking for simplest cases. Example: What is the simplest case in a chess game? What is the simplest case in juicing a lemon? What is the simplest case in flirting? I pretty much failed at using this problem-solving technique... so maybe I'm asking the wrong questions.

Applying Capture

Thursday's lecture was mostly review of what we've learned about and what we were supposed to read. The most striking things about it were:

1. Almost all world religions have a golden or silver rule that basically says do to others what you'd have them do to you.
2. Method in teaching is irrelevant. Like the quote attributed to Spinoza, "If men were fish, the last thing they would notice is water," if men were true educators the last thing they would notice is the method of their teaching.

I don't think the golden rule in its traditional form is comprehensive. Sometimes I do things for other people that I'd like them to do for me and it makes them uncomfortable (mostly the being blunt stuff, or possibly teasing). The golden rule should be something like "do what Jesus would do for others." I'm also not sure if teaching method is irrelevant, although our professor assured me that less than 10% of the variance (or something like that) in learning is accounted for by teaching - it's really the learner's outlook and effort that affect learning outcomes the most (I can't believe I just wrote "learning outcomes" it reminds me of "therapist outcomes." So now I'm comparing therapy to learning? I guess it's not too much of a stretch).

So, that was the evaluating part of my expansion, I suppose. Or "assessing." I also tried to teach a friend of mine about the Capture-Expand-Teach-Evaluate method and the Question-Answer-Support-So What method of taking notes/thinking of things. I don't know what else to call him, so I'll call this friend of mine Data (to protect the innocent). Data is a math major, and sometimes he really deserves the pseudonym Data because he's often found to be applying mathematical logic to people, but of course people aren't logical, at least not in a mathematical sense, so it usually doesn't work. Anyways, he mentioned some interesting things that could very well be relevant to the task at hand. He said that in math classes he never takes notes because if he did, he wouldn't have to depend on his memory to understand it. This really intrigues me because whenever I took math courses I would always copy the teacher's examples exactly and if I didn't understand, I'd go home and study it or ask my friends about it - I wouldn't try to understand it that instant in class. Now I'm wondering if I had spent more time thinking about the ideas and less time trying to copy everything down I might have understood Calculus and Trig better. He also tried to teach me the proof for how natural numbers are infinite. I was really trying to understand this, and I was in my "I'm-going-to-get-this-and-not-just-sit-and-nod" mode, so I was asking a lot of questions. I wasn't using the Question-Answer-Proof-So What method, but I was trying to Capture. And really, I think I could compartmentalize this pretty easily:

Question: Are natural numbers infinite?
Answer: Yes
Proof: Let n equal any natural number. For each n there is a 2n. It's bijective, so f(n)=2n. Since it's mapped, they have to be infinite. Okay, I guess I didn't learn it that well... but I was pretty good at fooling myself.
So What?: Now that we know that natural numbers are infinite, we can do many more things with them. Yay.

So, this was obviously my failure at a complete, accurate capture. Maybe I'll get brownie points for trying.

Intro to Expansion

This is a blog mostly for my graduate course in principles of learning. It's primarily for myself, but a big part of this class is sharing our knowledge with others, so I thought I'd make it available for others to read (because it's going to be SO interesting). I just wanted to have it in a notebook, but I'll end up typing it up for my final... so this is the best way. We have been learning about the fourfold way of learning - basically a way to organize information so we can capture it (understand and remember). In a neat little square divided into four parts we put down 1) the question at hand, 2) the answer to the question, 3) what evidence there is for the answer, and 4) why we care. It's a pretty cool way to take notes, and I've tried it in a few of my classes (there's an expansion right there). It's a little difficult sometimes though - teachers don't always teach in this way, and it can make for some pretty ugly notes (I hate leaving big spaces or having no room to write). After a successful capture, a successful Learner/Teacher (L/T for short) will expand on werf's knowledge by applying it and perhaps researching it more in-depth. The important part about expansion is that it expands knowledge (okay, that was a "duh" moment). To fully learn something, one must then teach others, and finally, evaluate whether or not the learning was worth it.

So, in class we've been discussing in class how learning is like a gospel ordinance (the logic here is that to be saved we must obey the laws and ordinances of the gospel (AoF 3), and being saved can mean being exalted, and being exalted means learning a lot more than we do now, so then learning must be either a gospel law or ordinance). We did this activity called "sacramental learning," where we try to act Christ-like in the roles of learner and then teacher (while we learn from and teach each other). While I was participating I felt good and like this was the best thing since sliced bread, but looking back, I'm not sure if I learned anything. It was like very nice-looking verbal spewing. So I'm skeptical of this whole method. I believe that the Holy Spirit can help us learn, but I don't believe it can instantly make a teacher out of a learner.

I also wanted to mention how I've been telling lots of people about the things I've been learning in this class. I've been reading Human Competence, which theorizes that competence is not a function of human behavior alone, but that competence is a function of worthy performance, which is a function of the ratio of accomplishment to behavior (wP = f(A/B)). I conveyed this message to a friend of mine and also my mentor. They weren't as excited about it as I was though. I should have explained that since competence can't be measured by behavior alone, that things like achievement tests are going about measuring things in the wrong way. In order to measure a person's competence, you can't just have him fill out a few bubbles - there are too many things that could go wrong to give a misrepresentation of his true knowledge.

I also gave the FHE lesson on Monday, and I wanted it to be about how the learner as an agent chooses what he will learn, but I'm not sure if I got that message across. I started out talking about how we can see different things in art and in the scriptures, and it's because we're different people looking for different things. I didn't go into agent learning at all though, primarily because the discussion took a turn to how common scriptures have sometimes come to mean different thing to each of us.

As I've learned about expansion, I've been trying to expand my knowledge about it my expanding my knowledge in other classes. It's actually something I've liked doing for a while, but I called it "overlearning." I would mention a particular expansion I'm working on but sadly, it would compromise my identity.