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.