Vocab of the Day:
Nonplussed: definition here.
courtesy of Angela
I almost spilled the beans on some exciting news. Thankfully, I was notified that I shouldn't post about it until next month. <phew> That could have been less than ideal. Well, more like "premature," but still... it sounds more impressive if related to the end of the world rather than "leaked" information.
Today we had some downtime, so we watched a show on the Discovery channel about the Bermuda Triangle. In the show they demonstrated that a large release of methane could produce a bubble of water that could sink a ship. Also, if the atmosphere composition is made up of as little as %1 methane it can cause a combustion engine to stall out and more methane can seriously tweak with a plane's instruments and lift.
All fascinating stuff.
But rather than telling me all about it in ten minutes--as they easily could have--they spent an hour (42 minutes + commercials).
And that got me thinking about education philosophies and attention spans. I hear a lot of complaints that kids don't have long enough attention spans due to television. But if your programing is intentionally designed to keep people watching for an hour--irregardless of content--then kids are trained not to have short attention spans but to expect redundant information. In fact, I was surprised how little real information was dispensed each segment.
And that got me wondering if classroom education has been informed by this.
How much information is really shared each class period?
It does vary by class, but I've sat in plenty of classes and seminars where the teacher/presenter was more interested in passing time than passing on beneficial information. Honestly, I've been nonplussed by some educator's lack of interest in educating their charges.
May your homeschooling experience be nothing like that.
~Luke Holzmann
Filmmaker, Writer, Expectant Father
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