Personal Blogs

When the head stuck out of the glacier
There was consternation
But looking into the records carefully preserved
Carefully preserved by the bureaucracy of the time.

They had an inkling of who it might be
So they sent down in to the valleys for ideas.

After time and search they found me.
Did I want to come up there or them to me?
They thought it was my father. I ascended. He was so young.

As far as we know it

No serious poet

Ever wrote a clerihew.

Or very few.

Here is my attempt at translation into Anglo Saxon.

Suddenly, late summer

the millstream's clogged.

All of us jostling against winter.

My parents wouldn't understand me now.

Even my neighbors grow rhubarb.

How do we learn?

Of course it makes a difference *what* we are learning. But evidence suggests that in most fields we will learn better if we structure the new learning.

This is not really a surprise. If we look at informal learning, even in adult life, we see that people fit new information into the matrix of what they already know. Of course they don't know they do this, it's just how they instinctively try make sense of the world. Formal learning often disrupts this process, because it offers fragments  learners can't easily fit in.

Back in the 80s Richard Skemp put forward the notion of a "Schema", which is just another word for a framework really. He was interested in mathematical learning, but I think his message applies in any academic sphere. If you want people to learn, make it possible for them to assimilate new information into an ongoing conceptual structure. Otherwise they'll find it hard to learn, hard to retain what they have learned, and at best the learning is likely to be shallow.

What reminded me of all this was that when looking for evidence of what works well if you are preparing for an exam, I wondered what the latest research pointed to.

I found [1] and from there [2]. I think in many ways this is saying what has been said all those years back, but maybe if we can bring the evidence base together better now these ideas will have more effect.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/education/2014/jan/08/five-secrets-of-successful-revising

[2] http://mindhacks.com/2011/10/24/make-study-more-effective-the-easy-way/

Feedback please!

No poem's a blanket.

Even the smallest have tiny holes

Leaking infinity.

Mosquito

Summer and the same old thing.

Good luck, let's enjoy it you and I.

We have recently begun work on the Uxbridge Dictionary of the Periodic Table. Here are 10 sample entries

Bromine: A mean brother.

Iodine: Thanks Dean!

Flourine: The floor.

Silicon: Pathetic attempt at a scam.

Boron: I'm not interested but continue if you must.

Gold: Similar to rhinitis.

Antimony: Preferring barter.

Zinc: Place for washing dishes.

Arsenic: Buttock injury.

Hafnium: 50% of Holmium.

Tonight at the Moon Under Water, someone read out an article about rhino horn. Then someone else mentioned whale hunting. 

This reminded me of the Inky Fool blog (IFB).

What's the connection between Vikings and a well-known coffee chain? 

From memory of the IFB.

In Yorkshire (sub-question, where did Yorick come from and why did he get dug up in Elsinore?) there was a place the Anglo-Saxons called 'Sedge brook'. Sedges are a sort of grassy plant that like the verges of streams, but they are pretty common. It's a bit like calling a moor 'Grasmoor" I suppose.)  But the sedges must have seemed distinctive enough to name a small village for them. It's quite sensible when you think about it though. The Strand is just a strand=beach and there must be many beaches. Sedgebrook wasn't Redbrook or Rushbrook, which would have been easily distinguished.

Along came the Vikings and had a big local influence, so it got renamed 'Star beck'. You can see the words are the same but Vikings and Anglo-Saxons just had different dialects. 

Back to coffee. As The Inky Fool describes some people from Starbeck acquired the surname 'Starbeck' because that's where their ancestry was from. Back then not everyone was a good speller. So we got 'Starbuck'.

People called Starbuck crossed the Atlantic to Natucket Mass.They became big in whale hunting. They were so famous that when Hermann Melville wrote 'Moby Dick' he called one of the ship's main people, apart from the obsessional Ahab, Starbuck.

Now, when the founders of Starbucks were searching for a company name they looked in Moby Dick. I'm not sure why really but the notion isn't silly and turned out rather well.

To go back to the beginning. Regulars at the Moon Under Water hate rhino and whale hunting.

So perhaps the human race is becoming more honourable in spite of all.