Quotations About Maps, Puzzles, Thought, Creativity, and Objectivity
(Page 4)
"Your brain is like a bratty child: It gets into trouble when you don't keep it busy. To stay mentally sharp, you need to work your mental muscles each and every day. Do jigsaw puzzles. These help strengthen the part of the brain that controls spatial relations - the ability to recognize how things piece together." Robert Friedland, M.D. |
"Anything that's intellectually challenging can probably serve as a kind of stimulus for dendritic growth, which means that it adds to the computational reserves in your brain." Arnold Scheibel, Head of UCLA's Brain Research Institute |
"Evidence is accumulating that the brain works a lot like a muscle - the harder you use it, the more it grows. Although scientists had long believed the brain's circuitry was hard-wired by adolescence and inflexible in adulthood, its newly discovered ability to change and adapt is apparently with us well into old age. Best of all, this research has opened up an exciting world of possibilities for treating strokes and head injuries - and warding off Alzheimer's Disease." Daniel Golden, Building a Better Brain, LIFE June 1994 |
"The task is to keep the conscious mind busy with a small, meaningful activity like completing a puzzle while the unconscious is able to perceive - piece together- solutions to life's larger conflicts, both personal and communal.
Through creative reflection and focused first time experiential activity we grow dendrites (neurons) and seed the state of our own future growth, physically, emotionally, spiritually." Mapzzles ® 2006 |
"It's what Teachers Think, and Act and Do...at the level of the classroom that ultimately shapes the kind of learning that young people get. Carl Jung once said, 'Children are educated by what the grown-up is and not by his talk'. If teachers don't know who they are - if they are unaware of their beliefs, values and metaphors about learning, teaching and the nature of knowledge itself - then they are also unaware of what they are teaching by reason of those unconscious processes." Andy Hargreaves and Michael Fullan: What's worth Fighting For in Your School © 1992 |
"...time is not a resource that teachers own. The traditional content of a given course or school year allots specific amounts of time to accomplish certain tasks. The teachers must budget this scarce resource, spending only within the limits of what is allotted. Wasting time on material that isn't part of the assigned curriculum means that they will have run out before they have "covered" all the material. Heaven forbid that time runs out before the test and the class hasn't covered everything! Time is a resource so accepted in Western thinking that most people are unaware that it is a metaphor, one that is not shared by some other cultures." Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By© 1980 |
"Teachers unconsciously describe their work in a variety of metaphors - gardening, weaving, coaching, sculpting or filling empty containers. Common educational metaphors conceptualize knowledge as a landscape to be 'covered' with the goal of 'picking up' concepts - knowledge objects -along the way. Each metaphor unconsciously creates a frame in which some behaviors and perceptions are enabled and others are inhibited." Judy Yero: How Teacher Thinking Shapes Education |
"Metaphors give us a way to categorize and make sense of our experience. Of course, this is based on the notion that we have to quantify things in their discrete entities in order to understand them. Admittedly, though, when we think and act in terms of metaphor, we are highlighting certain aspects of experience and obscuring others." Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By© 1980 |
My classroom is a zoo!
I try to weave all of the concepts together.
These kids are really blossoming.
He's one of my top students.
We're always falling behind.
"Metaphors may create realities for us, especially social realities. A metaphor may thus be a guide for future action. Such actions will, of course, fit the metaphor. This will, in turn, reinforce the power of the metaphor to make experience coherent. In this sense metaphors can be self-fulfilling prophesies." Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By© 1980 |
"The metaphor Time is a resource (money) drives much of what teachers do and don't do in teaching. Time is something that people can spend or waste, wisely invest in productive activities or squander in questionable pursuits. Thus, time becomes the cost of exploring how a knowledge object might be used." Judy Yero © 2002 Teaching in Mind |
