Rochelle’s play—The Miser—good stuff. A lot better than [play at school where I student-taught]. Some collegiate-level performances from M__ and others.
Saw Mr. P__ [who will be my principal next year]—he said I’ll have two physics, two physical science, and journalism—I’m excited by the idea of teaching journ., but I’m just not sure what I’ll do with them in the day-to-day. But then, I don’t really feel I know how to teach physics, either. I have now seen one model (my supervising teacher’s—I don’t consider what [a physics professor whose class I took] did to be even a workable model), but I don’t really think there’s a lot of value in the lecture method. As [someone] said, I want to inspire, to make science fun—or at least, let’s say, interesting and exciting—for these kids.
But I don’t know how to do this. I need to do some thinking and researching on this.
Idea: As the astronomy book I just got prompted me to thinking about science—why is it that the universe is a certain level of complication, but it’s not extremely difficult nor extremely easy? It takes a few years of study, but the basic laws about the universe are understood, enough for humans to manipulate their environment, use rockets and lasers and stuff. Why is the Earth this complicated but no more/no less?
And yet, life goes on much as it has for the last 10K years, with or without knowledge of the universe.
Likewise, a psychological question: ability to learn—why is it what it is? Learning takes work, effort, but it’s not too hard to do. What is the transference of ideas? Why is it possible at all—and yet, since it is, why does it still take some effort—why can’t we read this once and have the material committed to memory? Some people have nearly photographic memory, so it’s possible—why not more widespread?
Every year is a vital year for reproduction for animals like birds. If they don’t reproduce every year, their species would soon die out. There performance is now. And this fact hasn’t changed with human arrival—from a year 30,000 years ago, to 1100 A.D. to 1902 to this year, animals are always on the edge of survival, needing to eat now and mate this year (thinking of birds here, etc.).
I was unmindful this week and got out of touch with my body—heart beating from adrenaline, tired, eating when not hungry and eating too much at meal time and eating crap food at other times. Doing work today got me back in touch with my body.
[From journal of Sat., 7 April 2001, Journal 30, page 86-7]
MonkeyMoonMachine 