Learning for a Change

By JohnR |

Our everyday perceptual life is a back and forth exchange with the environment that is characterized by, among other things, a constant novelty in our awareness—I find out, through perception, that a man is arguing with his daughter in that house, but I didn’t know that until I came upon the scene and heard them […]

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Music and Mathematics

By JohnR |

Music is essentially about time, about the way a note or a beat picks up on those that went before and sets up those that will come after. A metronome responds to this essential temporality.  It produces a rigid beat to which a musician can refer in order to hold firmly to the temporal “skeleton” […]

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Can You Do the Math?

By JohnR |

Apparently, some urban elementary schools now encourage their 12-year-old students to “go out for lunch,” that is, to get together in small groups and go out to purchase their lunchtime meal at a nearby downtown restaurant. When I first heard this, I was surprised, and my first thoughts were critical.  “Should schools be encouraging consumerism?” […]

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On the Subject of Study

By JohnR |

When we undertake the study of something, we typically approach the subject-matter in a very circumscribed way. There already exists a very well-defined discipline of engineering or archaeology or management or kinesiology, and each such subject studied thus presents itself as an already complete, independently defined object.  The existence of the discipline, in other words, […]

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