A Good Quote

One must learn by doing the thing.
For though you think you know it,
you have no certainty until you try.
Sophocles (BC 495-406, Greek Tragic Poet)

I have used this quote in many ways. I have used it in my email signature, on my class syllaweb, and here. Quotes are powerful tools. They provide a truism common to all readers. They give us a way in, a segue to what we want to say, by pulling our readers into the same mind think. We read the quote, we interpret the quote, and now that we are on the same page, we can discuss how this quote leads us to our current conversation. Another neat aspect of quotes is who said it and when. In this case we are talking about a really old concept. A concept that is central to me as an educator and that is "we learn by doing." It is central to my work in that I am a constructivist. I want my scholars to construct, to generate projects that demonstrate their learning. We can read about things and we can hear about things in the world; but we don't know about them till we do them. Secondly, we must always try to do those things, otherwise life is wasted. This quote is a powerful one to have a conversation around in any class or gathering of people.

"Believe none of what you hear and half of what you see."
Benjamin Franklin

I first heard this quote in eighth grade from my math teacher. I think it took me years before I really understood it. This is another quote I use in my classes. Most recently I used it to introduce a lesson about Wikipedia. This was an eye opening exercise for my scholars. So many instances in our lives are cluttered with things we hear and see. What do we believe and what don't we believe? I use a sports analogy here to help make this more clear. We speak about using video replay from many angles to see if a foul was committed, a touchdown was scored, or if his knee was inbounds or not. We discover that we need different perspectives on things. We need to investigate, challenge, and question everything to arrive at our own conclusions.

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day.
Teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.
Lao-Tzu (BC 600-?, Chinese philosopher, founder of Taoism)

I have used this quote often in class. Whenever a scholar asks me how to spell a word or another question that is better answered by the scholar who does some work to find the answer then by me simply giving the answer, I reply, "I don't know, let's figure it out." The concept is that they must earn it. An analogy I use with them. If you find twenty dollars how carefully do you spend it as compared to the twenty dollars you earned through labor? I am a teacher and wish to teach my scholars how do do something rather than give them the answer. This is why I use computers in my classroom and not a lectern.

In New York State we have a section on the English Language Arts (ELA) exam called the "Critical Lens." It asks the student to examine two pieces of literature through a critical lens, which is a quote. The state provides the quote and asks the student to first interpret the quote and then to select any two pieces of literature that support the interpretation of the quote. In my class, I have used quotes as a "Do Now." I provide a quote and ask them to interpret it in on the class blog so we may use our interpretations in class. I have asked the scholars to select quotes that they think are appropriate segues for their own essays and to include them at the beginning as many authors use quotes at beginnings of chapters in a book or in the beginning of a book. On my class syllaweb, I have a link to "Quote of the Day" so that I have a fresh quote on my syllaweb each day as a Do Now.

Quotes are powerful tools. Authors, speakers, politicians use them to provide some authenticity to their own work, to give their enterprise credibility, to let them associate themselves with greatness. When an audience hears or sees a recognizable quote or a quote of good sense, the audience is joined with the speaker, the author, the politician around a common thread, a common idea, a common adage; that is a good segue to where we are about to go. Quotes in the classroom are powerful tools. I love them for their power and diversity.

"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."
Buckminster Fuller