Teaching Quote

"Even in order to understand we have to invent, or, that is, to reinvent, because we can't start from the beginning again. But I would say that anything is only understood to the extent that it is reinvented." -Jean Piaget

If by reinvent he means rethought, rediscovered, thought out by oneself, then I think he has a good point. If he means tearing the old down and discarding it for the reinvention that might not be accurate to the original, then he needs to be qualified.

An additional thought: the next generation is able to reinvent what came before in a faithful way that accurately represents what that older generation was doing only by the ever present loving guidance of God.

Language Quotes

"Surely, learning the dictionary, as Gouin discovered, would never lead to the mastery of a language, and lists of disconnected words would not be helpful either toward the master of a language--if we consider mastery the ability to express one's own thoughts. " -pg. 107

"When the grammar-translation method was labelled tradional, old fashioned, and obsolete, both of the words, grammar and translation, took on a negative connotation and many teachers accepted the concept that 'language is something you do'. Therefore, they attempted to develop solely automatic responses and asked the students not to analyze what they were saying."-pg. 108

"We live in a system-oriented society where even the most humble worker needs to have a modicum of understanding of the system in which he is involved."-pg. 109

"Teaching the grammar of any language for grammar's sake is, hopefully, a thing of the past. There seems to be little value in memorizing rules verbatim, and the modern emphasis is better placed on the application of the rules: Nobody wants to eat the recipe, everybody prefers the cake!" -pg. 109

Teaching a Living Language, Ralph Hester ed.

Augustine

"Everything which does not decrease on being given away is not properly owned when it is owned and not given." -Augustine.

Is there a pithier way to say this?

The gift that is truly possesed is one that grows when it is given.

The Beginning of Knowledge

In order to become wise, you must first become foolish.

In order to learn, you must first be stupid.

The way up is first of all the way down.

From Infant to Lover

In order to speak about something, one must love it.

In order to love something, one must know it.

In order to know something, one must study it.

In order to study something, one must be with it.

In order to be with something, one must have leisure.

Boredom

"The true antithesis of love is not hate, but rather dispairing indifference; the feeling that nothing is important."

"A silent lover is one who doesn't know his job."

My Wife

The lightning behind all this thunder.

Augustine on Different Interpretations of Scripture

"How can it harm me if I understand the writer's meaning in a different sense from that in which another understands it? All of us who read his words do our best to discover and understand what he had in mind, and since we believe that he wrote the truth, we are not so rash as to suppose that he wrote anything which we know or think to be false. Provided, therefore, that each of us tries as best he can to understand in the Holy Scriptures what the writer meant by them, what harm is there if a reader believes what you, the Light of all truthful minds, show him to be the true meaning? It may not even be the meaning which the writer had in mind, and yet he too saw in them a true meaning, different though it may have been from this."

Confessions, St. Augustine, pg. 296.

Tolkien on Songs

"As they sang the hobbit felt the love of beautiful things made by hands and by cunning and by magic moving through him, a fierce and jealous love, the desire of the hearts of dwarves. Then something Tookish woke up inside him, and he wished to go and see the great mountains, and hear the pine-trees and the waterfalls, and explore the caves, and wear a sword instead of a walking-stick."-pg. 15, The Hobbit

Tolkien chalks the hobbit's feelings up to the music that the dwarves make and the things that they sing about. This shows how winsome music can be.

Lewis and Integration

"The very power of Gaius and Titius depends on the fact that they are dealing with a boy: a boy who thinks that he is 'doing' his 'English prep' and has no notion that ethics, theology, and politics are all at stake. It is not a theory they put in his mind, but an assumption, which ten years hence, its origin forgotten and its presence unconcious, will condition him to take one side in a controversy which he never recognized as a controversy at all."-The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis, pg. 20.