AKMA’s Random Thoughts: Illich and Us, and Miscellanea
As a homeschooling parent, I marked Ivan Illich’s death earlier this week with sadness. So did AKMA who went on to discuss these great homeschooling strategies
Then too, we haven�t deployed elaborate stratified appointed-hours lesson plans to impose order on our young ones. We simply made space in which they might learn (a shade easier in our context, as we don�t watch television at home). They read, and read, and take classes that interest them outside our home, and read, and do interesting stuff. (One of our favorite tactics has been leaving books in prominent places: in the middle fo the floor, on the dining room table, in the hall. Sooner or later someone almost always picks up the book, begins leafing through it, and eventually becomes engrossed by this unanticipated visitor.) And in so doing they learn a lot, and they don�t learn a lot. They never learn that their primary social group is a herd of other children exactly their age; they�re acutely tuned in to adults as social partners. They don�t learn that they�re supposed to stop thinking when summer comes, or that they aren�t supposed to want to learn, or that guys (or girls) who learn a lot are geeks or dweebs or whatever opproprobrious nickname their classmates might throw at them.
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The Tesseract – a 4-dimensional cube
Hypercube is a multidimensional analogue of a 3-dimensional cube in that each coordinate of a point in a hypercube is restricted to the same 1-dimensional (line) segment. Tesseract is a 4-dimensional hypercube. In anticipation of MAM 2000, a remark by A. K. Dewdney served an additional reason to write about the tesseract. Wrote he, “Dimensions seem to creep up in everywhere as HYPERCUBE is written.” Dewdney was referring to matrices (2-dimensional objects) and vectors (1-dimensional objects) that are part of any modern computer language. They are also handy in describing and manipulating multidimensional objects. It’s a tribute to these mathematical notations that they make a CUBE variant of the program virtually indistinguishable from its HYPERCUBE analogue
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Overview of Loving-kindness Meditation
Loving-kindness is a meditation practice, which brings about positive attitudinal changes as it systematically develops the quality of ‘loving-acceptance’. It acts, as it were, as a form of self-psychotherapy, a way of healing the troubled mind to free it from its pain and confusion. Of all Buddhist meditations, loving-kindness has the immediate benefit of sweetening and changing old habituated negative patterns of mind.
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Genevi�ve Bergeron
H�l�ne Colgan
Nathalie Croteau
Barbara Daigneault
Anne-Marie Edward
Maud Haviernick
Maryse Lagani�re
Maryse Leclair
Anne-Marie Lemay
Sonia Pelletier
Mich�le Richard
Annie St-Arneault
Annie Turcotte
Barbara Klucznik Widajewicz
You must know who these women are. You may know the name of the man that killed them 13 years ago. But on this day of remeberance, as the federal government is up to it’s eye balls in mush over how badly it has mismanaged the gun control process, we should remember these women.