Effective Teaching and the Use of Examples
I know I’ve mentioned that I tutor at the local schools and the junior college in Santa Barbara and that I, like anyone who’s had these experiences, learned quickly that there are effective and ineffective ways of getting certain concepts across. In many cases, it’s just best to give an example and let that illustrate the idea.
For one gearhead who was having trouble with “force = mass * acceleration,” I said, “You’ve taken the engine and tranny out of your car parked in the street, right? OK, imagine that there was no friction between the road and the car’s wheels, and you were pushing it, adding force in a certain direction, it would accelerate in that direction, right? Now, if you and a buddy were both pushing it, your force would be twice as much, and so it would accelerate twice as fast. Now imagine that you put the engine and tranny back in, adding mass, you’d need more force to get the same acceleration.”
Some concepts are really tough to put into words, and that examples are really the only way to get the job done. Take the idea of irony in literature. I could define it: “a state of affairs or an event that seems deliberately contrary to what one expects and is often amusing as a result,” or I could simply provide the example that we see above.
As someone who marches in favor of things like science in policy-making, Black Lives Matter, women’s rights, banning new oil pipelines, or whatever, this made me smile. There really is a certain look that compatriots and I have, and, correspondingly, there are certain things that are extremely rare: racist tattoos, confederate flags, and AR-15s chief among them. 
Here’s a fabulous set of interviews of Noam Chomsky and economist Dr. Robert (Bob) Pollin at UMass Amherst’s 
I guess we’re all wondering how it was possible that security at the U.S. Capitol was so weak on January 6th that the building was easily compromised by hundreds of angry Trump supporters. I know I personally have invested a lot of mental cycles into this matter.
What lies ahead for the United States? We talk about a return to normality, but how is anything like that possible knowing that our country is filled with people that have the same political sensibilities as the twisted jackass pictured here?
The funny part about this, if there is one, is that this moron thinks supporting terrorists has political legs.
This iconic image of QAnon supporter and white supremacist Richard Barnett, sitting behind Nancy Pelosi’s desk after having stormed the Capitol, has a kind of irony to it, in that he’s far more likely to die in prison than in some sort of gun battle.
Since terrible people are all over our news at this point, it seems a good time to talk about Brian May, virtuoso guitarist with a doctorate in astrophysics, and fiercely dedicated to animal rights.
Here’s a concept I just came across:
As a reader commented: Newark is one of the cities that has already been doing the work of defunding by building up social services and changing police culture. Great progress, but still a long way to go.
