"We shall not cease from exploration
and the end of all our exploring
will be to arrive where we started
and know the place for the first time."
- T.S. Eliot
from "Little Giddings"
"I write for the reason I've always done so:
simply to survive, to make sense of my life.
I never know what I think until I read what
I've written. I refuse to live an unexamined
life. I intend to know what's going on. Writing
is a source of strength for me.
- Lee Smith, author
"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
- Albert Einstein, creative thinker
"Imagination is the capacity to think of things as possibly being so;
it is an intentional act of mind and the source of invention."
- Kieran Egan
from "Imagination in Teaching and Learning"
"History is past human experience recollected. Thus, our own everyday
experience is the substance of history. To construct stories about this
experience is to construct histories."
- Tom Holt
from "Thinking Historically"
"How can we make sense of the past if we cannot imagine it as real?"
- Monica Edinger & Stephanie Fins
from "Far Away and Long Ago"
"HISTORY is about peeling away the layers of artifice and getting at WHAT
IS. It is about examining the human experience. It might be ugly. It might
be shameful. It might be beautiful. It might be revelatory. But all those
things are TRUE and part of what it means to be human. HISTORY affords us
the opportunity to explore the sense of human character and soul at its most
profound center. Involved in the study of HISTORY is a certain amount of
risk and challange, of tension and attention, a certain presence that
suggests how we might become as a people."
- Ken Burns
Historian
"Point of View is EVERYTHING!"
- Mr. Holmes, student/teacher/observer/writer of history
"...the answer is of less practical value than the question. 'Question'
comes from the same root as 'quest' - to seek. A teaching question - one
that requires more than a push-button answer - impels seekers on a journey
to find the truth. Without the exercise of the quest, an answer can be
inconplete, meaningless, useless, or even dangerous. Don't only look at the
event from the outside, from YOUR point of view, look at it from the inside,
as clearly as you can imagine it. Following this practice, one
develops 'empathy' - defined as 'identification with and understanding of
another's situation, feelings, and motives.' Which is better prepared to
survive and prosper in this precarious, ever-changing world - the mind that
has been told the answer, or the mind that has been trained to question,
observe, reason, and imagine?"
- Benjamin Hoff
from
"The Art of Seeing"
Bad teacher: "LOOK!!"
Good teacher: "SEE???"
- Note the above quote regarding "Point of View."
Question: What does all of this mean and what does it have to do with a
middle school social studies class?
Answer:
