Category Archives: 傳道授業解惑也

Teachers 4

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I’m about to become a teacher. How can I be a good one?

The best teachers I remember from school had three things in common:

(1) They had high standards. Like three year olds testing their parents, students will test teachers to see if they can get away with low-quality work or bad behavior. They won’t respect the teachers who don’t call them on it.

(2) They liked us. Like dogs, kids can tell very accurately whether or not someone wishes them well. I think a lot of our teachers either never liked kids much, or got burned out and started not to like them. It’s hard to be a good teacher once that happens. I can’t think of one teacher in all the schools I went to who managed to be good despite disliking students.

(3) They were interested in the subject. Most of the public school teachers I had weren’t really interested in what they taught. Enthusiasm is contagious, and so is boredom.

— Paul Graham

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2011.04.05 Tuesday ACHK

ANSI Common LISP

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ANSI Common LISP (by Paul Graham) was the book I borrowed for a Machine Intelligence course project in 2000. My memory was that the author was called “Paul something”. I thought that Paul was the one who had invented LISP.

No. It should be John McCarthy.

Later on, during my teaching-in-high-school period, by a Wikipedia biography, I realized that that Paul was not as great as I thought, because he was not the one who had invented LISP.

However, now, I regard him as one of my five most important teachers.

— Me@2010.03.08

— Me@2011.03.14

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2011.03.14 Monday (c) All rights reserved by ACHK

A combination lock

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* Ambition is the death of thought.

* Philosophy is like trying to open a safe with a combination lock: each little adjustment of the dials seems to achieve nothing, only when everything is in place does the door open.

* Philosophical problems can be compared to locks on safes, which can be opened by dialing a certain word or number, so that no force can open the door until just this word has been hit upon, and once it is hit upon any child can open it.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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2010.12.30 Thursday ACHK

In between frames

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Scott McCloud’s classic book on comics explains a lot more than comics.

A key part of his thesis is that comic books work because the action takes place between the frames. Our imagination fills in the gaps between what happened in that frame and this frame, which means that we’re as much involved as the illustrator and author are in telling the story.

Marketing, it turns out, works precisely the same way.

— Seth Godin

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2010.11.26 Friday ACHK

Upwind

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I think the solution is to work in the other direction. Instead of working back from a goal, work forward from promising situations. This is what most successful people actually do anyway.

In the graduation-speech approach, you decide where you want to be in twenty years, and then ask: what should I do now to get there? I propose instead that you don’t commit to anything in the future, but just look at the options available now, and choose those that will give you the most promising range of options afterward.

It’s not so important what you work on, so long as you’re not wasting your time. Work on things that interest you and increase your options, and worry later about which you’ll take.

Suppose you’re a college freshman deciding whether to major in math or economics. Well, math will give you more options: you can go into almost any field from math. If you major in math it will be easy to get into grad school in economics, but if you major in economics it will be hard to get into grad school in math.

— Paul Graham

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2010.09.03 Friday ACHK

The teachers and the leading practitioners

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One way to tell whether a field has consistent standards is the overlap between the leading practitioners and the people who teach the subject in universities. At one end of the scale you have fields like math and physics, where nearly all the teachers are among the best practitioners. In the middle are medicine, law, history, architecture, and computer science, where many are. At the bottom are business, literature, and the visual arts, where there’s almost no overlap between the teachers and the leading practitioners. It’s this end that gives rise to phrases like “those who can’t do, teach.”

— Paul Graham

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2010.08.15 Sunday ACHK

Rinus Michels

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Marinus (“Rinus”) Jacobus Hendricus Michels (9 February 1928 – 3 March 2005) was a Dutch football player and coach who was named “coach of the century” by FIFA in 1999. He played his entire career for the club Ajax Amsterdam, whom he later coached, and was a member of the Netherlands national team both as a player and as manager.

Michels became most notable for his coaching achievements, having won the European Cup with Ajax and the Spanish league with Barcelona, and having had four tenures as coach of the Netherlands national team, whom he led to reach the final match of the 1974 World Cup and to win the 1988 European Championship. He is credited with the invention of a major football tactic known as “Total Football” in the 1970s.

— Wikipedia on Rinus Michels

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2010.07.01 Thursday ACHK

Clarke’s three laws 4

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* Clarke’s Law of Revolutionary Ideas: Every revolutionary idea — in science, politics, art, or whatever — seems to evoke three stages of reaction. They may be summed up by the phrases:

(1) “It’s completely impossible — don’t waste my time”;
(2) “It’s possible, but it’s not worth doing”;
(3) “I said it was a good idea all along.”

— The Promise of Space (1968); This and similar statements attributed to Mahatma Gandhi and J. B. S. Haldane may ultimately be derived from a statement attibuted to Arthur Schopenhauer:

All truth passes through three stages.

First it is ridiculed.
Second it is violently opposed.
And third it is accepted as self-evident.

— As quoted in Seeds of Peace : A Catalogue of Quotations (1986) by Jeanne Larson, Madge Micheels-Cyrus, p. 244

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2010.06.21 Monday ACHK

Job: Meaning of Life 2

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Your life would have no meaning if you just stay at home, using all the time thinking about the meaning of life.

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Every day, we face thousands of problems.

In order to survive, we have to create thousands of solutions to those thousands of problems.

Some of your solutions are not only useful for yourself,

but also useful for a lot of others.

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Why not publish them?

— Me@2010.02.22

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2010.06.19 Saturday copyright ACHK