Posts by Brent Kaneft
Education and the brain: On grace and development
For Coach Tommy Jones January is cold for baseball, but at this preseason practice, the team sitting, backs against the left field fence in front of our home dugout, I was as warm and shamefaced as I could be. Coach Tommy Jones, as he did before every practice, told us a story about life…
Read MoreThe Hollowdays
“We are the hollow men / We are the stuffed men / Leaning together / Headpiece filled with straw.” – T.S. Eliot (“The Hollow Men,” 1925) It is already Christmas at Starbucks. They may call it the “holidays,” of course, just one more way of extracting all the caffeine (i.e., authenticity) and profundity…
Read MoreLearning and the Brain: Bid the geldings be fruitful?
“And all the time – such is the tragicomedy of our situation – we continue to clamour for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more ‘drive,’ or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or ‘creativity.’ In a sort of…
Read MoreLearning and the Brain: On wind and roots
“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” – Frederich Nietzsche During the early 1990s, an experiment was taking place in New Mexico called Biosphere 2. It was (and still is) a closed ecological system — air, food, community, everything had to be generated in this biodome. Though now…
Read MoreFaculty and Student Wellness: Embracing the Interdependence
Earlier this summer, during an online discussion about grading practices, a teacher made a familiar, yet rarely challenged assertion: “When a student gets a D/F—or even an A—in my class, that’s the grade they earned.” My translation: “I provide opportunities for students to succeed. Their failure is on them, not me. It’s their choice.” In…
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