Posts tagged as:

critical thinking

Fundamentals and Jazz, Part 2: Connection

May 12, 2010

Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity. —Charles Mingus I love that: “Making the simple complicated is commonplace.” This gets me every time I read it because it’s so easy to think of jazz as really really complicated versions of simple songs. Isn’t that so? One might think [...]

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Fundamentals and Jazz, Part 1: Discipline

May 11, 2010

I’m into scales right now. —John Coltrane Fundamentals are the launching pad for expertise. Every field has them: they’re pieces of knowledge and practicable skills without which one cannot excel in a particular discipline. They’re conjugated verbs, times tables, and heavy machinery operating procedures. Most of us groan when think about teaching them or learning [...]

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Creativity: What Is It, Anyway?

May 7, 2010

People talk about creativity in all sorts of contexts—it’s used in reference to everything from ”scrap booking” to advertising, sculpture to physics, writing to teaching. We know the value of creativity. We know its fruit when we see it. But we’re so loose with our application of the word that sometimes I wonder if we [...]

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On Feynman and Us

April 29, 2010

Perhaps a thing is simple if you can describe it fully in several different ways without immediately knowing that you are describing the same thing. Richard Feynman, Nobel Lecture, December 11, 1965 If you’ve ever listened to a Richard Feynman lecture or read his books, you’ll understand why I like to think that his greatest [...]

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