Word: reflecting
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...some cases the original logic of disciplines and departments is powerful and worth preserving. But as the recent restructurings of biology and anthropology have suggested, a century-old logic is not necessarily a logic that best promotes research, teaching, and inquiry. For many faculty, our current departments reflect only a part of our intellectual and teaching horizons. Much the same is true for our students, as I learned this year. So if the decks were reshuffled, wholly new departments might emerge: a department of evolutionary studies, say, or perhaps a department of cognition and neurobiology which would unite professors from...
...American youth plagued by generational ADD. After observing a teenager’s impatience with the sloth of text messaging, comedian Louis CK commented wryly, “Your message is going to space. Give it a second.” Moreover, our vocabulary has come to reflect the speed at which our words are spoken and sent: Since we “obvi” don’t have time for those extra two syllables, our new bevy of “abbrevs” can sometimes be pretty “egreg” (egregious for those...
...hold. In some way, many of us have learned the most not from texts and lectures, but by observing our reactions to them and by becoming aware of our habits of thought and the limits of the human gift for “zooming out” to reflect on a subject from the perspective of someone else. The key to my learning, at least, was the attempt to eliminate an automatic creation of opinions...
...members of the Class of 2009 preparing to leave Harvard, it is fairly natural for us to reflect upon our four years within these walls. We ask whether it was worth the money and the time. What is the purpose of a good education? How do we hope to apply the knowledge we have gained here...
...hold even higher hopes for the ability of this year’s graduating class to pause, reflect, and consider the world around us. The great, albeit fictional, President Josiah Bartlet once described his job saying, “Every once in a while there’s a day with an absolute right and an absolute wrong…other than that, there aren’t very many un-nuanced moments in leading a country….” It is a testament to our education that we do understand nuance, embrace complexity, and savor intellectual challenge...