Website Wednesday

I read today that college may become financially out of reach for most Americans.(NYT) That's pretty shocking. But then we could look at colleges and universities as any retail institution trying to sell its products at the highest prices. It's just that they, unlike the auto industry, are supposedly "selling" knowledge.

I'm a great believer of Internet higher learning. It opens up a college degree to so many dedicated and harried people who would never have had the time for the traditional four-year trek to a bricks and mortar knowledge factory.

Thinking back to my college years with the 20-20 vision of hindsight, what I most remember is a professor I loathed: He couldn't teach; I didn't get it; I was so picked upon. Waaah!

And yet today, every day I spend time on writing (and that's about every day) I use the rules he taught me. Every major word I write, every major word I change, I think of his wise counsel. (Boy, have I matured.)

There is not one English class I teach where I do not use his word-for-word substitution of a famous document. (Try it some time: take the U.S. Pledge of Allegiance and do a word-for-word substitution without changing the meaning of the original words. It's not easy.)

Also, the best advice I ever got for handling children was from the college professor who taught in the college's on-site middle/high school, which it was mandatory for us to observe throughout our four years.

The advice given to us, students, after he had a tough time with one student and the class was dismissed: Never back a kid into a corner. Meaning: No matter what the situation always leave them with their dignity.

And remember, this advice was before the recent findings that children/teen brains operate differently from adults in the moral/ethical area.

So I did learn a lot in college. But I missed a lot too - like metaphor.

I just never could understand metaphors. They drove me nuts. My brain could not wrap around the concept that they were not just similes missing the "as" or "like." Not a good lack of understanding for an English major to have.

And then, sometime after college, I got it. It was divine revelation. The seas parted. I love metaphors now. And, I get them.

So much tells me that learning (and I mean strict learning like science, math or a language) is a lifetime process. There is a luxury of getting a head start with college when you're young but the love of knowledge should fill your entire life and be available to you for all that time.

Saying that, I have two websites related to learning today:

http://www.munseys.com/site/home

Munseys looks like a slicker Project Gutenberg. Scroll down to “Browse by Category” to click a favorite. You can’t see it on the home page but other pages list the number of books in each category.

Three things I like: in HTML, the font looks like Times Roman and not Gutenberg’s Courier. Second, some of the books have colored pictures of their original covers which is historically interesting. Also, some of the books have short reviews which are always fun to read.

The second site is one for teachers but applicable for anyone with children:

http://www.ilovethatteachingidea.com

The categories list the learning disciplines and tell the teacher how to use an idea in a classroom setting. However, you can adapt most of them for home use.

Just two I found interesting:
1- Give children a bag of alphabet cereal and have them make as many words as they can. Then, they eat their words.
2- Give children pipe cleaners and file cards with the names of different geometric forms. Have them make the forms out of the pipe cleaners.

Enjoy these sites. Learning should be lifelong and fun.