#ch

My fellow students there were very smart, but the really novel thing was that they actually seemed to put a lot of effort into their school work. By the end of my first semester there, I began to get into that habit as well. ↗

— Eric Allin Cornell

#began #effort #end #fellow #fellow students

My head was always bubbling over with facts and it seems to me this had little to do with my paying close attention in school and more to do with my voracious and omnivorous reading habits. ↗

— Eric Allin Cornell

#attention #bubbling #close #close attention #facts

Six months after that, I left Taiwan, first for Hong Kong and then for mainland China, where I spent another three months studying still more Chinese and generally kicking around the country. ↗

— Eric Allin Cornell

#another #around #china #chinese #country

I have always considered that choosing a companion for life was a very important affair and that my happyness or misery in this life depended on the choice. ↗

— Ezra Cornell

#always #choice #choosing #companion #considered

I was glad to hear of that determination as I detest the practice of cousins marrying or any marriage between persons in which there can be traced the most distant relationship. I go for the improvement instead of the deterioration of our race. ↗

— Ezra Cornell

#between #cousins #deterioration #determination #detest

My dear, the duty that devolved wholly on you in my absence of guiding and expanding the minds of our dear children is a laborious one and a responsible one. ↗

— Ezra Cornell

#children #dear #devolved #duty #expanding

One book at a time... though I'm usually doing the research for others while I'm writing, but that sort of research is fairly desultory and I like to stick to the book being written - and writing a book concentrates the mind so the research is more productive. ↗

— Bernard Cornwell

#book #concentrates #doing #fairly #i

Then you start another book and suddenly the galley proofs of the last one come in and you have to wrench your attention away from what you're writing and try to remember what you were thinking when you wrote the previous one. ↗

— Bernard Cornwell

#attention #away #book #come #last

Consider now the primal scene of education in the modern elementary school. Let us assume that a teacher wishes to inform a class of some 20 pupils about the structure of atoms, and that she plans to base the day's instruction on an analogy with the solar system. She knows that the instruction will be effective only to the extent that all the students in the class already know about the solar system. A good teacher would probably try to find out. 'Now, class, how many of you know about the solar system?' Fifteen hands go up. Five stay down. What is a teacher to do in this typical circumstance in the contemporary American school? "If he or she pauses to explain the solar system, a class period is lost, and 15 of the 20 students are bored and deprived of knowledge for that day. If the teacher plunges ahead with atomic structure, the hapless five—they are most likely to be poor or minority students—are bored, humiliated and deprived, because they cannot comprehend the teacher's explanation. ↗

— E.D. Hirsch Jr.

#teaching #education

Long lives aren't natural. We forget that senior citizens are as much an invention as toasters or penicillin. ↗

— Doug Coupland

#forget #invention #lives #long #much