Your Japanese word of the week is...

"manabu" 学ぶ which is "to learn (a skill)". And seeing that all I do these days is go to school, come home from school, and do schoolwork, it seems inevitable that it's something I think a lot about.

Learning isn't an easy task in itself, but learning to facilitate learning is a completely different beast. The B. Ed program tries to show the difference between what the commonly held belief of learning was (more or less rote memory) and what the new direction of education is taking (understanding and critical thinking). It isn't, however, to say that one is more important than the other, but that education as a whole is quite caught up in whether or not facts become "known", as opposed to "understood. This was further broken down by famous American educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom into Bloom's Taxonomy of Thinking.

There are two versions, one which is simpler and structured like a ladder in order of increasing difficulty and complexity. There's also this one, known as Bloom's Rose, which doesn't necessarily imply a ranking to them. Either way, it'll be useful as I think about what level I'm getting my students to learn at and how to move them away from the details and into concepts.

Otherwise, things are good here... the weather is typical Vancouver fall, karate is going well with everyone enjoying the classes, and the people in my class are great. Here's us at Science World for a Teacher's Night Out (read: pick up free posters night). =P