Skip to main content

It's all about Bloom

My wife (she's a Gifted and Talented teacher, for those that don't know) and I sometimes chat about important concepts in teaching, but I think this concept is an important life one:  Bloom's Taxonomy (specifically, of the cognitive domain).  Here's a random link: http://www.officeport.com/edu/blooms.htm

Why is this so important?  Because having a meaningful conversation without following this pyramid is virtually impossible.  People try it all the time, though.  See, the bottom of the pyramid is knowledge, and the top is evaluation, but a lot of folks get those mixed up.  I'll give a few examples.

1)  Talking heads.  See your average interview on CNN/Fox/etc.  Someone will be asked a question and that person will try to give you a value judgment.  "This was the wrong course to take in healthcare," "We should have left Iraq earlier," etc.  Did he have the facts?  Has she been to Iraq?  If you can't handle even the lowest level, you shouldn't try to hop to the highest.
2)  Your average teenage conversation.  "That's just stupid!"  How many times do we hear that?  Or "That sucks," etc.?  Teens intuit the idea that judgment/evaluation is the highest, and that they have the ability to do so ... but, man, actually learning all that stuff to make the opinion *valid*, then having the mental discipline to comprehend, analyze, etc. ... well, that's just asking an awful lot ....
3)  Most political discourse.  You know, this is really the same as category 2.  People on the left will say silly things about nationalizing healthcare without considering the types of disincentives that follow, and people on the right respond with tea-party platitudes without considering how the current system has failed.  The tough issues (healthcare, death penalty, abortion, Kirk v. Picard) are ... well, tough.  But it's much, much easier to try to skip the bottom Bloom layers and jump directly to the top.

And this is one of the reasons that my wife rocks.  She tries to teach kids that, while opinions might not be WRONG in that you really do hold that opinion, they can absolutely be INVALID because you haven't done the mental work needed to gain facts, comprehend, apply, analyze, and synthesize ... before you tell me that it sucks.  If you just tell me that, and can't back it up ... well, then your opinion sucks.

And I've done the research to back that up.  :-P

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The problem with fundamentalism, part 2: Religious fundamentalism

This is the second part of a two part series where I discuss the problems I see with two prevalent forms of fundamentalism (the first discussed Constitution and fundamentalism: http://amusingbeam.blogspot.com/2012/05/problem-with-fundamentalism-part-1.html ).  In this part, I will be discussing biblical fundamentalism.  I will be referring to sources more frequently here, as I cannot claim the expertise I could for the last installment. Let me start by saying that I understand this is an extremely controversial topic, especially the stance I am taking.  My goal is not to offend, but it is instead to discuss why I think a fundamentalist approach to the Bible (and, in some respects, any text) has insurmountable problems.  I think that most Fundamentalists I know are quite willing to discuss why they believe their hermeneutic approach is the correct one, so my hope is that they are equally sanguine when someone explains why that pathway seems problematic. Here is t...
2 comments
Read more

Why COVID-19 is MUCH worse than the seasonal flu

This is the second in a series of posts about the COVID-19 pandemic . This installment is discussing why COVID-19 is much, much worse than the seasonal flu. Here it is, in a nutshell : COVID-19 is more contagious, more deadly, already has more known long-term impacts, has no vaccine or truly effective treatments, and has no apparent seasonality. Contagion SARS-COV-2 is much more contagious. The median R0 (average number of people infected by each person when nobody is immune) is 5.7 , or more optimistically 2.5 . For the pandemic to go away, R0 would need to effectively be less than 1.  The estimate of the 1918 novel flu was between 1.2 and 2.4 .  (An R0 of 5.7 means we need over 80% of the population to be immune to reach effective herd immunity .) Beyond that, the incubation period is long, and the number of transmissions before symptoms begin hovers near half those infected . And the duration of being contagious is longer, up to 10 days after the first symptoms. That means ...
3 comments
Read more

Finding facts and data about COVID-19

It's easy to find thoughts on COVID-19, but hard to parse through it all.  This series is my attempt to give my view of the state of knowledge about COVID-19, as of late July and early August  through late 2020. Here are the entries (these will become links as I post the others): Finding facts and data about COVID-19 (this one) Why COVID-19 is much worse than the seasonal flu Testing, contact tracing, and quarantining The path to vaccines To wear a mask or not Deaths and long-term impacts Economic and secondary impacts Safely co-existing Bots and divisiveness Leadership You need to find reputable sources for data.  People are rightly skeptical of what they see online.  In fact, the World Health Organization has declared that, beyond the pandemic, there is an Infodemic, which is “a surge of information about COVID-19 that has made it hard for people to know which news and guidance about the virus is accurate.” If you are actually interested in how to find the best new...
2 comments
Read more