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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

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