What's Up With North?

Let's end our work this summer by rethinking our place on the planet. More exactly, we will examine the ways we subjectively orient ourselves, their bases, and their consequences. First, please read this short article. Next, contextualize it for yourself by considering a specific way that your perception of the orientation of the earth affects your understanding of countries, relationships, culture, etc. In your writing, examine the ways of knowing at work. Does your language reflect your conceptualization? Do you have emotional responses based on geographic orientation? Finally, pose and answer a knowledge question based on your musings. This is due Sunday 24 July and is your last TOK work for the summer. See you on campus.

Reading Lenses

This week, I want you to think about your reading. As we read, we add what we learn to all that has come before: what we've already read of the text, our knowledge of its contexts, and the wealth of knowledge that shapes us as knowers. Parts of this process are automatic, and we also have the ability to consciously shape the lens through which we read and understand. As you may have discussed in your English courses, critical theory offers different approaches to how we choose to understand and analyze a text. If you'd like, you can learn more about this from Professor Kristi Siegel's succinct and clear overview of approaches to literary criticism. For this week's post, I'd like you to consider your English summer reading book (or, if you didn't start reading that book as soon as June arrived, another book you're reading. You are reading a book, right?). First, examine the ways you naturally process what the text offers. What ways of knowing do you employ, and why? Next, consider another perspective--or lens--through which you might view the same text. How does this new perspective alter the ways of knowing at work? Finally, extract a knowledge question from your observations and analyses. Please post your response by the end of Sunday 17 July.

The Knowledge Just Keeps Adding Up

If mathematics is language that we use to describe our world, then we should not be surprised when it pops up in arenas other than the explicit study of math. Consider a time that ways of knowing you employ in your math studies came to bear in another realm. First, extract a knowledge question from the math moment, then explain how that math knowledge intersected with another area of your studies, and wrap it all together by applying the knowledge question to the other area of knowledge and answering the KQ. Consider why the answers may be different in the two different situations, and how different perspectives change the knowledge. Please post your response by the end of Sunday 10 July.

Here's a great old number to help you get in a mathy mood: The Magic Number