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Roger Schank

Roger Schank Biography

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“I'm not suggesting that teachers never tell the truth, only that it isn't necessary to do it all the time. Since coming to one's own conclusions is mostly how we learn, the real job of a teacher is to force students to come to sensible conclusions by confronting what they already believe with stuff that is antithetical to those beliefs. A confused person has only 2 choices. Admit he is confused and doesn't care, or resolve the confusion. Resolving the confusion invloves thinking. Teachers can encourage thinking by making sure students have something confusing to think about.”

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“There are endless books about what every third grader must know that use the idea that factual knowledge is the basis of the ability to read as their justification. Unfortunately, the writers of these tracts have misunderstood the cognitive science behind those statements. It is difficult to read things when you don't understand what they are about, but it does not follow from that thatthe solution is to ram that knowledge down kids' throats and then have them read. It is much more clever to have them read about what they know and to gradually increase their knowledge through stories that cause them to have to learn more in order to make the stories understandable to them.”

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“In summary, a good teacher does the following: - never tells a student anything that the teacher thinks is true - never allows himself to be the ultimate judge of his own students' success - teacher practice first, theory second (if he must teach theory at all) - does not come up with lists of knowledge that every student must know - doesn't teach anything unless he can easily explain the use of learning it - assigns no homework, unless that homework is to produce something - groups students according to their interests and abilities, not their ages - ensures that any reward to a student is intrinsic - teaches students things they may actually need to know after they leave school - helps students come up with their own explanations when they have made a mistake - never assumes that a student is listening to what he is saying - never assumes that students will do what he asks them to do if what he asked does not relate to a goal they truly hold - never allows pleasing the teacher to be the goal of the student - understands that students won't do what he tells them if they don't understand what is being asked of them - earns the respect of students by demonstrating abilities - motivate students to do better, and does not help them to do better - understands that his job is to get students to do something - understands that experience, not teachers, changes belief systems - confuses students - does not expect credit for good teaching”

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“We can tell people abstract rules of thumb which we have derived from prior experiences, but it is very difficult for other people to learn from these. We have difficulty remembering such abstractions, but we can more easily remember a good story. Stories give life to past experience. Stories make the events in memory memorable to others and to ourselves. This is one of the reasons why people like to tell stories.”

PeopleGivingWritingReasonStoriesPastRememberDifficultMemoriesEventsDifficultyReason WhyMemorableAbstractAbstractionThumbsGood StoryPast Experiences
Book:Tell Me a Story: Narrative and Intelligence
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“The language of the culture also reflects the stories of the culture. One word or simple phrasal labels often describe the story adequately enough in what we have termed culturally common stories. To some extent, the stories of a culture are observable by inspecting the vocabulary of that culture. Often entire stories are embodied in one very culture-specific word. The story words unique to a culture reveal cultural differences.”

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“Learning to explain phenomena such that one continues to be fascinated by the failure of one's explanations creates a continuing cycle of thinking, that is the crux of intelligence. It isn't that one person knows more than another, then. In as sense, it is important to know less than the next person, or at least to be certain of less, thus enabling more curiosity and less explaining away because one has again encountered a well-known phenomenon. The less you know the more you can find out about, and finding out for oneself is what intelligence is all about.”

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“Questions are the important thing, answers are less important. Learning to ask a good question is the heart of intelligence. Learning the answer-well, answers are for students. Questions are for thinkers.”

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Book:The Connoisseur's Guide to the Mind: How We Think, How We Learn, and What It Means to Be Intelligent
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“There is one very good reason to learn programming, but it has nothing to do with preparing for high-tech careers or with making sure one is computer literate in order to avoid being cynically manipulated by the computers of the future. The real value of learning to program can only be understood if we look at learning to program as an exercise of the intellect, as a kind of modern-day Latin that we learn to sharpen our minds.”

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Book:The cognitive computer: on language, learning, and artificial intelligence
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