Twin tower memories

 My summer 2000 lunches were taken sitting under the twin towers in New York. I was there for the recently opened Actant's NY office, and would either have lunch at Battery Park or looking up at the towers.

I have sometimes described my work as "if I were an architect, I would design skyscrapers", to then add "it is a pride thing, but also life is short, so let's push things forward". To eat my lunch below the towers, was in part to bask in the marvel of engineering tall buildings, but also to feel the ego that drives us to surpass ourself, and often others too. 

These are some pictures of the towers I took:

When the towers went down, I truly could not believe it. My old black and white TV had been switched on in the office (in Zug, Switzerland), my colleagues were huddled in front of it, I walked over, to hear someone say "one of the towers is down", to which I answered: "that is not possible, it must be hidden by the other". It was a sad day. 

Recently, I was asked "how does it look now?". And to note, I had chosen not to remember, even though I've been there a few times since then. I can visualise the inner mall, elevators, and escalators, yet my core memories have them standing tall, and I enjoying a sandwich below.

All original content copyright James Litsios, 2022.

Learning as a personal experience: James Taylor vs George Polya

How best to learn? How best to build deep personal growth? 

I noted this 1995 advice from James Taylor (in this YouTube), on how to become a 'musician like him':

Be as self-contained as possible, to keep the overheads to a minimum... spend as much time free and lonely as you can. ... I think lonely and free go together... somehow. And then you can’t help but evolve, if you keep your mind open, and you are not denying your experience, not shutting yourself down, not sort of clamping yourself down, or letting other wastes of time come in and claim all of your time. If you keep yourself open and free, then things will happen to you, and you will be educated by them and you will evolve, you will grow.

Is this good advice? Does deep personal growth only happen alone?

To contrast this with George Polya who states in 1966:

Teaching is giving opportunities to students to discover things by themselves.

We might rephrase this as:

To learn, students must be given the opportunity to discover things by themselves.

So in fact Polya is also saying that learning happens by actions of the students, not anyone else.

There are a few things to mention here:

1. We may learn by discovery, we may learn by imitation. Both James Taylor and George Polya are referring to learning by discovery. Learning by imitation, by definition, cannot be done alone.
2. Polya is not excluding that students 'discover together'. What is excluded is learning where each student does not personally experience the discovery from 'not learned' to 'learned'.
3. For Polya, the teacher is responsible that each student experiences their learning.
4. For James Taylor, the student is responsible to 'shut-away' others to experience alone their learning.
5. Polya is referring to learning math, James Taylor to learning to be a singer song writer.
6. Learning math can be organized with others, learning the humanity and introspection that goes into song writing is much about "maintaining one's aloneness", which some might call narcissism, remoteness, egoism, detachment, a religious experience, or even being a hermit.

Both advices are similar: learning is best experienced personally, and sometimes experiences learned alone change what is learned. And one cannot help to note that James Taylor naturally expresses the individual nature of learning in an asocial 'push others away' manner, while George Polya stays in a social and organized setting of teachers and students.

All original content copyright James Litsios, 2022.