Path to Discovery

“All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered, the point it to discover them.” 

Galileo Galilei

Are you leading your students on the path of discovery?  

The commitment to learning needs to be more than just obtaining competency in a certain subject area, it needs to be a desire to know more.   A teacher who leads their students into the unknown nurtures that desire. 

So what is the unknown?   It’s the great mystery of life, whether that is how the universe came into being or how numbers, order and sequence affect our daily lives.  Once the search begins the mystery unfolds.

The current bestseller list is full of titles that explore the mystery.

• The Drunkard’s Walk by Leonard Mlodinow, is about how randomness rules our lives.  The author explores how chance and probability affect our financial markets and our own individual choices.

• Change your Brain; Change your Life by Daniel G Amen.  The book gives instructions for conquering anxiety, depression and anger

• Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks.   The author devotes his book on the cognitive miracles of music.  It is a study about the pathologies of musical response and what they teach us about the anatomy of the human brain.

• The Power of Limits by Gyorgy Doczi.  Explores the discovery of patters in nature, and how these patterns are repeated again and again. 

• Blink by Malcolm Gladwell.  A book about how we think without thinking.  It explores our choices and how we come to make them.

All of these books give their readers something more to think about.  Perhaps that’s a good position for every teacher, give your students just a bit more to think about, give them a glimpse of the bigger picture help them become an explorer. 

Galileo is remembered not just because he put forth the model of the sun-centered universe but also because he stood alone against the authority of the science of his day and of the church.   He represented the humble reasoning of one man and was strong in that conviction.