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Anything that can be learned falls broadly into two categories: things you need to understand intellectually, and skills you need to be able to perform. Most things you want to learn involve a mix of the two.

ee the distinction between skills and concepts, you can devise two separate learning strategies for each.

Rule #1: Practice for Skills, Connections for Concepts

Are the students teaching each other?

Are the questions simple, level 1 questions or higher level questions that could even stump an adult? If a student can make a teacher's brain sweat, then you know they are really engaged and thinking.

The brain, it seems, does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life; in each case, the same neurological regions are stimulated. Keith Oatley, an emeritus professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto (and a published novelist), has proposed that reading produces a vivid simulation of reality, one that “runs on minds of readers just as computer simulations run on computers.” Fiction — with its redolent details, imaginative metaphors and attentive descriptions of people and their actions — offers an especially rich replica. Indeed, in one respect novels go beyond simulating reality to give readers an experience unavailable off the page: the opportunity to enter fully into other people’s thoughts and feelings.

It’s a rare joke that is funny. Only situations are funny.

“The point of life was the possibility it always held out for the exceptional.”

to do the kinds of things which people don’t really do in real life but which they do do in fiction—to follow their own irrational—but sane—obsessions which, achieved, would satisfy them. Alas, these guys never catch up with their obsessions.