The Importance of Incubation

The Importance of Incubation

Are you ever tangled up in a tough problem, sleep on it, and then wake up with a solution?   Do ideas come to you in the shower, on a walk, or doing the dishes?  These ideas come to you through incubation—a time of mental rest (or distraction) with no conscious...
Fresh Air of Common Sense

Fresh Air of Common Sense

“What I expect now is something as dramatic is going to happen, not so much in medicine but in economy and culture.”      — Gianna Pomata, Institute of the History of Medicine, at Johns Hopkins University.   Pandemics force people to change how...
Prisoners of Experience

Prisoners of Experience

“This is about lack of imagination.” Ali S. Khan, of the National Center for Zoonotic, Vector-Borne, and Enteric Diseases, New Yorker, May 4, 2020 The Coronavirus pandemic caught the world by surprise and found us unprepared.  Dr. Khan is not alone in his assessment:...
Turning Education Upside Down

Turning Education Upside Down

Like the U.S., Canada has been thrust into a national educational experiment in distance learning.  However, long before the arrival of Covid-19, the Ontario Ministry of Education was pushing to increase online learning in the name of “digital literacy.” In January...
The Great Distance Learning Experiment

The Great Distance Learning Experiment

The coronavirus has turned American education into a vast uncharted experiment, in which we are all both the experimenters and the guinea pigs. As one teacher commented in Education Week about the move to remote, on-line learning, we are “operating in the wild,...