Pocketed ideas

Yesterday’s year-end SLS symposium featured a keynote talk by Marc Aronson. He spoke about creating cluster displays and building text sets as avenues for librarians to support the Common Core. Within and between his prepared remarks, his insight sparkled with memorable historical anecdotes, keen observations, and ideas like these:

Persuasion is not insistance, it is engaging other views and refuting them with evidence.

The definition of nonfiction being not that it is true, but that it “seeks the true,” and is thereby “inherently active.”

Before the 17th century there was the “known” and there was “faith;” nothing in between. Then, with a flowering of math came the notion of probabilty...and the birth of “insurance.”

Only 4% of the slave trade came to the U.S.; 96% going to the sugar-lands of the West Indies because sugar was a perishable crop that needed immediate processing. The process was so labor intensive that slaves died faster than they could reproduce; creating a constant demand for replacements.

Slavery isn’t about race, it’s about who conquered who.

The idea of education being “how to know;” noticing and pursuing those “differences” in what is proposed to be true.

Go more than two citations deep into most that I know, and I really can’t tell you how I know it to be true.