While in the car with Cathy on our way to professional development today, we had this very involved conversation about the pain of learning and what is necessary to learn. We ended up thinking about two intersecting continua, one that would be a scale of intellectual generosity to intellectual rigidity and the other would be engagement to rejection. I would love to do tons of interviews with teachers and code what teachers think provide successful students. I'm not sure what we might find, but I wonder if it falls along those two continua.

On my way home, then, I began to think more about Maria Popova and her work at Brain Pickings. By reading around her blog, I came to a post on the difference between wisdom and knowledge. In some ways, she describes a "ladder of knowing" similar to Bloom's Taxonomy, but then she gives this lovely explanation

Information is having a library of books on shipbuilding. Knowledge applies that to building a ship. Access to the information — to the books — is a prerequisite for the knowledge, but not a guarantee of it.

Once you’ve built your ship, wisdom is what allows you to sail it without sinking, to protect it from the storm that creeps up from the horizon in the dead of the night, to point it just so that the wind breathes life into its sails.

She goes on to say that the stories offer the opportunity to explain why given knowledge (and experiences) matter, to see the bigger picture.

I wonder if I can find something of hers for my students to begin the school year with?