Erudite

 April 14 Word of the Day: Erudite

 

Erudite is the invisible mender

 Erudite bonds given hard facts to certain other unexpected and unlikely thoughts to produce original outcomes

 Erudite proves rapid-set in the receptive mind, keeping its stylish effects long after even though no one is quite sure how

 Erudite works long hours for detailed outcomes

 Erudite can be of the highly specialist application right through to domestic science, personal improvement and do-it-yourself

 Erudite appears to hang in the air, even look invisible, yet it is high load-bearing, if needs be going everywhere at once and impressively

 Erudite might look like it requires a lot of learning but without really trying it holds the whole construction together with a minimum of fuss

 Erudite is good around the house fixing ignorance and nonsense

 Erudite sometimes looks like it’s all surface, before noticing its hidden depths that spread into the past in vast inventions and intentions

 Erudite may be in error and rude, then dead right and civil

 Erudite is not the answer to everyone’s prayers, but then most prayers do not require erudite

 Erudite is resinous, resonant resounding, available to everyone but not everyone responds

 Erudite sticks to the point at every point, no matter the matter

 Erudite indites midnight flights 

 

 

 

Teddy

 April 13 Word of the Day: Teddy

 

The teddy bear was first produced in 1903, but the New Yorker who made the toys only started the Ideal Toy Co. in 1907, while Steiff of Germany had reportedly already been manufacturing them. This is all happening around 1906, the year of John Betjeman’s birth. Indeed, the teddy bear and Betjeman grow up together. They are peers. When, late in the poet laureate’s life, he was called ‘teddy bear to the nation’ the phrase had more Freudian meaning than the speaker could have been aware of.

 Is it an insult or term of praise? What is it? The English liked to believe the teddy bear was named after the King, though Americans are in no doubt it was named after the President. Evelyn Waugh gives Sebastian a teddy bear in ‘Brideshead Revisited’ to indicate that his character clings to childhood and doesn’t want to know about the adult world; Sebastian becomes an alcoholic and disappears half way through the novel. This was a clever ploy by Waugh, who had led his readers to think the book was all about Sebastian, when it was about Charles Ryder’s relations with the whole family and the attendant Roman Catholicism of its heritage. We are in no doubt too that Waugh got the teddy bear idea from observing the behaviour of Betjeman at Oxford in the 1920s, though Betjeman of course is not Sebastian in any way, shape or form. Aloysius is one of the few comforts and securities in a confusing world

 The teddy bear itself is a 20th century cultural artefact that was given supreme value by the great admirer of English cultural artefacts. Betjeman also wrote a story, one where the teddy bear is the main character. In contrast to the very Catholic Aloysius, Waugh’s name for Sebastian’s teddy, Betjeman’s teddy is called Archibald Ormsby-Gore. Archie, for short. (pictured) He had a lifelong friend, an elephant called Jumbo, who appears also in ‘Archie and the Strict Baptists’. Archie would go to chapel and listen to sermons that went for hours. Betjeman shared with Waugh a fascination with the peculiarities of English religion, though Betjeman would be called thoroughly Anglican, though not of the severe Calvinist kind, and certainly not a Strict Baptist. He has a memorial in Westminster Abbey. Noticeably, Archie in the story is someone whose differences the author both celebrates and tolerates. Through all the vicissitudes of life, Archie the actual teddy was there (and Jumbo) to the end, being in the poet’s arms when he died in 1984.     

Metacognition

 April 12 Word of the Day: Metacognition

 

At lunch today it was reported, via the most reliable sources, that our universe has as many as two trillion galaxies. It’s ours, but in what sense do we own it? Another word that floated into view over mushroom quiche was metacognition, which is to say thinking about thinking. Teachers need to be in possession of such things, the current shape of our universe and thinking about how we are thinking, in advance. As surely as day follows night, the classroom is ready to manage. There are pupils of all ages who, even today, are happy to believe there is at most, one galaxy and maybe a few others. They could care less about pushing the boundaries of the Milky Way. They are tacit learners. If a stargazer told them there are maybe two trillion and that’s just in this universe, tacits would take on this knowledge with equanimity and possibly never think about it again. After all, one galaxy or two trillion, there’s nothing we can do about it. Then there are aware learners, aware that is they are standing on our unique planet gazing out at immense star patterns, many of them so far away they are invisible. Awares might put down their knife and fork for a moment to ponder how that is possible, especially as the universe moves at sensational speeds even as it looks perfectly still in the night sky. Awares think about this in the way we wonder randomly how the ancients joined the dots ‘up there’ to make a scorpion or a lion. Pupils each must have their own drawing board. Then there are strategic learners, good whether at testing a hypothesis or setting the table and cleaning up afterwards. Their metacognitive skills wish to devise ways of finding answers to questions such as why stop at two trillion, if there are more universes then where do we stand in relation to them, or sit down to lunch even, and why weren’t we told this earlier? Together strategics figure out these and other conundrums, soft and hard, with the same doggedness and verve. Fourth, though presumably there are fifth, sixth, and seventh levels of metacognition given there are two trillion galaxies just for starters, is the reflective learner. As the word says, they are not only strategic but reflect on their thinking, monitor their strategies and change them accordingly. They may observe the correspondence between the only life we know on Earth, numbered in the trillions but all different in mode and appearance, and the burgeoning of galaxies up to and including the trillions likewise ‘out there’, many of those galaxies invisible even to the eye of the reflective. They will write a corresponding poem by way of illustration, or a record-breaking symphony eventually, or a group sculpture by the seashore.