Seasons

My math teacher put music on while we did homework in her class, that was about 7 or 8 years ago, I was in 7th grade. ONLY classical music, though. Not rock and roll, no pop...despite our begging and pleading for something more modern than mozart... She claimed she read somewhere it would make us perform better in the classroom...she must have been pretty desperate...we weren't all that bad...

If I was a teacher, I would stress vocabulary and creative writing over everything, for the more words a person knows, the more associations they can make between observations, and the deeper they can think. Creative writing helps develop the imagination, which stimulates abstract thought - which as far as I'm concerned, is extremely beneficial to personality and moral development.

My teachers never put music on in class, because they were too traditional - you know, cram as much monotonous and useless information as possible in the most formal way possible...

My third grade teacher liked to put on The Music Man, Oklahoma, stuff like that. Don't know if it did anything for our minds besides starting me on a lifelong habit of having one song or another stuck in my head, many many many times a day, every day.

colonel720 - On that note, I had a discussion with a friend of mine the other day on a topic similar to that. In the book "1984", they have a concept called 'newspeak', a new form of language in which all concepts relating to criminal activities have been exised. The thinking behind this is that if you're far less likely to become a criminal if you're unable to conceptualize criminal behavior. What's your thinking on this? Does language really limit thinking?

Have you ever had an idea that you just didn't have the words for? Those ideas are hard to hold onto, but not impossible. Usually to hold onto them, you have to find some way to put them into words. For some reason, I'm reminded of this exchange from Terry Pratchett's Small Gods:

"In Omnia, we have no word for slave."
"Yes... I imagine fish have no word for water, either."

hey, what a coincidence - 1984 is my favorite book!
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djfroggy - newspeak was a laguage of limited vocabulary, so of course it discouraged thought! what I was saying is that when a person knows a lot of words and has an extensive vocabulary, unlike 1984's "newspeak", deeper thought is possible.

DJ Froggy: Newspeak double minus good
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They say that the thumb caused humans to focus on intricate movement sets requiring precision which caused our cerebral cortex to grow a little but then language and its increasing complexity of potential expression made for the sharp fast (fast, like 200,000 years that is) cerebral cortex growth in our evolution.

Or that is to say: it ent broke so dun fix eet.

Actually more to the point: The entire framework of our conceptual and actualized growth as a species and as individuals can thank increasingly complex language potential.

I am fairly certain that to restate that in its opposite form, future tense would also be trtue.

Has anyone else read Helen Keller's autobiography? She talks about the connection between thoughts and words.

I have not. Whats the concept she puts forth?

Basically that thought without words is very limited. She talks about the contrast before and after she learned language.

well, think about how toddlers make more and more associations between things they percieve as they learn more language.