Wise Woman

It's Friday.

The 92nd Street Y is holding a Trivia Challenge. The winner will get FREE tickets to a public conversation between Jane Goodall, who proved that apes use tools, and Howard Gardner, who writes books.

The website says "On Sep 2 Ms. Goodall will be at 92Y with Harvard University Professor Howard Gardner for How to Change the World with Howard Gardner and Guests: Jane Goodall. These tickets are already selling briskly, and we want to give you a chance to win two of them. Our Trivia Challenge this week is offering one lucky winner two free tickets to the event. This contest closes at 5pm (EST) on Jul 3 and the winner will be announced here on Jul 6. Go ahead and enter your answer here!"

In this Leakey Foundation video, Ms. Goodall talks about apes' emotional landscape and family relationships.

Give It

In his Sunday column for the New York Times, Frank Rich says it's time to put aside the pursuit of money and do something good. Eventually, he gets around to chatting with Howard Gardner:

But it’s hardly a given that the entrenched money culture has evaporated along with the paper profits it generated. One skeptic is Howard Gardner, the Harvard education professor who has created seminars at several elite colleges to counsel students in the notion of pursuing meaningful, ethical and effective work — “Good Work,” as he has titled it. He believes that many students may still be operating on the assumption that the world of finance will just pick up where it left off in a few years. “But we’re not going to be back there,” Gardner told me last week, “and we shouldn’t be back there.”

Also, unemployment reached its highest level in 25 years.

Plus, Barbra - The Way We Were.

Different

Over at the Community Arts Network, professor Carol Ng-He interviews professional Teaching Artist Malik Gillani about "Myths to Drama" an arts-integrated education program that brings a global perspective into Chicago Public Schools classrooms. The program, developed and implemented by Mr. Gillani's Silk Road Theatre Project, is aligned with the State of Illinois’ Board of Education standards and helps students explore social studies themes through the arts. Activities include drama, music, reading and writing and the vision behind the project is expansive.

In answer to a question about why the company decided to use the study of myths as a vehicle, Mr. Gillani explains:

"Myths to Drama” isn’t another class; this is not just to repeat what has been offered in other classes. It is to provide a different model of learning. So, the basic theory of how we deliver “Myths to Drama” is the philosophy of multiple intelligences.

People learn differently, so you need to give people different avenues of learning. So for us, myth is a way of learning a culture in an alternative model, in a way that social studies are not taught in school.

This program appears to be pretty cool, the curriculum outline is online and I dig it.

I think the idea that we learn differently seems kind of commonsensical and true. But since I've started reading up I can't find an end to it and the books on the subject just seem to keep coming.

The categories keep coming.

We are of different minds.

It's an endlessly fascinating and lucrative idea.