Developing Your Creativity—Essential to the Economy of the Future
“What I cannot create, I do not understand.” — Richard Feynman More and more jobs today are being automated—from automations that are basic such as order-taking to complex judgments such as facial recognition. If you don’t want to be left behind, it’s your creativity that will keep you employed! Machines, however smart, just can’t do […]
Vickie Oddino: My Time In Greece and Italy
Here we have a guest blogger, Vickie Oddino. Her sharp eye caught unique aspects of our trip to Greece and Italy, which I wanted to share with you in her words and pictures. I took a ferry from Mykonos to Athens in order to meet the group I would be traveling with for the next […]
Sicily at Last
After enjoying the richness of Olympia, we skedaddled back to Athens and took a flight to Catania, Sicily the next day for the final leg of our trip. Why Sicily? Because the east side of the island was colonized by the Ionian Greeks (e.g. from the coast of Turkey and its islands) long, long ago. […]
Plumbing the Pelopponese
From Lesvos, we flew back to Athens and immediately boarded our coach for the Peloponnese. We had the services of an extremely knowledgeable historian as our guide for the next five days – Nikos Lanser – who is Greek-Dutch. On top of his immense knowledge and many skills, he favored us by singing a beautiful […]
Learning in Lesvos
Aristotle’s Lagoon: Naturalist Filios Akriotis informs Ray Raad about the lush bird and sea life in the large inland body of salt water in the middle of Lesvos Island. From Athens we flew to this large Greek island, a few kilometers off the coast of Turkey. It was part of the ancient Ionian colonies of […]
Athens Adventures
Before I continue chronicling our trip, I wanted to report that The Beverly Review published an article about our trip while we were away: “Woman Makes Great Connections for Area Students.” Last week I showed our Great Connections Travelers at the Parthenon of the Athenian Acropolis. This temple to Athena, goddess of the city, is but one of […]
The Adventures of The Great Connections in Greece and Italy Part 1
We read Will Durant’s The Life of Greece in preparation for our trip and it gave us a rich, rich background from which to understand the country and its history – such as its crucial port of Piraeus, pictured above. We intermingled our experience of historical sites, such as the Acropolis, with discussions about our readings. Ricardo […]
Rise of the Classics
The Classics, or Great Books—weren’t they the dreck of dead white males? In the past few years, many have discovered otherwise and now there’s astonishing growth in the programs using these books as their basic texts. Apparently, many have discovered what Goethe said two centuries ago: “Ignorant men raise questions that wise men answered a […]
The Brightest Students Don’t Get Enough Attention
A new longitudinal study of 5,000 mathematically precocious children concludes — as I’ve long thought — that very smart students do not get enough attention in school. This is one of the Great Connections’ purposes — to provide exceptional learning to exceptional young people, whomever they may be. What happened to “equality” for them? The equality warriors’ bottom line is […]
Do We Need the Department of Education?
In the latest edition of Hillsdale College’s Imprimis, Charles Murray recently wrote an excellent piece entitled “Do We Need the Department of Education?” adapted from a 2011 speech of his. He notes that the U.S. Department of Education didn’t come into being until 1980, but large-scale involvement of the federal government in education dates from 1965. In this piece he […]
