History: the past in the present

June 27, 2014

A symphony concert. A statue. These artworks of sculpture and music are charged with meaning in the context of war commemorations in Sarajevo today. The music is Haydn’s “God save the Emperor” and the statue is a monument to the assassin who killed the emperor’s heir....

TOK and the “real world”: How do we engage most appropriately when knowledge claims have been politicized?

June 22, 2014

  As a TOK teacher, do you feel you can be “political” in the classroom?   I’d love to have your thoughts on this topic. (Please use that “comment” feature!) I’d love to know how others walk the line between being relevant to the world – and hence engaged in its...

TOK and Counterfactual History

May 15, 2014

“Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Ho hum? Heard this before? In the first place, this famous “quotation” is apparently a distortion–albeit a slight distortion–from George Santayana’s actual...

time-delay in vision: TOK sense perception and the world

April 15, 2014

“What you are seeing at the present moment is not a fresh snapshot of the world but rather an average of what you’ve seen in the past 10 to 15 seconds,” says a neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Jason Fischer, who conducted...

breakthrough in science: gravitational waves

April 7, 2014

In my last post, I was captivated by the immediate impact on Andrei Linde himself of the recent breakthrough in astronomy, as recorded while Chao-Lin Kuo announced the big news that his theory concerning the Big Bang and inflation of the universe had been...

big bang, big smile: happy moment in sharing knowledge

April 4, 2014

In TOK, we speak of the natural sciences as shared knowledge — as knowledge built collectively as scientists publish their work and others use it toward their own.  But rarely is scientific knowledge shared with quite such a personal touch as in this video.  In...