A Learning Calendar II
Bill Long 9/4/08
A Few More Categories; Developing My Own
5. The omnipresent "365 Humorous Quotations" calendar is my fifth category. There are almost too many of these to mention. Sometimes they just give funny quotations from lots of people, other times they are just "Dilbert" quotations or the "Simpsons" quotes. There are so many humorous quotations floating around on the Net that there is no reason for anyone ever to have to give a dull speech again. Not particularly funny is this week's Dilbert quotation: "Accept that some days you are the pigeon and some days the statute." A recent one from Woody Allen is funnier: "Another good thing about being poor is that when you are seventy your children will not have declared you legally insane in order to gain control of your estate." But I like the calendars which highlight some of President George HW Bush's verbal miscues. Anyone whose every word is carefully weighed will sometimes slip up, but our current President seems to top all comers. Two hilarious ones from him are:
"And so, in my State of the - my State of the Union - or state - my speech to the nation, whatever you want to call it, speech to the nation - I asked Americans to give 4,000 years - 4,000 hours over the next - the rest of your life - of service to America. That's what I asked - 4,000 hours."
Wasn't it St. Paul who said something to the effect that if an uncertain trumpet is sounded that no one goes into battle? If one gave 4,000 hours of service to America in the next year, one would have little time for sleep and anything else; the year only has 8,765 hours in it...
Then, in a quotation I hadn't previously seen, we have:
"It would be a mistake for the United States Senate to allow any kind of human cloning to come out of that chamber."
Sometimes humor reveals one's true sentiments...
6. Then there is the growing popularity of what I call "soft-core learning." There is the "Easy Answer Science: 2008 Day-to-Day Calendar," there are a variety of trivia-knowledge calendars, especially on historical facts or sports trivia, there is even a 365 sex positions calendar (why would I put this under "learning"?), but the most popular is the "365 New Words-A-Year Page-A-day Calendar 2008, which, if it isn't the best calendar in the world, it at least has the most hyphens between words in any calendar. These word-of-the-day calendars are of different quality. Some give word origins (indeed there is a word-origin 365 word-a-day calendar), all provide definitions, but few give good sentences in which they are used. There are so many of these calendars online already that I think that the "365 words a day calendars" are destined, if not for extinction, then for a much lesser popularity. I think, however, that in order to make words your friends and begin actually to use them well, you need more than the word, its definition and even a sentence in which it is used. You have to see it in its natural environment, so to speak, which means that you have to see it used repeatedly.
My Proposal
I think there is a vast untapped potential for "learning" calendars which should be keyed to people who want to expand their horizons in a measurable and real way. These calendars would be targeted to particular fields, appeal to the senses, and provide enough information on each page so that the person could actually learn something and have the means by which to pursue the subject further if s/he desired. Three examples of my proposal follow: one on plants, one on cheeses, one on fabrics.
A. If you learned about a flower or plant a day, you soon would begin to make the natural world your friend, rather than a what it is for most people: a confusing and nameless jumble of "trees" or "birds" or "plants" out there. Once you learn the name of a person, you are more interested in learning about the person; the same holds true about the natural world. Each day the calendar could have a picture of a plant; it would be great if there was a way to have the "odor" of that plant or flower on the page, if the flower emitted one. Maybe there would be more than one picture--from different angles or focusing on buds and leaves. Then, there would be Linnaean and common information about the plant/flower. Care should be taken to state the family, as well as the genus and species of the plant, with most common English names given. There might even be a sentence about how it was named or what the name means--since so many of the plants/animals in our world are derived from Greek/Latin words that actually mean something. There you have it: a plant/flower a day. You really learn.
Let's take another idea: a fabric a day. There are online dictionaries or lists of fabrics; indeed the number of them is so vast that a word-a-day fabric calendar is needed in order to bring this number "under control" for us. Here is one list; here is another. We would need three things in the "fabric calendar." First, the name, pronunciation and definition of the fabric. Second, a brief story or hint about where the fabric originated. Perhaps its name is based on a far-away place and a sentence on that will lead people to investigate things further. Third, we need to have a little swatch of that fabric on the calendar, perhaps in a protected or covered area, so that you can actually feel the texture of it and see what it looks like. This "fabric" calendar could also be expanded to a sort of "color" calendar. There are so many colors "out there" and so many words to describe them, that we ought to have a day-by-day calendar which gives you a "color a day" with a picture of the color, and perhaps a piece of art or some other way in which the color is used.
Finally, we might have a "cheese" calendar, featuring 365 varieties of cheese from the world. There would be pictures of the cheese, as well as words describing its taste, where it came from, how it is produced, etc., but then, also in a little protected plastic area, there might be a sample of some of the cheeses (I am not sure how this would work, actually..). But this would give people a great incentive to learn about cheeses, for example, if you actually get to taste them after you learn about them. Inspire the senses, and learning is not only fun, but it "sticks" to you.
Conclusion
My ideas for "learning" calendars can be multiplied without number. Wherever there are 365 or more of something, you have the idea for a calendar. Why not have a "365 famous psychologists" calendar? Or a "365 chemical elements calendar"? Of course there are only about 110 chemical elements, but perhaps each one would deserve three pages. Wherever you can break a subject into 365 ideas, you have the genesis of a calendar. Just as I argue in these pages that future learning will be done through mini-essays, so I also believe that we will really discover in the future how learning has to be "chunk-sized," and that the chunks, actually, are very small each day. So, anyone want to help me market these things and draw them up?
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