Immersion Student Quotes

Every time we witness an injustice and do not act, we train our character to be passive in its presence and thereby eventually lose all ability to defend ourselves and those we love. In a modern economy it is impossible to seal oneself off from injustice. If we have brains or courage, then we are blessed and called on not to frit these qualities away, standing agape at the ideas of others, winning pissing contests, improving the efficiencies of the neocorporate state, or immersing ourselves in obscuranta, but rather to prove the vigor of our talents against the strongest opponents of love we can find. If we can only live once, then let it be a daring adventure that draws on all our powers. Let it be with similar types whos hearts and heads we may be proud of. Let our grandchildren delight to find the start of our stories in their ears but the endings all around in their wandering eyes. The whole universe or the structure that perceives it is a worthy opponent, but try as I may I can not escape the sound of suffering. Perhaps as an old man I will take great comfort in pottering around in a lab and gently talking to students in the summer evening and will accept suffering with insouciance. But not now; men in their prime, if they have convictions are tasked to act on them.

An overarching goal of education should be to immerse students in the beauty and inspiration of their surrounding world.

If we want to do better things for students, we have to become the guinea pigs and immerse ourselves in new learning opportunities to understand how to create the necessary changes. We rarely create something different until we experience something different.

The “Intelligence of Will” denotes that this is the path where each individual “created being” is “prepared” for the spiritual quest by being made aware of the higher and divine “will” of the creator. By spiritual preparation (prayer, meditation, visualization, and aspiration), the student becomes aware of the higher will and ultimately attains oneness with the Divine Self—fully immersed in the knowledge of “the existence of the Primordial Wisdom.

By immersing yourself in empowering mental images, you can shift your mindset from scarcity and limitation to possibility and abundance.

The “Intelligence of Will” denotes that this is the path where each individual “created being” is “prepared” for the spiritual quest by being made aware of the higher and divine “will” of the creator. By spiritual preparation (prayer, meditation, visualization, and aspiration), the student becomes aware of the higher will and ultimately attains oneness with the Divine Self—fully immersed in the knowledge of “the existence of the Primordial Wisdom.” The Hebrew letter Yod means “hand,” and it refers to the hand of the divine, extended to assist us. Yod is the primary letter whose shape forms the basis for all other Hebrew letters.

Service members will only stay on active duty if they can provide for their families—and DOD schools provide a world-class education that has proven time and again to be an incentive for sailors, soldiers, airmen and marines to reenlist. Military dependents that attend DoDDS schools are highly regarded by prestigious universities the world over for a number of reasons, but there’s one that you’d have a hard time replicating in a stateside school system: they’ve lived overseas, traveled the world, seen and experienced other cultures, learned foreign languages through immersion, and they’ve gained an understanding of the world that you can’t get in a traditional classroom. Add a rigorous curriculum and a long track record of high test scores throughout DoDDS, and it’s pretty easy to see why military kids are in such high demand.

Introductory paragraph incorporating the thesis: After a challenging childhood marked by adversity, Adam Parrish has become a successful freshman at Harvard University. In the past, he had spent his time doubting himself, fearing he would become like his father, obsessing that others could see his trailer-park roots, and idealizing wealth, but now he has built a new future where no one has to know where he's come from. Before becoming a self-actualized young man at Harvard, Adam had been deeply fascinated by the concept of the ley lines and also supernaturally entangled with one of the uncanny forests located along one, but he has now focused on the real world, using only the ghost of magic to fleece other students with parlor trick tarot card readings. He hasn't felt like himself for months, but he is going to be just fine. Followed by three paragraphs with information that supports the thesis. First: Adam understands that suffering is often transient, even when it feels permanent. This too shall pass, etc. Although college seems like a lifetime, it is only four years. Four years is only a lifetime if one is a guinea pig. Second paragraph, building on the first point: Magic has not always been good for Adam. During high school, he frequently immersed himself in it as a form of avoidance. Deep down, he fears that he is prone to it as his father is prone to abuse, and that it will eventually make him unsuitable for society. By depriving himself of magic, he forces himself to become someone valuable to the unmagic world, i.e. the Crying Club. Third paragraph, with the most persuasive point: Harvard is a place Ronan Lynch cannot be, because he cannot survive there, either physically or socially. Without such hard barriers, Adam will surely continue to return to Ronan Lynch again and again, and thus fall back in with bad habits. He will never achieve the life of financial security and recognition he planned. Thesis restated, bringing together all the information to prove it: Although life is unbearable now, and Adam Parrish seems to have lost everything important to him in the present by pursuing the things important to him in the past, he will be fine. Concluding paragraph describing what the reader just learned and why it is important for them to have learned it: He will be fine. He will be fine. He will be fine. He will be fine.

Merrill Swain and Sharon Lapkin (2002), who have investigated sociocultural explanations for second language learning in Canadian French immersion programmes. Their work has its origins in Swain’s comprehensible output hypothesis and the notion that when learners have to produce language, they must pay more attention to how meaning is expressed through language than they ordinarily do for the comprehension of language. Swain (1985) first proposed the comprehensible output hypothesis based on the observation that French immersion students were considerably weaker in their spoken and written production than in their reading and listening comprehension. She advocated more opportunities for learners to engage in verbal production (i.e. output) in French immersion classrooms.

Nietzsche is the moral philosopher of the present age. For I have already argued that the present age is in its presentation of itself dominantly Weberian, and I have also noticed that Nietzsche’s central thesis was presupposed by Weber’s central categories of thought. Hence Nietzsche’s prophetic irrationalism – irrationalism because Nietzsche’s problems remain unresolved and his solutions defy reason – remains immanent in the Weberian managerial forms of our culture. Whenever those immersed in the bureaucratic culture of the age try to think their way through to the moral foundations of what they are and what they do, they will discover suppressed Nietzschean premises. And consequently it is possible to predict with confidence that in the apparently quite unlikely contexts of bureaucratically managed modern societies there will periodically emerge social movements informed by just that kind of prophetic irrationalism of which Nietzsche’s thought is the ancestor. Indeed just because and insofar contemporary Marxism is Weberian in substance we can expect prophetic irrationalisms of the left as well as of the Right. So it was was with much student radicalism of the sixties.

MT: But you are. You are justifying it. RG: I'm trying to show that there's meaning at precisely the point where the nihilistic temptation is strongest today. I'm saying: there's a Revelation, and people are free to do with it what they will. But it too will keep reemerging. It's stronger than them. And, as we have seen, it's even capable of putting mimetic phenomena to work on its behalf, since today everyone is competing to see who is the most “victimized.” Revelation is dangerous. It's the spiritual equivalent of nuclear power. What's most pathetic is the insipidly modernized brand of Christianity that bows down before everything that's most ephemeral in contemporary thought. Christians don't see that they have at their disposal an instrument that is incomparably superior to the whole mishmash of psychoanalysis and sociology that they conscientiously feed themselves. It's the old story of Esau sacrificing his inheritance for a plate of lentils. All the modes of thought that once served to demolish Christianity are being discredited in turn by more “radical” versions of the same critique. There's no need to refute modern thought because, as each new trend one-ups its predecessors, it's liquidating itself at high speed. The students are becoming more and more skeptical, but, and above all in America, the people in power, the department chairs, the “chairpersons,” as they say, are fervent believers. They're often former sixties' radicals who've made the transition to administrative jobs in academia, the media, and the church. For a long time, Christians were protected from this insane downward spiral, and, when they finally dive in, you can recognize them by their naïve modernist faith. They're always one lap behind. They always choose the ships that the rats are in the midst of abandoning. They're hoping to tap into the hordes of people who have deserted their churches. They don't understand that the last thing that can attract the masses is a Christian version of the demagogic laxity in which they're already immersed. Today, it's thought that playing the social game, whether on the individual or the group level, is more indispensable than thinking…it's thought that there are truths that shouldn't be spoken. In America, it's become impossible to be unapologetically Christian, white, or European without running the risk of being accused of “ethnocentrism.” To which I reply that the eulogists of “multiculturalism” place themselves, to the contrary, in the purest of Western traditions. The West is the only civilization ever to have directed such criticisms against itself. The capital of the Incas had a name that I believe meant “the navel of the world.

all teachers in the content-based French immersion classes they observed used recasts more than any other type of feedback. Indeed, recasts accounted for more than half of the total feedback provided in the four classes. Repetition of error was the least frequent feedback type provided. The other types of corrective feedback fell in between. Student uptake was least likely to occur after recasts and more likely to occur after clarification requests, metalinguistic feedback, and repetitions. Furthermore, elicitations and metalinguistic feedback not only resulted in more uptake, they were also more likely to lead to a corrected form of the original utterance. Lyster (1998) has argued that students receiving content-based language teaching (where the emphasis is on meaning not form) are less likely to notice recasts than other forms of corrective feedback, because they may assume that the teacher is responding to the content rather than the form of their speech. Indeed, the double challenge of making the subject-matter comprehensible and enhancing knowledge of the second language itself within content-based language teaching has led Merrill Swain (1988) and others to conclude that ‘not all content teaching is necessarily good language teaching’ (p. 68). The challenges of content-based language teaching will be discussed further in Chapter 6.

Who can ignore that the Olympians of the new bourgeois aristocracy no longer inhabit. They go from grand hotel to grand hotel, or from castle to castle, commanding a fleet or a country from a yacht. They are everywhere and nowhere. That is how they fascinate people immersed into everyday life. They transcend everyday life, possess nature and leave it up to the cops to contrive culture. Is it essential to describe at length, besides the condition of youth, students and intellectuals, armies of workers with or without white collars, people from the provinces, the colonized and semi-colonized of all sorts, all those who endure a well-organized daily life, is it here necessary to exhibit the derisory and untragic misery of the inhabitant, of the suburban dweller and of the people who stay in residential ghettoes, in the mouldering centres of old cities and in the proliferations lost beyond them? One only has to open one's eyes to understand the daily life of the one who runs from his dwelling to the station, near or far away, to the packed underground train, the office or the factory, to return the same way in the evening and come home to recuperate enough to start again the next day. The picture of this generalized misery would not go without a picture of 'satisfactions' which hides it and becomes the means to elude it and break free from it.

The final principle is that, more often than not, originality lies on the far side of unoriginality. The Finnish American photographer Arno Minkkinen dramatizes this deep truth about the power of patience with a parable about Helsinki’s main bus station. There are two dozen platforms there, he explains, with several different bus lines departing from each one—and for the first part of its journey, each bus leaving from any given platform takes the same route through the city as all the others, making identical stops. Think of each stop as representing one year of your career, Minkkinen advises photography students. You pick an artistic direction—perhaps you start working on platinum studies of nudes—and you begin to accumulate a portfolio of work. Three years (or bus stops) later, you proudly present it to the owner of a gallery. But you’re dismayed to be told that your pictures aren’t as original as you thought, because they look like knockoffs of the work of the photographer Irving Penn; Penn’s bus, it turns out, had been on the same route as yours. Annoyed at yourself for having wasted three years following somebody else’s path, you jump off that bus, hail a taxi, and return to where you started at the bus station. This time, you board a different bus, choosing a different genre of photography in which to specialize. But a few stops later, the same thing happens: you’re informed that your new body of work seems derivative, too. Back you go to the bus station. But the pattern keeps on repeating: nothing you produce ever gets recognized as being truly your own. What’s the solution? “It’s simple,” Minkkinen says. “Stay on the bus. Stay on the fucking bus.” A little farther out on their journeys through the city, Helsinki’s bus routes diverge, plunging off to unique destinations as they head through the suburbs and into the countryside beyond. That’s where the distinctive work begins. But it begins at all only for those who can muster the patience to immerse themselves in the earlier stage—the trial-and-error phase of copying others, learning new skills, and accumulating experience.

Weston, having been born in Chicago, was raised with typical, well-grounded, mid-western values. On his 16th birthday, his father gave him a Kodak camera with which he started what would become his lifetime vocation. During the summer of 1908, Weston met Flora May Chandler, a schoolteacher who was seven years older than he was. The following year the couple married and in time they had four sons. Weston and his family moved to Southern California and opened a portrait studio on Brand Boulevard, in the artsy section of Glendale, California, called Tropico. His artistic skills soon became apparent and he became well known for his portraits of famous people, such as Carl Sandburg and Max Eastman. In the autumn of 1913, hearing of his work, Margrethe Mather, a photographer from Los Angeles, came to his studio, where Weston asked her to be his studio assistant. It didn’t take long before the two developed a passionate, intimate relationship. Both Weston and Mather became active in the growing bohemian cultural scene in Los Angeles. She was extremely outgoing and artistic in a most flamboyant way. Her bohemian sexual values were new to Weston’s conventional thinking, but Mather excited him and presented him with a new outlook that he found enticing. Mather was beautiful, and being bisexual and having been a high-class prostitute, was delightfully worldly. Mather's uninhibited lifestyle became irresistible to Weston and her photography took him into a new and exciting art form. As Mather worked and overtly played with him, she presented a lifestyle that was in stark contrast to Weston’s conventional home life, and he soon came to see his wife Flora as a person with whom he had little in common. Weston expanded his horizons but tried to keep his affairs with other women a secret. As he immersed himself further into nude photography, it became more difficult to hide his new lifestyle from his wife. Flora became suspicious about this secret life, but apparently suffered in silence. One of the first of many women who agreed to model nude for Weston was Tina Modotti. Although Mather remained with Weston, Tina soon became his primary model and remained so for the next several years. There was an instant attraction between Tina Modotti, Mather and Edward Weston, and although he remained married, Tina became his student, model and lover. Richey soon became aware of the affair, but it didn’t seem to bother him, as they all continued to remain good friends. The relationship Tina had with Weston could definitely be considered “cheating,” since knowledge of the affair was withheld as much as possible from his wife Flora May. Perhaps his wife knew and condoned this new promiscuous relationship, since she had also endured the intense liaison with Margrethe Mather. Tina, Mather and Weston continued working together until Tina and Weston suddenly left for Mexico in 1923. As a group, they were all a part of the cozy, artsy, bohemian society of Los Angeles, which was where they were introduced to the then-fashionable, communistic philosophy.

Students relished times when Reacting games careened into absurdity, such as when a young woman, as a Ming scholar, delivered a persuasive speech on why women should not speak in public, or when a disciple of Gandhi denounced modernity while referring to notes on his iPad.

Senior scholars, insulated by tenure, pawn undergraduate instruction onto overburdened adjuncts and unprepared grad students. Beleaguered instructors ward off student resentment by offering fluff courses, assigning little work, and bestowing As with glad-handed largesse. This 'non-aggression' pact enables students to enjoy the social aspects of college without the inconvenience of doing much academic work, and it allows professors to focus on research (or carpentry or yoga) unencumbered by pestering students.

Advancing no particular theory of their own, some insist that explicit teaching of grammar, vocabulary, semantics, pragmatics, and even pronunciation is necessary because students in immersion classrooms sometimes have trouble with these features of the second language. Direct instruction, they say, is the only remedy. Such claims rely heavily on short-term studies in which older students—rarely K–12 English learners—are taught a linguistic form, such as word order, verb conjugation, relative clauses, and so forth, then tested on their conscious knowledge of the form soon after.

Through long immersion in a particular field of practice and inquiry, you become a connoisseur of a certain class of intellectual problems. You adopt the language of your subfield, but also a shared, usually inarticulate sense of what sort of problems are worth investigating: what to take seriously. In the course of this apprenticeship you make the characteristic mistakes of a novice, and suffer their humiliations before your teachers (who include the more advanced graduate students). Conversely, you experience elation at those moments when you feel a growing mastery—you’re becoming a journeyman.

By incorporating gamification elements into lesson plans, educators can harness the power of play to increase student motivation, participation, and retention, transforming the learning process into an engaging and immersive experience.

Providing experiential learning opportunities through internships, field trips, and service learning projects immerses students in real-world contexts, deepening their understanding and appreciation of academic concepts and preparing them for the future.

For years the Christian education community has used the term “biblical worldview integration” to describe efforts to teach every subject from a biblical perspective. It’s time to retire that phrase. Why? Because if the Bible is God’s special revelation for everyone, everywhere, all the time, then it isn’t something we integrate into whatever else we’re doing. It’s something we immerse ourselves in; any other truth rises out of it. God’s Word isn’t a partial truth that dovetails with other, “not-from-God” truths. God’s Word is true truth. Here’s a new way to phrase the mission of Christian education: biblical worldview immersion.

Tragant (2006: 239) sums up the evidence: ‘When FL (foreign language) instruction starts early in primary school there seems to be a decline in the learners’ attitudes around the age of ten to eleven; when most students start a foreign language or enter immersion programmes in secondary school, their initial attitudes are positive but their interest soon wanes.’ This may, of course, have a lot to do with the kind of teaching the children are subject to. If teachers are untrained in foreign language instruction for young learners, it’s unlikely that even the small amount of time available will be used to best effect. This is especially the case if instruction mimics the kind of teacher-fronted, transmissive, grammar-focused instruction that characterizes language teaching at secondary and tertiary level. And a transmissive approach is typically the default choice in large classes of (potentially) unruly children.

What did he do?” I whipped around, startled. I had been so immersed in my own thoughts that I hadn’t even noticed Philantha standing into the doorway to one of the sitting rooms. “Pardon?” “Well, in my experience, it’s usually the man who bumbles about causing most of the problems in relationships of romance,” she said. “So, naturally, I assumed that your young man has done or said or thought something that caused you to come bursting in like a hurricane. Am I correct?” I shook my head so violently the braid coiled around my head threatened to come loose. “We’re not in a…relationship of romance. He’s just my friend.” Philantha made a sound surprisingly like a snicker. “Truly?” she asked. “I suppose that’s why he’s been with you most evenings.” “Like I said, we’re friends. And we haven’t seen each other in a long time.” She raised an eyebrow. “I may not care about it--or at least I didn’t, until recently--but I do hear some of the court gossip when I visit the college. The noble students, they bring it with them, you know. And one of the stories is how the Earl of Rithia and his wife are scrambling to find eligible matches for their son.” I felt suddenly dizzy for no reason, and a hot flush--disturbingly like the jealous feeling I had experienced at the inn--rushed through me. “Matches?” I repeated. “Girls, young women, marriageable prospects. Strange, how suddenly they started. Right after the princess came back, it’s been noted. As if they had had hope for another match before, and it was ruined.” “Me?” I asked. “People think Kiernan’s parents wanted him to marry me? That’s…ridiculous. Princesses don’t marry earls--a duke, maybe, but not an earl, not unless he’s foreign and brings some grand alliance. And besides, we’re just--” “Friends,” Philantha finished. “I know. That’s what you keep saying.” She eyed me, before saying, “They haven’t had much luck, though, from the gossip. He’s polite to everyone they trot out, but nothing more. But that’s neither here nor there, since you don’t love him.” I glared at her, my face and chest still filled with that rush of heat. “In fact, he’s made you angry, hasn’t he?” “He did. Well, I said…Yes, we fought. He says that Na--the princess--wants to see me. And I told him that he couldn’t bring her to me, that I didn’t want to see her. He said that if she asked, he would have to. But he’s wormed his way out of stickier situations than that. He could find a way to avoid it, if he wanted to.” “Then perhaps he doesn’t want to,” Philantha answered before gliding away up the stairs and out of sight. I had plenty of time to mull over Philantha’s words, because I didn’t see Kiernan for the next three days. It was the longest we had been parted since I returned to the city, and even through my anger at him it drove me to distraction. I mangled my spells even worse than usual, spilled ink, and tripped so frequently that Philantha threatened to call Kiernan to the house herself and turn him into a sparrow if we didn’t make up. Her eyes glinted dangerously when she said it, and only that was enough to force away a bit of my muddleheadedness.

If the students were taught about shuttle flights, plate tectonics and submarine volcanoes, they were also immersed in the traditional myths of their culture—the ancient story, for example, of how the island of Pohnpei had been built under the direction of a mystical octopus, Lidakika. (I was fascinated by this, for it was the only cephalopod creation myth I had ever heard.

How would I like to work for the CIA, he said, as a Non-Official agent. NOs are the guys who don’t technically exist. They are ghost operatives, working without schedules, bureaucracy, and, above all, students.

Immerse yourself in good books. Read one to two hours per week if you can, more if time permits. Become acquainted with the literary classics. Read as much as you can on personal improvement (self help), history, people, business, and finances. Study the great works of the philosophers. Study scriptures and read about religions and anything that adds value to religious beliefs. Invest in yourself! Learn as much as you can and become a student of life. You can learn a great deal from the experiences of others, from their great successes and also from their failures. Everything you read becomes part of you. Carefully choose what you read on a daily basis. Be very careful with what you choose to read. The words you choose to read play an important role in your personal development and overall outlook on life. Be open-minded about what you read and often take what you read with a grain of salt. Much of what we read is written through colored lenses and is the summation of someone else’s thought, habit, education, beliefs, and past and present life experiences.

Immersion teachers adjusted their use of French to make it accessible to students. They did this through careful choice of vocabulary, syntax, pacing, and intonation, and by avoiding needless complexity, making points directly rather than elliptically, and adding redundancy. Other techniques included contextual cues such as gestures, facial expressions, and body language.

Another factor in the success of French immersion, Krashen postulated, was the exclusion of native-French-speaking students. The linguistic composition of the classroom, restricted to second language learners, made teachers constantly aware of the need to shelter their French to make it understandable at or near the level of the class. This also created a relaxed learning environment, reducing students’ stress levels. They all made errors in French and, without the presence of native speakers of French, errors were less cause for embarrassment. The result was to lower what Krashen has termed the affective filter, a psychological barrier that can keep comprehensible input

neighborhood. So the school, being unable to utilize this everyday experience, sets painfully to work, on another tack and by a variety of means, to arouse in the child an interest in school studies. (Dewey, 1959, pp. 76–77) During Dewey’s tenure at the University of Chicago, he and his colleagues created a model of an educational process that sought to immerse children in those fundamental community activities from which the contemporary academic disciplines have emerged. Using such perennial vocations as gardening, cooking, carpentry, and clothing manufacture, students at the Laboratory School were drawn into the forms of problem-solving and investigation that led to the invention of biology, mathematics, chemistry,

Students and their families opened their homes to paying guests interested in immersing themselves in another language. Like immersion programs in other countries, home stays were combined with intensive language instruction.

End of May 2012 The continuation of my email to Andy: …I was delighted to return to London after war-ravaged Belfast. The students in our college had to evacuate several times due to IRA bomb threats. I must have subconsciously selected to be in Northern Ireland because of my unsettling inner upheavals. Much like the riots that went on in the city in 1971, I was unconsciously fighting my inner demons within myself. I needed that year to overcome my sexual additions and to immerse myself in my fashion studies. By the following year, I had compiled an impressive fashion design portfolio for application with various London Art and Design colleges. Foundation students generally required two years to complete their studies. I graduated from the Belfast College of Art with flying colors within a year. By the autumn of 1972, I was accepted into the prestigious Harrow School of Art and Technology. Around that period, my father’s business was waning and my family had financial difficulty sponsoring my graduate studies. Unbeknownst to my family, I had earned sufficient money during my Harem services to comfortably put myself through college. I lied to my parents and told them I was working part-time in London to make ends meet so I could finance my fashion education. They believed my tall tale. For the next three years I put my heart and soul into my fashion projects. I would occasionally work as a waiter at the famous Rainbow Room in Biba, which is now defunct. Working at this dinner dance club was a convenient way of meeting beautiful and trendy patrons, who often visit this capricious establishment.

The rise of television made the situation even worse, bringing a glut of celebrities to “inane talk shows,” Marlon said, where they “babble on about nothing.” Meanwhile, in Mississippi, he pointed out, “state troopers were keeping James Meredith,” a black student, from “his constitutional right” of attending his classes at Ole Miss. Was this really the sort of media Americans wanted? Perhaps it was, Marlon realized to his horror. The reason television airtime wasn’t filled with more Shakespeare or more honest political debate was “because the American people don’t want to see it,” he said. The public greedily consumed gossip about the private lives of celebrities while stories of black teenagers being arrested on the streets of Los Angeles went untold. Marlon called it a “peephole impulse,” and concluded that it came from the public’s “naïveté.” Through “immersion in nonsense” fed to them by the media, people were content to live in blissful ignorance of “the painful truths of the world.” By the early 1960s, Marlon made it his mission to open people’s eyes. “I’ve decided,” he told one reporter, “I finally want to speak out against slop-oriented journalism and the conversational scavengers who exploit for profit and libel for entertainment.” That was essential, he said, in any effort to “change the way the public saw the world.” People got their impressions of the world through the media—so the media, in Marlon’s view, needed to be changed.

Sadly, I find that, for many Christians, the set of ideas that make up the cognitive dimension of their worldview resembles a junk drawer more than a well-organized silverware drawer, with every piece neatly laid out in appropriate places.

Generally, individuals and societies are not aware that they (1) are ordering their behaviors in certain ways, (2) have potentially contradictory and untrue ideas to which they subscribe, and (3) are pursuing their vision of the good life. It’s as if they are simply anchored to and animated by an unexamined, unseen foundation and wellspring of life (think of Kant’s super-sensible substrate).

Christianity is not merely a set of rules or propositions to obey; nor is it solely a “personal relationship with Christ.” In that moment, it dawned on me that Christianity is a comprehensive framework and overarching view of reality within which I could orient my entire being and find ultimate meaning and fulfillment.

Humanism is antiquated and has given way to scientific and technological training because the environment in which the student will be immersed is, first of all, no longer a human, but a technological environment.

Nietzsche is the moral philosopher of the present age. For I have already argued that the present age is in its presentation of itself dominantly Weberian; and I have also noticed that Nietzsche’s central thesis was presupposed by Weber’s central categories of thought. Hence Nietzsche’s prophetic irrationalism —irrationalism because Nietzsche’s problems remain unresolved and his solutions defy reason—remains immanent in the Weberian managerial forms of our culture. Whenever those immersed in the bureaucratic culture of the age try to think their way through to the moral foundations of what they are and what they do, they will discover suppressed Nietzschean premises. And consequently, it is possible to predict with confidence that in the apparently quite unlikely contexts of bureaucratically managed modern societies there will periodically emerge social movements informed by just that kind of prophetic irrationalism of which Nietzsche’s thought is the ancestor. Indeed just because and insofar as contemporary Marxism is Weberian in substance we can expect prophetic irrationalisms of the Left as well as of the Right. So it was with much student radicalism of the sixties.

Unfortunately, the midbrain is ignored in the training philosophy of many institutions. We do too much training “in the abstract.” “In the abstract” is where all training must begin, because the front brain is the entry point for all information. Unhappily, that is where much of what passes for training also ends. As the student is gradually immersed in the training environment, stress levels must be increased so that important psychomotor skills begin to filter into the midbrain. The midbrain will only “know what to do” if the student has been “stress inoculated.

Reacting students also indicated that they would be less likely to take future Reacting-type courses. The explanation, the researchers learned, was that Reacting students had worked much harder than their peers in regular seminars.

If classes were 'sorta boring,' was it because of the student or the teacher?

That same year [2001], young anthropology professor Cathy Small went undercover as "Rebekah Nathan, undergraduate student" and lived in a first-year form at Northern Arizona University. She was repeating the study of anthropologist Michael Moffatt, who in 1977 had attempted to pass himself off as an undergraduate at Rutgers. Like him, she found virtually no evidence that students derived intellectual benefit from classes. They skipped more frequently than she had expected: in the one large course for which she had solid data, barely half came to class on any given day. The students in her dorm, moreover, almost never discussed academic issues — in class or outside of it. Small's 'most sobering' insight was 'how little intellectual life' mattered to students.

The walls covered with paintings and tapestries that often concealed the doors didn't help either. There were countless animal heads of all kinds lit by torches in several corridors, and I could have sworn I saw them move, but I was always so late for the lessons that I had no time to pay attention to them. Intense smells of herbs, vapors, and fumes filled this space, as potions and spells were constantly being played throughout the days and nights. Every time we passed Mrs. Fitz's secretary's office, we had to pinch our Nose, because she seemed to burn horrible herbs while she worked, and the smell spread down the hallway to the classrooms. Then there was Miss Melva Flin with her ever-vigilant bat. She controlled every person who came in and out of Philcrocks and roamed the corridors making sure no students broke the rules or tried to stick their noses where they weren't called. She had two spare eyes as her bat squeaked whenever it detected problems. No student liked her and everyone wished they could close that bat in the library where he could eat the bookworms for the rest of his life. Found the practice sites, there were still the lessons. Every Thursday at midnight the clan would gather in the High Ridge stone circle, at which hour it aligned with the moon, and it was possible to make omens from the constellations. On Tuesdays we went to the Philcrocks Woods where we watched the wild animals and any other species that walked around, hunted and fished in the river and even stayed overnight for the next day hoping to see the vampires hunt, which did not happen. I still couldn't believe vampires existed but the next day I turned away from all the sarcophagi I came across in the castle corridors. The most boring of the chairs was the Philcrocks Story, where they talked about the story of magic. Especially because the teacher talked monotonously and always behind the book, which made it impossible to see his face and understand what he was saying. He also made references to maps and wall articles that no one understood, which did not matter to him as long as he remained immersed in its reading aloud. Most interesting so far has been the story of the division of the 3 kingdoms and the emergence of the 3 clans. For many centuries they had lived peacefully until pure races emerged and the thirst for power increased, promoting their perpetuation. The segregation of sleves began there. King Elive's Night Clan was destroyed by King Ashen and the Night Clan disappeared, except for some sorcerers who chose the Shadow Kingdom to live on and continued the clan to which I now belong. Having to memorize endless dates and events was the worst part. It was hard to remember if it was Orlk or Orls who started the battle and whether it was in Cral or Crap, especially since all those names were strange to me.

Few students or teachers were interested in Cicero or Erasmus’s other literary heroes. There was, however, a new teacher at Magdalen College named John Colet, who had immersed himself in the humanism coming out of Italy and its Platonist themes. He and Erasmus found an instant harmony. In listening to Colet speak, Erasmus wrote later, he “seemed to be listening to Plato himself.”14

These wonderings/wanderings by the students span poetry, experience, and politics. They remind us of the multiple meanings in the “facts” presented to our senses. Art is immersed in the welter of description and the pronouncements of desire.

The Shaivism of Kashmir teaches a system of yoga that leads to the highest level of Self-realization and yields a revelation of the innermost secrets of the nature of the Self. In the practice of this yoga, the student is able to pass beyond the various levels of susupti and turya that we have been describing and finally to become immersed in the blissful experience of the Self as one with Absolute Consciousness. The student of Kashmir Shaivism discovers that what others experience as the void is actually pulsating with divine creative energy and that this creative energy is their very essence. Further, these practitioners experience everyone (pramatr) and everything (prameya) as the Absolute Lord, endowed with infinite divine potency and joyfully manifesting the whole universe. They see everything as His divine play, and recognize that everything is actually He. This totally monistic view of the world was termed “immediate non-dualism” (pratyaksadvaita) by Narasimhagupta, father of the famous eleventh-century philosopher, Abhinavagupta. Immediate non-dualism sees total unity even in mundane perceptions. Those who live in this state of unity do actually see monism with their eyes and feel it through all their senses. — B. N. Pandit, Specific Principles of Kashmir Shaivism (3rd ed., 2008), p. xvii-xviii

LANGUAGE LESSONS, n. A romantic idea that one can teach students a foreign language by listening to an instructor or cramming grammar. Pupils hardly ever learn languages in lessons. People acquire them through immersion in what’s known as travel, love, or life.