Replying to LO30600 --
Dear Organlearners,
Leo Minnigh <minnigh@dds.nl> wrote:
>Maybe the self-centered person is like a wine grape - you can
>bear it if taken with care, but become drunk and dizzy if you
>consume too much.
Greetings dear Leo,
Thanks for giving me this insight -- one may get too "drunk" by focussing
on only one of the 7Es (seven essentialities of creativity)
>At, shall we leave this person and look for the beauty of diversity?
Certainly. We can keep the name of the topic "The cashew fruit". I was
really amazed in finding those cultivated cashew trees on a farm in the
deep Amazon. There are many species of wild trees with edible fruit in
Southern Africa. But i never had tasted among them anything even close to
the cashew fruit. Furthermore, the way in which it bear its seed in front
of the fruit was also completely new to me.
This illustrates for me one of the joys of diversity. I sometimes fall in
the groove that there is a fundamental pattern in a general category of
diverse species. (The difference between a groove and a grave is only the
depth ;-) Then, suddenly, I am confronted with a species which upsets my
comfort zone -- the "cognitive dissonance" as it surfaced in another LO
topic on art.
When I was a student, only a few lecturers tried to upset our comfort
zones by creating problems which would require from us to bash our brains
with more than a feather. When I became a teacher and then a lecturer, i
soon found myself doing the same thing -- using diversity to promote the
student's authentic learning. But it is politically a dangerous thing to
do because most students think that the lecturer/teacher want to trick
them into a failure. They do not perceive such a way out problem as a
cashew fruit. Why?
I think it is the teaching which they were subjected to at school. They
expect variations on a theme, but they do not expect such a way out
variation ("uitskietter"=outshooter) that it appears as a sudden change in
the theme itself. They do not expect such outshooters because they were
not exposed to them and were not taught how to be open minded for them.
Furthermore, and this is the curse of shallow movies and TV programs, they
do not read novels in which the outshooter, deftly motivated during the
development of the novel, has a decisive influence on its final outcome.
It also applies to other art forms like "complex music". Perhaps Beethoven
was the greaest exponent of this in his compositions. The jewel of this
among all his works for me is his Fantasy for Orchestra, Piano and Choir.
This is for me also a marked difference between an OO (Ordinary
Organisation) and a LO (Learning Organisation). A LO thrives on the
outshooters of diversity.
Leo, i await with great expectations to your reply, pointing to another
outshooter.
With care and best wishes
--At de Lange <amdelange@postino.up.ac.za> Snailmail: A M de Lange Gold Fields Computer Centre Faculty of Science - University of Pretoria Pretoria 0001 - Rep of South Africa
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