Education

About a week ago I told my students that my goal was to turn them into
sappers. As many of you know, a
sapper is a military or combat engineer who performs many duties such as bridge-building, searching minefields for mines and clearing them, building field defenses, and engaging in general construction and repairs. As sappers, I want my students to be able to
construct arguments, to
break down arguments and put them back together again (analysis), to
repair ineffective arguments, and to
search out and
identify propositions, key terms, and underlying assumptions. But in particular, my young sappers are expected to use certain tools to help them in their tasks as intellectual engineers. Their tools are a series of
questions. They are as follows:
S------What is the
significance? (importance, relevance, implication)
#4
A-----What are the
alternatives?
#5
P------What is the
proposition or problem?
#1
P------From whose
point-of-view am I seeing or hearing?
#3
E------What is the
evidence?
#2
R------What is the
relationship between/among ideas?
#6
[Photographic Art by Ric Couchman]
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