psychology dector

Jazz trumpeter Miles Davis, one of the greatest musicians to ever walk the planet, once said that “In music, silence is more important than sound.” I’d broaden that advice out a bit:   in life, silence is more important than the sound and fury of constant chatter in this age of instant communication.   Lately, I’ve lost the ability to hear that silence.   This is, at least in part, due to the obsessive roar of my own engines churning up that vacant space in the universe.   I need to send a message to the battlefield of everyday life:   shut up and listen! A while back, I wrote up a list of thirteen theses statements about how to live.   My hope was that the statements would offer me the opportunity to reflect on how I comport myself each day.   The list was written somewhere in the past and dutifully filed away only to be buried by more pressing matters, more words, words, words cascading and falling through my life.   Number one on this list was...

There is no shortage of books about education, and most of them are not positive.   The line of critics telling us what is wrong in our schools, with our teachers, and with students today, stretches to infinity.   If someone does manage to sneak through a book extolling something positive that is happening in the classroom, he is shouted down by those holding up schools as models of disorganization and chaos filled with child molesters and do-nothings.   No doubt, American education has been at a crossroads, a critical juncture that may well determine the future of the nation.   However, there is good happening on our school campuses.   And there are excellent teachers doing the job and living the life in the face of almost constant criticism and negativity. One of those good teachers is Rafe Esquith, winner of the National Medal of the Arts and the Kennedy Center/Stephen Sondheim Inspirational Teacher Award among other honors.   Even Queen Elizabeth has t...

I have spent some time in the last weeks rereading Hamlet , and that brings me around to contemplating Ophelia again. To me, she is one of the most captivating characters in English literature. Why? Because she is caught in the mechanizations that are not of her own creation. Because she is a lost soul who can find no other way to fight back in her world but to sink into madness. Because, in the end, Hamlet loves her, and the result is tragedy of the deepest kind. I love literary critic Elaine Showalter’s essay , “Representing Ophelia: Woman, Madness, and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism,” if only because she gets it right when she writes about Ophelia that she brings forward “the issues in an ongoing theoretical debate about the cultural links between femininity, female sexuality, insanity, and representation.” Ophelia suffers in the play, caught in the pedantic spying of her father, Polonius, the treacherous actions of Claudius, the savvy escapism of Gertrude, and Hamlet’s...

Shakespeare: The Illustrated and Updated Edition By Bill Bryson HarperCollins; $29.99, cloth ISBN 978-0-06-196532-6 Let’s face it, we do not have much documentary evidence of William Shakespeare’s life, and where evidence fails us, legend takes hold. Bill Bryson discusses what we know, what we speculate, and what has been misconstrued in his updated edition of the great writer’s biography, Shakespeare: The Illustrated and Updated Edition. The book itself is a work of art, with heavy paper and loads of drawings, illustrations, and a significant bibliography. Still, the ground Bryson tills has been planted and harvested before, yet one gets the feeling that this is an up-to-the-minute biography, and Bryson himself admits in the preface that “For somebody who has been dead for nearly four hundred years, William Shakespeare remains awfully active.” He refers, of course, to the endless reams of scholarship and investigation published each year about the man, the myth and the legend. Bryson...