We opened up today with a class translation of our longest ever Latin text. We'll be working in the next few weeks at techniques for getting faster and more accurate, such as finding the subject, then the verb, and making sure we're parsing all the endings right before rushing ahead with the English translation. This was followed by some more work on the imperfect tense, including putting present tense Latin sentences into the imperfect.Then on to matters more weighty in the shape of Aristotle. Here's a useful flying overview of the man and his work:
We took part in a quiz that sneakily demonstrated the following biases from which humans unknowingly tend to suffer:
Attribution
bias (science test question)
Using internal personality
characteristics to explain others’ actions, but to ascribe our own failure to
external factors only.
Overconfidence
bias (Jakarta question)
The mistake of being more confident in
your actions than experience or logic would dictate to be appropriate.
Ingroup bias (debating team question)
The tendency to favour or
think better of members of one’s own perceived social groupings.
Primacy/recency bias (list question)
The tendency to remember the first and
last things in a list/narrative.
Aristotle advocates understanding our weaknesses and excesses in order to correct them: fortunately the last century has seen an explosion in psychological research to provide evidence of these. If you're interested in this kind of thing, you can read more about them here.
P.S. Thanks to everyone for the loudest rendition of Happy Birthday I've ever experienced ;-) mihi dies natalis felix erat, gratias vobis ago!