Quote of the Week...from Niels Bohr

 An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field. 

                                                                           ---Niels Bohr

Neils Bohr (1885-1962) was a Danish physicist, one of the most instrumental scientists in history who made crucial contributions toward the creation of the theory of quantum mechanics.  He was a great teacher and role model for his ethics and understanding in his chosen field.  He also apparently understood quite well about the nature of learning and how necessary action is, along with the required trait of not being afraid to made mistakes in the pursuit of higher academic attainment.  I loved the above quote when I found it, for I'm dealing with similar issues regarding my study of foreign languages...although I'm confident that a Nobel Prize of the sort that Bohr received isn't going to be in the works for me.  For the past few months I've been following polyglot Steve Kaufmann, subscribing to his excellent Internet foreign language study site called LingQ,  Kaufmann is an advocate of absorbing vast amounts of material in the target language through listening and reading while allowing the human brain to work its own magic as it is specifically designed to acquire language without the need to go through painstaking rules and memorization of the kind students over the ages have been subjected to (and still are).  But he also emphasizes that during the process many mistakes will be made...and that's all right, it's a part of the learning!  But people have been conditioned from both the pressures in school of being "correct" for good grades and possible public humiliation around others for goofing up when they try to express themselves.  I even once had a Russian professor at UF who told his class that they could say anything they wanted to him in Russian, only that they had better say it right: that shut everyone up in a hurry! When I worked more than forty years ago as a cook at a local Chinese restaurant, I noticed that of my Vietnamese coworkers who were trying to learn English, the ones who threw away their pride and jumped into speaking English, errors and all, quickly learned it while those afraid to sound silly took much, much longer.  Making mistakes is an important part of learning...schools should chiefly be concerned about keeping their students from blowing up the lab in the process instead of stifling their progress by creating artificial little phony pockets of perfection...