Sesquipedalianist

Every time you read about any of the famous scientists of old, you read about their studies with their mentor(s). I always have this image of someone immersing himself in the work he does with his mentor, who invests much of his time teaching his student all he knows. I rarely ever picture what we now know as formal education. Most times I wish I could have the sort of intellectual relationship they had back then rather than the kind of education we get today. It just feels much more personal, tailored to your specific needs. It also sounds much more interesting than our current state of trying to survive going from assignment to assignment and test to test. For a person that spends much of her time thinking about education, I must say the current system we use isn't without its flaws. However, I am here to argue that we simply cannot do away with formal education. Indeed we should improve upon it, but we cannot abandon it completely; we should not. Today postgraduate study towa...

I have a statement to make. I'm generally a very laid back person, but sometimes things bother me. I'm going to tell you about what is bothering me right now. I'm not just bothered but I'm also concerned. I know the very least I could possibly know about children, and most of me doesn't want to know any more than I already do know. I don't have any younger siblings and I don't really spend that much time around kids. But what I do know is a little bit of psychology, and from what I know things don't look particularly well for this current generation of young children. We are all quite familiar with the notion that children are born quite creative but lose most of their creativity growing older (possibly due to school). There are countless experiments that have confirmed this. Kids are generally quite good at  divergent thinking , which is generally the " process of generating multiple related ideas for a given topic or solutions to a problem. ...

I have recently come to the conclusion that I can only think when I write, and quite frankly (as you can see from the blog archive to your right) I haven't been writing much. However, as I was working on an essay several days ago I stumbled upon something that didn't seem quite right. Not to me at least. A few days ago, in case you did not know, was the World Wide Web's 20th "birthday." In case you didn't know, the World Wide Web is not the same as the internet ( click link for further detail ). It was on a certain last day of April before I came into existence that the inventors of the World Wide Web decided that it was probably for the best to put their lovely creation out in the public domain. Let me say simply that it was on the 30th of April of the year 1993. The other option these men had in mind was to start a company with their creation. Another was to leave it as the intellectual property of CERN, the birthplace of this wonderful World Wide Web.  B...

I haven't posted in such a long while, I kind of feel like I have to. It's not that I don't have the time; I do. Rather it's that I haven't felt like I had any thoughts to share. Nothing popped out at me as something to write about, so I just refrained from writing anything. Now I realize that sometimes you have to actually think about something to write about, and an idea will appear. So here I am. I kind of realize that my blog didn't turn out to be what I intended it to be, it wasn't supposed to be a blog geared out to a mainly Emirati audience. But that's what it turned out to be. That's nothing bad - I suppose - although I initially envisioned a blog with a more global outlook. Yet here goes another Emirati-specific post. Every once in a while we see these hashtags on twitter that people try so hard to get trending, for reasons beyond my capability to understand. Whether or not I understand why getting something to trend on twitter is impor...

I thought I'd be blogging a lot more during summer. But of course, I forgot that I lose my thoughts over summer when I'm bored, only to regain them when class starts and I'm too busy to do anything with the thoughts that bounce around my head. Now, enough of run-on sentences that don't make sense. I think all I have to say is a quick comment on something that's been going on in my head for a long time. Let's see if I can keep this short. Recently I've become more aware of things. By things, I mean the daily usage of language, phrases people throw around naturally, and other matters of such. I’ve noticed so many common phrases that shouldn’t be said. Some I’d noticed a long time ago, others I had to have pointed out to me, while others yet I could spot very clearly only lately. We’ve gotten so very affected by the media, and by globalization in general, that we seldom realize that we should not say or do whatever is it that we generally d...

About 6 weeks ago I posted something about what I learnt when I started researching through those Arabic books. Now its time that I let you know what I actually learned. It's quite fascinating and I learned a lot. It also wasn't as tiresome as I thought it would be. So here goes, a brief history lesson for you all. The first time I heard about this, I found it hard to believe. Not because it didn't make sense, but because I found it hard to believe that I had gone through my life without hearing a single word about this, without knowing it ever existed. I shall assume that most of you don't know anything about it either; excuse me if you do. Iran. A country the Arab world is not exactly good friends with. You could also generalize and include the rest of the world into the previous statement, with Iran's suspicious nuclear program and all. To keep things short, there was an Arab land in what is not southern and southwestern Iran. It was its own Arab state even ...