"Questions about Energy"

Questions for Week 31

When asked, "how do you best learn?" most people usually respond with either a technique, like, "in a classroom," or by naming their favorite sense, like, "I learn best visually." Unfortunately, this implies most people define "learning" as the ability to parrot the correct answer.

What is wrong with this? We believe that "parroting the correct answer" creates parrots, not students; dullards, not Einsteins. So how can we create more Einsteins? We believe, by asking questions which are intended to provoke the student's own questions. More important, we see this as the best way with which to reawaken in students the love of learning.

This week's topic is, "Questions about Energy." Would you like to awaken your love of learning about this topic? You can, simply by reading the teacher's questions and then, by asking yourself, "what questions did these words just provoke in me?"

"Questions about Energy"

The Teacher's Questions (asked by Ed)

• Are "truths," energy sources? Or is the expression of truth, the medium for releasing energy?
• Is the change truths bring, an expression of the momentum of truth or of energy itself.
• A truth that is not expressed, does it become an energy sink? Is this why we feel so invigorated when someone speaks the truth?
• Are lies devoid of energy? Are they black holes? Is that why we feel depleted when in the presence of a lie, whether or not we created it.
• Is that why artificial plants feel so lifeless? Not even dead, lifeless.

• Is energy a symptom? Or is it the evidence of something else we can’t see.
• Is how the wind moves grass an expression of energy? Or is it energy itself? I see that I can neither see, nor accurately express, the question; meaning, I can neither name the hole nor the edge of the hole. I suspect that the moving grass is momentum and that the energy source happened sometime and somewhere else.

• The sun. Even the sun does not create its energy alone. It is feed by the debris in space and by its own creation of energy. If the sun is an energy source, is all life on earth an expression of it’s momentum?
• Is something alive if it creates its own energy? If so, does this mean "emergence" is life?
  
• Are emergence learning and learning by extension examples of energy sources, or are the symptoms of expressed energy?
• Is the feeling of being alive the same as feeling energy?
• Do fossil fuels pollute because they are the release of momentum, as opposed to the creation of energy?

Sample Student Response Questions (asked by Steven)

Ed, these are some of the best questions you've ever asked. Wow!

• What defines something as being "alive"; as a "living" thing as opposed to a non living thing?
• Is it even possible to define "truth?"
• What is "energy?" Is it even a real thing? Or is it a merely a physics professor's metaphor, a made up idea which stands in for something we have yet to really understand?