The student who uses home made apparatus, which is always going wrong, often learns more than one who has the use of carefully adjusted instruments, to which he is apt to trust and which he dares not take to pieces.
Interpretation
Learning from mistakes and hands-on experience is often more valuable than relying on perfect tools.
In this quote, James Clerk Maxwell emphasizes the importance of practical experience in learning. He suggests that students who work with imperfect or homemade tools gain deeper insights and understanding from their failures and troubleshooting experiences, compared to those who only rely on well-calibrated instruments they may be hesitant to explore or question.
In practice
During a workshop on innovation, this quote can inspire students to embrace trial and error.
Science appears to us with a very different aspect after we have found out that it is not in lecture rooms only, and by means of the electric light projected on a screen, that we may witness physical phenomena, but that we may find illustrations of the highest doctrines of science in games and gymnastics, in travelling by land and by water, in storms of the air and of the sea, and wherever there is matter in motion.
... that, in a few years, all great physical constants will have been approximately estimated, and that the only occupation which will be left to men of science will be to carry these measurements to another place of decimals.
Very few of us can now place ourselves in the mental condition in which even such philosophers as the great Descartes were involved in the days before Newton had announced the true laws of the motion of bodies.
What's the go of that? What's the particular go of that?
I have also a paper afloat, with an electromagnetic theory of light, which, till I am convinced to the contrary, I hold to be great guns.
If we betake ourselves to the statistical method, we do so confessing that we are unable to follow the details of each individual case, and expecting that the effects of widespread causes, though very different in each individual, will produce an average result on the whole nation, from a study of which we may estimate the character and propensities of an imaginary being called the Mean Man.
The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.
I have met thousands of children now, and not even one time has a child come up to me and said, 'Ms. Rowling, I'm so glad I've read these books because now I want to be a witch.'
Media literacy is not just important, it's absolutely critical. It's going to make the difference between whether kids are a tool of the mass media or whether the mass media is a tool for kids to use.
What is the use of merely listening to lectures? The real thing is practice.
The federal government spends about $2.51 per child per day to feed them lunch. Out of that, you have to pay for labor, facilities, and administrative costs, leaving about a dollar for food. Imagine trying to feed yourself a nutritious meal every day with only a dollar. Very difficult.
You don't need to have kids to write a good book for kids. I don't want my kids to see themselves in my books. Their lives should be their lives.
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