TITLE: The Strange and the Familiar
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: May 23, 2007  8:03 AM
DESC: 
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BODY:
Artists and other creative types often define their
artistic endeavor obliquely as "to make the familiar
strange, and the strange familiar".  I've seen this
phrase
<A HREF="http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B/sem11.html">
   attributed to the German poet Novalis</A>,
who coined it as "the essence of romanticism".  You
may have seen me use half of the phrase in my entry
on a
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2007-04.html#e2007-04-05T20_57_33.htm">
   recent talk by Roy Behrens</A>.

Recently, I began to wonder...  Is this what teaching is!?

In a sense, the second half of the definition is indeed one
of the teacher's goals: to help students understand ideas
and use techniques that are, at the beginning of a course,
new or poorly understood.  The strange becomes familiar
when it becomes a part of how we understand and think about
about our worlds.

But I think the first part of the definition -- to make
the familiar strange -- is important, too, sometimes more
important.  Often the greatest learning occurs when we
confront an idea that we think we understand, which seems
to hold nothing new for us, which seems almost old, and
are led beneath the surface to a wrinkle we never new
existed.  Or when we are led to where the idea intersects
with another in a way we never considered before and find
that the old idea opens new doors.  We find that our old
understanding was incomplete at best and wrong at worst.

Many of the courses I am fortunate enough to teach on
are replete with opportunities both to make the strange
familiar and to make the familiar strange.  Programming
Languages and Algorithms are two.  So are Object-Oriented
Programming and Artificial Intelligence.  Frankly, so, too,
is <EM>any</EM> course that we approach with open hearts
and minds.

Teachers do what artists do.  They just work in a different
medium.

(A little googling finds that Alistair Cockburn
<A HREF="http://alistair.cockburn.us/index.php/Making_the_strange_familiar,_and_the_familiar_strange">
   wrote on this phrase</A>
last year.  There is so much to read and know!)
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