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John Keats

1795—1821SharePortrait of John Keats by William Hilton.

John Keats was born in London on 31 October 1795, the eldest of Thomas and Frances Jennings Keats’s four children. Although he died at the age of twenty-five, Keats had perhaps the most remarkable career of any English poet. He published only fifty-four poems, in three slim volumes and a few magazines. But over his short development he took on the challenges of a wide range of poetic forms from the sonnet, to the Spenserian romance, to the Miltonic epic, defining anew their possibilities with his own distinctive fusion of earnest energy, control of conflicting perspectives and forces, poetic self-consciousness, and, occasionally, dry ironic wit.

Although he is now seen as part of the British Romantic literary tradition, in his own lifetime Keats would not have been associated with other major Romantic poets, and he himself was often uneasy among them. Outside his friend Leigh Hunt‘s circle of liberal intellectuals, the generally conservative reviewers of the day attacked his work as mawkish and bad-mannered, as the work of an upstart “vulgar Cockney poetaster” (John Gibson Lockhart), and as consisting of “the most incongruous ideas in the most uncouth language” (John Wilson Croker). Although Keats had a liberal education in the boy’s academy at Enfield and trained at Guy’s Hospital to become a surgeon, he had no formal literary education. Yet Keats today is seen as one of the canniest readers, interpreters, questioners, of the “modern” poetic project-which he saw as beginning with William Wordsworth—to create poetry in a world devoid of mythic grandeur, poetry that sought its wonder in the desires and sufferings of the human heart. Beyond his precise sense of the difficulties presented him in his own literary-historical moment, he developed with unparalleled rapidity, in a relative handful of poems

Only learn nonsense if it’s written by Lewis Carroll

When we were at school some of us came across a little geometry probably concerning triangles squares circles etc and I learned something valuable not from the teacher but from the other girls when we were 16 years old.

We had spent a long time studying Pythagoras’ theorem

And when we sat our O level exam  one of the questions was to prove Pythagoras theorem for which they kindly provided a triangle

The triangle had three points labeled A,B,C.

So I thought that’s an easy question when you spent probably two or four weeks studying this theorem

After the examination was over I was talking to some of my friends and one of them said to me I couldn’t prove pythagoas theorem.

Because in the textbook it was labeled

X,Y,Z

Maybe I was naive to think that the proof did not depend on the letters that we used to denote the points of the triangle.

This was the A stream in a  convent grammar school.

So everybody must have had an IQ above 120 if that means anything which I don’t believe it does by the way. IQ is not really very significant or importance which is fortunate because the last time I did a test I got 65 when a hundred is the average.

I think I must be an imbecile how amazing this i managed to get a degree

If several girls { probably more than half the class} were not able to answer the question because they had learnt the answer by memory they did nothing to understand what they were doing.

Furthermore they didn’t know that was not the right way to learn. They believed studying was memorizing passages which were nonsense to them or proofs which were nonsense.

So it just makes me wonder just how useful education is to most of us

Maybe there’s a problem about dealing with the abstract rather than the concrete.

I never taught geometry so I don’t know what it’s like but I would have thought it’s important to get across to the children or the students that this theorem does not depend on the name you gift the points of the triangle.

It seems obvious to me but perhaps I’m not like other people but I really don’t believe that…… I think people don’t realize that it ought to  make sense and if it doesn’t make sense they have to ask the teacher to explain it again

I have taught at Oxford I have taught at a  polytechnic and I did not find many students who were unable to learn mathematics if it was presented in a sensible way. Even in people who had not done O levels or A levels

But it’s worth remembering that even the cleverest children find geometry quite difficult and do not grasp what is important about it.

And it is not just geometry that they are learning by heart in a meaningless manner I think it was apply to a lot of what they learn.

And so it must be that learning and study can be very destructive to the mind. It’s just a way of keeping adolescents off the streets

Never learn nonsense by heart unless it is written by Lewis Carroll

It is not good to learn parrot fashion or to memorize proofs that you don’t understand

So if anyone in your family asks you for help with their homework try to see whether they understand the general principle behind it do not help them to learn proofs by heart when they have no idea what it’s about at all.

I can’t really see why we spent five years in my school to reach the peak of Pythagoras’s theorem

No ok I understand why it takes five years to do o level at arithmetics containing six wonderful things as compound interest and percentages; how could that take five years?

It goes to show that school is a prison in a way to keep children under control.

I recollect that I had done o level arithmetic by the edge of 11 in the primary school working at my own pace.

I’m going to spend 5 years learning it all again

Yes compound interest is quite difficult but if you get a job on your earning money and you want to save you will learn about interest very quickly when you really need to and if you don’t need to it’s very  tedious

Next time, who invented the straight line?