RECOCT … To boil or cook a second time; also fig. to vamp or furbish up anew. So RECOCTION.
RECOGNITION … The act of recognising. 1. Payment on the conclusion of a bargain. The resumption of lands by a feudal superior. 3. Revision, recension. b. The form of inquest by jury in use in England under the early Norman kings. 4. The action of acknowledging as true, valid, or entitled to consideration; formal acknowledgement as conveying approval or sanction of something: hence, notice or attention accorded to thing or person …. (‘.. kind of publick reading, whereby the lives of such saints had .. solemn r. in the church of God.’ Hooker.) 5. The acknowledgement or admission of a kindness, service, obligation, or merit, or the expression of this in some way… not chiefly in phr. in r. of. 6. The action or fact of perceiving that some thing, person, etc., is the same as one previously known; the mental process of identifying what has been known before; the fact of being known or identified… (‘I could not escape r.’) b. The action or fact of apprehending a thing as having a certain characteristic or belonging to a certain class. (The r. that certain things were not true’,)
…
RECOGNITOR …A member of a jury impanelled on an assize or inquest.
...
(Recognitions – page 1, no 1, April 1975)
COUNTING FROM ZERO Lucinda Bedford
Teacher: Draw me a line 3 cm long.
(The child, aged 9, drew a line 2cm long.)
Teacher: Let me draw one for you. Is that the same as yours?
Child: No, yours is longer.
Teacher: You draw yours again.
Again the child (aged 9) drew a line 2cm long. I watched what she did, and found that she had started to draw from the line marked 1, and not from the 0 mark. She could not understand that you started measuring from a point marked 0; to her you began with 1. It was as if she were counting 1, 2, 3. She had no concept of 0 with regard to measurement.
I related the situation to the child; I asked her how old she was when she was born. She replied “Nothing”. So I said, “Yes, the same thing happens when you draw a line, you start at nothing and then go on to one. It is like having a birthday, you have to live one year before you are one.”
Child: If I had drawn a line 1 cm long in my way, it would have only been a dot.
(Recognitions – pages 8-9, no 1, April 1975)
Broadly speaking there are two strands in the writings submitted and being published so far. On the one hand there are anecdotes – accounts of some actual teaching encounter which someone at any rate feels to be sufficiently striking to be worth recording. These might be long or short. They may or may not have a point. Sometimes a reader can latch on to someone else’s observation; at other times he cannot and does not. But developing powers of observation is an important task and writing to share with others is a useful way of noticing what happens. Apart from anything else, a brief anecdote is something that everyone can submit – it requires no special literary skill or sustained analytic thought. An account of a classroom happening can be a start to reflective thinking – and writing; it is also a welcome reminder of where the action really is.
But observations are only the raw material of experimental science. They already reflect an implicit theory and we are surely concerned with using them to explore such frameworks in further depth. So on the other hand we have had articles that are reflective and exploratory. Research is a much abused and misunderstood word so that we hesitate to call these research articles. A sort of research that we are all depressingly familiar with is that which starts with a hypothetical construction and then seeks to confirm it, the construction. But in either case the scope of the exploration is predetermined. Real advance in any field seems to have an unpreconceived, unplanned and often zany, atmosphere about it. Probing the unknown is like walking towards the enemy lines in the dark – not at all the sort of thing that could be funded by a Schools Council. We need less ‘research’ and more recce. So we print articles that reconnoitre, make reconnaissance – well, allright, RECOGNITIONS.
(Recognitions – page 32, no 2, July 1975)
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