What we see

I've just been starting the exercise I like to try with first-year students each year, hoping to begin encouraging them to see more in the world and to recognise more ways of seeing the world, where I ask them to tell me what they see when they look out of the window. As the discussion has developed this time around, one of the students this week picked me up on my comment that "what I see depends only partly on what is actually there". Thinking about that, I started wondering what we would get if we tried to graph what we see against what is actually there. Plot a graph with "what is actually there" on the vertical axis and "what I can see" on the horizontal. For people who see exactly what is there, they will no doubt expect their line to be straight and sloping at 45 degrees. Did I just write "no doubt"? I must be tired.

My great job!

I have a great job. Every year at about this time the University gives me a bunch of the country's brightest youngsters, all of whom have signed up because they want to know more about our amazing world, and for three years I get to learn about how they see the world, and I get to watch them learn to see the world in new ways so that they gradually appreciate it more and more.