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I know it's a sign of age, but I do enjoy reminiscing about my teaching days so many years ago. The things I remember most fondly don't involve computers since there were none of them in my school until my last years there. (Now I'm really dating myself!) But they're relevant nonetheless.
I don't know whether it was my own obsession or my students', but my most exciting teaching adventures tended to center around mysteries and how we "know" what we do about the world. My fifthand sixth-grade students were always digging up the school yard in search of "ancient" and mysterious artifacts buried days earlier by classmates from a "different" culture. They spent hours shaking sealed coffee cans to guess their contents, conducting experiments to identify "mystery powders" and deciphering pictographic messages in writing that lacked a Rosetta stone for translation guidance.
Those of you who happened to read my online column for the...