© Copyright 2001 Jack C. Straton

This material may be reproduced for educational purposes provided that (1) you notify me (Jack C. Straton, University Studies, Portland State University, Portland, OR, 97210-0751, straton@pdx.edu) that you are doing so, (2) you include this copyright policy and contact information, and (3) the students are charged only for the cost of reproduction. Any commercial use requires explicit permission.

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Early on students are challenged to examine how they know what they know. The historian on our Einstein team, Barbara Traver, comes into class dressed as a 14th century scholar and proceeds to explain the nature of the heavens, as described by Aristotle and refined by Ptolemy, motion of matter and vapors on the earth, and the constituents of the human body, such as sang and choler, the relative balance of which lead to sanguine and melancholic personalities. Our students find it impossible to refute her assertions, they "just know" that they are right and she is wrong. The next day we show a scene from Monty Python's The Holy Grail in which villagers assert to a knight that a woman (played by Helen Mirren) is a witch, and the knight takes them through a "logical" process to determine that if she weighs the same amount as a duck, she is a witch. They then freewrite on the general issue of how they know what they know.

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