Summer Reading and Viewing Suggestions

Here are a few ideas of how you can keep your TOK brain active over the summer months. Building up your background knowledge by reading, listening and viewing resources like these can only be helpful in preparing you for your essay and presentation in the fall. As you engage with these resources try to draw linkages between them and course concepts, ways of knowing, and areas of knowledge.

TOK related Readings

• Man is the Measure by Reuben Abel - An introduction to the central problems of Philosophy. Many of the issues discussed so far come up in this book.
• Sophie's World - recommended by other TOK teachers and I will be reading it this summer. It is an introduction to major issues in philosophy.
• Books by Steven Pinker, including The Blank Slate, How the Mind Works, The Stuff of Thought and The Language Instinct.
• The Life of Pi
• Politics and the English Language, essay by George Orwell

Five TOK related TedTalks

• Mandy Len Catron - "Falling in love is the easy part" - Links to emotion and the human sciences.
• Hannah Fry - "The mathematics of love" - connections to math and the human sciences.
• Mark Applebaum- "The mad scientist of music" - breaking the rules and conventions of music.
• Jared Diamond "Why do societies collapse?" - Mr. Diamond has an interesting perspective on history.
• Murray Gell-Mann "Beauty, truth, and physics?" - Are elegant equations more likely to be right than inelegant ones.

Five TOK related movies

• 12 Angry Men - reason, emotion, bias
• Inception - Truth or illusion, how do we know the difference?
• The Book of Eli - Issues related to faith, memory, emotion and language as ways of knowing.
• The Final Cut - Issues related to memory and making sense of your personal experience.
• Mindwalk - Issues related to paradigms, the natural sciences, and systems theory.

Five TOK related podcast channels

• Radiolab - Season 11 Episode 5 is cool "Are you sure?" and there are lots of others to listen to in this archive.
• This American life - this link will take you to an archive of past podcasts. Recent episodes have a lot of connections to TOK. Listen to them on your summer walks.
• CBC - Under the influence and the older Age of persuasion, both with Terry O'Reilly have a great number of podcasts with connections to TOK, particularly emotion, reason, intuition, memory, bias, and propaganda. These series examine the role of advertising in shaping our beliefs and our consumption choices.
• CBC - Ideas: most of the Ideas podcasts have TOK connections. Some recent podcasts of interest include 
• Big Data, a multipart examination of privacy, surveillance, other knowledge issues in the digital age. 
• Catalogues of Culture - Wade Davis, excellent connections to human sciences, indigenous knowledge systems, and cultural perspectives
• Counting in Colour with Daniel Tammett, connections to sense perception as a way of knowing.

Have a restful summer and see you all at the retreat in the fall. We will have an Amazing time.

Moffdawg

P.S. This hammock is reserved for me.