Bloom's taxonomy has 6 levels of increasingly sophisticated thinking skills. It was originally developed, in a slightly different form to here, for classifying educational objectives and with additional variations, dimensions and sub-levels in the full models, is still useful for teaching and learning. The hierarchy reflects, among other things, that a strong foundation for learning is knowledge.

The 6 levels in the revised Bloom's Taxonomy for learning are: Remember, Understand, Apply, Analyze, Evaluate, Create

Also see: the learning pit, the third teacher, zone of proximal development

Bloom's Taxonomy

"This negative is the score. The print is the performance."

This memorable analogy is from Ansel Adams, one of the foremost American photographers.

From the negative captured by the camera, Ansel would experiment with cropping, dodging and burning (lightening and darkening) to create the final print.

We have a large print of moon and half dome in our hallway. It reminds me that what the camera captured directly isn't the final piece. You still have the performance to perform.

The analogy works beyond photographs. A recipe, a script, a joke, or a business idea all still need the right performance.

Prints and performances

School mathematics refresher: when faced with a calculation that looks like it could be tackled multiple ways, use BODMAS to help clear it up (See PEMDAS at the end).

BODMAS is an acronym (as opposed to an initialism) that tells you the order of operations to tackle in a calculation.

BODMAS stands for Brackets, Order/Indices, Division, Multiplication, Addition, and Subtraction. So in 2 + 4 x 2 you don't end up with 6 x 2 = 12 but instead, 2 + 8 = 10

BODMAS is generally built into calculators (you can search 2 + 4 x 2 in Google to see). If you need additions or subtractions to be carried out first you can surround them in brackets eg (2 + 4) x 2

I always learned it as BODMAS, but many people told me they learned this as PEMDAS. The idea is the same just the words are different, and the ordering of Division and Multiplication, which are interchangeable:

PEMDAS: Parentheses, Exponents, Multiplication, Division, Addition, and Subtraction

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BODMAS