The only UK English spelling word of the day feed I’ve found is the OED. And their word of the day today is lubricous. I had to look it up. It means:

smooth and glassy; slippery; lewd, wanton, salacious or lecherous

Sheesh. Back to the drawing board. Might have to add things manually.

So I was chuffed to learn that William James had sorted it out for me a long time ago. He comments that

“You make a great, a very great mistake, if you think that psychology, being the science of the mind’s laws, is something from which you can deduce definite programmes and schemes and methods of instruction for immediate school-room use. Psychology is a science, and teaching is an art; and sciences never generate arts directly out of themselves. An intermediate inventive mind must make that application, by using its originality.

A science only lays down lines within which the rules of the art must fall, laws which the follower of the art must not transgress; but what particular thing he shall positively do within those lines is left exclusively to his own genius. … To know psychology, therefore, is absolutely no guarantee that we shall be good teachers. To advance that result we must have an additional endowment altogether, a happy tact and ingenuity to tell us what definite things to say and do when that pupil is before us. That ingenuity in meeting … the pupil, that tact for the concrete situation, . . . are things to which psychology cannot help us in the least. [My emphasis]

As David Berliner says,

“James did, however, see the study of psychology as useful in three ways: to provide the underpinnings for beliefs about instruction, to prohibit teachers from making certain egregious errors, and to provide intellectual support to teachers for some of their pedagogical decisions.”

Bingo.

“Before that wonderful tour of Australia in 1960-1, Barbadians would tend to stick together and so would the Trinidadians, Jamaicans and Guyanans. Worrell cut across all that. Soon there were no groups, just one team.

He told his batsmen to walk if they were given out. When Gary Sobers appeared to show his dissent with a decision, he reprimanded him. After that, everyone walked as soon as the umpire’s finger went up.”

What I like more, though, is this from his friend C. L. R. James. While the tour started badly, Worrell lectured nobody on cricket itself.m Instead,

“If something was wrong, I told them what was right and left it to them”

Genius.

“A sample poll can investigate only what the pollsters know, and it cannot do even that properly”

“A man’s unstated assumptions, those he is often not aware of, are usually the mainspring of his thought”