December 8, 2015

Wittgenstein, primary school teacher

Two pages of handwritten lesson plans from Wittgenstein’s brief career as a primary school teacher:

In the top left corner are some mathematic equations for solving:

$x + a = b$

$x a = b$

$8 x = 528$

$g x = 756$

$7 x = 1428$

$4 x = 1524$

Between WWI and the publication of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein was briefly a primary school teacher in the small Austrian villages Trattenbach, Hassbach, Puchberg and finally Otterthal. His feelings about the provincials seem to have vacillated between Tolstoyan romanticism and repulsion (“These people are not human at all but loathsome worms”).

Wittgenstein’s brief career as a schoolteacher ended when he lost patience with an 11-year old boy and clobbered him so hard that he fell unconscious. History remembers this as the Haidbauer incident.

philosophy

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