Taking your word for it

If you give me permission, that is different from me giving my word, non?

I love these little hidden gems in language - especially the ones where I have had all the tools to figure it out myself but somehow have been too obtuse to connect the dots (see December, Quarantine, Turkey).

Lately, thanks to a rec from my bro, I've been reading my way through the Horatio Hornblower series. Early on, the protagonist is taken prisoner and when he asks to be released temporarily, the warden asks him for his "parole".  The French word for "word"  - which I have known all my life but never associated with our English word "parole" which is something we grant prisoners or the accused these days.

Hmmm.... methinks this might make an interesting blog post someday:  We used to give our word now we are granted it. Someday I'll have some profound insight on this and write about it, for now you'll just have to take my word for it...

 

Friendship

 Austin, TX 1997

Friends since 6th grade having coffee in the backyard in their late 20's

Photo creds: D. Finley

Sixteen Candles, "Cancel Culture", and making things "Great" again

Romanticizing the past or having a rosy retrospective is a well documented phenomenon.

Last year CZ asked if she could interview me about the "old" movie "Sixteen Candles" as she was doing a unit on the 80's for history class.  (If that sentence doesn't make you feel old, you did not go to high school in the 80's or earlier like me and all of my friends!).  I said sure as I had fond memories of the movie and it is a classic 80's movie.  So, in preparation for the interview, I rewatched the movie.  Oh boy, what a mind-warping experience that was.  I mean, I know that it was a different time.  But did I really think jokes about someone's race or being cavalier about taking advantage of people while they were passed out was okay or entertaining?  I guess we all did back then.(*)  Shocking as it was for me to revisit a movie that had occupied an unexamined fond spot in my heart, it was comforting in a way to acknowledge that we have made some progress as a society in the past 30 years.  When I think back on the 80's, I remember them with great fondness and even longing sometimes.  Wasn't the past great?  Well, that's kind of how we operate isn't it?

Of course things were not always better, I just have my own cognitive bias to remember the good stuff and forget (or ignore) the stuff that wasn't quite right.  This is a great survival mechanism to keep up the old self esteem and cognitive illusion that I am the hero of my own story.  When we tell ourselves we want to go back to when things were great, we mean only those positive things that felt good... we don't really mean the actual reality of the past.

When I see people break out that dog whistle term "cancel culture", it strikes me that these folks are just relying on their memories of their personal, proverbial Sixteen Candles rather than the realities of pervasive misogyny and racism that lie embedded in our past (and current) culture.  Do they really think we should all just 'relax' and 'calm down' about casual racism, sexism, and all that other hurtful stuff?  "It's just a joke!"  At one point, I used to think that the joke was okay if I, as a straight white male, would think it was funny if the joke was about being white or being male or being straight.  Well, you know what - a lot of times I did think the joke would be funny.  Here's the thing: No one has used my whiteness, maleness, or straightness to try to make me lesser or to put me down.  Even today, when I am sometimes made to feel like I am part of the problem rather than the solution because I have those attributes - they are not actually taking away any of my power or privilege.  I grew up and was enabled all my life by that privilege - it's in the air I breath.  No children's books I read ever put down any aspect of me.  I found myself reflected in the admirable people presented for emulation my entire life.  I never had to worry much about being judged or put in a box based on those things I can't help about myself.

So, if you are in the public eye and you get a say in setting the standards of what the norms are, I don't want you dehumanizing or objectifying people. When you normalize that, I am not going to 'chill out about it' or 'calm down', I want you to admit you were wrong and change your behavior or I don't want you setting the norms of society with your social platform.  I want things to go forward towards greatness, not backwards towards romanticized nostalgia.  

---------------

(*) Recently I have reconnected with my old gang from the 80's.  I mentioned the movie Sixteen Candles and one of my friends groaned and told us about how he was excited to show it to his own daughters a few years back when they were turning sixteen.  His growing horror as he shared this 'gem' from his childhood with his increasingly dismayed daughters really warmed my heart as I had just gone through the interview experience with CZ.

Grades, Entropy, and Growing Up

 

One of my standard gags that I do most years is that I tell my classes that I have an idea for a new grading paradigm.   At first, they kind of like it because I say I’ll start everyone off with 100 percent.  Then, as the year goes by, I will deduct points for items they miss rather than building their grades out of an accumulation of points or a running average.   Almost right away, some of the quicker students start to lose their delight over this idea.  Then, I spell it out for everyone: “Imagine, if you will, that day, when you lose your 11th point and you are sitting on an 89, and you realize the A is never coming back!”   At this point, the students are happy enough that they were not the guinea pigs for this experiment.  Every time I tell this story though, I feel there is something to it.  Some deeper truth embedded in the outrageousness of this grading scheme…

I am fond of the fact that an infant’s brain contains neurons that are over-connected.  Learning to control one’s body, recognize faces, and make sounds on demand is the pruning of connection.  The elimination of possibility if you will.   As we age, indeed as time goes forward in general, we are in the business of eliminating possibilities.  As the Universe converts organized energy into unorganized energy thereby increasing the entropy – time literally moves forward.   As we each grow out of childhood and start racking up ‘accomplishments’ as adults and find our place in the world, we are, once again, solidifying who we are and what our roles are.  We do this by eliminating other possibilities, don’t we?   As I brace for turning 51, I know that the 21 is never coming back.  That’s okay, Kenny my boy – the elimination of possible futures is what living your life is…

An Album Review 35 years in the making

 

In high school, I read a review of something and the writer described an event as being as 'jarring as encountering a scratch on your new Steve Reich record".  I don't recall what the review was about or who wrote it, but boy do I remember that line!

Well, the next time I was in a record store, I looked for something by this artist whom I had never heard of and found a CD of "The Desert Music" which had only come out a few years earlier.  I flipped it over and read the words 

"Begin, my friend

                 for you cannot,
                                  you may be sure,
take your song,
                 which drives all things out of mind,
                                  with you to the other world."

And then later

    

               "Well, shall we
think or listen? Is there a sound addressed
                 not wholly to the ear?"

(turns out the lyrics are from poems by William Carlos Williams)

I bought the CD on the spot.  When I got home, I discovered an in-depth review of the piece in the liner notes by a critic.  So, as I hit play, I read about how this reviewer pictures music in color and light.  I remember specifically that Mozart to him is a "slow moving barge of bright white light". I think about that line a lot.  Even today.

Years later, I attended a performance where Steve Reich was interviewed and he confessed that he had picked up a book of poems by William Carlos Williams having never heard of him, but just intrigued by the symmetry of his name.  How cool, I thought.

I miss the era of rolling the dice on the spot in a record store, not knowing whether what you were buying was even worth the $14.99 or whether it would be life-transforming.  Now, I google and read at least 3 reviews before I buy a new can opener online.  

If you are willing to spend 48 minutes of focused appreciation, see if The Desert Music transports and transforms you as it did a 15 year Ken Rideout some 35 years ago:

What's the frequency, Kenneth?

I have often been fascinated by this idea that everything happens in the squishy space between things:  it's all about relationships  - you are not so much what you are made of, but the relationship between those items (within and without).

Well, my man Dr. Derek Muller has knocked it out of the park again.  In a recent video he shows how the very color of light - its frequency or wavelength, is a construct of relationship. Whether the photon is blue or red depends not just on its intrinsic properties but also your relationship to the photon (are you moving away/towards? Are you cosmically far from it? Are you at a different location in a gravitational well?). Mass, color, your personality:  all constructs of relationship.  So little is actually intrinsic!

If a real tree falls in the woods, it certainly creates sound waves even if no one is there to hear it.  But, if a quantum particle pops into existence and then out again and no one sees it, was it ever there?  If I live by myself on an island for my entire life, do I even have a personality? I'm not so sure...

Even the attributes of fundamental particles are ones of relationship: Spin Up or Down?  Need an external field to define up and down.  Intrinsic mass?  Needs Higgs field to interact with. Charge?  Wouldn't know you have it if I didn't have another one to respond to it...

I find myself returning to that classic Carl Sagan saying that gives us all a reason to exist: "We are a way for the Universe to know itself."  Deeper every time I think about it, Carl.

Now, What is that frequency, Kenneth?

Illusions of Fluency

Although it's well known phenomenon (thinking you understand something better than you actually do), this crazy experiment in education during the pandemic is really driving the "Illusion of Fluency" issue home for me.

All this remote and hybrid learning has led to less testing.  

Sure, students are being exposed to the material and given ample opportunity to practice problem solving, ask questions, etc.  They are even doing virtual labs.  In fact, much of the material is even more accessible this year because teachers are so focused on presentation and accessibility and scaffolding since they can't rely on the usual classroom dynamic to provide opportunities to respond spontaneously. (Okay, maybe the virtual labs aren't as good as the real thing, but you'd be surprised!).  Less testing has led to a greater ability for students to fool themselves into thinking they understand something.  With unlimited time and lots of resources and ample opportunity to redo problems until you experience success, you can really feel like you are getting it.  However, there's nothing like drawing a mental blank during a quiz or test to let you know you really aren't quite there yet.  Also, the motivation to study and the intensity of the reviewing really does need a performance event at the end of the day.  So few of us are intrinsically motivated in the same way that an external judging can provide.

I've said it before (here and here), but now I say it with evidence of the contrapositive: testing is important in learning.