I Hate School
1. One reason why I hate the current education system is because it often punishes with no reason.
People without external support (or people whose supposed support – teachers, parents, classmates are even abusive) may get punished by bad grades or being expelled for something that they actually wanted and tried to do right with their whole heart.
I think teachers should be mindful that one instruction that may look to be the same for all pupils is actually perceived quite differently by each of them, and is of different difficulty for each of them depending on their capacity, background and interests and environment.
This is why it was deemed impolite to keep asking people around you for small favors that don’t mean much to you, from the beginning of time in our culture already. It is assumed that the school system is not subject to this, but i want to argue it is.
Something that seems small to one person may actually cause a big hassle to another. This is why many cultures evolve into praising behavior that is helping, and frowning upon behavior that is needy.
2. Let me close this by a story i heard recently, maybe some readers may link to the correct story; i will tell it as i remember it.
A monkey one day decides to organize a race. All animals are invited, and there is a big price to be gotten by the winner, for a small fee to enter the race. The rules will be known in time, and will be the same for everyone.
Animals from far and near gather for the race – hippos, horses, dogs, snakes..
Then the rules are announced: “The one who shall climb the tree the fastest will be the winner”.
War and Peace and Health and Disease
Us people, we like to have enemies. Don’t believe me? Check any news. Look at any movie. Play nearly any game. While many of them are not of the “slash around with a sword type”, surely you can find an enemy to your liking.
Well, it may be that you are at peace with the world – but still, shouldn’t we at least get rid of that corrupted politician? He is just destructive to society.
As society, we function way more cohesive when we have common enemies, and politicians love to offer people of other nations, colors, hairstyles, whatever, as enemies.
Enemies help define us, and make us stop flowing in that kind of uncertainty that we would find ourselves in in circumstances of perfect peace.
Most nations have a defense and a healthcare budget. They are usually paying for different things though.
A sensible defense minister would probably arrange the funds to target the enemy that is the biggest threat to the life of its citizens. For us living in developed world, this enemy has a name, and it is called vascular disease.
Wait, what?
War and disease are considered totally unrelated in our culture. Both take lives and in both we need to understand the enemy. We should take untreatable disease with the same serious consideration as a threat of a strong nation. We research and make weapons. Then charge and kill.
If the rationale that enemies that require applications of guns require their own budget, we could as well have huge, separate budgets for enemies requiring statins, the enemy requiring chemotherapy etc.
For the one who kills the most – disease, not war, we need to step together, not just leave it to the individual. If another nations army killed your neighbor but not you, wouldn’t you still be outraged? When disease kills someone, why do we prefer so much to ignore it?
It would be outrageous to just let someone kill another person. Whole communities have risen up through history for such unfair cases. In the case of a rare disease, the world is silent. The people and their families silently weep, while nothing some rare random people are making slow strides to some resolution.
Teams
I was with a bunch of idiots again, or so it seemed. The project we were about to do would again be a contest about whether our mind’s will get numbed more then the ones of our audience, out of sheer, thick, suffocating, boredom. We heard it before, we were going to tell it again, and they are going to hear it again. None of us even wanted to be there. It was as fun as death.
Then i threw my ideas in. I was stunned. Not about what i said (it was just a hair-width away in terms of boredom, still a bit better, as i thought at the time), but what people started coming up with in reply. The whole thing started to become interesting and engaging.
All of a sudden, there was a flood of ideas that i found not boring, but just amazing.
What did just happen? Was it me that did something?
The Paradox
We should all try to devalue the work we are doing and make more valuable the work we do.
Everything can be improved, customized, made easier to achieve.
The Challenge
1. When young, we like to prove ourselves to the world. It is nearly irrelevant who the person we prove ourselves to is.
‘Look mommy what i did.’ ‘ Wow, you are awesome indeed.’
Then we get to know our first friends, and the number of people in our social circles increases. At this point we start to evolve to thinking that hey, those guys are actually full of shit, they have no authority to judge me! These people don’t know what they are talking about, i’m not going to associate with them.
Our environment is putting us through a kind of test – are you good enough? Sometimes, we succeed, sometimes we fail; often, we dismiss the system. It is irrelevant what someone who doesn’t really know anything about a topic thinks about your knowledge of it.
There are valid reasons to consider some examinations invalid. It is reasonable, that through life more and more things turn out relative and shallow, especially when we are looking intentionally into such things. But never to expose ourselves to authority we consider valid is some kind of cowardice really. It is something that causes our knowledge and vitality to regress.
The more the trivial things we dismiss, the happier we are. At least until we stop pushing ourselves at things that actually meant something to us. At this point, instead of life becoming richer, it looses some of its vibrancy.
This is a problem common with many old people. It prevents people to look out of the box and causes them to become in a way ‘rusty at life’.
We all know people that seem old even when their age is not even that old. Even if magically they turned young-looking suddenly, they would still have that grumpy old feel to them.
We also know some people whose bodies and id’s clearly show their age , but retain this kinda youth, vitality. Often, these people work into their old age, and keep up to date – with people around them wondering – what in the world is pushing them?
This is a consequence of a lifetime of careful weighting of personal priorities against one another. Such people know why they are doing what they are, even if the reason only makes sense to them. They haven’t given up when they were afraid or obstacles arose, because they knew that whatever actually happens, they are working at things that matter to them.
This is as opposed to people who found themselves in the wrong place, and tried to get out using someone else’s dream. We all know such dreams, they are advertisements, whether they are a product of a company wanting to sell you something (e.g. having a Yacht) or are subtle pressures of society (e.g. being generous). Such people tend to give up on life – ‘It is always going to be like this, why bother’, and stay dormant in a state of semi-contentment, always with the lingering feeling of something not being enough. After they get old, society gives them this excuse, and they take it with delight – “I can’t do anything anymore, i’m too old”.
They are bored, but will not do things. They are sick of their environment, but they will not change it. They can’t.
2. This is a point where many people get thrown out of balance. It is easy to get swayed by opinions and advertisements.
People buy things they don’t need, with money they don’t have, to impress people they don’t like.
Clive Hamilton
There is a balance between a trivial busy life and paralysis in fear of failure. Where are you at?
Is Wikipedia the Best We’ve Got?
1. Knowing the way we learn has become more important. We no longer live in a world where we would spend more time trying to acquire the information (we, exceedingly, no longer need to go to expensive schools, be born in or travel to a certain (social) place etc.) then we take to understand it (that is, work ourselves through the material).
2. When i went to grade school, the way people learn wasn’t discussed. The assumption was – we give you access to the information, you will deal with it. But now, with internet, we all have access to the information. So the question should be – how do we efficiently present it, making the best use of the medium (this now being a computer with ever-advancing software)
3. We tend to still think in terms of traditional media – we were thought what a pencil can do; but few know how to actually use the advanced tools a computer brings. Sometimes we use the ‘fake’ markers, brushes, animation. But few can actually present something well in an interactive form – something peculiar to the medium.
It is like we did not develop the ‘fine motor skills’ to use the computer. We fiddle with software like young kids do with pencils, we are unsure what to do with the new tools. We write text, we stuff the gadgets in things resembling pencil cases. We look at whether their cover glitters or doesn’t, or looks like it has been blessed by the latest (now geeky) celebrity. We show our friends how our tools – computers, smartphones, look on the outside, never having a real clue about what they do. It is a good thing that the tool is similar enough to our old one that we do not try to eat it, like small children would try to do! Often we never realize that the new functionality we think it has, was really possible in our old one too. We buy them, ‘sharpen’ them, lug them around in bags for awhile, and throw them away when our friends no longer seem impressed by them.
This time, there will be no grown up teacher telling us what to do, and no parent making sure we attend and listen – but still we should all take some time and learn to use the tools we got as best as we can. The computer will always be a bad pencil. We should learn to use it as its own tool, not as an emulator.
4. How do i present what i know if i don’t know how people learn? The science is getting there, but i have this impression that this issue is most often showed off as of inferior importance, mostly of the ‘grade school’ assumption that is still made by the majority of people.
5. Literacy of today is not the literacy of yesterday. A program has substituted the word. We cannot read if we cannot use software, nor can we really write if we cannot program. Today’s new illiterate are tolerated, but this is only so because they are the majority. It is something we, as people and as a society, will have to overcome. How will we teach the use of the new medium? How long will we postpone and reserve it for the ‘blessed’? I wonder, how long the majority will have to ‘work in the fields’, to gain the time (as money is no longer an issue much) for an education?
Truth
There always seems to be this ignored, small, trivial problem, that later brings down the whole system (of belief, knowledge). Whether on a personal level or on the level of society.
Images of a Presentation
The age of irrelevant clip-art and silly music in slide shows seems to be gone for good. Still quite common today are images that are semi-relevant to what is being presented. Pictures that represent the message of the title are easily visualized (and as of today, stolen of the internet from someone).
I wonder though, if this practice is any better from the clip-art practice of the past. That which the title is about is often easily imagined by the audience. Quality presentations, no matter how complex, are on the other hand by nature minimalistic. That is, adding the unnecessary distracts from the important.
A stolen image that is too general may fit into the presentation and the message you are trying to convey. It hides in it, and if someone quickly glances over the presentation, it may seem better. But for the sake of the transmission of the information, it is destructive. A picture is rarely inert, and if it is for you, it is probably not for someone else.
We understand our world in the way of understanding concepts. For example, we may imagine a “plant” as a rose, with a cut off stem, having a nice fragrance etc. This is different for everybody – every person has their own visualizations and thoughts that code for this concept. A “plant” means something different to everybody, since our bodies and experience differ. Still, we communicate by means of the idea that a “plant” means the same thing to me as it does to you. This assumption is necessary for our communication to be considered meaningful in the first place.
Now with pictures, the thing is that they tend to have more emotional content then do words. You may add a picture of a rose when talking about plants – and it is likely that people will feel a sense of love, content, happiness as an association and means of understanding of what they see. Now note, what if the message you were trying to convey was how plants get periodically eaten up by pests? The positive association of the rose will be in direct contradiction with the negative association of the pest. Already has your message become less effective, and as such more easily forgotten.
Pictures also tend to be laden with hidden information. Proof of this is that no matter how long you look at a picture, it is likely you will not know all that was represented, when later asked about it. This information, that you may not even notice, is an invitation for your audience to start daydreaming. Picture filled magazines are often used by artists to improve their creativity, since they are a source of emotion and association. When you are trying to explain a complex physics concepts to your audience however, fostering the creativity of your audience about what they may do with their friend when they leave, is not your intention. Nowadays, creativity is praised as once knowledge was, it is the best thing “education can offer”.
Isn’t it a good thing if i am making people more creative, some would say? You should understand that creativity and trying to concentrate on something are often in conflict. You should also know that boredom has actually been said by some to be similar in its nature as creativity – that is, boredom is in a way creativity gone wrong. You don’t feel bored if you don’t mind not doing anything. It is when you “want to do something (fun)” – do you see how the positive feeling conveying this is “feeling creative” and the negative, which is about the same expression, is “feeling bored”?
Not understanding what pictures do is the source of confusion for many a teacher. Didn’t i tell them twice? An audience that is daydreaming seems alert – which may be worse than some other unwanted behaviour. If they chatted, you would have done something about it. But now you are thinking your presentation was good, even though people may not have heard a word of it. Even worse, they may have liked it, since it did invoke in them positive associations. This way, one may forever think their presentations are ok, when in actuality they are worse than if your audience were screaming about it in horror. They tend not to be corrected.
Thus, give your audience a visualization of what you know is hard to imagine. And keep to what is necessary.
Sheer Lazyness
Science
The most noble work is that that you will never do again.
Art
The most noble work is that that is never finished. Even after it is finished, people who see it should add to it by their own contemplation and interpretation.
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I think there is too much art in science today.
zacione 