The Person I Saw From Afar
I have seen a person from afar. Or rather didn’t ‘see’, as it often is these days.
All these great leaders of nations you see on TV – you will never see her be.
She is in the realm of magic, but since magic went out of fashion, she exists in no realm.
I have seen a person from afar. Or was she near? It’s hard to tell these days.
All the songs that sing of beautiful things, they didn’t sing of her.
Once there were ten millionaires – inexpensively, she gave something to expensive for money to buy.
I have seen a person from afar – when people spoke of technology, science and new things – their minds were to small to gasp her into view.
A person who can’t be seen.
A person who can’t be heard.
Would you believe me when I told you I once saw a person from afar?
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?
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.
Studying is Good, Studying Sucks
I.
“Boredom is excess attention with insufficient intention.”
(McLeod, 2001)
Most of today’s education is indoctrination: we need to promote languange, we need to promote literacy, we need to promote…
They’re good, mkay.
What remains unsaid is that the world’s knowledge is a reply to someone else’s problem. Mostly, we don’t even know what it was that the person was asking. If we do, we usually don’t really have that problem.
With this said, we learn about those people (since they made “important” contributions): their life, hobbies, year born and died; a rich plethora of irrelavant facts to help us join into the worship of someone else’s idol.
“My child just can’t concentrate on his studies.”
random ADHD mum
His concentration is alive and well. The problem lies in yours. Nevermind, that pill has less abuse potential than cocaine and amphetamine. As long as he gets into that School, he will be fine (i.e. in debt; enslaved). His affliction is real (i.e. like diabetes) after all.
So he can learn about important things.
“Important
1. Strongly affecting the course of events or the nature of things; significant: an important message that must get through; close friends who are important to me.”
TheFreeDictionary
How is what doesn’t affect me important to me?
This is ridiculous. When do we stop montillating the Traxoline?
“Better something then nothing”
our culture
Really, a room full of clutter is just as bad as an empty room, lets be honest.
II.
I’m sitting here, staring into space – why wont anybody hire me? But then again, if i won’t hire myself why would anybody else? 14 years of education, and i’m as unemployable as ever. I’m unemployable because i lack knowledge about how to do things. In other words, i’m uneducated.
III.
There are people out on the street fighting the police again. They want jobs and money. But the people they think can give them jobs are getting fired tomorrow themselves. They are all angry. I wonder why?
Leaders, Supply, Demand
It is unlikely that you should ever become rich without opening at least some resemblance of your own company at one time or or another.
Working for someone will nearly always mean you will do tasks the other person does not think worthy of his time to do, and as such needing to pay the worker less then what the employer gets payed.
No matter how ridiculous and low-education the work of what the person above you does, in our world the supply (employers) are not as many as those who want to be employed by them (demand); thus, the work of the employer will most often be worth more as the work of the worker.
–
When a government takes a lot, or makes a lot of demands on employers (most of rich people are actually in the category) – it is even less likely that the average, low-wage person should start their own company. This is because loosing money when you don’t have it is much worse then loosing the money you don’t mind that much about. Thus at the same risk of succession of a new enterprise, the more that is taken from the rich man, the more likely it is to keep the poor man in his situation.
Less employers means less job options for the employed, making for a vicious cycle of poverty for many people, forcing people to work and not be able to go to another place should the situation become adverse. Thus, high taxes are actually a load put on the worker to carry, regardless on who is taxed on paper.
Sometimes, employers will pay a good amount of money to the worker. This is by no means impossible. But it will often happen, that something will go wrong, and a person in the company will be fired; and you should keep a job you like, but you should also keep this understanding in mind.
Occasionally, with such a thing happening, the employer becomes the enemy. “All they are after is money” is often heard, behind it a person devastated by what just happened.
Personally, i have had a hard time understanding this – would you base your livelihood on a job that is most likely to take money from you, instead of earning you money to buy the groceries? Would you work if you knew you would be payed less than you thought your time deserved? The absolute amount doesn’t matter. Either it feels enough or it doesn’t.
The employers thinking is the same.
Sheep may put blame about their situation on the shepherd. You are men (or women), you have the power to be both the leader of the led.
–
Partly, i blame today’s lame education systems. Not following is punished since childhood. By the amount of children that break the rules, you may see that leadership is actually as natural to a man as is being a follower. In a world of physical labor, you want the person to follow the leader (teacher); and let the most persistent people (who still refuse to follow) lead in the future. This would be in a world that requires a lot of work, and little thinking.
The problem is, in this system, the amount of people not wanting to follow is considered too high to such a degree, that it is often even considered acceptable to ridicule the person into submission, even if it means the person will completely give up any productivity because of it – possibly ending in drugs, or even suicide. The absurdity of this is in that in the real world, there is actually a lack of people who are willing to lead and risk for a better future.
It should be understood that most education systems still in use in the world today, are designed to produce large amounts of workers and a small percentage of leaders. The sad thing is, many people take this as the ultimate reality – some people are smart, others work for them. This is ludicrous.
Just looking at the curriculum and compare it to what sells in the real world. The education you got in elementary or high school is random and often worthless, so do not base the value of yourself as a person on it.
In the real world, everyone may open up their own enterprise. How good you were in school is completely independent of that (apart of the perception of people that was just described).
zacione 