Where is Two?

Some of you have noticed that Two's Facebook page is currently down. Not to worry - this is temporary. It's a requirement for something she's doing for her school.

Auto didacticism (or not)

This word pops up every now and again but seldom enough that I always have to stop and remind myself that it means self-education.

But what does self-education mean? Is it Leonardo Da Vinci or Copernicus exploring beyond the known to find new paths in pursuit of truth? Is it Clara Barton redefining nursing practice by designing new protocols based simply on observation, imagination and a great deal of practicality?

Lincoln was said to be largely self-taught, at least in his youth.

I frequently wonder the extent to which I am an autodidact. I’ve received a lot of education through the good offices of some amazing (and a few less-than-amazing) folks who dedicated their professional lives to bringing to me and others new information, ways of knowing, ways of thinking. But in a very real sense, I defined my own winding, tortuous path to becoming ‘educated.’

Does this make me an autodidact? And does it matter if I am?

A few years ago, I might have said it didn’t matter much. But now, I’m not so sure.

The sheer weight and volume of information that comes our way, through myriad channels and from sources innumerable, makes the construction of a curricular approach to learning somewhat inadequate, don’t you think? How do we understand a pedagogical approach that is so seemingly random in terms of input.

Kahn and Brainerd and others are daily encouraging us to revisit our concepts of how we seek out knowledge and make it our own. But while Kahn et al can put topics uncountable at our fingertips, what we grasp is more than ever up to each of us to decide for ourselves.

I just led a two day learning experience in which I’m pretty sure I learned more than any of the other participants. Oh sure, the ‘students’ learned how to use the software and the managers learned how to make use of the information that will aggregate as they use this system moving forward. But I learned about learning and about not assuming that just because I’m the putative teacher, I’m not also one of the students.  

It seems to me that self-teaching is going to emerge as a critical undertaking for any thinking person. When a few strokes of a keyboard can bring almost any topic within reach, how do we decide when to reach out and grab and when to take a pass?

I’ve worked on a couple of international teams tasked with constructing bodies of knowledge around particular subject matter areas and I can tell you that while such a team must come to consensus, it will almost never reach unanimity. And I think that’s a good and necessary condition. Unanimity on most topics feels too squeamishly close to group think, which is of course the opposite of anything resembling what I would term learning.

On our kitchen counter is the diploma for a degree I recently completed. I’m a bona fide Magna Cum Laude, doncha know. But does that mean I’ve learning anything? I completed concentrations in three different disciplines, wrote and defended a ninety-three page capstone thesis. I did a lot of thinking and reflecting and considering.

But have I learned anything? Anything of real value?

I hope so. But still, I wonder.

When noticing takes a bad turn

Those of you who have been following this string for awhile know that one of my favorite activities is noticing. I notice when I’m on trips, when I’m walking around, when I’m talking to people or watching strangers talk.

I don’t know where I’d be if not for my penchant for noticing. Certainly, it would have been difficult to have written many of the posts you’ve seen here. I believe that most of what people call artistic imagination is closely tied to simply noticing.

I love noticing. So it may come as at least a mild surprise that I’m bothered by noticing today and for the foreseeable future. Of course, it’s not my noticing that worries me.

Mary is at home recovering from rotator cuff surgery and her activities – at least those of an active physical nature – are constrained for the next six weeks or so. But you see, me beloved is not given to sitting around twiddling her thumbs. The more sedentary she’s forced to be, the more her mind works.

And therein lies the rub, from my point of view.

You see, Mary is no slouch at noticing. And I expect she’ll do a lot of it in the next few weeks. But she won’t be noticing glacial peaks or interesting people or much of anything outside our property. No-o-o-o… Mary will be noticing things around the homestead.

You see where this is going, right?

She’ll notice things that need to be fixed. Walls that need to be painted, lamps that blink, loose doorknobs. Mary will pick up on the need for new wallpaper and floor covering, the as-yet-unrefinished hardwood on the main level, a patio in need of pressure washing and lawns in need of pre-rainy season treatment.

The dog house needs painting and some finish carpentry and there are several pickup loads worth of detritus awaiting runs to the dump. One tree needs pruning and another removal. I should really put an extra coat of paint on the front railing, and the gutters probably need some scooping. And all of these things fall within easy visual range of my spouse.

There is nothing – NO THING – more potentially damaging to my future status as a relaxed husband than a Mary with time to notice and ponder.

It’s going to be a very long six weeks.

More about heroes

I’ve been reading Anton Myrer’s Once An Eagle . I loved The Last Convertible and I thought I’d read this one years ago but apparently not. Anyway, it follows U.S. military and social history of the twentieth century through the eyes of an Army officer.

Myrer was a fine writer and a great storyteller.  More than that, he clearly gave a lot of thought to the whole idea of human conflict. Since we’re currently engaged in a major conflict of what I consider questionable legitimacy, reading this book has given rise to a welter of thoughts and feelings.

One of the central themes of this book is the nature of heroism. It’s a subject we could spend hours discussing and never come close to consensus as to what it means. Heroism, that is.

 The word is overworked of late. Professional athletes are heroes. People who do good works are heroes. Folks whose approach to life we admire are heroes. It seems that heroes may be found in all walks of life, seemingly everywhere we look. And that bothers me.

A hero, for me, is a person who has done something heroic. Beyond the pale goodness displayed at some significant risk to self.

Salman Khan is a brilliant guy and a top notch visionary. It’s likely the Khan Academy will lead the charge in re-forming our collective educational enterprise and just might finally – FINALLY – make stellar educational opportunities accessible to everyone. I’m working with a group applying his principles to adult learning and his simple but brilliant reconsideration of pedagogical approaches is changing my world for the better. But is he a hero? Hmm, maybe not.  I’d give anything to have dinner with Khan and I’m fascinated by and beholden to his vision but that doesn’t make him a hero.

Malala Yousafzai was shot by the Taliban for daring to go to school and then encouraging other girls to do the same. Recovered from her head wound, she is back in school and even more vocal than ever about the importance of access to education for girls. Now, Malala - she’s definitely a hero.

We refer to our uniformed military as heroes whether or not the individual in question has ever done anything heroic. The folks who wear their country’s uniform deserve our appreciation and respect. And some of them are indeed heroic. But still…

When we use too wide a brush in painting our heroes, we cheapen the term. And I think it’s a term that deserves to be preserved in its original meaning and import.

Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu was fascinated from an early age with the lives of missionaries. She gave her life to the “poorest of the poor,” exposing herself and her sister nuns to poverty, malnutrition and truly horrible diseases. The world came to know her as Mother Teresa of Calcutta. For me, she defines the term ‘hero.’

Wayne Morse and Ernest Gruening opposed passage of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and they were widely censured for being the sole standouts against sending our troops into a conflict in which we had no legitimate interest except in the minds of Domino Theory adherents.  58,000 American deaths later, they were proven right. They were heroes.

 Gerald Ford was one of my heroes. He had to know that in pardoning Nixon he was signing his own political death warrant. And that pardon was necessary if the country was to start to move on from the toxic political climate that Nixon and his evil crones created. Ford didn’t do it for Nixon, he did it for all of us. And it cost him dearly.

Elie Wiesel – at a time when so many acted as bystanders to the holocaust – devoted his life to explicating the nature and ever ready presence of evil among us. While others assigned the blame entirely to the evils and excesses of the Nazis, Wiesel correctly and courageously pointed the finger at those who knew or should have known of the mounting horror and did nothing.  He’s one of my heroes.

There are folks out there, or at least I hope there are, who will help us find a way to resolve conflict without killing people and blowing things up. It’s the only way the human race will survive.

Cruising at altitude

Yesterday, Mary and I spent about twelve hours driving 360 miles through the Colorado Rockies with Pat and Patty, all above 5,000 feet and maybe two thirds above 8,000, topping out at 14,000 and change. The day before, we took the cog railway to the top of Pike’s Peak (14,000-plus) and then today, we flew home (commercial airliners are pressurized to the equivalent of about 8,000 feet).

This evening, I feel like I’m in a permanent yawn.  And I’m as tired as I can recall having been. Turns out, altitude does not become me.

That’s okay. Mary and I had a fantastic time visiting with Pat and Patty and their friends.

Don’t get me wrong - I couldn’t live in a mile-high location. I’m too fond of oxygen. But I definitely understand why people would go through acclimating themselves to the rarified atmosphere in order to be able to live where they do.

We saw bighorn sheep and elk and deer and marmots up close. Rock formations that could only be formed by the patient hand of erosion. We witnessed virga and pouring rain, dark gray clouds and blue skies within an hour of each other. Babbling brooks and roaring rapids and dry gulches abounded.

We travelled through high tundra and conifer forests. Granite canyons and high plains. And saw firsthand the ravages of fires and bark beetles and time.

We saw where Katharine Lee Bates was inspired to write the lyric to America The Beautiful and understood why.  

Mary and I are unlikely ever to have the scratch to afford whirlwind tours of Europe or cruises to the Pacific islands. Doesn’t matter. There are some truly wondrous things to see right here at home.

Exploring the Rockies

Turns out it’s a sight easier to explore the Rocky Mountains now than it must have been in the 1850s.  

We’re in our last day with Pat and Patty in Colorado before flying back home for Mary’s rotator cuff surgery. Yesterday we took the cog railway to the top of Pike’s Peak and it was truly a lovely day. Today we’ll do a Rockies loop and visit with Mary’s old work buddy in Leadville.

We’ve also done a nice drive up the Poudre River drainage which has been one of my favorite scenic drives since I first did it with Pat years ago.

We have cameras and binoculars and bottles of water. A Garmin gps has replaced hand-drawn maps. Nary a pack mule nor a Sharps rifle to be seen.  Donuts and muffins have replaced jerky and beans in our travel  larder.

Both in the car and on the railway, internal combustion engines have replaced leg power and the sweat on my brow is due solely to the heat of the day. Speaking of the heat of the day, we’re only exposed to it when we step out of the rental car to get a closer look.

We have it a lot easier than those earlier touristas.

Little girls and wishes

When One was in about second or third grade, her grandmother – my Mom - sent her and her sister  Disney princess costumes for Halloween. They were orders of magnitude grander and more expensive than anything we could have afforded at that point and One decided she wanted to wear hers for her class costume party.

Being a good Dad and a total pushover, I agreed to deliver the Belle costume to One at Stevenson Elementary at the appropriate time.  Having signed in at the front office, I was walking toward the classroom costume in hand when two little girls of approximately pretend-Belle age came around the corner and stopped dead in their tracks at the sight of the costume of their dreams.

Seeing the longing on their little faces, I quickly ran through my options:

·         Instantly produce two more Belle costumes;

·         Work out a sharing arrangement that allowed each of them to Trick or Treat in their own neighborhoods, with me running back and forth with the costume;

·         Skulk off toward my daughter’s classroom;

·         Die.

I may have told you the story to this point before. What I haven’t told you is that at odd moments, such as when Two is about to leave for another several months at school on the other side of the continent, I find myself wondering about those two little girls. My little girl got to be Belle that day and now she works at the magical place they all dreamed of back when.

How did things turn out for those would be Belles from Stevenson? I hope well. I hope they still pretend and that one day they’ll be able to provide the perfect costume for their own little girls.

Every little girl deserves to be Belle just once in her life.

A week in the country

I was in Southeast Idaho this week, leading workshops with a good friend of mine for some of the best people in the world. It was a great week both professionally and personally.

I always enjoy the area around Blackfoot and Idaho Falls. Probably not my cup of tea as a place to retire, but a lovely place to visit.

We finished the last day’s workshop about 3:00pm and decided to go check out Yellowstone Bear World before dinner. You drive through – with your windows UP – and gawk at bears and deer and woodchucks and birds and wolves and a moose… You get the idea. Admittedly cliché touristy but it was fun so don’t judge me.

The best part was the petting zoo. The two month fawn fawned over me.

Then, this morning as my plane waited its turn at the runway, I happened to glance out the windows to either side. On the left, no more than a hundred, sixty or so yards away a herd of cows was grazing, udderly (couldn’t hep masef) unconcerned at the jet engines spooling up so close to them. Maybe four hundred yards to the right a classic Midwest Protestant church steeple, improbably pointy and impossibly white, poked up through the trees.

So, just before being propelled to four hundred miles per hour, I got this little dose of country.

Cool trip.

Age and foibles

Last night, I did something truly dumb and it was only by an incredible stroke of dumb luck and fortuitous timing that it didn’t turn into an honest-to-goodness disaster. (And before you ask, no, I’m not about to tell you what dumb thing I did – it’s too embarrassing.)

The thing is, my faux pas had to do with mental failures. Failure to notice and failure to recall and failure to predict. Failure of situational awareness.

And that scares me.

Maybe it should and maybe it shouldn’t but the simple fact is that at age thirty this would have been a woops, sorry about that. At sixty, it’s more of a “is this how it begins?” And therein lays the genesis of my discomfort.

I’ve never been an athlete or developed any particular physical skills but I’ve always been able to rely on my brain. My work is centered there, as are most of my leisure activities. Noticing and recalling and situational awareness have always been my strong suits, my go-to abilities. So when I fail to notice and correct a simple but potentially catastrophic situation, it sets me reeling.

I’ll provide a more entertaining post soon, I promise. But for the moment, I’m sort of tied up with spinal shivers.