Reluctant Learners

I once heard a senior educator say, "You can teach all you like, but if the student hasn't learnt, you haven't really taught."

The problem I have with this is that it is akin to saying, "You can hit the wall all you like, but if the wall hasn't crumbled, you haven't really hit it."

There should always be some degree of collaboration involved. The student has a duty to try to learn. It is not a scenario in which the teacher is an entertainer to be appraised by the skeptical crowd at 'Education Idol' or some such — it is one in which the teacher is a conductor (at the very least) expecting some degree of compliance from an orchestra.

There are many other metaphors that will serves us well, but the 'go ahead, impress me, and if I haven't learnt — it's because you haven't taught' concept is rubbish.

Which brings me to the title of this post. The word 'reluctant' is not a passive one; the Latin reluctari means 'to struggle against'. A reluctant learner, like some I have encountered, is not a passive lump, but one who struggles against the teacher and the teaching process.

Nowadays, that unteachability is seen as a sign of 'independent thinking' and indeed seems to be considered a virtue. And so, we have reluctant teachers — teachers who must struggle against such silly ideas as accepting such thinking without critical evaluation.

The One Best System Syndrome

The One Best System is the title of David Tyack's classic examination (haha) of the 'History of American Urban Education'. In it he shows how large cities like Chicago constructed and executed their theories of a 'best system of education' and what the consequences were.

As more big cities elbow and punch (always above their weight, it seems) their way to global prominence, more rubbish about education policy (as opposed to education) begins to consume news cycles. You know that education can only suffer when we begin to ignore the cognitive neuroscience of 2010 while privileging the sociology of the 1960s and the politics of the 1980s — and ignoring the history of the last 200 years.

Children are malleable, even if the imago stage is not. Adults always fret about the pressures on children. I can tell you that young people, given a range of tasks of variable challenge in the classroom, and a range of commensurate rewards and consequences (both tangible and less so), will always rise to the challenge. What balks their personal growth is the weight of parental and societal expectation — the pressure of the social, cultural and economic 'reality' crafted for them by the parents who are complaining about that same pressure.

Only the enlightened parents with great courage and enviable reasoning powers escape the trap. They do this through a mixture of building tough endoskeletal support (e.g. 'spine', values) or by changing the environment (e.g. homeschooling, emigration). I prefer the 'spine' option because that is what differentiates vertebrates from invertebrates.

The highest form of education is the kind that combines planning (where the individual does not have the capacity) with personal interest and available breadth. A young person in a house with a large library in a nature reserve, with internet access only unlocked when specific but complex tasks are achieved, and some minimal guidance on tap, will likely prosper.

You're dreaming, is what most people will mutter. Well, no. This is what a school is, with the added benefit of live social networking and many guides (although, it must be said, not all are good at guidance). This is what a home can be. It is the reason why home-schooling can work for some. Build endoskeleton, and you can hook up muscle. The heavier the skeleton, the more the muscle.

But don't use politics and sociology and economics as the driving forces. These lead to 'One Best System Syndrome', the quest to systematize the life out of education, even while the injured politicians and sociologists and economists claim they are saving it.

Yearly

Looking back on the year just past, I can now see that the learning experiences I suffered through have made me rethink education. It is becoming more and more true that direct intervention appears to jump-start learning, but habituation is a powerful force and conditioning polishes the responses and reflexes. Learning occurs best after severe trauma, while the brain (if we thought of it as self-aware) would be desperately re-organizing its networks for optimality.

In other words, throw all the blocks into the air, and while they are falling, catch and reassemble. The people who can do this to themselves most quickly and usefully will win the education sweepstakes. If you can indeed think of several impossible things before breakfast and then have dinner at the restaurant at the end of the universe, you have indeed got it made.

Whither then assessment and evaluation? Last year, some very bright people concluded that increasingly detailed fMRI scans would allow us to decide very clearly whether someone had learnt something or not. Who knows? In a few years' time, maybe examinations for certain simple or easily-defined tasks will consist of a 30-second brain scan.

In fact, perhaps an annual medical exam would tell us what our individual rankings should be. Haha!

Dictionary, Lexicon, Encyclopaedia

Sometimes, I am asked on what authority it is that I give definitions for terms. Why should my definition of 'science', or 'humanities', or 'education' (etc., etc.) be used instead of that found in the venerable Oxford or Merriam-Webster or whatever dictionary tome is the flavour of the decade?

The answer is a simple one.

A dictionary is a compilation of diction — that is, the uses to which words have been put. Most dictionaries are alphabetized lexicons — that is, they are lists of words in alphabetical order, with notes on their usual meaning and usage attached.

Some are encyclopaedic, which is to say they are meant to be both descriptive and prescriptive — they provide enkyklios paideia, as the Greeks would put it, an 'all-encompassing education' (literally, 'a (full) circle of child-rearing').

All definitions are provided by lexicographers who examine the typical diction (in the sense of usage) of a given word and from this describe the uses to which it is put. They do not tell you that you must use a word that way; they only tell you what it would probably mean if you used it in a given context. You are at liberty to essay a new meaning, and if that becomes a common usage, the next generation of lexicographers may include your meaning in a dictionary.

What I do is simple. I define words the way I use them, while keeping an eye on their pedigree and the uses to which other people put them. When I define a word, it is usually in historical and functional context, for the purpose of some practical use (for example, writing an essay on a given topic). Anybody can do this, but the test of validity is whether the reader will accept the word as you use it.

So I suggest this: anyone who reads this blog and disagrees with any definition I give should educate me more fully by counter-defining or re-defining the term. You should explain the amendment you wish to make, and I will certainly agree with you if it is a reasonable one that makes the definition more useful in its context of use.

I don't mean that sarcastically, ironically, or in any other perverse sense. I'm being honest here. The point about teaching is trying to nurture better outcomes, and you can't get better outcomes if you refuse to improve your word-hoard, stock-in-trade, or other parts of your armamentarium. So, teach me, and I will learn. Thanks!

Learning

The problem with learning these days is that there is insufficient antagonism. Each student I meet seems to be the protagonist of a private drama. We have pussyfooted around so much that it is hard to move them away from their solipsistic lotus-dreams. In some cases, they seem less like lotus-dreams, though, than bad trips.

Whatever it is, I think more students would do better if they had constant rigorous antagonists. I suppose that a teacher could do the job, but only if that teacher were consistent, kind, and genuinely interested in being a creative and productive antagonist.

Why do I think so? I think that just as a drama with an unopposed protagonist is flat, or even one-dimensional, so too are the learning lives of students without someone to challenge them where it is needed and warranted. In order for constructs of depth to be created, somebody has to create the orthogonal and shift these self-involved people out of their ruts.

The problem is not confined to this generation; we were like that too. The difference is that now the rut-digging apparatus is more complex, ubiquitous, attractive. The whole 'cheap information network' idea has made people contributors and digesters of facts and information-bites, but not of knowledge and theory.

Or so I think.

Endings and Beginnings

This is the end of the year of the Golden Tiger, a year of financial and social upheaval, according to traditional beliefs. It also heralds the beginning of the year of the Golden Hare, a year of plenty, and of social comfort. Within months, the Citadel will see a new lord and the High King will no longer have to fill the lands with war and rumours of war. The former is certain, the latter is wishful thinking.

For me, personally, the year of the Golden Tiger brought nothing but sought-for upheavals. It has ended with me realising how stress I have been under and how much faith I have unknowingly been using. It has left me mulling over the strangeness (in a fundamental sense) of God, and yet how difficult it is to become truly estranged from Him. Once a son, always a son, as they say.

I have renewed old friendships in startling ways. Old wyverns still carry their stingers, and old venom is more powerful than young. The truth of the wyvern's venom is that it is not the evil of gossip and rumour, nor the scorpion's backbiting sting; rather, the wyvern's venom is an alchemical catalyst. It forces change: "Change or die!" is its motto.

But why is that the case? It is by change that the best is yet to be. As an older sage once put it, "Old things are passed away; behold, the new has come." All things that one wishes for can only come if present circumstances change.

Every Egypt will one day have a new Pharaoh; if the new one has forgotten Joseph, then Israel mourns. But it the new Pharaoh makes Egypt not the ancient tyranny of the past, then Egypt become something new, not-Egypt in a sense.

As a child of two calendars, I get to see the grace and glory of God twice in the special way that a calendar offers. A year ends, a year begins; in one year and out the other. But something always happens in between, and as I grow older, I have learnt that each year means opportunities offered to be wiser.

Thanks be to God.

Underground

Today was a good day in the bowels of the Citadel of Wyverns, at the Crescent of the Dogs. Much learning occurred, with no interruptions except for food and coffee. This is how learning ought to take place. And so, fun was had by all.

January Session

For some reason, January is when all the budding epistemologists crawl out of their winter depression to hunt the elusive responses to questions on the theory of knowledge. It is interesting to see how one can be of help and yet not so helpful.

Just the other day, I had a note from a young person saying, "Errm, could you make your responses easier to understand so I can put them in my essay?"

I wasn't quite sure how to answer that one. I admit my ramblings are not always easy to understand — hey, in retrospect I myself can't figure out a few of them. But mostly, they aren't so difficult, and they do make some sort of sense.

Over the years, the time-sensitivity of human knowledge needs has increased to the point where impatience has become a counter-virtue. Everything is needed quickly with minimum effort. Every fix must be shot up into the brain, bypassing the sensible metabolism of useful filters.

It distresses me. It leads to problems with universal attention span and ability to retain stuff. Recently, I discovered that Primary 4 students (children mostly turning 10 that year) learn all the facts about air that O-level students (young people mostly turning 16 that year) need to know. Yet I've noticed that for some reason, most of the 16 year olds have forgotten all of it.

Then again, when I was in school, carbon dioxide levels were at 0.03%, and now they're at 0.042%; they've gone up 40% (yes, yes, confusing, I know) since then. Some things need to be updated and the latest figures used, certainly. But topics like discussing how doubt is the key to knowledge will never go out of fashion.

Learn to live with that, young people. Learn.

Integrated Programmes (Epilogue): Disintegrated

I was sitting with two wild men in the rainy lunchtime half a day and half a world ago. We were library-bound, like books or students. We wondered, with all the wealth of our small experience, more than a century combined, why the integrated was not.

We figured it out. You can only have multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary education when the people delivering it are like that. But too many are happy to be in their safe zones, happy to build up barricades and lie that disciplines are cleanly separated, clearly different, and that the value of one will not transfer into the success of another.

We figured it out. It's those dang mathematicians. The old ones were philosophers, visionaries, architects and surveyors for the vaults of creation. The modern ones are accountants, statisticians, people to whom ranking and numerical scores are more important than what is learnt, what is dreamt. The new ones forget that mathematics is no longer a discipline, but a tool.

The reason the Integrated Programmes don't work is that they don't teach synthesis of ideas. Or if they do, it is the incestuous synthesis of thoughts that are siblings, ideas brought forth from the same womb. Everyone is still a brick-layer, not a sculptor.

The only way the Integrated Programmes can work is if the teachers are multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary; the teachers must be able to discuss any discipline, or mash them up together and deal with that. Because in this new world we are in, the pure disciplines no longer are as useful as the ability to meld them in various proportions.

Strangely enough, it was Alexander, the best remembered student of Aristotle, who pioneered this. It is the combined-arms approach. Hannibal at Cannae did it too, and generation after generation until war bled into the sea and sky, and smashed bullets across the face of the earth and into her eyeballs.

If your teacher cannot move through the walls of the disciplines like a ghost, or juggle them like a conjurer, or craft a deck of many things from them, then your education is all wrong. It would be like learning to play a piano one note at a time, with each note taught by a different master, and each one insisting that his note is not related to the rest, or if it is, it is by accidental placement on the same keyboard.

And those dang math teachers (not even mathematicians)? Well, apart from the rare few, most of them are masters of hitting the same note repeatedly, about a hundred times each session, with holiday homework and remedials raising the number into the thousands. It's called 'drill and practice'.

Conventional Education

This morning, I was made to remember some of the best years of my life, all over again. The catalyst was a little note from one of my former students, from the first batch of young people which I taught through the full O-Level (grades 9-10) course.

Why were those years so good to me? I think it was because I learnt so much and I felt useful. As my former vice-principal Mrs M said to me once, "Always be useful. Work hard because one day when people don't ask you to do things, you'll realise how much you enjoyed working before you became useless."

Those young ladies meant a lot to me, both because they were my students and because I was their teacher. Sometimes it was the other way around; they taught me a lot about how to be fair and how to negotiate the tricky business of being a male teacher in a girls' school. I learnt how to be kinder. I learnt more about sympathy.

What we learn is never enough, and sometimes it is far from sufficient. But we keep learning, in the hope that learning will become practice, and maybe even teaching. That is why we 'learn to learn', and make it a lifetime's work.

For the young ladies I worked with from 1993 to 1995, here are my thanks. They will never be sufficient, but they are heartfelt. I've always wished the best for you, and I am glad to have lived long enough to see some of it come to pass for many of you. Just remember, the best is yet to be — the last of life, for which the first was made.

The Apprentices' Sources

I have always favoured the apprenticeship model of learning. A good apprentice-master demonstrates habits of mind (thought, perception, planning and discrimination) while acting out the outcomes of these habits in real life.

The apprentice learns these habits, applies these habits, and in time learns to debate the master's actions — just as the master would contest his own decisions in the theatre of his head. Eventually, the apprentice learns from what is done, what is not done, and why things were done or not done.

The problem in the Citadel of the Wyverns right now is that there are few masters who can apply habits of mind to the teaching of the craft. In fact, there are few masters — the rest are journeymen or senior apprentices pretending to be masters.

I have a sample size of about 40 apprentices in this 2-year batch of about 900 students, roughly 5% of the population and somewhat statistically significant. They can't do proper references and citations, have little knowledge of the technical vocabulary of their areas of knowledge, and come up with spurious ideas which have no basis in research or reality.

It is shocking, in particular, to find out that the apprentices often have no idea of how to obtain source material, evaluate such material, or craft an argument out of such material. When I ask them, "What is your source?" they cannot reply; when I ask them, "What is the difference between X and Y?" they give me irrelevant excursions from the path of academic righteousness.

Yet, they are spending hours with their 'masters' every week. So what is being taught? I know that there are still some good teachers there; you can tell by what the apprentices do when you force them to do work on the spot. But some are completely at sea. About five of them, just in the last month or so, have told me that they have learnt more from one session with me than 15 months at the Citadel.

I am not sure that this means I am that good a master. It could mean that they have had the misfortune of having a journeyman or senior apprentice fobbed off on them as a master. It could mean they have been sleeping at lectures. It could mean that I am a convincing trickster.

But whatever it means, this must indicate a problem of some sort — the Citadel is behaving badly, the students are behaving badly, or the students are now more easily conned than they used to be. If there are problems, they need to be solved.

Shoulder

My working year actually starts today, more or less. It's that time of year when some people finally get down to work, which in my context means that people come looking for me to teach them how to get work done.

It's not that these people are idle, but that they are not fully competent. There is a lot of potential there, and it only needs a little tweaking to bring it out.

Recently, someone asked how you would encourage someone with more talent than yourself. I think you have to do it whole-heartedly. You can't stint on judicious (i.e. critically exact, but erring on the positive side) encouragement.

I've dealt with precocious and high-potential young people all my life. I can't offer them what I am as a goal, because that would be cheating them. I can only offer them what I am as a spur to higher achievement, much as a mountain shoulder can be used as a base camp for an assault on the summit.

I don't envy them, have never envied them. Their world is different from what mine was, and their heirs and successors will find it different again. In that light, there's no point having regrets about the past or casting a jaundiced eye over the future.

What I can bequeath to them however, are the lessons of age: patience, but not too much; cleverness, but not too much; faith, hope and love. Some come to these lessons early, some later. I always pray that the learning of such lessons comes sooner for most.

Narrative Troubles

Over the last 18 months or so, I've come to realise the truth of a problem which I thought might just have been a mirage. The problem with some of the brightest young people I've met is that they don't read enough. They are a throwback to the idea that ingesting the quintessence is equivalent to ingesting the rest of the materia mundi.

So when discussing literature with one young person, I was not appalled, or even saddened, to realise that he'd not read any literature at all. He had been reading the pre-digested pap of other people's commercial notes, and using their insights and analysis to procure a grade that was a reasonable one.

Ah well. It's too early to tell, but my gut feeling is that people who can't construct and deconstruct a narrative for themselves are doomed to follow other people's narratives. It's like a sort of metaliterary Huck Finn idea; Huck follows the river 'there and back' because Samuel Clemens, or 'Mark Twain', makes him do it. Huck really has no control over his destiny.

These thoughts do bug me at times; if God is a narrator, the author and perfector of my faith, then have I no control over what I should be doing? Am I merely a character in a narrative myself? Should I just go look for some pre-digested pap that will tell me what my significance and the themes of the story are?

Then it occurred to me. At the very least, as I've found when writing, and other writers have found too, you can have characters that seem to write themselves — they are entertaining, they are easy to write about. I will try (if it is at all possible) to be an entertaining character that will give other people pleasure when they read about me, and hopefully, that will give pleasure to my Author when He deigns to mention me in the narrative.

Another Neighbour

One of my former neighbours wrote a book which turned out, in a rare surprise for him, to be a bestseller. The title of the book was A Brief History of Time. This was the same neighbour who used to speculate on whether God existed or not, pointing out that Gödel had famously proven that He ought to exist but not proven it well enough to show that He indeed existed.

Sometimes, you wonder whether the dinner conversations and suchlike that whirl around you in your younger years actually shape your older years to such a great extent. All I can say is that. if anything, listening to such things makes you curious about particular things if you are already a curious child.

The first step is therefore to bring up a child to be curious. Then he will look for answers both within and without. And he will develop methodologies for finding those answers. Later, he will develop methodologies for evaluating those answers, and even methodologies for evaluating methodologies. If you happen to be able to provide examples and exemplars, then the child is on his way to having a lot of useful experiences.

Bear in mind, however, that the form of the answer can be physical as well as conceptual, spatial as well as numerical. There are many questions, and their answers come in many shapes, sizes, sounds, smells, savours and sensations.

All I can say is the study of falconry and of falcons can sometimes be of inestimable value in a later life bereft of both. You never know what might turn up, that will turn both salesmanship and hunting into a single word, and make a singularity out of many things.

Waxing Philosophical

One of the questions everyone asks me these days is: "How is your PhD coming along?"

The thing about a PhD is that it doesn't 'come along'. It's a qualification, like any other, that says you know enough about a particular sub-area of knowledge to probably lecture anyone else about it. It says nothing about how much more competent or useful you might be. It does, however, imply that you have the 'iron backside' to work at something until it's done.

This has always been my problem. I don't have the 'iron backside' nor the 'brass spheres' to sit down and hammer at something until it's done. I need to get up and walk around, look at the problem from all angles, learn things about the things that are about the things that are about my topic, and so on.

I finished my PhD module exams about five years ago, getting an 'A' for each module. It's the dissertation, that 120,000 word monster, that is occupying about 60% of my resources! As many people will tell you, it's not the length, but the strength. I believe that when I'm done, the thesis will stand as a fairly strong and interesting one. It might even be useful. But it is agony to churn out five thousand words and then spend the next day rewriting four thousand of them.

Even at that rate, people might say, "Shouldn't your dissertation then take 120 days to write?" Heh. It doesn't quite work that way. As the length of the thing grows, its complexity also increases. In order for it to remain coherent, you need to check more things. And as you check more things, things get more complicated because of new input.

They say it should take you not more than 80 hours to do a 4000-word extended essay. That's about right. For 120,000 words you would probably need 2400 hours, with about 12 really solid productive hours a week. It will take about 200 weeks, or four years working full-time, to do a proper PhD unless you have it set up just right.

Unfortunately, not everyone gets it right from the beginning. Some of us start from scratch or from scanty foundations. This isn't always a bad thing, since you explore a lot of new ground. But it can be terrible when you find yourself out in the wasteland and wondering what on earth (or where on earth) you are, metaphorically speaking.

Right now, I sense I have reached critical mass. I have explored my tiny microcosmic space and I know it fairly well. I now need to write the travelogue, and I'm done. I will no longer have to make Atlantean digressions or summon forth spirits from the vasty deeps. But it's hard work. It's labour and toil and suffering and not a week passes when I don't think at least once, "Why am I doing this???!!!"

How To Be A Good Teacher (Part I)

If I were actually to answer the questions implicit in the title of this post, I would probably have to exhaust the server space and then point out that I hadn't given a definitive (let alone exhaustive, heh) answer. But the thing is that new, young, and/or probationary teachers have asked me this kind of question before, and I have tried my level best to answer it.

If I had to give a really short tutorial in teaching, I'd probably focus on a few points, all of which are almost equally important.

1. Respect your calling: You need to remember you're a teacher. You're someone who has to bias students in favour of wanting to learn, and show them how and where and why they should, can, or might want to do it. You are a communicator, a motivator, a coach; if you can't do these things, get out of the profession. If you can't create an environment for disciplined, informed and intelligent learning, then you have your task cut out for you. You must be competent, fair, and flexible where necessary. You are lighting lamps in the darkness, leading expeditions into the unknown; you are the shadow of a mighty rock within a burning land, and a stream of water in a desert.

2. Respect your students: You need to remember that you were sitting there once, and yet none of them is exactly (or sometimes even remotely) like what you used to be. Each student is special, has a biographical and biological context, has moods and emotions, has a style of reasoning, has a brain and a heart and all the diversity that the many years between being born and coming to your class can bring. Each one is a gem, but one that can be cut and polished, or that can be set uncut, or displayed or made useful in many different ways. One difference, though, is that these gems transmute and change themselves as well. They will reflect their surroundings, but they will also ennoble and illuminate their settings if treated right. They have their own nature; your job is to help them shine and only cut and reform if absolutely necessary.

3. Respect your subject: Know why your subject is different from other subjects, and what its 'secret agenda' really is. Know in what ways your subject is like some others, how it is linked, why it matters and is relevant in today's world and the world to come. Remember that all subjects and subject boundaries change with time; know the history of your subject and its cultural context. Understand why it can be boring in some places, and don't gloss over the difficult parts. Inculcate the habits of mind that are most important for your subject, while not neglecting other good habits; an aesthetic appreciation for science is often a valuable asset, for example.

4. Respect the context: Yes, this means the school, the hierarchy, the dominion and power (oops, got carried away there). All teachers work in a sociocultural context. Look out for socioeconomic factors, school culture, political underpinnings. Respecting these things doesn't necessarily mean you buy into them or participate in the kind of hierarchical games that such systems engender. It means you should appreciate the cost of participation as well as the cost of non-participation; you need to know how much latitude you have and how much that will affect your longitude. If you are going to be a rebel, just look around and count the cost. If you respect the context enough to want to reform it, that is going to take time, energy and capital (in allies, funds, and many other hidden forms).

All these are attitudes. You need to have these tendencies built in even before you start considering the technical aspects of being a teacher, a professional unlike any other kind. Teaching as a profession is the highest point of all professions because no other profession can exist, survive and propagate itself without it.

Three Months

This is going to be a critical quarter. By 'critical', I'm using the Greek sense of the word; it is a time that will require a lot of good judgement.

For a start, if I can't get my dissertation done within the period July-September, I might as well not bother anymore, because it will have become obvious that the knot I have tied myself in is far too difficult to unravel. The dissertation topic is like an overlay which covers several minefields. You read Tony Wagner and other North American pundits and they say how good the education system is that you're writing about. But what if it is good but not that good?

My parents are away too. For three months, it will be about house management, bills, gardening, doing the mail, watching out for serious documents from places like the USP and the various agencies that somehow have a lien on the pater's time. And interacting with my very interesting brother, who can be quirky, is always intelligent, and likes things done in certain ways.

Meanwhile, my students approach their penultimate or ultimate deadlines and examinations. And I need to help some of them a lot, because habits of mind are not so easily inculcated when for years they've been let off lightly by a system that a) doesn't push them very hard, or b) pushes them hard but provides them with unnatural assistance in getting there.

The obvious case is the TOK essays I've been marking. I used to write these things when I was primary school simply because the #1 method of dealing with the brat I used to be was to give him work to do, no assistance except answering questions with more questions (or a gesture towards the family library), and set him a deadline — something like two pages in one morning, four pages by the end of the day.

There was a marked lack of coddling when it came to intellectual problems: I remember teaching myself algebra and calculus from my maternal grandfather's library, biology and bridge from my paternal grandfather's. You learn it, you earn it.

That attitude rubbed off on me as a teacher; I'm sure a lot of my students will remember that my favourite response to a question raised in class was, "What do you think?" (I must say that Big Ben was the best exponent of all time at answering this question. He actually could think on the fly and would come up with answers on the spot. I appreciated that.)

I believe that three months of intensive teaching in questioning techniques — how to come up with good questions, how to redirect questions, how to change the focus of a question and ask it another way, stuff like that — would certainly make a cohort capable of answering epistemological questions on their own. The problem is that nobody wants to do it.

So. Three months. We should all stoke the furnaces and go for broke.

The Write Stuff

There's a problem with craftsmanship and complexity; there's a problem with the 3 Cs — comprehension, composition and computation; there's a problem with consideration and cogitation. That's 7 Cs altogether, and not a single ocean.

The thing is this: you can get simple hacks to teach how to write sentences. You can get simple hacks to teach how to string them together in some order. And you can get these simple hacks to be English teachers, and everyone will be satisfied if only simple constructs are to be expressed. I mean, "See Spot run!" is pretty easy, and if you want to make Spot go through some adventures too, that's fine.

But the thing is that if you're going to craft a rock, there is large margin for error; if you want to make a sundial, there's a whole lot less; and if you want to assemble a clock, there's preferably as little error as humanly possible. The same applies to the writing of complex essays.

And that's where things have begun to go wrong. A simple essay with the only restriction that you write about the topic given can be hacked out of raw stone (so to speak) in about 20 minutes or less. A literary essay can be designed, sourced and hacked out in about a day or so. But an essay which discusses epistemology and requires more than passing acquaintance with several fields of knowledge, an understanding of various ways of knowing, and a personal engagement with the material that shines out from the murkiness — ha, this is not so easy, especially if the word limit is brutally tight.

If you want to teach people to write these things, you can't be just an ordinary hack. The apprenticeship model for clockmakers is a lot more rigorous than the apprenticeship model for brickmakers. For both, composition of the raw material and comprehension of what it can do (and how it should do it) are essential. But the former requires a lot more computation, a lot more exactitude, and a lot more craft than the latter. You need to be able to handle complexity with tighter tolerances.

If you want to learn how to make something, look at the craftsmanship of the person who is going to teach you. If you want a person to teach something, you should ask them to show that they can do it first. In a school system, if a person gets to university and qualifies in a subject, that normally means they can make bricks and even houses. But it doesn't mean they can build windmills and television sets and clocks.

If making the simplest brick house is tough, making the simplest working mechanical clock is tougher. And if you get brickmakers to make both, the first will be functional and the second will be crap.

Stuffing

Just yesterday a friend of mine remarked, "How do you know all this stuff?" Without going into all that 'how do I know I know' business, it's of course a comment on how much clutter seems to have accumulated on the shelves of my brain.

It's also the kind of comment I've heard a number of times before. I've wondered about that myself. My conclusion is that the sheer mass of bits and pieces in the storeroom comes from two tendencies. One is the corvid tendency to go (as Khayce might say), "Oooh look, shineeeeeeee!" and pick up yet another piece of mental bling. The other is the corvid tendency to go, "Eh, what's this..." and end up spending hours of a perfectly useful day delving deep into some esoteric subject.

The two things are related in some ways, but the former tends to increase breadth and the latter depth. It's acquisitiveness and inquisitiveness, or (to the more sinister-minded) acquisition and inquisition. Or Memory and Thought, but that's another thing altogether.

There is a third thing, the urge to deliberately fill in spaces in one's education that seem to be void for one reason or another. This is relatively rare; I'm happy with some of those voids, never having had the urge to try things like colonic cleansing (for example).

I think that all these put together make me a good research partner to have. I tend to do all the random-correlation, what-if, how-about-this stuff while someone else does all the heavy lifting. It's not that I can't do structure, but that I can more or less do the basic stuff and the value-added stuff too. I'm far less efficient than other people, though. Too easily distracted...

"Eh, what's this... oooh look, shineeeeeeee!"

Lessons From Games

Over the last few decades, I've had both opportunity and reason to compare rugby, chess, soccer and water polo. These are more traditional games, compared to the rash of strategic boardgames and role-playing games I've also had the pleasure to examine and try out.

A few things stand out. All four of these games have a strategy best described as 'hold up the centre and infiltrate round the flanks'. They also have 'open up your opponent by shifting the thrust to the other flank'. They have 'dominate the key player by cutting off his supply and support', 'defend your links' and 'protect your home rank'. Of course, they don't all use this terminology, and the circumstances are different in each case—but the concepts are the same, and strong analogies and consequent lessons can be drawn from this.

You see, all four games are about spatial control and getting your stuff from one end to the other after mixing it up in the centre (or avoiding the mix-up in the centre). Dominance can be unit-on-unit, group-on-group, by local outnumbering at some minor sacrifice elsewhere, and so on.

I realise that I've benefited a lot from all the sports and games I've managed to get a taste of. By watching the professionals in action live and in videos, I've learnt much about strategy that has transferred from one game to another. What I'm not about to try, though, is chessboxing, that peculiar alternating chess+boxing contest which ends up either by checkmate or knockout.