two hands

My good friend and colleague talks about a guiding hand that we find pushing us along in much of our work. Recently, though, I've been reminded of the importance of two hands. Lately it's been especially important to consider this because I've felt scattered and slightly panicked, preoccupied with the packing and preparation for leading teachers out into the desert. Fortunately, Carl's leading the writing exercises, but I'm making sure we have the right food to eat, the right supplies, the right key to the right trailer. In the morning, when I wake up, things seem clear and fine (and I'm sure they will be); but as night gets darker and I should be thinking about nothing -- just sleep -- my head spins. What about firewood? What about the tire pressure in the trailer? Can I use the firewood to place under the wheels of the trailer? Did I write that down? And then someone asks if we'll have decaf. Of course we can have decaf. But I need to write it down. Write it down write it down write it down. I've written down enough that I'm fairly certain that I'm going to forget to wear my own pants. Or shorts. But I did pack extra sunscreen, thank god. And a hat.

At times like this I need to have something steering things -- a central goal to concentrate upon -- and a way to do the steering. That's where the guiding hand idea came into my psyche. The guide, whether external or internal, is useful and often even crucial. But sometimes we need more, and this is where the advice of my two-year-old nephew has come to bear: Use two hands.

Just over a week ago I was taking care of Nephew #1 while his brother, Nephew #2 (sometimes mis-typed as "new-phew") was being delivered by the stork. (As said nephews are my sister's children, I'd prefer to imagine the stork.) One of the fun things about having a two-year-old nephew in my care is the process of maintaining the newly learned potty techniques. Nephew #1 is adept at going #1 into the potty, even though there is plenty of prompting and escorting and cheering. As I was helping him with all of the details (there's a stool and a seat and an entire process which includes a flamboyant kicking off of the Thomas-the-Train underpants), my proud nephew proclaimed the superiority of his technique. "I use two hands!" he told me. He went on to tell me, midstream, how one hand wasn't as good. Two hands was clearly not only preferred, but superior in all ways. His aim, true like the line of an Elvis Costello song that popped into my head, demonstrated the wisdom of his technique.

Rather than a single guiding hand, I've realized that in many cases we need a leftward and rightward push and pull, simultaneously guiding our aim. I've been fortunate enough to have engaged in projects that require two voices, two inputs, or two hands. A push or the guidance of a single hand might be effective in some cases, but, as my nephew points out (and I imagine he's clearly demonstrated it), the use of two hands is not only useful for motivation, but for a sense of direction and deliberate guidance. So, the trip with 10 teachers to Arches National Park is not only launched and guided by my ambition to get myself and a group outside and in the sand under the sun and within a speck of geological scale, it is also steered by Carl and his thoughtful writing prompts. Or perhaps we each know that the other is there, and even if neither of us knows what we're doing, the faith that the other is leading this trajectory is a good feeling to have. Certainly, other successful projects I've worked in have had the same sense, whether real or imagined, and that sense has ruled the day.

A few days later, I realized another important lesson in the potty-training regimen. While over at the Nephews' home, I heard their dad cheering on #1 while going #1: "Get the cheddar bunny!!! Get him!!! Get him!!!!" What was taking place was the use of a motivational target, an organic-all-natural cracker placed into the bowl to be used as a goal. Guided by two hands, Nephew #1 was both motivated and set on his target. It sounded like so much fun that I was tempted to use the same technique. Instead, I just intend to leave crackers on the floor in random corners of my sister's home the next time I visit.

Again, another life lesson from my most recently toilet trained relative. I'm lucky to have such a good model for life's focus. Even as I write this, I struggle with how to portray the meaning I'm taking away from a two-year-old's urinary habits. What I have to remember is that there is one goal at a time: a cheddar bunny, making dinner, writing a page, portraying an image, filling out a form, finishing an email, scheduling a doctor appointment. I tend to throw a dozen cheddar bunnies in front of me -- fun for a while, but ultimately disorienting. I need to see the one goal, and with two hands, feet planted, steady aim, focus on the cheddar bunny.

possibilities

"I keep telling people that anyone can do science anywhere and with anything, but I never really believed it."

"Yeah, who knew that bullshit was true?"

My statement and Larry's honest response was in reaction to how some middle school students had discovered, on their own, an insect. Not a big deal, except that it is a non-native and non-flying insect, and only lives in one other known place in the world. How did they get here? Hitchhiking? Remarkable. More remarkable still, students at this school were being given the resources -- a few tools and some mentoring and some freedom -- to do other independent work. Matt and Larry started telling me about the student who did the most boring, overdone science fair project known to humanity: testing what treatments get stains out of a piece of fabric. Except this student used a light sensor that he'd learned to use for another project in class and quantified the stain removal by measuring how much light could get through it after the various treatments. The result? One of the most potentially boring science fair projects on earth was now the winner of a regional competition.

These weren't the only extraordinary things. There was the room of telescopes and the giant physics lab for next year and the courtyard that the middle schoolers were designing into a xeric landscape and the mini-museum that students were designing and filling with specimens they themselves had done the taxidermy work for. (In addition, a bull elk already stood tall in the middle of the museum space, and a cougar is en route.) My favorite part was the bike shop, though, where a classroom set of bicycles was ready for use (to be complemented by kayaks next year), students did the shop work, and community members could get their bikes worked on for free or a donation. A reconstruction of a newly painted frame together with a new set of handlebars and an imminent cogwheel all were in the process of being matched together when we walked through.

It's all enough to make you not only want to teach eighth grade, but dream about it. All this was the brainchild of a couple of people, and then a few other good people came along and a few others and before you'd know it, the good things just kept happening. How? I think simply because it was possible, and because the right people believed it was possible. So, to quote Larry, "Who knew that bullshit," the possibilities for dreams to become a middle school, "was true?" Larry and Ken did, apparently, and Matt and others were just bright enough and naive enough to follow along with it. I suspect that any good thing just takes a faith, generally encouraged and supported by those you bring to the workshop with you, that the possibility is worth working on hard enough to make a reality.

potential

In our backyard is a giant maple tree that was planted at the same time that the house was built, we're told. Pushing 70 years old, it could pass for something much older still as it dwarfs the house with its branches and pulls the Earth up as its trunk and its roots continue to expand. Somehow it negotiates the space with the house and the plumbing. Even more kind, it shades the house from the south during the summer months, in addition to giving us something to appreciate and inform us of the season.

One of the fascinating phenomena of this monster deciduous tree is that it drops its seeds in late May. During the spring we watch the leaves come back to life, a set of flowery things burst out, and then in May we see the seeds at the end of a wing begin to sprout. Fair warning, they let us know well in advance that we'll see them come raining down on us, fluttering to the yard and roof (and gutters). This year they've done a particularly good job of falling down evenly throughout the yard, and I've done a good job of using our manual-push reel mower to trim the grass, leaving not only the grass clippings behind but the seeds unscathed. So now, in the backyard, I appreciate all the potential of thousands of "helicopters," seed-side-down and wing-side-up in the grass.

What if all these seeds took root? A part of me wants to see what could happen. Every year there are at least a few seedlings that begin to sprout from the bare dirt on the sides of the yard or in the garden. But what if we let each seed have its own fair shot at it? Could I have a backyard filled with seedlings, the beginning of a maple leaf jungle? Probably not, but I love the idea of the potential.

Tonight I returned from a high school graduation of about 50 students from the local public charter school for which I serve as a board member. While I don't want to push the metaphor too far, for fear of the anxiety I'd feel the next time I bring out the gas-driven lawnmower that bags all the grass clippings and seeds in the yard, the enthusiasm of this group of graduates seemed like they had finally landed and were ready to sprout. They celebrated not so much the accomplishment of graduating high school (although there was plenty of this) as they seemed to talk about what they were yet to become. The diploma in hand, they seemed poised, confident, and giddy about what potential futures they had yet to fulfill.

Potential surrounds me lately. In the lab, Ryan, a graduate with a teaching position offered to him this week, is laying out the science activities that we'll bring to the parks this summer. On lab benches sit familiar old toys from previous years, but also the experiments with new things: a pinhole projector, a new bubble recipe, a soda-vinegar rocket, and plans for a new expanded PVC instrument. Or there's my "new" office. Finally with a key in hand, I began installing the new computer and taking down the 2008 calendar. On the shelf is a library of teaching "self-help" books from discussion groups past. A new calendar, a new operating system, and maybe a new way of doing things are all potentially being planted in the office, but first I need to clean out the old computer, the old dying plant, and the arrangement of synthetic still life fruit. The latter can't be a good role model -- there's no potential for anything but dust collection.

Now almost 10 days old, my new nephew Samuel is the epitome of potential. And as I look at him and look to my 9-year-old and look back to him I realize how quickly it all turns (and is turning) from potential to reality right before my eyes. Anna just received accolades for scoring in the 90th percentile or above on almost all subsections* and composite scores of a national test. (The random chance of doing this, by my calculation, is one in ten thousand, but I know that there are correlations between scores that make this an exaggeration.) So, here's this kid with a gift that she seems to be well on her way to putting to good use, and it all started with a bundle weighing in at about six pounds with a swirl of hair that only had a hint -- a potential -- of being red at the time. Looking at Samuel and looking at Anna I see a progression from one to the other in a heartbeat of an instant of a moment. The potential is not only there, it's being realized right before my eyes.

This all was never more apparent than when we went to Anna's dance recital last Friday night. There was the typical bar work and waltz and ballet, but this year she began practicing contemporary and jazz routines. Through three costume changes, I saw the one who was previously swaddled in blankets now dancing. And not just "dancing" like she used to or like I still do, but really dancing. And all the while she smiled. And I swear, that once, as she bent her legs and raised her arms I was sure that she was about to leap into the air and do a backflip. Of course she didn't ... but then when she made the same motion a second time, I was still sure, again, that she was about to do a backflip. And frankly, I don't remember her not doing a backflip. Through the smile and the dancing and the image of what this child has become in only 9 years or 9 minutes, there was not only the potential of something, but the realization of it. Anna's found joy in herself and in what she does. I only hope I can look to her example for this in my own tasks before me.

____

*The one subsection she did not score in the top 10%? Science. It's a funny irony in the household of the science educator.

hate

I'm beginning to think that I hate most everyone. I've heard a friend tell me and others, "The thing you should know about me is that I don't like people." When David says this, I'm first taken by the facetious nature of the statement, until I realize that he's simply being honest. A native New Yorker, David can pull this off and in fact still be a likable person himself in his own way. But me, a wide eyed suburbanite who grew up with the naivete that he could fly if he just believed hard enough ... that person can't pull off even a most basic cynicism, not to mention outright loathing for his fellow man.

But that's where I think I've arrived. And maybe I should just begin to embrace it: I hate people. Maybe not all people, but maybe I'm just starting down the slippery slope towards a world that I'm either above or betrayed by continually. More likely, perhaps I'll just come to believe that the world is flooded with idiocy that somehow finds a way to reproduce its genetic message before it has wandered in front of a city bus.

How has all this vitriol* seeped into my bloodstream and psyche? A visit from my parents (now at church, hopefully praying for me)? A new office left in a state similar to how I left behind my first rented apartment, not worrying about the retrieval of my down payment? My current office's state of utter confusion and mess, such that even my department chair has commented that it has finally sunk to a lower state than his own? Or just a mental state effected by a change of season, family busyness and work projects? Maybe ... or maybe it's my neighbor and his Fucking Sprinkler.

Out my window and across the street I can see the whirling flow of water, click-click-clicking to and fro, over and over again as it perpetually waters the lawn. Not just now, but last night. All night, even as I listened to the rain fall. And all day today, I'm sure, it will continue. On the 7th day God rests, but the oscillating sprinkler connected to the green hose connected to the unmetered secondary water system will continue, and with each pass of the sprinkles of water my vitriol rises like mercury in a thermometer. The sprinkler across the street, in spite of City citations and warnings, is a perpetually dependable sign of warming spring turning to summer, like tulips, perhaps. Or, more likely, like the box elder bugs that descend upon us each spring: red and black and completely inert. But they arrive and propagate and crawl up the outside of our home's walls and eventually find themselves in through the screens of our windows and somehow into our home. And then they begin to attach themselves to one another, and I find myself wondering if I should be more offended by the fact that they are engaging in a sex act right in front of me (and my children!) or the fact that they are blatantly reproducing, much like the human idiocy I loathe. It could be that my springtime hatefulness is caused directly and specifically by these red and black, harmless and pointless six-legged creatures.

But I still blame it on my neighbor and his sprinkler. Because the sprinkler is a waste of water on a waste of a lawn. Presumably, we water our lawns so that we can enjoy them; yet when does one get to enjoy the lawn that is perpetually being flooded with water? I'm confident that the rationale for the continual click-click-clicking of the oscillator is actually a non-rationality, a result of laziness and lack of creativity and sloth and inability to motivate a real solution to one's problems. Or perhaps an inability to consider real problems and real solutions to them. This is the same neighbor who lives in what should be the nicest, most historic looking home on the street, but allows it to fall into disrepair, roofing materials literally falling off with each burst of wind filtering through the canyon; the same neighbor who parks his oil-dripping vehicles in front of other people's homes when they're out of town; the same neighbor who, in spite of his own job as a vehicle maintainer for a federal agency known for reliably being able to make deliveries regardless of "snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night," his own oil-leaking beaten-down eyesore of a truck recently lost its brakes, in front of our elementary school. It hopped the curb, plunged towards the front doors of the school only to be stopped by the flagpole, toppled over onto the first grade classroom that the multi-ton vehicle was routed towards.

So, maybe it's more than the perpetual click-click-clicking. Maybe it's the fact that my mother just walked in, sat down, started talking, asking if I have much work to do this summer and has continued to talk about gardening and tomato varieties and laundry (front loading versus top loading) and her cats. She has a washcloth with ice in it to place on her eyes, swollen apparently from allergies. My own scientific analysis is that the wide open window of her room, next to the monstrous pollenating maple tree, with the fan blowing all night long, may have had something to do with this. But, like most things, I still blame my mother, personally, for her own shortcomings. I'm just that petty, and hateful.

But this is about my neighbor. Or maybe, really, this is about me. Still out my window the sprinkler turns and the rain falls. My hate boils up, and I wonder if Anakin Skywalker started out like this as he was following his destined path towards the dark side of the force. Just as we begin to take out frustrations on pests by stepping on the box elder bugs, I'm waiting for the day that God steps across the landscape and lets the corner lot across the street bear the weight of His Foot. A quick and relatively gentle end to the click-click-cli ...

____

* I think this is the first time I've actually used this word.

Do the astronomers have this problem?

I gave a talk last week where I got to talk about educational goals and learning theory.

At the end, a few people came up and thanked me. And then, inevitably at the end of a talk about education and some of my own research, someone comes up and says something like, "How do we deal with the students/situation/problem _____?" Because they think I know. As I drifted off to sleep that night, I was thinking about how the astronomers never have this question: "So, I'm designing this solar system and my earthlike planet's orbit has an eccentricity of 0.870 and an albedo of .420; what do I do about that?"

Or maybe the astronomers have exactly the same problem.

At any rate, I'm glad I work in a field where there are practical questions. I wish I had practical answers.

commen cement speech

I enjoy myself a good commencement speech, and since the honorary degree recipient's address at my own university was relatively anti-inspirational, I was glad to have a friend point this one out to me:

compare and contrast

I spent an hour at the doctor today. I go to an "internist," which first concerns me. I react to this term by thinking about an "intern," which isn't what Dr. F. is. Rather, he specializes in the internal part of the body, which I suppose is what I'd want any doctor to do. I'm just glad that he's good -- and experienced -- at it.

Today we compared things called LDLs with things called HDLs. I admit that I don't fully understand any of these DLs, but I picture them dancing around in my blood stream, doing things ... I'm not sure exactly what. Maybe it's something like the old Warner Brother cartoons in which a sheep dog and a coyote both "punch in" to clock their hours on the job and then go about their contrarily aimed goals. Or, maybe it's something to be placed in the scene of a vague memory of a Disneyland exhibit or a 4th grade movie reel of some miniaturized space craft that is made to travel through the arteries and veins. If the craft and its arsenal knew anything about LDLs, they would shoot them with miniature torpedos, splattering and disintegrating them at every turn. As it is, there is no such craft nor any such torpedos, but I have this image that the HDLs do something similar. Or maybe they just hang out with the LDLs for a while so that the LDLs stay out of trouble. In my case, I have a high count of LDLs, but also a high count of HDLs, and this makes it all better.

In the waiting room, I sat among of the many typical patients for an "internist." Everyone that was there at the time was about 30 or 40 years my senior. One guy had big windshield like glasses with a tall cap, the kind you wear when you're driving a tractor. Another carried a device that pumped extra puffs of air into his nose when he inhaled. All remaining hair in the room was white, and all the shirts buttoned up. Next to the lab, where they draw blood, discussion of "PSA" abounded. I visited the restroom just to celebrate still being able to efficiently. In contrast to my brethren, I had shown up with a messenger bag slung over my shoulder and a bike helmet under my arm. Looking around at the time I didn't feel so much out of place as I felt like I was in the right place: If these guys were still up and about under the care of this physician, then maybe I was in good hands. Only as I was leaving did I realize that there was start contrast between the person who rides his bike to the hospital (no bike racks, only ramps for wheelchairs) and the person who is being consulted for possible heart conditions. The prognosis: I can still ride the bike for now. In fact, I ought to keep at it.

learning for life, part II

This semester I was teaching with a historian, enjoyable because I got to see things from a perspective I have really no training in whatsoever. We could truly "team teach," each lending perspectives from different corners, including history and science, but also education and technology and religion and science fiction. It struck me, though, when on the first day of class he stated that "all learning is done through narrative." He went on to describe his own teaching philosophy, that the understanding of major themes and concepts comes through the understanding of the story that's being told. Generally, these are statements that I like to engage, churn a debate around, reconsider the ideas, because this is what I think learning is. But in the spirit of team teaching, and since it wasn't really a substantive point for anyone besides myself, I just listened and have let the idea stew for a few months.

My main contention with a statement that all learning is the retelling of story is that learning over a lifetime (or even a semester) should be a potluck of stories, and these servings should all fit onto one plate, coherently. This breaks down at some point: the jello melts into the meatloaf and the extra olives you served yourself start rolling around aimlessly. These various entrees need to find a way to connect to one another. Moreover, there are pieces of information, stories, and the like, which we already have in our head that are wrong; and there will be future stories that we'll be told or we'll tell ourselves that we'll realize later we had wrong. There has to be some kind of change that takes place, not to the individual narratives we're told but to how we've lumped them together on our plates. When the jello melts, we realize that this wasn't such a good idea, and we may decide to start over.

This process of starting over describes my own interest in learning research. There are plenty of examples in which learning is not really so much an addition of an idea, concept, or story, but a deconstruction of what we already know. Some learning only comes to fruition when other things we "know" get out of the way. Physics is ripe with examples of this: We keep intuitively thinking that things move only when they're being pushed, and that the push is indicative of motion and vice-versa. We're either born with some of these ideas, or we see enough examples of this all the time that it gets hardwired into our psyches, and no matter how many times a lecturer tells the story of Newton's laws of motion, we'll still hold onto those deeply engrained notions.

Like I said, my stewing has been on the stovetop for a few months now, especially as I've been thinking about this "learning for life" talk. I never really thought that one view of learning was completely wrong and another completely right. (Although, truth be told, I tend to think that my own ideas are more right than others, but I come around eventually . . . maybe because eventually I always want to be right?) Then, just in the last few days, I've been thinking harder about some geology that I'm supposed to have some understanding of, because I'm supposed to be leading some teachers out into the desert to investigate some of the stuff. There is a lot about geology that confounds me, not because I don't understand the words or the pictures, but because I have a hard time understanding the story. Right: the story. I read all of John McPhee's Basin and Range and enjoyed and learned and embraced all of the description of the study and formation of the basin and range (basically everything in between the Wasatch Range on my right, and the Sierra Nevada Range on my left, as I'm facing north), but there were still pieces in there that didn't fit or that I couldn't picture. It turns out there was one piece of the story that I hadn't glued in the right place, and when I heard a talk last fall that piece was inadvertently revealed and the entire story made sense. Actually, now that I think about it again, I realize that I had had a wrong idea that was getting in the way of the right one. All the ranges within the basin seem to me to be sticking "up," when in fact the process is such that other stuff gets thinned out and falls down, leaving these folded things upward. In my mind for the longest time I couldn't figure out how the spreading of the basin would lead to these ranges getting pushed up. It turns out they weren't pushed at all.

So, that bit of "learning" was a combination of a change in my thinking, replacing an idea that was messing up any progress in my thinking with an idea that then worked. In particular, the new idea worked with the whole story. So, yes, there is narrative there. We just have to be careful that our own story's details don't interfere or obscure the real plot line. I'm hesitantly considering this as I think that I've finally understood the story of salt and arches in Arches N.P. It's a long (geologically so!) story, but basically one in which an old sea leaves behind a layer of salt, there's an upheaval somewhere else, the salt layer now sits on an inclined plane and slowly "flows" into a spot where it concentrates; but then eventually water seeps through layers above and dissolves the salt, leaving a void that other stuff then gets pulled towards. This pulls layers of sedimentary rock, and begins to separate it into "fins," parallel stands of sandstone that will eventually have the spaces between eroded away. All these fins run parallel to one another, but all pointed perpendicularly to the direction to the salt concentration, because that was the center of the "pull" that caused these fins to begin to form in the first place. When you visit a place like Arches, there are signs and brochures and trail guides that have all these words about the salt and the fins and the like, but it's all been just words to me. Now, maybe just after one reading that really put the pieces together for me, I've been able to tell the story to myself. So, in this case, there wasn't this conceptual change, but a bit by bit construction until the whole story came together. Until I realize there's some piece of it that isn't right.

This is all to say that, for the talk I'm giving as well as multiple other purposes, learning isn't a story nor a changed idea. It's either, or both, or other things as well. We just have to be careful about what it is we think learning is versus what it is that we expect out of a student versus what it is that the student thinks learning is. (This becomes the major theme of the talk.) There are multiple possibilities, and if you've read this far you might as well keep going because I'm running out of steam and coffee and time and need to just list these:

• memorizing words/numbers/facts -- Surely, most people who would dare to go to a talk on "learning for life" probably don't think that it's this simple, but I do run into people like this all the time. In fact, it's probably the de facto (facto?!) assumption we implicitly make about learning as policy about schooling is being constructed. Just consider the current testing regime in place, or listen to a politician talk about education sometime.
• ability to do something: a skill (e.g., a backflip), write a paragraph, make a measurement
• ability to know a story and interweave the ideas. Better yet would be the ability to tell the story yourself.
• a construction of a new explanation based on your own investigation.
• a deconstruction of an old idea based on your own investigation.
• the reconstruction of how you do something . . . often this is learned via an apprenticeship experience of some kind, as are many of the following.
• the reconstruction of how you think about something . . .
• the reconstruction of yourself (i.e., your identity).
• the ability and gumption to reconstruct something outside of yourself (e.g., plant a garden, run for mayor, ride a bike, decide to teach, etc.)

And there are many other possibilities in between and beyond these. I guess the point is that we should consider all the possibilities, and then consider if our own modes of educational operation are making good on more than one or two of these. We inherently expect more out of learners, so we probably need to expect more out of what we design for them as well.

overpreparation

I've spent much of the morning drinking coffee and planning first order approximations of a family vacation at the end of June. This means I have been able to pore through online maps of roads and campgrounds and trails and figure out which tent site is the best combination of close to the bathroom and not too close to the bathroom. I love this level of planning, or maybe I love maps and the possibilities that they present. When I was growing up, I was often in my dad's office for a few minutes to a couple of hours every now and then. As a forest surveyor and in a day that pre-dated the widespread use of computers for such a trade, my dad shared a large office with three others, surrounded by drafting tables, colored pencils, and large maps. I'm not sure if this is where my love for maps came about or not, but now whenever I have anything from a large pdf file on a computer screen to an old, muddied (literally) scroll of a USGS quadrangle, I flash back to that office, boots drying in the corner and electric pencil sharpeners on spacious tables.

I think that maps are mostly fascinating to me because they represent possibility -- somewhere I can go, set foot upon in a real, physical way -- represented by contour lines and dotted paths. At the same time, I know that the map only tells part of the picture, where just a dull shade of green represents an expanse of redwood forest or a crowd of brown parallel lines represents the cliff above some route. Maps may also be just a manifestation of my desire to plan something. With the map in hand, I know where I'll be going and where paths from there could lead.

There is no such a thing as being too prepared. At least I generally wouldn't think so. I recently bought not only a map and a new pack for leading teachers through the desert, but also a bear canister. (Not for putting the renegade bear in, but for storing food to be protected from the bear.) Why a bear canister in the desert? Maybe it keeps the bears in the forest? It's actually a great storage container for organizing (and not crushing) food for a group, doubling as a stool or small table. And, truth be told, I'll use it again on backpacking trips. So I'm doubly prepared.

But I think that there is a potential risk of unforeseen consequences arising from the preparation itself. I had a warning of this as I discovered that in the entire house we were down to only a few more squares of toilet paper. How could this happen? We were so prepared: A trip to Costco provides us with 24 36 rolls of toilet paper, enough to prepare us for the long haul. Yet, with that preparation comes complacency. With each exhausted roll there is one to fill its place, and we don't remember that there's any need to resupply it until it is potentially too late. No amount of route planning and map printing will make up for a lacking supply of TP in the house.

learning for life

A week from today I'm giving a keynote address for a local conference. It's held here on campus, so I don't have far to go and I get breakfast. The conference planning committee was kind enough to think of me, and kind enough to advertise my talk using the picture of me with a rainbow ribbon suction cupped to my head.

The conference theme, and the given title of my talk, is "Learning for Life." The facetious side of me has the immediate reaction of, "For life? Really, that long? Do we have to?" But I'll play nice, since that's what the free breakfast is paying for. And, I believe in the idea. The bigger issue is that I think the idea has multiple meanings, and I'm not sure if we think of all of these (although I suspect the conference organizers were aware of the multiple meanings, making it a flexible theme for a wide array of presentations).

Both "leaning" and "for life" have multiple paths they can take us down. "Learning" is the one I am able to address the best (probably a part II of brainstorming here), while the "for life" is the one that keeps surprising me with possibilities. The most obvious (maybe?) and concrete of the "for life" meanings is that it has to do with the duration of our lives. Learning, especially when it's discussed at a conference for college level tutors and instructors, is something that isn't relegated to the preK-12 timeline we usually talk about in public policy. Additionally, the stereotype of a college learner is someone fresh out of high school and on track to graduate in a span of 4 years. Yet our university systems are more and more faced with learners who take time off for other pursuits, extend their college careers over 6, 8, 12+ years, or even come back after long absences, looking for a first or second degree even though they may be well established in their "for life" pursuits of career, family, and gray and receding hair. This is all to say that "for life" means that we should consider the learning needs of those who are 30, 40, or 50 years of age. How we think about learning could change when we consider these other demographical and personal profiles.

"For life" also suggests application. We learn for learning's sake, I'd like to think. We also learn because we foresee that it will be useful in our lives -- "for life," you might say. I think, like most good ideas, we could quote some John Dewey here, emphasizing that learning could be for the personal and pragmatic, directed by and for the student. I don't advocate that we cater to first order whims of students, nor do I think that our education needs to be so coarse as to only teach basic skills that will get put to immediate use. We can think forward enough to imagine that understanding how science works is going to help in the voting booth as well as in an engineering career. The fun is in trying to figure out the details. Learning how to convert ounces to milliliters to tablespoons isn't something that's particularly crucial all by itself, but a student of beer brewing might use this in determining how to mix a certain potion of sanitizing solution. (Not the best example, but one I often find myself within -- I never remembered that there are about 15 ml in a tablespoon and about 30 ml in an ounce, but when faced with a mix of kitchen supplies and metric based instructions I find myself remembering these important details.) The point is that the learning we do now should be relevant to us now and in the long term. Educators need to figure out how to make this happen by being clear about the goals of what's being taught, and matching this with the pedagogy. A friend's recent lament about a textbook that asks students to create a rap about metalloids may be a good example of how we often miss this mark. Yet this isn't an isolated example. A recent exhibitor's booth at a major national science teachers association meeting had an array of these examples, including an entire company devoted to teaching scientific concepts using hip-hop videos and dance routines.

The other aspect of "for life" that grabs my attention is probably the most literal but the least obvious. "For life" can also mean for the purpose of being alive. Education around the world brings prosperity, democratic citizens, societal reforms, and new prospects. To have learned something could someday save one's life, but not necessarily in a traditionally heroic way. Seldom are we going to find ourselves taken hostage by a group of pirates who will only free us if we are able to state the second law of thermodynamics. Yet an education can create an opportunity for individuals that gives them a new life: not just living, but livelihood; and not just in a financial sense but in a human sense. Education isn't successful because it gives us rocket scientists and iPod engineers (although these are good too), but because it should be creating and recreating the best of our humanity, investing in individuals as well as in the collective.

I'm still working on this entire talk -- that's actually what scribbling this out is all for. This encompasses the first third of the talk, I think. The other two parts are about the "learning" in "learning for life" -- what do we say that learning is and why does it matter that we think about it; and about our own imperative to do something about all this -- how we need to be those who actually attempt to create changes in education because it would be irresponsible not to. But I'll think (write) about these later. For now, I have to read chapter 18 and beyond of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory -- some good potential learning for life for my daughters.  

rapt attention

I just read an article about trying to focus attention on one thing at a time and how this is actually useful to you but I also kept getting distracted by a butterfly outside and the song on the stereo and it seemed as though I would never actually complete the article advocated meditation and concentration on a single task for 90 minutes which is all well and good but who has 90 minutes of time to simply concentrate well I guess I did this morning but then there was that butterfly and the music and then even within the article there were all these links to other things like books which made me look things up further on Amazon and oh-my-heck did you realize that they just announced a bigger screened ebook reader that could actually allow you to see full magazine sized pages and I wondered if that would be something I could load all of my books onto and maybe that would be worth the $500 (if I had $500) except surely there will be something new coming along right after this that could have color and a way to record your own things (maybe like random blogged thoughts?) so that you could really multitask except that is exactly what the article -- right, the article, what I was talking about -- was saying that I can't do but there I was doing it just not really very well and without any real success so I decided that I needed some more coffee and a banana and that I needed to sit down and write because after all I have about 90 minutes of time to devote to something except that that was about 60 minutes ago when I realized that perfect amount of timing so maybe I'll go pick out some more music and -- shit -- I also have those receipts to organize and send back to get reimbursed and it's so sunny outside and I actually really want to weed and clear out the brush so that we can plant the garden but I can't forget about the talk I'm giving next week but I was also right now this instant supposed to still be in the desert perhaps making one last loop around the hoodoos before we packed back into the car and headed home but I'm already home at least without any more illness but always waiting for another shoe (or germ) to drop while G. is on antibiotics which have kicked in enough that she was able to go to school today along with A. and K. but it's a short day so maybe we'll all do stuff outside this afternoon so I should do some writing right now which is, I guess, what I'm doing right now only I can't remember exactly what it was I was supposed to be writing about.

Oh. Right. Focus. I'll start over.

projecting the future

A fun dinner conversation with the girls during the school year is to learn about the various diseases spreading through the classrooms. In particular, there are certain weeks of the academic calendar when the question, "Did anyone throw up in class today?" is not really out of line nor out of context. It's perhaps one of the charms of first grade, at least from a distance, as I imagine children are just figuring out their own bodily functions and their key indicators. Too, although completely disgusting, I'm intrigued with the in-class vomit count simply because I'm fascinated with how a first grade teacher must balance all kinds of different issues, ranging from reading strategies and phonemic awareness to nose picking and post-lunch projecta. Yet, because I'm just so infantile, I probably am asking about the day-to-day vomit count in class simply because it's like the retelling of a car wreck, but described matter-of-factly from a six-year-old perspective. In its own weird way it's quite charming as G. will tell us what the vomiter was doing, where it went, how Ms. C. reacted, the magic stuff that the custodian put on the offending mass, etc.

Our kids have never been one of the in-school cases. (It is in their genes, though. I myself had an episode in first grade on the day of our Halloween party. I didn't get to wear my C3PO costume that afternoon in the school parade.) Instead, 2:30 AM seems to be the preferred time of day for sickness. I suppose it's good that they're home, but the rude awakening and the subsequent dealing with and cleaning of is inconvenient. The surreal nature of parenting or 2:30 AM or vomit cleaning is particularly heightened when the three are combined -- a trifecta of surreality.

One of the other special blessings that we've had in recent years is that this surreal event has happened at particularly inconvenient times. There is no convenient time, but this morning, at 2:30 AM, when G.'s physical self erupted without her mental self keeping up, my beautiful partner (more beautiful than ever, 2:30 AM with a vomiting child) and I both had the silent, slumped-shoulders-droopy-eyes-get-the-lysol resolve accompanying the unspoken thought that we probably wouldn't be leaving for a camping trip this morning. That probably should go without saying, but we have a history of having A. go through the same trauma (2:30 AM) and us still hitting the road, albeit delayed, the next morning for Disneyland. It was a long trip; A. felt better by the next day to experience the happiest place on Earth. G. fell ill the next night, in the hotel, but was fine the following day. (Ever since we've warned people that the ice buckets in hotel rooms should probably not be assumed to be perfectly sanitary.) That was a great trip, an example of how children's resolve to get to Disneyland and parents' will to gamble on a 12 hour car ride could pay dividends.

This time, though, the risk seemed slightly higher. Being sick in a 4-person tent in the desert seems like too much of a risk. And, now that I'm staying home with G. for the morning, I'm not out getting food and wood and supplies for the trip. Maybe we'll leave tomorrow and have a shorter trip. Or maybe we'll take it as a sign that some trips just aren't worth the adventure, no matter what kind of story you'd be able to tell afterwards. I'll limit our stories to those that take place inside a first grade classroom, or even a hotel room at 2:30 AM.