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In interviews I often ask this question of prospective teachers.
“How do you teach the same thing again and and still keep it fresh?”
I don’t know the answer to this question. I’m still waiting for an answer that I really like. But I’ve encountered one in writing, in a book called Against School Reform by Peter S. Temes.
Here it is. If you’re ever in an interview with me, just memorize this, and you’ll make me cry.
“The challenge . . . is not the teaching of cell division but the learning of it by a wild variety of individual students who will file through the biology teacher’s class one after the other, year after year. Should the teacher present all these students the solution to the problem arrived at years ago, and written in the lesson plan? Or should the teacher embrace the problem anew, confront its challenges, try new ways to teach it, experiment again and again with new approaches? The simpler approach seems easier, and in a way it is, much as sitting in a dark room from morning till night is easier than getting up and walking into the world. But if a teacher is to find and share any joy of learning as part of his or her own work, that joy will be bound up with the vivid newness of trying something new.”
You’ll make me cry, and you’ll probably get the job.
OK here it comes. I’m a . . .
Bengals fan.
There. I said it. Feel free to pile on the derision.
Today, September 13, 2009, will forever on be known as “The Tip.” This moniker will distinguish the day from:
“The Drop” : Lewis Billups had the interception in his hands just moments before Montana finds Taylor for the winning touchdown in Super Bowl 23.
“The Call” Somehow Coach Sam Wyche manages to not run the clock out with only 6 seconds left, and on the final play Montana beat us again.
“The Twist” Former Bengal Kimo Van Ohlhofen (aka the prince of darkness) went after Carson Palmer’s knee on Palmer’s first pass of a 2005 playoff game, destroying the knee and wrecking the Bengals’ season.
“The Snap” After scoring a touchdown in the final seconds against Denver on Christmas Eve, the Bungles botch the extra point snap and lose 24-23, costing themselves a playoff spot.
And dozens of others, of course, too numerous to mention. What happened today (and I won’t go into it, the memory is still too green. If you want to know, go to worstfootballlossesofalltime.com or something) just adds to my conviction that in fact there is a god, and I’ve really pissed her off.
OK, football is a deeply meaningless thing. Perhaps the meaninglessness makes it worse, because I’m convinced, somewhere in my deep, dark recessed psyche, that by daring to spend precious time watching such a deeply meaningless spectacle, I encourage the universe to punish me. I should be writing, or earning money somehow, or how about playing with my daughters? There’s a thought. And so the guilt and angst I feel at watching the game is matched only by the pain that usually comes with the final outcome.
Why not just root for some other team, one not so cursed under a bad star? Only those not afflicted with my special version of sports cutting could possibly understand the futility of such a thought. A Bengal fan I am, and a Bengal fan I must remain.
We sometimes meet, we pitiful creatures. It usually happens accidentally. We’re unlikely to be spotted wearing our team insignia. It’s not that we don’t own the stuff. We just keep it hidden in a secret, shameful place, bringing it out only on days like this, the season opener, to don it for a few hopeful hours until reality once again strikes.
When we do discover one another, an instant bond is formed.
“Bengal fan?”
“Yeah, Bengal fan.”
“Oh. Me, too. Ouch.”
That’s all we need, and we’re connected, cutting across lines of race, creed, and political affiliation. We’re Bengal fans. Ouch.
I look for meaning in the meaningless losses. I try to grow. I’m growing an awful lot, being a fan of this team. I remember the pain much more than the joy. Essex Johnson losing his 1000 yard rushing season by losing 3 yards on the last carry of the year. The Bengals missing the playoffs again, and again, and again, by the tiniest of margins. The ridiculous losses. The horrendous personnel moves – Akili Smith, Ki-Jana Carter, David Klingler, and on and on and on.
What must it be like to be a fan of some other team, the Steelers, perhaps? Rooting for them would be like rooting for death and taxes, the only things surer than Pittsburgh finishing ahead of the Bengals. Where are the growth opportunities there? So I’ve got something that no Steeler fan will ever have. I’ve got pain. And pain makes you stronger.
Yeah.
I’ll just wait for the lesson of today’s pain to come through.
OK, still waiting.
Still . . .
How ’bout I let you know?
After writing the previous post, I remembered something I saw more than a decade ago. During a partial solar eclipse, I saw the image of the crescent Sun projected onto the ground through tree leaves. The leaves act as pinhole cameras by blocking out all but a small portion of the light.
This doesn’t happen only during an eclipse, of course. Next time you walk under a tree on a bright summer day, look for small, roundish images on the ground below the tree. These are images of the Sun, created by the leaves over your head! Even without a lens, the tree has created a picture of the Sun. The world is an amazing place.
After much deliberation and study of all the world’s pressing issues, I’ve decided that the one thing I most want to comment on is the use of the designated hitter by baseball’s American League.
OK, for those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about, here’s the short version. In 1973, pitchers dominated hitters in baseball. The American League decided to try to turn the tide back to the offense by adding an additional hitter to team’s lineups and removing traditionally the worst hitter on the team, the pitcher.
Pitching is a skill that requires hours and hours of work, study, and practice to perfect. Hitting is such a skill, as well. No one has the time or the energy to devote to both pitching and hitting. The result is that by the time they reach the major leagues, the best athletes (who were often great hitters and great pitchers in high school and sometimes even college) have specialized in one or the other. So we have the paradox of players who are often the biggest and strongest players on the field being the most anemic hitters.
In the National League, the pitcher almost always bats last in the lineup. Not only that, but from the 6th inning on, pitcher at bats are rare. When the pitcher is scheduled up, the National League manager often calls on a pinch-hitter. This move not only removes the pitcher from what is often an embarrassing at bat, but also removes him from pitching the rest of the game. A new pitcher must enter once the team’s at bat is finished.
In the American League, there is no reason to take out a pitcher for a pinch-hitter, because the pitcher never bats. Not once. Instead, a Designated Hitter (usually a good hitter who doesn’t field well) takes one of the nine spots in the batting order.
OK, now I’ll tell you why the DH stinks.
It’s not because I love to watch pitchers bat. They’re pretty lousy. It’s not because I like the “strategy” of having the pitcher bunt with a runner on base. It’s pretty automatic, and while pretty, not nearly as exciting as when a bunt, hit-and-run, or steal are called in surprise situations.
So why? One reason. Bottom of the 6th, your team is down by a run, runner on 1st, 2 outs. Do you pinch-hit for your starting pitcher, or leave him in for one more inning? That’s the kind of gut-wrenching decision National League managers have to make 2-3 times a week. It’s a decision an American League manager never faces. That’s why the DH should go away.
OK, I have to come back to reductionism. It’s like a sore in your mouth that you just have to keep touching.
I’m reading this book “Darwin Loves You” by George Levine. He at first gives a decent account of reductionism and its power. Then he goes into the most bizarre straw man argument. Honestly, I can’t find an argument against reductionism that isn’t a straw man (or perhaps I’m just not smart enough to see the error of my ways – please help me!)
Levine quotes a philosopher of science named John Dupre. According to Levine, Dupre says, “as objects are united into integrated wholes they acquire new properties.” OK, I’ve no problem with that statement, nor I believe would anyone calling herself a reductionist.
Then Dupre makes the further wild-eyed claim that “these higher-level wholes . . . have causal properties just as real as those of the lower-level wholes out of which they are constructed.”
Wow. So much for reductionism.
I honestly, completely, utterly don’t get it. Someone please help.
No one would ever deny that new properties appear as objects are united. Look around! A single water molecule displays no sense of being wet, but a mole of water molecules suddenly displays wetness. Of course they do (it does?). But surely no one would claim that this “new” property arises from some new law of nature? “Wet” is a property of hydrogen bonds, the fact that the loose hydrogens on every water molecule are attracted to all sorts of other things, resulting in the sticky adhesion that we call wet. That property doesn’t suddenly appear when we put a million, or a billion, or a mole of water molecules together. It was there from the start. That’s all reductionism says.
As for the second point (what little sense I can make of it), once “wet” is established, it can cause lots of other things – presumably things like the squishiness of bread or the slickness of concrete or the stickiness of flour once these things get “wet.” And again, surely no one is claiming a new law of physics for bread dough? Surely squishiness, slickness, and stickiness, all caused by the emergent property of wetness, are best explained by the same hydrogen bonding that makes water wet in the first place?
I understand that as a practical matter reductionism doesn’t always work. Even within physics this is well recognized. My own physics professor used the example of fluid flow. One could try to describe a flowing fluid as a combination of all the positions, all the momenta, and all the physical properties of the flowing particles. But the exercise is hopeless in its complexity. So physicists create a macroscopic object called the body of water (or whatever fluid) and describe it with properties – surface tension, adhesion, cohesion – that “emerge” within the fluid.
This approach has a chance of working. It can’t describe the motion of an individual molecule, but it can capture the motion of the fluid body. And yet surely no one using these simplifications imagines them to be real? Surely everyone recognizes that this is a shortcut, designed to make an impossible problem soluble? Surely no one believes that surface tension, adhesion, and cohesion are anything more than the collective actions of lots and lots of itty bitty molecules?
I know this topic doesn’t have the heat of an evolution vs creation debate. To me, though, the fuzzy thinking I see associated with “holistic science” is a bigger threat than all the young earth creationists you can shove in an ark.
Any thoughts on why this reductionism bashing has become so popular (particularly with, I’m sorry to say, the political left – where I find myself on most every other issue), yet (at least to my undiscerning eye) to be so utterly bereft of substance? Anyone? Bueller?
This is something I wrote last year, but I didn’t have a blog then. Merry Christmas to all those Santas out there.
I’m an atheist. I was born an atheist, and then various people talked me out of it. As a child, with a relatively non-religious immediate family but a deeply religious, southern Baptist extended family (who by the way were and are all warm, loving, and amazingly tolerant and easygoing people), I was eventually sucked in to various bits of the church scene, including being “saved” at one point.
Deep down, though, I knew it was all nonsense. There was a little voice inside me all the time saying, “Come on, really? People actually buy this stuff?” It was a lot like a belief in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, and so on.
Such a comparison inevitably offends religious people, but I think it is important to understand that in a child’s mind these are all big, weighty issues, and it isn’t really clear which ones carry the most weight. I think I have a skill that sets me apart from many people. That skill is that I still remember what it was like to be a kid, even though I’ll soon be – well, not a kid.
The Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny are minor players, so I’ll leave them out. Santa is the big guy, and we all know it. As a child, I went through the gamut with Santa, at the same time I was going through thoughts about God. First there’s belief. Sure Santa exists, where else did all the toys come from? Then there’s doubt. Wait a minute, I saw my parents buy that. Wait a minute, I saw that toy under their bed. Wait a minute, there’s no snow, how does the sled work? Wait a minute, our chimney is blocked, how’d he get in? Wait a minute, I couldn’t sleep and got up and found my parents putting toys together.
But there’s still a chance. You hear explanations, rationalizations. The sled doesn’t need snow, of course. Santa brings some of the toys and your parents buy the rest. Santa uses time dilation, the rotation of the Earth, a snap of his magic fingers, etc. etc. etc. You gather scattered bits of evidence, ignoring the rest. I thought I heard sleigh bells. I saw a leg out the basement window that looked like a reindeer. I heard something go bump in the night. Someone ate all the cookies.
It all sounds pretty implausible, but you say, eh, maybe it could all work. I don’t understand enough about the world yet, so I’m reserving judgment. Besides, what if I’m wrong? What if I don’t believe, and then Santa doesn’t come? A year is a long, long, long time when you’re a kid. Why take a chance?
Then you hear someone say something like “Santa is the spirit of giving” and you start to see. My parents are Santa Claus! It all fits. The secret shopping trips. The bags you’re not allowed to look in. The forbidden closets. The “early to bed and don’t come out of your room” commands. Ah, that’s how they did it!
For me, and I remember this distinctly, there was no anger or resentment. I loved the fact that my parents would go out and buy all these toys, then not take credit for doing the buying. It was about this time that I started to find out how much fun it was to give presents to other people, and Christmas for me started to become much less about getting and much more about giving. I started to realize that I was Santa Claus, too.
Later, all the doubts about God started coming to the fore. I felt like I wanted to hang onto this idea of God; so many people I knew believed, there must be something to it. Again, I started gathering scattered pieces of evidence. All the supposed miracles, all the eyewitness testimony. But then those got pretty thin when you looked close. What about the spark of life itself, though, wasn’t there something about life that made it different from non-life, and was it that spark that required God? And, most notorious, what if I’m wrong? Do I really want to risk eternity in Hell? Is it really too much to ask, to just believe, to give up that little bit of your mind in order to receive a get out of Hell free card?
And yet inside was that little voice. “Oh, come on. You know the truth, just like you knew about Santa Claus. There is no God. You decide your fate. You make the choices that matter. You decide for yourself if you’re going to be a good person or a bad person, and not because of any reward or punishment, but because it’s who you are, who you want to be, who you see yourself as. It’s not outside you. It’s inside you, and it’s been there the whole time. You’re an atheist, and you always have been, really.”
And so I teach my children about Santa Claus. And the Tooth Fairy. And the Easter Bunny. I also teach them to be skeptical, to doubt the things they’re told, to figure out for themselves what kind of person they want to be. I believe (and maybe I’ll be proved wrong, but that’s what experiments are all about) that my girls will follow my own line of questions, use the tools of skepticism I’m giving them, and figure it out for themselves. I hope they’ll see the beauty and joy of giving as opposed to getting, and decide that they want to be Santa themselves.
From there, I hope they see the power within themselves to make the choices regarding their own lives. What kind of person will you be? How will you treat others? How do you want to see yourself? No one else, not me, not your mom, not God nor Santa Claus, can tell you who you will be. Only you can do that. Just as you are your own Santa, you are your own God.
That’s why, in our house, we believe in Santa. For now.
And just for fun, here’s the same idea in much more succinct language:
http://atheistempire.com/entertainment/humor/calvin-565×191.png
Happy Holidays!
