Learning isn't Easy

So there's this atlantic article, which @freddiedeboer is currently tearing to pieces on twitter, which is yet another article asserting that the tech version of any aspect of human civilization, in this case teaching, immediately renders the human aspect inferior and irrelevant.  Which is a wonderful idea if you're a tech giant selling teaching equipment, less so if you actually care about whether people are learning and motivated to learn.

Said article references TED talks as a key educational element in future classroom lectures, as broadcast by "super-teachers", which is similarly ridiculous.  TED talks are roughly as informative as NPR programs which are roughly informative as the back of a cereal box, and they function mostly as infotainment for educated people so they feel good about being educated and conspicuous consumption thereof signals to other citizens that you are in fact, educated and modern and know all the right things.  It's the intellectual version of keeping up with the Joneses'.

So how can I dismiss TED talks and NPR (just to pick on a couple) as not educational, when they are clearly given by well-educated people on very thoughtful topics?  Because they demand almost nothing of the listener is my response, and as such function more as brain candy than brain food.  Or at best, a brain bite, rather than a full meal.  It reminded me of an article I read earlier this week from Robert Twigger on Aeon, talking about polymaths.  Specifically, the section on the importance of the Nucleus basalis on learning.  This is the portion of the brain, if I understand correctly, that generates acetylcholine, a key neurotransmitter in memory formation and learning.  

In his article, Twigger asserts that:

Between birth and the age of ten or eleven, the nucleus basalisis is permanently ‘switched on’. It contains an abundance of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, and this means new connections are being made all the time. Typically this means that a child will be learning almost all the time — if they see or hear something once they remember it. But as we progress towards the later teenage years the brain becomes more selective. From research into the way stroke victims recover lost skills it has been observed that the nucleus basalis only switches on when one of three conditions occur: a novel situation, a shock, or intense focus, maintained through repetition or continuous application.

 The third, aspect of what activates improved memory is what interests me the most: "intense focus, maintained through repetition or continuous application."  Which is not something I'm convinced that the modern emphasis on tech and tech products is actively fostering in the world.  When you see people addicted to their phones and their computers, and complaining about their use of such, what are they typically complaining about?  In my experience, almost universally their reduced attention span, their constant need to be dividing their attention between this app and that app and this other thing.  To be sure, the highly motivated can mostly likely minimize distractions and focus heavily on learning through apps and computers, but what about people who are constantly asking, like the over-used acting joke, "What's my motivation?"

Ideally, this is where a teacher comes in.  Again, the answer I'm being given from the Atlantic is that kids are just naturally drawn to tech because it is it, and now and modern and shiny and why wouldn't they learn when given a computer?  To be sure, children are drawn to computers, but what app inspires them to focus hard on a topic and learn it well in a virtual environment?  It brings to mind another article I read this week, via @shelske.  In it, he outlines the key factors in motivating change (from the book Change or Die by Alan Deutschman), the first of which being:

"a new, emotional relationship with a person or community that you can relate to who inspires the possibility of change."

Isn't that what we want a school to be?  A community that inspires students to the possibility of change?  Moreover, can we ever realistically expect machines themselves to be the sole motivator for learning?  If human relationships are one of the key motivators for change, and I suspect they are, does it not make the role of responsive, interactive human teacher irreducible in education?

So as far as I can tell, if it is indeed true that intense focus is required to genuinely learn, and human relationships are key (be it parent, teacher or more likely some combination of the two) in providing the inspiration and willpower to focus and learn anything well, then any tech solution that diminishes either one of those two elements of education is either misguided at best or actually harmful and counterproductive at worst.  So while tech and tech promoters do seem to answer the questions of, "is it new, is it modern, is it shiny, do people want to fiddle with it", it seems important to point out that these are not really important questions in to how to best serve students in their education.

A better question might be, "How do we get students inspired and focused in a world seemingly hell-bent on distraction and entertainment disguised as education?"  Hint:  the answer is NOT, "disguise our own education as entertainment and distraction."

 As bastions of education and learning that have existed for centuries, the universities needed to do nothing more than provide the materials and space for focus, and the human beings, or "teachers" as I like to call them, to inspire students to take advantage of it.  Embracing the attitudes and equipment of universal distraction as a way of keeping up with the times and appearing modern is not victory for education, it is the surrender of the timeless necessities of human learning to the fickle consumerism of the present moment by the strangely weak-willed guardians of institutional power and as such, in my humble opinion, is a gigantic mistake.

Technics and my complete inability to put a longform thought together

I'm still kind of stuck on Technics and Civilization.  Not because it's not a good read, it's great, but because I keep thinking I need to take copious notes and write some kind of meaningful essay-length review about it once I'm done.  But, I'm starting to realize this is maybe like trying to run a marathon first thing after not exercising at all for 10 years.  Plus, my to-read pile is only getting larger, that last trip to Powell's really put an exclamation point on how big my to-read list has gotten.  And realistically I'd probably be better served with some reading for a while, if only to relearn the ability to patiently focus on something for more than five minutes.

So I think the new plan is to plow through my reading list at a comfortable pace, and write whatever I have to say in whatever way I can manage to form the words, and hope both the reading and the writing and the thinking get better over time.  Gotta learn to run before you can fly.  And walk before you can run.  And crawl before you can walk.  And flail helplessly while rolling about before you can crawl apparently.

If you need me, I'll just be over here flailing about helplessly.

Mind Muscles

One of the many reasons I've dialed down my know-it-all cynicism is just how limited our language and ideas are on certain topics.  For instance, there's very little more important to my daily life than my mental health, but the language and tools to address mental health barely exist in the common culture, and maybe not even in a clinical setting.

We know what it means to be physically healthy more or less.  Each person will have an ideal weight, and should have a certain blood pressure and resting heart rate and blood sugar level, etc.  And if those are out of whack for some reason, the solution is relatively straight forward:  eat healthier, and do some regular exercise.  And one can go into MANY specifics, or try to short-cut them with magic pills that may or may not contain side effects, but the in general we all know the solution:  eat better and exercise.  AND we generally understand what those activities entail (working up a sweat, and eating as close to un-processed as possible).  And while there is still a ways to go on our knowledge of nutrition and the biochemistry of the body, we still know things like: leafy vegetables and regular exercise seem to be very good for the human body and there's a fairly solid body of practical research backing that up.

So what about my precious, fragile mind?  What are the metrics for maintaining my mental health?  What is a preventative health regimen for the mind?  What mental exercises should I do to maintain optimal mental health?  For the most part, the questions of "what mental exercises should I do" seem to be held back by "what are the specific metrics of mental health" as far as I can tell.  Is mental health simply being able to function in my daily life, in the culture I was born into?  Is it thriving in my environment, as opposed to simple functioning?  Is lots of memorization good for me?  Is it actively learning new things every day (I've read some interesting things on that front)?  Is it reading challenging material?  Is there such a thing as mental candy and should I avoid too much of it?  Is there such a thing as mental health food and I should consume more of it?  We have a wealth of material attempting to address these questions with specific answers, but so far, in nailing down specifics of how to talk about and assess mental health and processing it seems to come down to shrugs and how we feel about it, you know?  In fact, most of the solutions in mental health seem to be in pill form, as if to address a simple chemical imbalance, but the medication seems clumsy and I'm really much more interested in the mental equivalent of eating right and exercising, and I still haven't found something satisfying on that front with any kind of intelligent and compelling research to support it.  Of course, it's possible they exist and I just haven't seen them.  I'm pretty sure I haven't been exercising my brain very well or otherwise contributing to my own good mental health.

The only thing I need to know, that some other people seem to agree on, is that the mind and body are linked, so a healthy body is a tremendous asset to good mental health.  I struggle with depression, but I would much rather do the equivalent of eating right and exercising to claw myself out of it rather than take meds.  I don't like anti-depression meds, they let me function day to day, but kill my sex drive something fierce.  And I think a healthy sex-drive is maybe a key component of my long-term mental health, you know?

But are touch screens rotting my brain?  Is a trashy novel really junk food?  Do I need to rigorously study something for a few hours every week/day to stay in tip-top mental shape?  I honestly don't know, and I'm not sure anyone else really does either.  I find that frustrating, don't you?

Operating note

Two mini-reviews of Saga and Sex Criminals over at my "reviews and crap" blog. Short version: both are pretty good. Note to self: read more comics.

I went for a walk

Depression has as many faces as the people it wears.  For me, it most frequently manifests as a denial of self.  For me, depression is refusing to thrive, for reasons I can rarely articulate.

Depression is denying myself the pleasure of _______.

So, generally, for reasons I cannot even now explain, I deny myself the pleasure of hiking (and the greater outdoors), the stars, sex (even masturbation to a degree that seems to surprise my male friends), of exercising and getting fit, of becoming good at something like piano or Japanese or drawing, maintaining a social network, going out, going to bed on time, waking up at an hour that leaves me room to breathe, of getting my work done on time, of finding a career that matches me better, of not feeling anxious, and, in general, of feeling good about myself.

Sunday, I allowed myself the pleasure of a long (6ish mile) hike in Forest Park.  I don't know what it is about silence right now but goddamn I need it.  The birds and the wind in the trees were acceptable noises.  Soothing even.  There were some children accompanied by a bored parent who were shrieking in delight at streams and mud, but the trees politely muffled the sound for me.  Children can be loud, but I can't hold it against them.  I'm secretly just jealous that I'm not that uninhibited anymore.

But there was a decidedly pleasurable relaxation of tension deep in my chest as a result of the exercise and the luxurious quiet of the great outdoors and I am glad I decided not to deny myself the pleasure, at least for a day.

Pent Up

I'm feeling a little pent up right now.  My consciousness is circling my brain anxiously looking for an outlet, but I've connected them all wrong.  All my old outlet nozzles are connected to nothing inside and my inner tubing keeps dead-ending just under my skin.  I could bleed it out through my pores, but why.

But I gots the open relationship squirmies and I gotta get it out.  I got the "my body wants to movey-groovey" and I gotta let it out.  I got the words in a jumble, but I gotta write 'em out.  I got ye ol' yarn ball of anxiety and repression and I gotta start pulling strings again.

Pulling strings is good.  Pulling threads is life.  I pulled one and left the dry desert of Reno for the lush fields of Portland.  I pulled another and at the end were handsome dudes and lost knowledge.  I pulled a third and knitted a nice sweater.

I need to allow myself the privilege of sweating and howling at the moon and cultivating and co-sharing with curious confidants before I get the deep down crazies.

Split blog disorder

I have a hard time deciding what to do with my blogs, which is why I have like 10 of them.  Sometimes I think this blog might be better served by me just curating pictures/posts that strike a chord, letting readers see if it strikes a chord with them.  Well, which is to say sometimes I think this blog is really pretty and meaningful and then I open my mouth and say something and it changes to my teenage journal.  So I wonder if I shouldn't keep my text posts in another tumblr entirely.  My short stories in another.  I could probably do a whole blog just on the trials and tribulations of an open relationship (not too far into it yet, but just a feeling).  

It seems like the platform I want doesn't exist though.  I want a blog and a social network.  I want to write about a lot of things on a wide variety of topics, but with enough flexibility that users can screen out the topics they want to hear about and don't want to hear about very easily.

I want a clean, ad-free, centralized content management system that allows to me to generate 1 to 100 types of content in separate feeds (blog/microblog/twitter/tumblr/research papers/thinkpieces/essays/etc) that users can subscribe to, comment on (either verbally in small sound files or in text), like or tag with an emotion where other users can second the emotion and/or add their own, IM, video chat, feeds organized into theme pages around various topics, formatting I can impose, that users will see as default but can subvert to their own liking as they need to.  Why this doesn't exist yet, I don't know, the tools are there, they're just currently around in spiritual and pragmatic wastelands like FB and Twitter.

There's a better blogging/social media/net communication portal just waiting to happen where we can talk to each other, and share the things we want to share in a wide variety of formats without unduly imposing on subscribers and the first person to realize it is going to be successful beyond their wildest dreams.

Showdown at the OKC

So, I'm back on the OKC just to see what's out there.  I'm listed as bisexual and in an open relationship so I don't expect to get a lot of attention.  So far I've only been awkwardly asked to join some kind of bear cult and told I shouldn't haven't shaved, which is more or less what I expected from Portland in the first week.  Which is A-okay, honestly, not feeling super confident right now.  The transition to an open relationship was not entirely smooth for me emotionally , but I'm doing okay with the idea now.  

That said, my impulse here is more to continue to try and get my shit together than it is to jump back into dating a lot.  Work on learning piano, journal, practice my Japanese, actually read, try and write coherently about what I read, get some goddamn exercise, if only to extend the amount of time I'll have to procrastinate later in life, etc.  Maybe get out of the house in some fashion where I'll end up meeting people and then if I click with someone out there that's fine.

But I think I've learned enough to know that my relationship with other people is only as good as my relationship with myself and if I'm being honest with myself it's the relationship with myself that needs work again.  So maybe I need to listen to my gut on this one.