Dave Badtke’s Blog

A few articles in the New York Times that might be of interest:

1) The same U.S. agency, DARPA, that initially funded the development of the internet is now offering a half-million dollars, to be awarded on 11/11/11, to an organization that will research stellar exploration. Are you interested?

Unfortunately, since gravity is so weak, some 36 orders of magnitude — 36 powers of 10 — weaker than the atomic force holding atoms together, objects in our Milky Way are very, very far away. Indeed, the nearest star beyond our Sun is Alpha Centauri, approximately 4.3 light years or 25 trillion miles from Earth.

Interstellar travel is a tall order. It would take Voyager 1, humanity’s fastest artifact, now traveling 38,000 miles an hour relative to the Sun, more than 70,000 years to reach Alpha Centauri, if it were headed in that direction.

2) A team of scientists has discovered single-celled fossils that are 3.4 billion years old, which is only a billion years after the formation of Earth. This is surprising for many reasons, not the least of which derives from the modern definition of a planet, which is a body large enough to clear its orbit of debris. This is one of the reasons Pluto, too small to accomplish this, was demoted from its planet status.  But this also means that Earth was being constantly bombarded during the first billion years, a period called the Late Heavy Bombardment, that created an environment so hot that life was not possible.

3) “The Kids Are Not All Right,” Joel Bakan writes, because these times are not like previous times. While each older generation tends to believe that the younger generation doesn’t measure up, the corporate culture that has evolved during the past 30 years is definitely a change from the past. The push to recognize corporations as “people” using legal arguments that have been so effective in the development of human rights has created an ethical dilemma because corporations have ever-increasing power whereas other groups that historically lacked rights — African Americans, women, children — lacked power. And corporations’ power to influence us, as we’ll see in my English 1 class during our discussion of advertisements, has had a profound influence on how our children think and behave.

I hope you had a restful and interesting summer.

Links to your class can be found at the top right of this page or you can go to QCounty.com, where the link path to my Solano classes is a bit shorter.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson with Chaser the Border Collie

If you haven’t heard about Chaser the Border Collie, you’ll be amazed. The link is to a short segment on ABC or you can find the complete video on NOVA’s website.

And if you have heard about him, I’d like you to contemplate how amazing Chaser is.  Here’s a dog who is able to associate arbitrary names, at least from Chaser’s POV since he doesn’t speak English, with stuffed toys, which are equally arbitrary from his POV.

Could you do this? Not knowing the context of the object you’re seeing, would you then be able to associate an equally arbitrary name with this object, and do this a thousand times over?

Sure you could, and probably in less time than Chaser — but maybe not.

Since a metaphor is a substitution that replaces one thing for another, Chaser is clearly a champion metaphor machine. It’ll be interesting to see how this research helps us understand and model the nature of animal thought.

I hope you had a restful and interesting winter break.

Links to your class can be found at the top of this page or you can go to QCounty.com, where the link path is a bit shorter.

I hope you had a restful, engaging, creative and memorable summer and that you’re now ready to get back to the wonderful world of English.

For information concerning your class, follow My Teaching Links at the right, or at the top right, to my Solano classes, Fall 2010 and your English class, either 1, 2 or 370.

While I've labeled this from the point of view of the reader who over time becomes more or less engaged, the POV can be that of a narrator or character. Indeed, once you understand the concept, you may find yourself applying it in the most inappropriate situations.

Key to my approach to teaching reading and writing to my English students, no matter the level or the focus — expository writing, short stories, narrative poetry, drama — is the checkmark story structure that I came across in Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft when I was trying to understand my fiction and MFA creative writing workshops at Mills College. While most English texts and English professors seem to prefer a narrative approach to plot — we English teachers are, after all, comfortable with words — this graph, which has evolved some since Burroway, appealed to my physicist’s need to see everything mathematically — except, of course, true love.

Fundamentally, the graph displays in emotional space-time that if you (or a character) need to get from point A to D, there will be a bump in your road at B that will make you question your ability to get to your destination until you reach C, when all will become clear.

One might say, if one were sitting in one of my classes, reviewing my approach, that I take this checkmark story structure stuff rather seriously. Too seriously, some might say, in that I sometimes apply it in conversation as well, telling someone who just bared his soul that his conflict was in search of a turning point and moral resolution. As you might imagine, this can be a rather abrupt conversation stopper.

Kurt Vonnegut seems to have had a more whimsical view of this versatile structure as evidenced by an article in the Spring 2010 edition of Lapham’s Quarterly. On his abscissa, time starts with the beginning and ends with the end, which seems appropriate. Instead of the ordinate measuring engagement, his axis goes from ill fortune to

good fortune. Indeed, if one shifts the structure to the POV of a character, fortune seems like the right measure. I especially liked his depiction of a boy meeting a girl, which might be true love. And then there’s Kafka’s Metamorphosis, in which a despondent young man turns into a bug. Less understandable is Vonnegut’s take on Hamlet and truth. For this he decides that it’s impossible to know when fortune is ill or good, so the play has nothing about fortune, ill or good. To attempt to understand Vonnegut’s humorous point, you’ll have to read the article.

While a no-brainer, it’s nice to have quantitative support for this psychological consequence: turn off violent video games and you’ve increased your child’s chances of being empathetic and ethical:

Exposure to violent video games makes kids more aggressive, less caring, regardless of their age, sex, or culture. That’s the conclusion of a study analyzing 130 research reports that included more than 130,000 subjects worldwide.

We can now say with utmost confidence that regardless of research method — that is experimental, correlational, or longitudinal — and regardless of the cultures tested in this study [East and West], you get the same effects, says Craig Anderson, Iowa State University Distinguished Professor of Psychology.

And the effects are that exposure to violent video games increases the likelihood of aggressive behavior in both short-term and long-term contexts. Such exposure also increases aggressive thinking and aggressive affect, and decreases prosocial behavior.

In The Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life, Alison Gopnik writes that “Children and adults are different forms of Homo Sapiens”, this from a review of the book by Michael Greenberg in the March 11 issue of the New York Review of Books:

For one thing, the prefrontal lobe, which has a major part in blocking out stimuli from other parts of the brain and fostering internally driven attention, is undeveloped in young children, and doesn’t fully form in most people until they are in their twenties. Internally driven attention, cognitive research suggests, isn’t a capacity that children fully acquire until at least the age of five. What arouses them is what is in front of their eyes, the first burst of information about cause and effect in the physical world.”

Because of this rather direct link between the physical world and experience, an infant’s perception may be something like ours when we suspend our disbelief and become emotionally engaged in a movie or play. Certainly this is not surprising on some level, for we know we are acting most childlike when we play imaginatively or when we’re able to drop our defenses, built up through years of adolescent and adult training, and experience something new as a child, who’s seeing so much for the first time, might. Now, it appears, there’s increasing quantitative evidence to support our suspicions. But these data go further by suggesting that morality may be different from what Piaget and others thought:

There is a complicated interplay between rules and morality in young children, a sophisticated sensitivity to intention when rules are broken, and a subtle appreciation that some rules are important, others less so. Moral knowledge, Gopnik argues, is imaginative knowledge, a direct outgrowth of empathy, which babies seem to experience in some form or another from almost the moment they are born.”

While babies certainly have original emotions, they also learn by imitating the joy and sorrow of others. When we smile at a baby, we expect at some point to see that smile mirrored. Perhaps the same is true of sadness though we more often than not try to hide this emotion from children. Gopnik speculates that babies may not see the difference between their emotional reactions and the world’s:

It’s possible that babies literally don’t see a difference between their own pain and the pain of others. Maybe babies want to end all suffering, no matter where it happens to be located. For them, pain is pain and joy is joy. Moral thinkers from Buddha to David Hume to Martin Buber have suggested that erasing the boundaries between yourself and others in this way can underpin morality. We know that children’s conception of a continuous separate self develops slowly in the first five years.

However, because of their ability to empathize, children can also quickly pick up discriminatory behaviors as when they learn to exclude rather than include others because “a tiny, arbitrary distinction becomes a reason for enmity. Children as young as three can refuse to play with another child because of the color of her hair or the clothes that he’s wearing.

While there’s much that I’m skipping in the review, I want to jump to the concluding thought which seems to capture a difference between the Chekhovian concept of description, in which one connects to a narrative along a zoomed path that focuses on details, to the less focused observation often associated with non-narrative poetry and Zen-like ideals:

The Philosophical Baby is both a scientific and romantic book, a result of Gopnik’s charming willingness to imagine herself inside the consciousness of young children. She compares “the lantern consciousness of childhood…to the spotlight consciousness of ordinary adult attention.” With lantern consciousness “you are vividly aware of everything without being focused on any one thing in particular. There is a kind of exaltation and a peculiar kind of happiness that goes with these experiences too.”

Gopnik likens lantern consciousness to Romantic poetry, the uninhibited receptiveness that is the artist’s ideal, and the Zen ideal of “beginner’s mind” where the meditator relinquishes attachment to his inner “I.” “Babies, like Buddhas, are travelers in a little room,” she writes. Lantern consciousness provokes the feeling that “we have lost our sense of self…by becoming part of the world.”

So, it seems, we make it past five years of age, enter first grade, then second. On and on we struggle to organize our identity and our lives, but may only find ourselves most in touch with ourselves and others when we return to a mental state that is similar to a period that we can no longer remember, but that we sense when we’re with a baby who searches our face and smiles.

I hope you had a great winter break and am looking forward to working with each of you.

Look to the right for links to my Solano classes ==>

In my English classes I’m at that point in the semester when we discuss the three fundamental elements necessary to think and write critically about a thesis: description, compare-contrast, and effect-cause. (Until yesterday I would have said cause-effect, but then one of my students pointed out that actually we should say effect-cause since we notice the effect before we look for the cause. Go students!)

To make clear how these three fundamental elements work, consider the current health care debate which has as its thesis something like the following:

Because so many Americans do not have insurance or can’t afford the insurance they have or are surprised to find that the insurance they have doesn’t cover their illnesses or discover when they become ill that they are no longer covered, and because private insurance companies can deny coverage based on pre-existing conditions and because there is too often too little competition between insurers and because medical care has devolved into a profession in which doctors and their patients are no longer the primary focus of health care and because these intolerable conditions obtain right here in these United States of America, the only industrialized nation without universal health care, we, the American people, have decided to reform health care in such a way that all will be covered and that will enable doctors and their patients to focus on staying and getting well.

This is a mouthful I know, which probably, even at this length, has left some important concerns out. It certainly leaves out President Obama’s paramount point in his speech on health care reform that fixing health care is a moral imperative: we need to fix health care because the moral character of our country must extend beyond me to you; each of us is to a degree our brothers’ and sisters’ keeper because we care about others, not just about ourselves.

Ideally, we and our government representatives should critically examine this thesis using the three fundamental elements of critical thinking:

Description: We need to describe in detail each element of the thesis, using evidence as necessary as well as examples and illustrations. We can quote statistics, and certainly we want to hear the horror stories about those who weren’t properly served and about those who died or were injured for life.

Compare-Contrast: We then need to compare and contrast our health care system with others that seem to work better and worse than ours, looking in detail at the moving parts in and design of each.

Effect-Cause: And in each case we need to examine the why of our system as well as of the others. Why does a particular system produce better or worse health care? Why does a particular system cost more or less? (Actually, it seems that there is no system that costs more than ours.) Why do doctors and patients prefer one system over another?

Sadly, much of our “discussion” of health care here in the US is about as far from critical thinking as is possible for a people who have putatively evolved beyond  throwing stones at one another. Shrill cries from some that we are creating death panels, are enabling government to take over medicine, and are constructing a public-option Trojan horse that will lead inevitably to “socialized” medicine in which all will wear gray suits and speak without humor are hardly signs of a rational, critical discussion.

For an antidote to this sad state of affairs and to celebrate critical thinking, see T. R. Reid’s The Healing of America, reviewed by Dr. Abigail Zuger in The New York Times, in which Reid describes health care in the world, compares health care systems, looks carefully at why they work, and examines possible effect-cause solutions to what ails us in the US.