Fire and Knowledge

Figuring out what really matters to us in life can seem difficult. But here’s an easy way: attend your own funeral.

Walk down the aisle, sit in the pew, and imagine what you want your spouse and family and friends to say and think about you. Write those things down.

Now what are you doing today to accomplish them?

Abraham Piper says that “deciding against college is like deciding to not graduate from high school.” Here was my comment:

College can be a waste of time and money. Steve Jobs only had a semester of college. Bill Gates dropped out after two years. And they didn’t do too bad.

If you’re going to be a doctor, engineer, academic or something similar, college is necessary. If you’re going to be an entrepreneur, it’s often not.

Self-education is very easy these days. You can even listen to professors through The Teaching Company that you’d have to go to ivy league schools to hear. Books abound. Knowledge on any topic is a couple clicks away.

I disagree that “deciding against college is like deciding to not graduate from high school.” I think a high school education (or equivalent) is necessary for most decent jobs unless you’re starting your own business or have connections. But college is often overlooked if the person has the experience and skills required. I know lots of stupid people who have attended college, and many smart people who have not. When looking at a resume, I mainly look at what they’ve accomplished, not what school they’ve attended.

Of course I’m a bit biased here, having dropped out of college myself and having no desire to go back.

What do you think?

Prediction: That within a year, Apple will release or announce some kind of iPhone Mini that is smaller, cheaper, and has fewer features. They did this for the Mac (the Mac Mini) and for the iPod (Nano and Shuffle) to bring the price down and reach a new market, and they’ll do it for the iPhone, too.

I was looking through the magazine rack at the hospital and noticed a number of Watchtower pamphlets. For those who don’t know, Watchtower is the Jehovah’s Witnesses propaganda magazine. I became frustrated that they would put their literature there, preying upon sick and scared people at the hospital.

It also reminded me of my time in high school when a friend and I would put gospel tracts in books (especially in the Occult section) at Books-a-Million. That was lame, but not this lame. I wasn’t preying upon the sick and scared, wooing them into a religion where it’s a sin to have blood transfusions.

Anyway, there are no more Watchtower magazines at that hospital.

When I was a child I used to watch politics on C-SPAN and CNN with my grandmother. For fun, I’d guess who were the Democrats and Republicans. I could do it pretty well. I had a rigorous test: I would look at their faces and decide if they looked mean or nice. The nice ones were Republicans, and the mean ones were Democrats. It never worked out perfectly, but I was right more than wrong.

I’m sure that doesn’t give any hints about the political affiliation of my family. I assure you, I was very objective and unbiased and remain so to this day.

What happens if I apply my old philosophy to the 2008 campaign? Huckabee has the most real smile and I would inevitably thought him a Republican. He’s sort of the funny Uncle in the race, someone you like and respect but think he’d be better at running a tractor than the country. McCain I might have mistaken for a democrat, though. His smile is more grim, yet there is kindness there. Obama I would have mistaken for a Republican for sure. If you didn’t already know, he’s going to win. Hillary, however, would have been unmistakably Democrat. I would have been afraid of that smile.

Steve Hargadon argues that Web 2.0 is the future of education. I disagree. Of course it will influence and change education to some extent, but will it be the future of education? Unlikely.

Steve says Web 2.0 will help move education “from formal schooling to lifelong learning.” People have been devoted to lifelong learning long before the Internet. The Internet does make some information easier to retrieve, but many people do not take advantage of this, just as many people didn’t take advantage of books on their shelves. I’m not convinced the Internet is going to change this too much. Hopefully I’m wrong here, though, because it would be great if more people were interested in lifelong learning.

I took a quick look at Classroom 2.0, which Steve recommended for learning about education and Web 2.0. On the homepage was a teacher asking this question:

I’m looking for a new project for my (online) students in an Ancient Civilizations class to deomostrate their knowledge of the material we’ve been learning. They’ve written numerous blogs, they’ve created PowerPoints, and I’ve offered podcasting or videos( but haven’t had too many students intersested in in these). I was thinking of a comic strip project to where the students show how the geography of the area has played a very important role in determining how the society developed and what technologies evolved. I’m having trouble finding a comic strip generator that students can use their own clip art or has appropriate pictures for this assignment. Anyone have a suggestion? or other ideas for web 2.0 projects for this class.

Now it would be hard for me to find a better demonstration for my skepticism. This is a teacher for “gifted” students. She misspells demonstrate and interested. She’s having her students write “numerous blogs,” which I assume she means blog posts, which I assume must be something like very short, undemanding essays. And a comic strip generator? Good God. Has it really come to this?

This is, in essence, a teacher asking how to do the basics of teaching. How can your students demonstrate their knowledge of a subject? You have them write papers and debate with other students. You ask them questions. Yes, there are creative ways to have them learn. But if you want them to create a comic strip, you can have them draw it on paper. But, alas, that doesn’t have very much to do with Web 2.0 and flashy websites and cool technology.

Can Web 2.0 help education? Possibly. But it can also hinder it, as we see with the teacher’s question above. I suppose teachers really exist who are having their students mess around with comic strip generators and powerpoint and podcasts instead of writing and reading and debating. And I thought I got a lousy education.

So I don’t think the future of education is Web 2.0. I don’t think nifty websites can replace the classroom, reading classics, writing essays, memorizing, debating ideas, doing painstaking research, or running experiments.

The Sparrow (1996) by Mary Doria Russell, 408 pages.

Summary: After intercepting alien radio waves, Jesuit scientists are sent to the planet Rakhat on an anthropological mission of contact. They travel on an outfitted asteroid and arrive many years later. While learning about the sentient species and their cultures, things go terribly wrong. Emilio Sandoz is the only survivor of the mission, and he doesn’t want to explain why.

It’s an interesting, easy, disturbing read. The friendships that are formed by the main characters make the reader long for similar companionship in life. The priests are shown as real people with real struggles (though perhaps a little too much so).

The most weighty questions addressed are the existence, goodness, and plan of an omnipotent and compassionate God. Is everything that happens the plan of God? Fr. Sandoz, after much doubt and wrestling, comes to believes this. And as he comes into the culmination of God’s plan, he is spiritually broken when it turns out to be his worst possible nightmare.

Anne, the doctor, also struggles with the age-old question of theodicy. For example, after a teammate dies, she says:

“Why is it that God gets all the credit for all the good stuff, but it’s the doctor’s fault when [death] happens? When the patient comes through, it’s always ‘Thank God,’ and when the patient dies, it’s always blaming the doctor. Just once in my life, just for the sheer … novelty of it, it would be nice if somebody blamed God when the patient dies, instead of me.” (198)

I’d cautiously recommend this book. The vulgarity can get annoying and feel forced, but the book is challenging and perspective changing. It made me wrestle through theodicy along with the characters. If there is a loving God, why is there so much suffering? “Perhaps we can’t understand the answers,” says Fr. Marc Robichaus in his eulogy for Alan Pace,

“because we are incapable of knowing God’s ways and God’s thoughts. We are, after all, only very clever tailless primates, doing the best we can, but limited. Perhaps we must all own up to being agnostic, unable to know the unknowable.” (201)

And yet, we press on.

We’ve had HTML and websites for over a decade now, isn’t it about time we can start using tabs? There’s still no easy way to do this with HTML, which is why most websites have a space between each paragraph instead of a tab. There’s something backwards here. Let’s get a &tab;!