bearing blog

Treasure-hunting.

My eleven-year-old recently sat for his first set of fill-in-the-bubbles, comprehensive nationally standardized tests.  Till now we've fulfilled our legal obligations with an annual sitting of the PIAT-R or "Peabody" test, which is administered verbally; I like that format for younger children, but of course I'd prefer my older kids to get comfortable with the format they'll be using for college boards and the like.

I'm satisfied with his performance, but I had to point out to him something that amused me about his lowest score.  It was on the topic "Searching for Information" on the "Reference Materials" test.  

Let's just put it this way:  When was the last time you used an almanac?  When was the last time anyone used an almanac?    Isn't the answer to "Where would you find this sort of information?" always "Google it" now?

Don't get me wrong, I'll sit down with him and teach him about the various uses of an almanac, a multivolume alphabetical dead-tree encyclopedia, an atlas -- heck, I'll teach him about the Guinness Book of World Records if I have to.  But I'm afraid it's going to have to be a history lesson.

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The instant availability of searchable information has affected far more academic pursuits than those of schoolchildren writing reports about the annual rainfall in Colorado or the principal exports of Nicaragua.

I had this thought while reading over Melanie's latest installment in her "Blogging T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land" series.  

The Waste Land is an exceptionally intricate poem, exceptionally difficult to analyze -- even to read and experience.  Advanced high school students can deal with something like The Hollow Men;  The Waste Land, by contrast, is packed full of so many allusions and references that the person who aspires to read it and understand it with any degree of ease must either possess

(1) a wide-ranging literary background including some facility in several languages  --OR--

(2)  a heavily annotated edition of the poem in which all the literary references are explained to you.

Number one is difficult, and renders the poem inaccessible to almost everyone.   Number two is not so hard to come by, but it is not very fun, and it also ruins the experience of sitting and reading.

That has been what it takes, for many years.

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But now, our information environment is so very different -- the experience of reading something like The Waste Land is more like a treasure hunt.  The reader reads along, comes upon a place that catches the eye:  Here is something intriguing; what can it mean?  

So, for example, in lines 31-34 of the poem, you come to this:

Frisch weht der Wind/Der Heimat zu/Mein Irisch Kind/Wo weilest du?

And hey,  I can recognize it as German, but I don't speak or read German.  I can guess at some of this (fresh is the wind? my Irish child?) but not much.  

But it's a simple matter to Google the whole mess and to discover that the passage is a quote from Wagner's opera Tristan und Isolde. 

You could follow the links that are all about The Wasteland, of course, and other people's ideas about why Eliot quoted Tristan und Isolde just here, and why this passage.  That is, you could if you were in a hurry, or if you wanted to cheat, and if you were more interested in hearing what other people think than in thinking about the poem yourself.  (Nothing wrong with that, if that's what you want.)

But if you are more interested in the treasure hunt, and coming up with your own ideas, you could instead turn to Googling Tristan und Isolde, in which case you'd discover that there is a British movie version released in 2006, and you'd also find the Wikipedia page with a synopsis, with a synopsis, plus other topics such as the influence of Schopenhauer on the plot of the opera.  

Maybe you would follow the Schopenhauer thread ("Hm, it says here 'The world-view of Schopenhauer dictates that the only way for man to achieve inner peace is to renounce his desires!' Could that be a theme of The Waste Land?") or maybe you would keep searching until you found a translation of just that bit of the passage.  That might lead you to compare different translations, as Melanie has in her latest post.  

We can meet the poem in a sort of middle ground now.  Even people who haven't had a really top-notch literary education can have all the references at their fingertips, and we can follow the rabbit trails of the poem as we will with relative ease.  We can do this now without having to passively listen to a lecturer explaining each line at a time, or passively checking the footnotes of our annotated edition.  Now we can read and enjoy it actively, individually, according to what strikes our fancy; exploring and discovering the poem on our own.  

Something like The Waste Land  is no longer a sealed message from one high-end mind to its fellows, accessible only to those privileged by a lavish education or the luxury of enough leisure time to become self-taught.  It is now almost like a puzzle carefully crafted by Eliot, a puzzle that the ordinary literate person can tease apart bit by bit, independently, or perhaps in a conversation among friends -- like the one unfolding in Melanie's combox.

If you enjoy that sort of thing, it's fun.  A lot more fun for me than it was before the Internet.   And if anyone ever asks me "In what source of information would you look to find out the analysis of a difficult piece of literature?" I'll be filling in the circle that goes with "the blogosphere."

"Take as your model the tall women with yellow hair in plaits/Who walked back into burning houses to die with men..."

Marc Barnes at Bad Catholic put up a post today in which he quoted a few lines from a poem by C. S. Lewis that I didn't know -- a poem that appeared to mock the idea that the modern world is falling into "paganism," on the grounds that paganism is much cooler and certainly manlier than whatever it is the modern world is falling into today.   I thought my classics-loving 11-year-old would like it, so I went looking.

Here's the poem, Googled and presented for your enjoyment.

Cliche Came Out of Its Cage

by C. S. Lewis

1

You said 'The world is going back to Paganism'. 
Oh bright Vision! I saw our dynasty in the bar of the House 
Spill from their tumblers a libation to the Erinyes, 
And Leavis with Lord Russell wreathed in flowers, heralded with flutes, 
Leading white bulls to the cathedral of the solemn Muses 
To pay where due the glory of their latest theorem. 
Hestia's fire in every flat, rekindled, burned before 
The Lardergods. Unmarried daughters with obedient hands 
Tended it By the hearth the white-armd venerable mother 
Domum servabat, lanam faciebat. at the hour 
Of sacrifice their brothers came, silent, corrected, grave 
Before their elders; on their downy cheeks easily the blush 
Arose (it is the mark of freemen's children) as they trooped, 
Gleaming with oil, demurely home from the palaestra or the dance. 
Walk carefully, do not wake the envy of the happy gods, 
Shun Hubris. The middle of the road, the middle sort of men, 
Are best. Aidos surpasses gold. Reverence for the aged 
Is wholesome as seasonable rain, and for a man to die 
Defending the city in battle is a harmonious thing. 
Thus with magistral hand the Puritan Sophrosune 
Cooled and schooled and tempered our uneasy motions; 
Heathendom came again, the circumspection and the holy fears ... 
You said it. Did you mean it? Oh inordinate liar, stop.

2

Or did you mean another kind of heathenry? 
Think, then, that under heaven-roof the little disc of the earth, 
Fortified Midgard, lies encircled by the ravening Worm. 
Over its icy bastions faces of giant and troll 
Look in, ready to invade it. The Wolf, admittedly, is bound; 
But the bond wil1 break, the Beast run free. The weary gods, 
Scarred with old wounds the one-eyed Odin, Tyr who has lost a hand, 
Will limp to their stations for the Last defence. Make it your hope 
To be counted worthy on that day to stand beside them; 
For the end of man is to partake of their defeat and die 
His second, final death in good company. The stupid, strong 
Unteachable monsters are certain to be victorious at last, 
And every man of decent blood is on the losing side. 
Take as your model the tall women with yellow hair in plaits 
Who walked back into burning houses to die with men, 
Or him who as the death spear entered into his vitals 
Made critical comments on its workmanship and aim. 
Are these the Pagans you spoke of? Know your betters and crouch, dogs; 
You that have Vichy water in your veins and worship the event 
Your goddess History (whom your fathers called the strumpet Fortune).

Fun, isn't it?

More on First Saturdays: the results of an experiment I didn't know I was doing.

Some time ago, while I was working on the Total Consecration, I wrote about my reluctance to enter deeply into Marian devotions -- a reluctance that was brought into high relief when I encountered a certain online book by Fr. William Most that discussed Mary as "co-Redemptrix":

"This is the kind of Marian writing that makes the tops of Protestants' heads blow off. ...[A]s I read it, I found myself struggling with some of the concepts, precisely because of the Protestant, anti-Marian influence in American Christian culture. It was very edifying, because intellectually, Father Most's arguments make a great deal of sense to me. And yet the logical conclusion of his arguments suggests an attitude toward the Blessed Virgin that feels radical to me. Deep down, it seems, I feel a sort of repulsion against fully embracing the idea of Mary as intercessor, which as I search my history seems can only have come from contact with American Protestantism. I didn't even realize that I felt that internal repulsion until reading Fr. Most's arguments forced me to confront it."

 

I have long had that feeling about many Marian devotions. Take, for example, the Five First Saturdays devotion. Originating in a request that Our Lady reportedly made in an apparition to Lucia Santos, it is a superficially pleasant-sounding-enough activity: Attend Mass, say a rosary, go to Confession, and spend fifteen minutes in meditation, all with the intention of making reparation for sins committed against the mother of Jesus. Do it five first Saturdays in a row, and you are done. A simple little thing, not terribly demanding, a one-time commitment, like making a pilgrimage.

But I was always bothered by the fact that, in recommending it to us, the Church, or Mary, didn't stop there, but instead went on to promise something in return. Here is a direct quote of what Sister Lucia reports that Mary told her in her vision:

"I promise to assist at the hour of death, with the graces necessary for salvation, all who on the First Saturday of five consecutive months confess their sins, receive Holy Communion, recite five decades of the Rosary, and keep me company for fifteen minutes meditating on the mysteries of the Rosary, with the purpose of making reparation to my Immaculate Heart."

One resistance:  I felt that this promise ...cheapened the devotion somehow. And that Mary had made it that much harder to do it with the purpose of making reparation, by dangling a carrot of promised graces before us.

It felt presumptuous too. All I have to do is check off these items, and I get the graces necessary for salvation? (I hadn't noticed the subtle difference between promising salvation, and promising the graces necessary for salvation.)

Finally, it seemed disturbingly superstitious, which is to say that I could not see any logical or natural connection between "do these things now, and when you die, possibly far off in the future, after who knows what temptations have assailed you and after you have failed in who knows how many ways, you will get something you don't deserve, just because you checked off the boxes." Even if I mean it now, suppose I become hard and unrepentant later? How can doing this now protect me and help me then? This put it in company with a number of other Marian devotions, e.g., the wearing of the Brown Scapular (what? Die with your magic necklace on and you're good to go? How does THAT work?)

Okay, well, I decided to try to do it anyway. I get Saturday mornings off, at least if Mark isn't traveling, and so I didn't have much excuse not to give it a whirl. I prayed for the grace to purify my intentions, so that I really could do it with the purpose of making reparation; I found a local parish that had a Saturday morning Mass; and off I went, on the first Saturday in July, which turned out to be the feast of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. I went on to complete the devotion over the next four months as prescribed.

For the benefit of anyone else who is creeped about Marian devotions because they smack of superstition, presumption, and illogical connections, I want to report back on two results that had the effect of removing my creeped-outedness completely. The caveat is that they are specific to me -- I haven't the foggiest idea whether other people would get similar results. Another caveat is that I can only speak for this moment in time -- for all I know I may think differently after life has thrown more curveballs at me. I am just throwing it out there, as a sort of personal testimony, in the now.

Direct result #1 of doing the Five First Saturdays: I discovered that I rather like going to Mass and confession once a month. This was a bit of a surprise. I rather thought I would be ready to have a "Woo-hoo, I did it, now I'm done!" party. Instead, by the time I had been through five of them, I wanted to keep it up. And so now it is sort of an established habit of mine. I go to Mass on the first Saturday of the month, if I can. I show up early enough to say the rosary with the other folks who are there. I go to Confession. After my penance I stick around for fifteen minutes. I like it. I don't know why I never thought of going to Mass on Saturday mornings before, along with the trip to the gym and the library and getting my hair cut and running personal errands and all those other things I try to do in those few hours I have to myself each week. It was a great idea that I somehow never came up with on my own. I don't know for sure if I will keep it up for the rest of my life, but it has certainly lasted longer than the five Saturdays I originally signed up for, and who knows how much good I will get out of it? Maybe exactly what is necessary.

Direct result #2: On the second Saturday, the priest in the confessional advised me to make the Total Consecration to Jesus through Mary. If you have been following along at all, you know that the Total Consecration, encompassing as it does pretty much all authentic Marian devotion, feels to me transcendently more radical than something like the five first Saturdays. Here I was, just trying to check off the boxes and asking please for the grace to do it with the right intentions and not the wrong ones, and now I was being invited to go deeper. I went away knowing I had at least a responsibility to find out more about the Consecration and to discern whether I should make it. You know by now that I did this, and that I made the Consecration in the fall.

Has it changed me in any real way? I can't know that for sure. I hope so. But its totality, inherently, promises more than five Saturdays seems capable of promising. The Five First Saturdays seemed so mean a commitment; so much more might happen to me afterwards; it seemed insane to accept that in any natural way, in any just way, they could be part of the cause of graces received maybe fifty years from now or more. But the Total Consecration promises to be a bridge across the unknown future, between now and that hour of my death, across all the pitfalls that could still swallow me, across the pavement of my good intentions. It is not a guarantee, but it is an accessible path from here to there. And there is no doubt that the invitation came as a result of the First Saturdays.

Obviously there is no way I can generalize from my experience to anyone else's. I only know what is inside me. And I have written before that I am fully aware of the proclivity of the human mind to see patterns wherever we want to see them. Perhaps I am only unconsciously justifying my irrational decisions by overlaying a perception of rationality that comes from outside myself and cannot be falsified by any external test. Like persisting in the belief that my spouse loves me; I can't prove its truth or falsity, but it is certainly convenient to think so.

It is just that I tried something that I couldn't make sense of, and received a result that -- well -- not so much made it make sense, as left the possibility that it could make sense. And as a result, I am not sorry I tried. YMMV.

 

A MrsDarwin review.

MrsDarwin reviews a new book about chastity for adolescents and young adults.

In my days as a young unmarried Catholic, I often suffered through chastity talks or had dating manuals pressed on me. The Protestant dating manuals (or, more accurately, not-dating, since apparently dating is right out in those circles, to be replaced by the nebulous concept of "courtship") were painfully earnest in their descriptions of hypothetical couples who were keeping their relationships 99.44% pure by following strict rules of behavior. Chastity talks were even more painful because you had to be there in person, squirming in your folding chair and wishing the floor would swallow you as the speaker hemmed and hawed, or, even worse, was wildly enthusiastic for Purity! There seemed to be no happy medium between  either rigid guidelines that seemed designed to minimize contact between a couple, or hazy exhortations to purity that gave one no practical guidance in the matter of a relationship rooted in reality.

The book is How Far Can We Go? A Catholic Guide to Sex and Dating, by Brett Salkeld and Leah Perrault.

...One thing I really appreciate here is that Salkeld and Perrault have a respect for their young audience, and don't treat the question "How far can we go?" as an attempt to find out how much whoopie one can get away with, but an honest query about what is right and appropriate at any point in a relationship. (I snickered out loud at their description of a youth group leader who answers this question from a young couple by saying, "I'll let you in on a little secret. Your relationship will do much better if, instead, you ask yourselves how pure you can be." If you haven't heard twaddle like that, you haven't been around the Authentically Catholic! youth scene much.) They emphasize from the start that their model of dating "presumes that those who use it are sincerely trying to live holy lives. If you're hoping to find loopholes so you can get away with as much as possible and still say you're following Catholic rules, this model isn't for you."

Just what is this model? It relies on honestly answering the question "How much of myself does God want me to give to this other person?"

I detest (detest!) Catholic twaddle even more than ordinary secular twaddle, and (unfortunately) there's probably more twaddle in Catholic material aimed at youth and young adults than in Catholic material aimed at young children.  

So far the only anti-twaddle approach I had imagined was going to be to start reading Flannery O'Connor for bedtime stories (I might skip the "people being crushed under farm equipment" parts until they're older) but I submit that this could be an unbalanced approach.

So I'm interested in adding this book to my library -- because material that doesn't treat young people as people -- people with the intent to live a life of integrity, but not one in a bubble -- is not worth having, and this one sounds like a decent alternative.  I'll tell you what I think of it later.

Book review, part 2: Glucose and willpower.

(Part 1 of my review of  Willpower:  Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength by Roy Baumeister and John Tierney is here)

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Sometimes, at the end of what feels like a long day, or a long mental effort, I have a feeling that I often describe as "brain-fried."  I've been struggling not to yell at the kids, I've been thinking about a blog post I need to write, I've been trying not to procrastinate the million things I need to do, and I have an inexplicable craving for things like mashed potatoes or chocolate -- and solitude.  Tierney and Baumeister use a different term, but I immediately recognized it.  They call it "ego depletion," and it is the state of having used up all your willpower.

Yes, "used up."  Here are what they have to say about it, based on the research described in the book:

1. Resisting temptation is only one way we use willpower. Three others are

• controlling display of emotion or emotional outburst; 
• making decisions; 
• and performing physical tasks that require skill, e.g., balancing speed and accuracy.

2.  You have a limited supply of willpower. Repeated effort at any of the willpower-using activities depletes it.  After trying to control yourself for long enough, you lack the self-control to do any of them.  It becomes more difficult to restrain your displays of emotion, to think about decisions you have to make, to practice your skills, or -- yes -- to resist temptations and urges.

3.  It's trying to control yourself, not succeeding, that depletes willpower.   Even if you give in, you're left with less willpower to work with.

4. When your blood glucose levels drop, your willpower depletes faster.  

5. Accordingly, raising your blood sugar (i.e., by consuming food) restores your willpower supply.  The fastest way to do this is, of course, easily digestible carbohydrates, but protein and more-healthful, more-slowly digestible carbohydrates also work, albeit more slowly.

6. At low glucose and low willpower, your brain turns its effort to other things.  It keeps working and consuming fuel at the same rate, but it gives up on the willpower-consuming activities.

7.  One of the things it turns to is trying to get you to raise your blood sugar.  Hello, carb cravings!

Tierney and Baumeister point out the obvious "Catch-22" for people who struggle with food cravings here:  You need willpower in order not to eat, and you need to eat in order to have willpower.  

Just as obvious is that, if what they are saying is true, then folks with impaired glucose tolerance -- insulin resistance, hypoglycemia, diabetes and prediabetes (even, they suggest, premenstrual syndrome!)  -- will frequently be in a state of (relatively) impaired impulse control and decisionmaking skills.  

We can get a little overfocused on overeating here at bearing blog.  Remember that impulse control applies to a lot of different areas of life (and indeed Tierney and Baumeister mention many):  drinking and drug abuse, procrastination, violent outbursts, child discipline, studying and schoolwork, performance at a variety of difficult tasks.

I have to go now (procrastinating long enough) but I'll post again with more insights about willpower, not so glucose related, and then try to tie them into some practical tips for behavioral change.

Information flow.

This is very good news:  The Chronicle of Higher Education is reporting that JSTOR, the database of academic journals, is about to beta-test a system that will allow users to access a limited number of journal articles for free.

It’s about to get a little easier—emphasis on “a little”—for users without subscriptions to tap JSTOR’s enormous digital archive of journal articles. In the coming weeks, JSTOR will make available the beta version of a new program, Register & Read, which will give researchers read-only access to some journal articles, no payment required. All users have to do is to sign up for a free “MyJSTOR” account, which will create a virtual shelf on which to store the desired articles.

But there are limits. Users won’t be able to download the articles; they will be able to access only three at a time, and there will be a minimum viewing time frame of 14 days per article, which means that a user can’t consume lots of content in a short period. Depending on the journal and the publisher, users may have an option to pay for and download an article if they choose.

To start, the program will feature articles from 70 journals.

This is an exciting development.  The Internet is a wonderful thing, but it has always frustrated me that it's comparatively difficult to access peer-reviewed research.  I know, it has always been possible to buy reprints of journal articles you want to read ($30 a pop is not an atypical charge), and it has always been possible (for me, an able-bodied resident of a major urban area) to trek physically to the libraries at the state university and do my searching from there, but face it ... with these obstacles, it's always been easier just to do the best one can with Wikipedia.  

Besides, at least when I was working on my graduate degree, I found that I generally didn't know if an article was going to be useful until after I'd read it.  That makes me rather unwilling to arrange childcare and cross town for a single article, or to pay $30 for the privilege of accessing it.  

Make no mistakes, the program described in the Chronicle is severely limited:  few people, however self-motivated, will be able to conduct significant independent research at the rate of six articles a month (partly because of that phenomenon I described -- with the exception of seminal "classic" papers or comprehensive literature reviews, it's hard to tell whether an article is useful until after you've read it).   But maybe this will be a step forward into a new era that makes independent scholarship more accessible to everyone.   As Alexis Madrigal at the Atlantic points out, 

Why is this important? Well, get a load of this stat. JSTOR told the Chronicle that each and every year, they turn away 150 million attempts to gain access to articles. That's right. 150 million attempts! 

The way I see it, that's 150 million chances lost to improve the quality of the Internet. JSTOR, as the keeper of so much great scholarly work, should be one of the Internet's dominant suppliers of facts and serious research. But if something is not publicly available, key gatekeepers like journalists and Wikipedians, move to the best available source, even if they know that there probably is a better source behind JSTOR's paywall. 

150 million potential pageviews is a lot of potential transactions, and if awareness grew that you could actually access the content of scholarly journals, it's likely there would be many more.  If JSTOR can find a way to monetize these access attempts in a way that delivers decent bang-for-the-buck, a real win-win situation could be created:  profit for the journal, which after all has to pay the bills, and a more fluid -- if not entirely "free" -- flow of information.

This would be good for everyone:  patients who need to understand the latest research about their own medical diagnoses, activists who want to marshall the best arguments to rally people to their causes, independent scholars who seek to educate themselves, high-school level home-educated students, high school teachers, tech professionals temporarily absent from the workforce who need to stay current in their field -- and nerds like me who just like to go straight to the source and maybe blog about it.   It could be good for the journals, too.

Book review, part 1: Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength.

This past week I finished reading Willpower:  Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength by Roy Baumeister and John Tierney.  I recommend it.  

As nonfiction goes, it's a fairly light and quick read, and interesting:  I would rank it with Brian Wansink's Mindless Eating in the pop psychology genre.  Like those Wansink describes, some of the psychological experiments that Tierney and Baumeister recount (most of which were designed and executed by others) are interesting and creative.  Interesting, creative, and cruel:  I really, really felt bad for some of the experimental subjects, who had to do things like

1. first, fast for many hours
2. then, hungry, be ushered into a waiting room filled with the smell of baking cookies
3. sit next to a bowl of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies and be told "Those aren't for you, here, have one of these nice crunchy radishes instead"
4. finally be given "intelligence tests" which consisted of puzzles that, in fact, had no solution, the point being to measure how long the subjects sweated over them before they gave up trying.

The book also includes material gleaned from a handful of celebrities, either from interviews or from excerpts from memoirs.  Not sure why they had to be celebrities, but they do make for interesting stories.  How Drew Carey looked at his messy desk, said "Shit, man, I'm rich," and hired David Allen (of Getting Things Done) to work with him as a personal organizer for a year.  How Eric Clapton stopped drinking, and speculations as to how AA's "abandon yourself to a higher power" thing can work even for atheists.  How performance artist Amanda Palmer maintained composure as a living statue, standing perfectly still for three hours a day even in the face of people trying to anger or amuse her, and how it affected her for hours afterward.  There's also a historical discussion of Henry Stanley (he of "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?") and how his memoirs hint that he could maintain discipline -- both of himself and of the men under his command -- through truly horrific conditions.

But the real gem of Willpower is the insights it suggests from research, some of which are surprising -- but which explain a lot.  I hinted at this in a blog post I wrote  about sticking to your resolutions, which drew on an article written by Tierney, and also you can see a New York Times review of the book here which summarizes it pretty well.

Before getting into the specific insights, though, let's talk about the problem posed by the very idea of "willpower" itself.   Some people, to be blunt, believe there is no such thing, pointing to various research findings that convincingly show that we are so often driven by forces of which we are not conscious.  Others are wary of bringing up the possibility because it smacks so much of blaming people for the situation they find themselves in, which may largely be because of forces outside their control.  

In the obesity research world, there is a lot of evidence out there that "lack of willpower" is not the root reason for much of the obesity problem.  Take Gary Taubes's two books, Good Calories, Bad Calories (I reviewed it here) and Why We Get Fat (I reviewed it here, here, here).  Both of them make a very convincing case that intractable obesity is caused by a biochemical vicious cycle that is triggered by exposure -- maybe even as early as in utero! -- to a diet of sugars and other refined carbohydrates.   The cravings and the difficulty resisting them are both products of broken hormonal signals, according to this model, and so you simply cannot say that obesity can be "fixed" through application of willpower alone to resist the temptation to overeat.  From Good Calories, Bad Calories:  "Though the traditional response to the failure of semi-starvation diets to produce long-term weight loss has been to blame the fat person for a lack of willpower... [some] have argued that this failure is precisely the evidence that tells us positive caloric balance or overeating is not the underlying disorder in obesity."

So let's stipulate for the purposes that this is true:  our decisions to give in, or not to give in, very often come from unconscious processes, or biochemical urges, or explicable impulses.  How do Tierney and Baumeister deal with that?  And the answer is that they  do it through a careful -- and useful -- definition of the terms "will" and "willpower."

The will is to be found in connecting units across time.... Will involves treating the current situation as part of a general pattern... You must treat (almost) every episode [of temptation] as a reflection of a general need to resist these temptations.

That's where conscious self-control comes in, and that's why it makes the difference between success and failure in just about every aspect of life.

The way I read it is this:  We may have no conscious and immediate control over the impulses that overtake us, the urges and cravings and temptations.  They may come from our environment or from chemical signals inside us.  And we may have little conscious and immediate control over the strength of our resistance against those impulses:  once the impulse has begun, if we are "caught out," there may be little we can do to fight against them.  

 

But we do have power to predict the impulses that may overtake us in the future, and we can take steps to prepare.  We can shape our environment so that they meet us on a battleground we have chosen, or we can avoid meeting them at all.  We can also whip ourselves into shape so that we have a better chance at resisting even if we are surprised by our impulses.

That is where the "will" part of "willpower" comes in.

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In a future post, I'll list some of the insights from the book that resonated with me.  Some of them, I met with a sense of recognition, as a general form of the specific insights that I discovered for myself during my weight loss and subsequent struggles with maintenance.  Finally, I'll discuss how I think people can harness these insights to hammer out a plan of action for personal change.

(I think I can write with some conviction and experience about how to harness willpower to overcome the specific fault of gluttony.  What I'd really like to do, though, is figure out how to harness it to overcome faults I'm still mired in.  Maybe, through continued writing about gluttony, I can see a way to draw analogies that will create a map to escape from those other faults as well.)

 

In the book pile.

Just jumping in here to say that I started reading that book on willpower that I mentioned in passing a couple of days ago and it's really, really interesting.  I am only on chapter two and I'm riveted.

Here's a link to a NYT review of the book, Willpower:  Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength by Roy Baumeister and John Tierney.

I will be writing about this one when I finish it.

I made a resolution last year to wait for new books to come from the library rather than making impulse purchases, but this one I couldn't stand waiting for any longer and after reading the review finally hit the "buy now" button for the Kindle edition.  I think there's probably some irony there, but I don't want to look too hard at it.

Literature-based American History (III): Topics of the twentieth century.

The other two parents that I co-school with really liked the topic-based format that I used for the year we studied 19th-century America, so I went with that again for the twentieth century.  

There's so much that happens in the twentieth century, it was very hard to narrow down the topics.  In the end I let two principles guide me:

(1) Since this is American history, I would stick with a U. S. perspective on global events.  I wouldn't, for example, explain what led up to World War One over in Europe.  We would cover that material in World History.  So instead I would limit my discussion of WWI to the Americans' entry into the Great War and afterward.  I applied this same principle to a number of other global events.

(2) I would favor topics that would help explain "how we got where we are today."   If something is important in today's news, I wanted to try to give the last hundred years of context for it.

After much fruitful discussion, we came to this arrangement of topics:

• American foreign relations and the roots of the War on Terror
• Economics (including the Depression, the effects of unionization, Social Security, the national debt)
• American mobility (including the interstate highway system, migrations, immigrants)
• Parties and ideologies (FDR, Reagan, the 2000 presidential election, Bush v. Gore)
• Civil rights (women's suffrage, Brown vs Board of Education, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, the disability rights movement,  important Supreme Court cases, and homeschooling rights)
• Twentieth-century changes to the American experience of childhood (child labor, schooling, gender and race restrictions are lifted, the American family mutates, the unborn lose protection)
• Communication technology (radio, television, movies, computers, Internet and social media)

Meanwhile, I completed my short list of dates for the kids to memorize, and we did various exercises with the dates all year long.  Previously learned memory dates include:

• 1492, Columbus sails 
• 1776, Declaration of Independence 
• 1860, Lincoln elected
• 1865, Civil War ends; Lincoln assassinated 
• 1900, remember that McKinley was the president at the turn of the century

Here's a week-by-week book list.  "Hakim" refers to Joy Hakim, A History of US.

Week 1------ MEMORY DATE: 1918, the "Spanish" flu epidemic and the end of World War I.

• Hakim vol. 9 Preface about world war I 
• Marquette, World War I 
• Hibbert, In the Trenches in World War I
•  "U. S. Enters World War I" short film at http://www.newseum.org 
• Kudlinski K, Hero Over Here (Spanish flu) 
• Sergeant York (film)

Week 2 ------

• Blassingame, Combat Nurses of World War II .  This book is twelve kinds of awesome.  You get the stories of women who saw combat, you get a close look at the Pacific theater, and you get lots of interesting details that never make it into textbooks.
• Hakim vol. 9, chapters 26, 27, 29, 30 
• The Great Escape (film)  (okay, they were Brits, but it's such a great movie)
• Sands of Iwo Jima (film)
• Leckie R, The Battle of Iwo Jima

Week 3 ------ MEMORY DATE:  1941, Pearl Harbor attack, U. S. enters WWII.

• "Japan Bombs Pearl Harbor;"  "Nazi Holocaust Exposed;" "Hiroshima" all at  http://www.newseum.org 
• Stein, The U. S. S. Arizona 
• McGowen, Battle for Iwo Jima
•  Blassingame, Combat Nurses of World War II (continued) 
• "The Great Escape" (PBS NOVA documentary)

Week 4 ------ MEMORY DATE:  1945, the first nuclear attack on a city; WWII ends.

• Elish,The Story of the Manhattan Project

Week 5 ------

• Foster, The Story of the Cold War (read parts through 1957)
• Kallen, The Race to Space 
• Grant, NATO 
• Various books about Apollo and Mercury missions
• Doeden, Weapons of the Cold War
• WarGames (film)
• Russkies (film)  DO NOT LAUGH AT THE EIGHTIES FILM LOVE.  I wanted to show the kids what the pop-culture notions of Russians and of nuclear war were like in the mid-eighties.

Week 6 ------

• Hakim, vol. 10, chapter 7 
• Leckie, The War in Korea 1950-1953 chapters 1, 2, 12, 13.  This is a fantastic Landmark book.  I wish I had had time to read it all to the kids.
• Foster, The Story of the Cold War (read from Sputnik to Johnson) 
• Kent, The Story of the Saigon Airlift
•  Discussion question: If the war in Vietnam is over, why continue to argue about whether the US sould have fought it, or when it should have come to an end? 
• Huynh Q, The Land I Lost - a memoir about Vietnam from a Vietnamese refugee

Week 7 ------ MEMORY DATE: 1989, the Berlin Wall is opened.

• Foster, The Story of the Cold War (finished)
•  Schmemann, How the Wall Came Down (parts) 
• "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" speech by Reagan, Youtube
•  "The opening of the Wall at Berlin Bornholmer Strasse 1989" 

Week 8 ------ MEMORY DATE: 2001, the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon

• Meltzer, The Day the Sky Fell.  This is a history of terrorism in general.  It is a Landmark book and was revised after September 11, 2001; older editions won't have a discussion of the 9/11 attacks.  It's really wonderfully comprehensive.

Week 9 ------

• Meltzer, The Day the Sky Fell (continued)

Week 10 -------

• Meltzer, The Day the Sky Fell (continued)
• Several news articles about terrorism in the past week, to show that it continues to be a significant global threat

Week 11 -------

•    14 Cows for America

Week 12 ------- MEMORY DATE: 1929, the great stock market crash

• Downing, The Great Depression (free browsing) 
• Blumenthal, Six Days in October 
• Sandler, The Dust Bowl through the Lens
• Lange, "Migrant Mother" (photograph)

Week 13 -------

• Appelt and Schmitzer, Down Cut Shin Creek: The Pack Horse Librarians of Kentucky.  Love.  This.  Book.  

Week 14 -------

• Discuss current economic recession 
• Lauber, Flood: Wrestling with the Mississippi.  This book didn't really fit in anywhere but I liked it so much I wanted to use it, so I decided it went in with economics (since natural disasters are economic disasters, right?)   Patricia Lauber is a prolific writer of kids' science titles.

Week 15 -------

• Paradis, From Trails to Superhighways: The Story of America's Roads to show how we got our interstate system
• Williams, Road and Rail Transportation (pgs 20-26) for a handful of technical details

Week 16 -------

• Stanley J, Children of the Dust Bowl: The True Story of the School at Weedpatch Camp.  This is an utterly amazing story of how Okie children, rejected by Californians, built their own school with their own hands under the leadership of a visionary and kind public school official.  It is sobering to think how far we have come from the regionalistic xenophobia of just a couple generations ago, when citizens of one state regarded migrants from another state  as dangerous aliens.
• Discuss other migrations (African-American "Great Migration;" Mormon migration; Gold Rush)

Week 17 -------

• Paul, North Across the Border (Mexican immigrants) 
• Springstubb T, The Vietnamese Americans.  I picked these two books not because I particularly favored Mexican or Vietnamese immigrants over others, but because they seemed the best books our library had about the immigrant experience

Week 18 -------

• "The Rainmaker" (from Armstrong, The American Story) about FDR
•  Church and Lacayo, "Social Insecurity," TIME magazine, March 20, 1995 
• Hakim vol. 9, chapters 20, 22, 23, 24, 25 
• Discussion about how Social Security works and potential for insolvency; possible solutions.

Week 19 -------

• Hakim, vol. 10, ch. 36 and 37 (Nixon) 
• Lewis and others, "5 Held in Plot to Bug Democrats' Office Here" The Washington Post, June 18, 1972 
• Discuss the attitude that one's political opponents are one's enemies.

Week 20 -------

• Hakim, vol. 10, chapters about Ronald Reagan 
• Discuss: Reagan as polarizing figure, liberal vs. conservative economic philosophies, pros and cons of progressive taxation, arguments about trickle-down economics, Reagan as "the great communicator."

Week 21 -------

• The American Experience: Ronald Reagan (film)

Week 22 -------

• Discuss 2000 presidential election, close elections, electoral college, Florida recount, mechanics of voting machines, chads; 
• 2008 Minnesota senate race (close race with hand recount) "Challenged Ballots: You Be the Judge." Activity from Minnesota Public Radio website,  I printed out the challenged ballots, cut them apart, and had the three kids pretend to be election judges and decide how to allocate the challenged ballots.
• CBS News archive coverage of presidential election night, 2000. 
• Hakim, vol. 10, chapters 46-47 
• Greene A, Understanding the 2000 Election (background chapter)

Week 23 -------

• Separate but Equal (film): first half.  It's a made-for-TV movie about Brown v. Board of Education.

Week 24 -------

• Finish Separate but Equal (film). 
• Read Justice Earl Warren's opinion in Brown vs. Board of Education.

Week 25 -------

• Hakim, vol. 10, chapter 16 (integration of Little Rock Central High)
•  "1920: Votes for Women" (from Armstrong, The American Story) 
• McKissack P and Zarembka A, To Establish Justice: Citizenship and the Constitution, chapter 10 on the disability rights movement.  There's some adult and controversial material in this book so I excerpted carefully.

Week 26 -------

• "I Have a Dream" Martin Luther King speech, full, on Youtube 
• Short clip of Malcolm X speaking 
• Hakim vol. 10, chapters 14, 15, 19 (Martin Luther King) 
• King ML, "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" (excerpts) 
• Graves R, Malcolm X (Cornerstones of Freedom series) 
• "The Black Revolution" from The World's Great Speeches (Malcolm X speech to socialists organization, 1964) 
• Discuss Malcolm X and MLK: influences of religion on them, name change, assassinations, opinions of the method of nonviolence

Week 27 -------

• Curtis CP, The Watsons Go to Birmingham -- 1963 (fiction, used as independent reading)
• Writing assignment: Curtis places a real event (the 1963 Birmingham church bombing) in a fictional story. Does it make a fictional story more interesting if it contains a real event? Does the fictional context make it easier to understand the impact of the historical event?

Week 28-------

•  Laws and court cases relevant to homeschooling rights and regulations: 
  • Meyer v. Nebraska 
  • Pierce v. Society of Sisters 
  • Wisconsin v. Yoder
  • Minnesota v. Newstrom (relevant in Minnesota only)
  • Current Minnesota statutes about home schools 
• Discuss: Should the state regulate the subjects taught? Should the state regulate the credentials of homeschooling parents? Should the state regulate the number of days of instruction? Should the state ban homeschooled children from working during school hours? Should the state require public schools to allow homeschooled students to use their facilities?

Week 29 -------

• Discussion about how the lives of children changed between about 1920 and 1990. (consumer safety regulations, equality in education, overall better health but more obesity, labor laws, sanitation, vaccinations, antibiotics, extended families living more often far away, fewer family members lost to premature death, more divorce, working mothers, smaller families, racial and gender diversity of role models) 
• Discussed growing awareness of diversity by discussing the role models who were available to young people. 
• Ryan, When Marian Sang (about Marian Anderson) 
• Weatherford, Jesse Owens: Fastest Man Alive 
• Szabo C, Sky Pioneer: A Photobiography of Amelia Earhart 
• (Biographies of others were available, including Jackie Robinson and Jim Thorpe)

Week 30 -------

•  Cleary B, Dear Mr. Henshaw (fiction; first half) 
• Themes of 20th-century child life: divorce, working parents, child support, moving to a new school, small family, lack of connection to extended family 
• Discuss various literary styles of Dear Mr. Henshaw: first- person; "epistolary" or letter format ; writing in dialogue; diary format; book review . 
• What do we think Mr. Henshaw thinks about Leigh? How do we learn what Mr. Henshaw has written to Leigh? How does Leigh express his feelings?
• (this actually appeared a few weeks later and we discussed it then, but thematically it goes here:) "Census: Saying No to Marriage," Star Tribune, May 12, 2011. Less than fifty percent of Twin Cities households include married couples. Read the article, list the main points, and discuss the implications.

Week 31 -------

• Cleary B, Dear Mr. Henshaw (second half) 
• Continue discussions of themes of 20th-century child life
• 20th-century child life: Roe v. Wade. Discussion with parent.  (I did not teach this to the group.)
•  My take: 
  • What it means. 
  • How it changed U. S. law. 
  • Current legal controversy (aside from moral controversy) about whether there is a constitutional right to privacy. 
  • Rights of the unborn compared to what we have learned about civil rights, women's rights, and the rights of the disabled. 
  • What mechanisms exist under which the law could be changed? What can an ordinary citizen do about it?

Week 32 -------

• Discuss radio, cinema, silent movies, newsreels 
• "1938: The War of the Worlds" from Armstrong, The American Story 
• Watch: "Keystone Kops: Fatty Joins the Force"
•  Watch: Newsreel of the Queen Mum's 1923 wedding, side by side with TV highlights of Prince William's wedding to Kate Middleton in 2011 
• Watch: Trailer for movie "THEM!" 
• Discuss the social and cultural purposes and effects of movies in different periods 
• Are there fewer moviegoers now? Why? What do theaters do to keep customers coming?
•  For browsing: Parkinson D, The Young Oxford Book of the Movies

week 33 -------

• Kent, Z. The Story of Television. 
• Clarification of the differences among broadcast television, cable television, VCRs, DVDs, streaming video, hard drive storage of video. 
• Discussion of expanding choices; role of advertising; and cultural and economic changes brought about by television. 
• Discussion of genres of television shows. 
• Watch: Two episodes of I Love Lucy. "Switching Jobs" and "Lucy Does a TV Commercial."

Week 34 -------

• Sherman J, The History of the Internet 
• McPherson SS, Tim Berners-Lee: Inventor of the World Wide Web (parts) 
• Stewart GB, Larry Page and Sergey Brin: The Google Guys (parts) 
• Discussion (mostly of technical details and GenX reminiscings): ARPAnet, Usenet, bulletin board analogy, gopher, email, world wide web, browsers, search engines.
•  How the Web brings people together bycommon interest. "Cyberspace."

Week 35 ------- MEMORY DATE: 1991, the World Wide Web opens to the general public

• Discussion of safety while using email, online shopping, and social media. 
• Predators; viruses; identity theft; inappropriate or dangerous material; privacy settings; information that should remain personal; precautions that kids should take. 
• Risks organized from most to least dangerous: encountering people who intend physical harm; encountering people who intend harm via internet communications; identity theft; monetary fraud; spreading of private or secret information; bullying; malware; inaccurate information or lies; harvesting personal information for targeted advertising.
•  "1500 Crash Birthday Party After Facebook Slip Up," Stephen Spencer Davis, 6/6/2011.  
• Frontline: Digital Nation (TV documentary)

Week 36 ------- final exam.

 

More on Benedict for families: Prayer, work, and study.

I'm totally buried in school planning this week, so blogging has gone to the back burner.

 Scratch that:  I'm immersed in school planning.  Planning is absolutely my favorite part of homeschooling.  It's summer, I only have to teach a little bit of "remedial" stuff (or let them teach themselves; for example, my 10-y-o's special summer subject is intensive typing practice with Mavis Beacon), and to top it all off, two of my kids are visiting Grandma and Grandpa for two or three weeks right now, so I have tons of time.  And I'm pouring most of it into lesson planning NOW so I won't wake up some morning in February 2012 and say "I don't know what I'm going to do today so I guess we'll just watch movies."

So speaking of being immersed in work, did any of you go and read Fr. Longenecker's Saint Benedict for Busy Parents that I recommended a few posts ago?*

I found myself unable to stop myself from creating a three-by-three matrix:

	Prayer	Work	Study
Obedience
Stability
Conversion of Life

...and trying to fill in all the cells, or at least some of them.  Do I practice obedience with regard to prayer, etc.

Because that's the kind of response a girl like me has to a piece of spiritual reading.  (You should have seen my notebook after I finished The Interior Castle.)

Of course, I immediately ran into another question, because while some of the stuff I do every day is undoubtedly prayer, and some of it is surely work, and some of it is arguably study, there's a lot of other stuff that isn't clearly any of them.   It's not hard to classify, for example, driving to the grocery store as "work."  What about going for a swim?  What about eating dinner?  And for that matter:  what about hanging out with friends or just sitting down with a cup of coffee in the morning getting ready to face the day?  I noticed a distinct lack of "just chillin'" in St. Benedict's trinity of how you spend your time.  And yet the monks were expected to have recreation time.   So do you suppose St. Benedict thought of the free time the monks had as part of prayer, part of work, part of study?  Or is free time some kind of fourth thing outside of prayer, work, and study?  Or is free time spent doing things that all can get classified as either prayer or work or study?  (If scrubbing the floor can be a form of prayer if it is done with love, I suppose finally getting that cup of coffee can be prayer if it is done with gratitude.  "If?"  Who isn't grateful for that cup of coffee?)    

Or maybe there really is no such thing as free time and the reality is that whatever we're doing, we are working, or studying, or praying, whether we realize it or not, and maybe we should sit up and pay attention to what it is we're making, or learning, or saying to God.

But anyway, I made a stab at classifying all the things I do as either "prayer," "work," or "study."  

Prayer wasn't too hard.  Attending Mass is prayer (even if I'm too busy attending to children to pay much attention to it, I decided).  Prayer is prayer.  Going to Confession or Adoration is prayer.  No problem.  

So you could say it was pretty easy to classify everything I do into "prayer" and "not-prayer."  (Subject to the caveat about all activities being a form of prayer if you do it in love, à la St. Thérèse.)  It was trickier to decide what to do with all the "not-prayer."   

In other forms of "what do you call what you do" classification, "work" is divided from other things, like "leisure," by monetary considerations.  Does it create wealth?  Can you get paid for it?  This won't work here.  It's more essential than that; it has to make sense whatever the context of economy.  And anyway, we're not distinguishing it from "leisure," but from "study."

So, in this system, "work" is something you do (I decided) that participates in creation:  remakes the physical world somehow.  It "co-operates with God in the redemption of the world," to quote Fr. Longenecker.  "Study" is something primarily interior that involves taking in the world as it is, and shaping it in the mind.   

With that in mind, I decided that teaching children is work; that preparing lessons is work.  That all the aspects of life that I could call "homemaking" is work.  For the purpose of dividing life up into this trinity, writing is work, even though I do it almost entirely for fun.  Traveling of all kinds is work, even driving to the grocery store.  Physically caring for other people, like nursing this child on my lap right now as I type, is work.  Physically caring for myself is work, too, and that includes getting the exercise I need and want.  And so having dinner with my family or friends is work.  Indeed, interacting with other people is almost always work, even just hanging out, because through our interactions with each other don't we remake the world in a small way?  Don't we have an opportunity to co-operate (if we are kind and prudent and open to the spirit) in redemption?

That leaves a number of things that can be called "study."  Scripture study and spiritual reading seem like they could be either "study" or "prayer," but fortunately, St. Benedict himself called them "study," and that is a bit of a guide to help us define the category.  All kinds of scholarship and research are "study."

Now, if you work as an academic, or a scientist, or a teacher in or out of the home, the distinction between "work" and "study" may be a little difficult to pinpoint; I, personally, make the classification based on whether I am remaking my own mind or something outside my own mind at the time.  When I skim through a stack of history books to decide what I will teach the children, I am studying.  When I put pen to paper to make a list of points I plan to teach, I am working.  

I have worked in laboratories, and I think I can figure out how I would classify as work or as study the various tasks: planning experiments, building apparatus, running experiments, collecting and analyzing data, writing up results and presenting them.  There is some prayer, of course, too:  I suspect that even if you include all the atheists, it's a rare researcher who hasn't uttered "OH PLEASE LET THIS THING WORK" at least once.  

Much leisure is study.  All reading for pleasure, and by extension all media consumption of any kind (this includes reading Facebook -- but not updating your status, which would be work, since you are creating content for others).   Developing skills of your own through reading or watching others  is study (although practicing them may be work).  Self-examination is study, even when prompted by prayer.

+ + +

Speaking of self-examination:  here is where I explain something about myself, because I can hear a voice asking "What's the point?"  The point is, I find a peculiar entertainment in continually examining my life, interior and exterior.  I find a meditative peace in the act of simplifying and filtering it.  Creating a blank table in a spreadsheet, all crisscross black lines, and empty  -- like the one above, before I started filling in the cells -- rakes the sand in my little mental Zen garden.

And I like the exercise of "What if I thought of --say-- getting to the gym as part of my work?  How would that change my attitude toward it?  Would it affect how I see it interrelating with the other things that are part of my work?"

Actually, the bit that felt most satisfying when it clicked into place was the concept that for me, hanging out with my friends, insofar as I am capable of "hanging out"  -- being with other people in general -- what I called "Fellowship" in my spreadsheet -- was to classify that as "work."  Because really, I am a classic introvert, and even though I enjoy other people, it wears me out.  Calling "fellowship" "work" lifted a bit of weight from my shoulders. 

The most useful insight for me, though, is that when you classify everything as either prayer, work, or study, no time is wasted.  It's either spent for good, or spent for ill.  

When I attend Mass, or pick up the breviary, or stand in line for confession, or even utter a voiceless "please!", I'm praying.  Am I referring to God or to myself?  Am I aligning my will with God's or against it?  Am I a channel for grace or an obstruction?  Am I opening my heart or trying to conceal it?

When I watch a video, or check comments on a news story, or listen to music, or read a book, I'm learning something.  Did I learn something true or something false?

When I write a blog post, or clean up a mess, or assign work to the children, or go for a run, or go to sleep, or spend time chatting with my friends, I'm participating in the creation and redemption of the world.  Did I help it or hinder it?

 

 

________________

* I forgot to mention on that post that I owe a hat-tip to Rich Leonardi for linking to it.