bearing blog

Accepting apology.

I take my three-year-old to a birth-through-age-five, music-and-movement class that meets once a week in my neighborhood.  Our family's been doing the classes since my first was a toddler and my second a newborn, so -- nearly ten years!   

In those years we've seen many other families come and go.  A mother arrives with a toddler and a newborn; and a year or two later the older one disappears into the school system; and a year or two later the family is done with music class.  But we're still going.  I usually have one or two of the older ones with me, too; they stay in the anteroom and work on math or read books while I'm in the studio with the 3yo and the other children, singing and waving scarves.

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This quarter the class is fuller than usual -- due to a combination of babies being born during the course of the session, and a computer glitch that accidentally allowed too many families to sign up.  And it can get boisterous in there.   The instructor is very easygoing about the children getting up and moving around the room, as long as they're not running with claves, and I'm pretty used to that.  It is a music-and-movement class, after all.  

Today, however, in the middle of a song, a frustrated mother from across the room got up, walked over to me, and said:  "Can you please keep your son from running around the room?  All the other children are following him!"  (Including, I assume, her own two-year-old daughter.)

I was caught off guard because it's pretty usual for the children to be running around the room -- but I immediately saw three things:  (1) She was new, (2) there are more children than usual and so running around might actually be a problem in this particular class, (3) I was sitting right next to the instructor -- and I knew that I could trust the instructor to talk to us separately if there was a problem.  So I apologized to her, and then I grabbed my 3yo as he trotted by and pulled him into my lap for a Tickle of Redirection.

While I had him in my lap I whispered to him, "See that mommy over there?  She got worried because you were running around the room and her little girl wanted to do what you are doing.  It's okay to run, but can you help her forgive us?  Can you go apologize to her?"

I admit that part of me, feeling stung, wanted to show off my good-mothering skills.  As I've written before, the disciplinarian in me is pretty smug about having mastered the art of teaching kids to apologize.

"Okay, mama," he said, and a song or two later he danced over and said -- not actually to the correct mommy, but I think perhaps she heard him anyway -- "I'm sorry I was running, will you forgive me?"

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Part of me was a little indignant about this whole thing because it isn't, after all, against the rules for the small children to run and dance around the room in this class.  (Just as I was leaving the studio I caught sight of the instructor starting a conversation with the worrying mother, but I didn't stick around to eavesdrop.)  And I started to be indignant on behalf of my three-year-old.  Maybe I shouldn't have sent him to apologize.  Why should he feel ashamed or bad just because she didn't like the way he was playing?

And then I realized that he did not give any sign whatsoever of having felt ashamed or bad.  He had danced right over there, eagerly, and recited the words he has learned.

Apologies in our household are so common, so routine, and so ritualized that for most of us they don't have any connotation of humiliation.*  

I don't punish kids by making them apologize.  

I tell them that we do it to help the other person forgive them, and it doesn't matter whose fault something was or whether the other person was wrong; the point is to smooth the way to forgiveness, something we always should desire from anyone who is unhappy with our behavior -- justified or not.

It was a nice reminder, seeing my three-year-old cheerfully dancing around the room afterwards, free, and I felt my own indignation at "having been made to apologize" evaporating as I contemplated him.

I think there'd be a lot fewer "fake apologies" and "apology-non-apologies" in the world if we all understood that there's nothing inherently humiliating or false about apologies -- if we understood that the point of apology is nothing more than a desire for forgiveness -- for the sake of someone else who needs to forgive -- put into words and actions.  It's not necessarily or only a way of saying "I was wrong and I need your forgiveness."  It can also be a way of saying "You need to forgive me, and I want what's good for you."

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*I do have one child, age nine,  who finds it hard to summon the words "I'm sorry," even with a script.  He turns a little red and smiles nervously.  I think it's more performance anxiety than anything.  I find I need to take a little more care with him, so that he doesn't interpret the act of apologizing as a humiliating punishment -- but I still think that the practice is good for him, and that the repetition will make it easier eventually.

Translations.

MrsDarwin is reminiscing about having translated Sartre's Huis Clos (No Exit) in college for a theater production, and I am sharing her distaste for English translations of it.

From her first post:

One thing I noticed quickly was that of the small number of translations I could find, none of them made use of Sartre's own phrasing, so essential in creating from the very first lines the ennui of Hell and the cyclical feel of the plot.

Garcin, il entre et regard autour de lui. -- Alors voila.

Le Garçon. -- Voila.

Garcin. -- C'est comme ça...

Le Garçon. -- C'est comme ça.

Stuart Gilbert's translation starts off:

Garcin [enters, accompanied by the Room-Valet, and glances around him]: Hm! So here we are?

Valet: Yes, Mr. Garcin.

Garcin: And this is what it looks like?

Valet: Yes.

You don't have to know French to see that Gilbert is padding here.

 

Even though I read French pretty well, I sometimes would rather read a work in English translation just so I don't have to work too hard to understand it. Not so with Huis Clos. Maybe it is just because the French isn't very difficult, but I have always found it easier to read in the original -- I encountered it first in the original, and all the English translations bug me because they aren't the play I remember.

MrsDarwin posts a sample of her own translation here. I much prefer it to the one she was working from.

Here is a little Sartre-translation story of my own:

In high school, fourth-year French, we read Sartre's Les Jeux Sont Faits, a novel with themes of powerlessness to change past choices. My teacher (really, a great teacher, one of my best) told us off-hand that the title meant something like "The Game is Up" or "The Jig is Up," but she didn't spend much time on it.

I remember being displeased with that rough translation. I knew from the context, roughly, what the title meant (along the lines of "There's no going back now"). I also recognized that neither "The Game is Up" or "The Jig is Up" really captured that meaning perfectly -- those have connotations of guilty discovery, which is technically a theme in the book but is a minor theme, not really worthy of the title. It bugged me.

This is before Wikipedia and Google, you understand.

Some years later I was watching Casablanca, some scene in the casino; extras, gamblers, placed bets in the background, and the real action was happening between the movie stars in the foreground. I would have to watch it again to find the specific scene. Suddenly my ears pricked up, because in the background the French-speaking roulette croupier was announcing that the time for placing bets was over: "Les jeux sont faits, les jeux sont faits."

I yelped, "So that's what that means!" confusing my companion. That is exactly what the title means. There is no going back now; we will only watch as the ball falls into place, and the table will be divided into winners and losers.

Idioms are fun, but you have to be able to recognize them. Googling the phrase now, I discover that the novel's title has been rendered most often as The Chips Are Down. I don't frequent Las Vegas often enough to know what roulette croupiers say there to stop people from betting as the wheel's turning begins to slow.

 

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So how did that whirlwind overview of Spanish for Latin speakers go, bearing?

We're halfway into our school year and I thought I'd report back on an idea I had earlier that gathered some interest in the combox.   A little more than a year ago I wrote:

The Memoria Press Latin programs that we are using -- Prima Latina, Latina Christiana, and First Form Latin -- all have a component that examines Latin-derived words in the English language.  It has seemed like a bit of a waste of time, sort of an afterthought, and we really haven't used it much at all.  But what if instead of learning about Latin-derived words in English, we looked at Latin-derived words in Spanish?  What if we studied Spanish as a specimen of late Latin -- very late Latin?  What if learning Spanish became an extension of our Latin study?

All the beginner's Spanish programs start from scratch.  But we're not starting from scratch:  we're starting from a few years of Latin.   Why can't we build on what they know already?  After all -- a great deal of the effort that English speakers have to make, when they learn their first Romance language -- we've already been through that.  Verbs are conjugated.  Nouns have gender.  Adjectives can come after nouns.  Adjectives agree with nouns.  And we've already talked about tense, and principal parts, and negation and interrogation... a lot of concepts that take up time grasping for the first time have already been grasped.  They just need to know how to do in Spanish what they already know to do in Latin.

I wrote here, a little later, about teaching pronunciation lessons based on Latin pronunciation:

I made a little chart of Latin words and Spanish words that are their cognates and that demonstrate the differences and some of the similarities between ecclesiastical Latin and Spanish pronunciation rules.  For example: 

• In Latin gens (tribe), the g is pronounced like English /j/.  In Spanish la gente (race, nation), it's pronounced with a throaty /h/.
• In Latin hora (hour), the h is pronounced as in English.  In Spanish la hora, it's silent.
• In Latin signum (sign), the gn is pronounced as in English "lasagna."  In Spanish el signo, the g sound and n sound are distinct.
• Vowels are similar: A: pater/el padre (father), E: cena/la cena (dinner), I: vita/vida(life), O: oculus/el ojo (eye), U: mundus/el mundo (world) and aqua/agua (water).

So I figured I would work my way down the chart with the kids.  The emphasis is on similarities and differences between ecclesiastical Latin and Spanish.  I thought maybe Hannah, who knows more about linguistics than I, could talk to the kids a little bit about consonant shift and things -- why filius became el hijo, why pax became la paz.

But I am taking seriously the need to hear a native Spanish speaker pronounce the words, so I went looking for an online audio dictionary....

H. found a neat article, which I described here, on which I constructed a pretty cool history-of-language lesson.    And then here's where I describe how we got started, just before last summer (summer's when I generally experiment with new subjects):

Lesson one was conjugating regular verbs ending in -ar -- those are very much like the verbs of the first conjugation in Latin. I picked "hablar" (to speak) as a model verb, not "amar," because I did not want to muck up the "amo, amas, amat" in Latin class. So I gave them about three dozen verbs, many of them derived directly from Latin verbs they know, and we practiced making sentences with those for a week. I had them translate from English to Spanish and Spanish to English and Spanish to Latin and Latin to Spanish.

Lesson two was the irregular verb "estar," one of the two verbs that translate "to be," and then using it to form the present progressive tense -- "I am speaking," "Estoy hablando" -- with the three dozen regular verbs. The kids liked that Spanish has this construction that they are so familiar with in English and that is missing in Latin.

What was great about it was that we could jump right in without having to explain about why verbs are conjugated, or how it can be that you do not need to use a subject pronoun, or what person and number and tense mean. The same recitation of the same meanings in the same order: hablo, hablas, habla, hablamos, hablais, hablan. There are some differences to get used to, like the appearance of informal and polite forms of address, but most of it is comfortable already.

After my few experimental lessons, it turned out to take me approximately one semester to get a very basic Spanish grammar overview into them.  I have to tell you, I'm pleased with the results.  Let me tell you what I did.

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 I have three Latin students in this "class."  One's a ninth-grade girl, the other two are seventh-grade boys.  At the start of this year they had been doing Memoria Press Latin together for about 4 years; we had finished Latina Christiana I and were about halfway through First Form Latin, supplemented with translations I cobbled together from other sources and some other things I added along the way.  So they had had six tenses, two verb conjugations, three noun declensions, and some experience reading and writing Latin.

Here are the lessons I presented.  I teach two days a week; on Mondays we did a lesson, and on Thursdays I assigned a written exercise based on the lesson.

 

1- Pronunciation lesson, focusing on similarities and differences between Latin and Spanish.  Saves a ton of trouble as the vowel advice is all about the same, and there are only a handful of consonant differences.

 

2 - Regular -ar verbs like hablar, "to speak."  I presented our verbs, including hablar, exactly as we would learn a new Latin verb:  through recitation.  Hablo, hablas, habla, hablamos, habláis, hablan.  We compared it to the first conjugation in Latin.    I also gave them a little chart that contained the infinitive, gerund (hablando, "speaking"), and participle (hablado, "spoken").  And I gave them a lexicon of about thirty completely regular -ar verbs and their meanings, including all the ones I could find that are cognates of Latin words they know:  convocar and adorar and amar and habitar and laborar and navegar and narrar...

 3 - The irregular verb estar, which is one of two "to be" verbs.   Again, we recited it (estoy, estás, está, estamos, estáis, están), and I taught the gerund and the participle as well as the infinitive.  They learned a little bit about the usage difference between estar and ser (the other "to be" verb), and then I taught the present progressive tense, which uses estar + gerund just as in English:  hablo = "I speak," but estoy hablando = "I am studying."  

Three lessons in and already two ways to speak about what is happening now!

 

4 - Regular -er verbs like comer, "to eat."  I taught this lesson just the same as Lesson 2, but keyed to the second conjugation in Latin: Spanish deber is the exact cognate of Latin debere.  I explained that what we call the "stem" in Spanish is short one vowel -- for example, the Latin stem of debere is debe-, with endings -o, -s, -t, -mus and so on, but the Spanish stem of deber is deb- and the vowel is considered part of the endings -o, -es, -e, -emos and so on.  And I gave them more words for their lexicon -- about ten completely regular -er verbs.

 

5 - Irregular verb haber, the helping verb for the perfect tense.  I taught it like the other verbs (he, has, ha, hemos, habéis, han), and then showed them how to use it with the past participle to form the perfect tense (como = "I eat," he comido = "I have eaten, I ate.")  Also habiendo comido ("having eaten...") and haber de comer (to be supposed to eat, to "have to eat.")

 

6 - Regular -ir verbs like vivir = "to live."  Compared the conjugation to the two other families of verbs.  Added a dozen more verbs to their lexicon.

 

7 - The irregular verb ir, "to go."  Voy, vas, va, vamos, vaís, van.  I built on that to teach the immediate future construction, ir + a + infinitive, which is very much like English:  vamos a decidir = "we're going to decide."  

Seven lessons in, and they have one way to speak of the past, two ways to speak of the present, and one way to speak of the future.  (And in case you're wondering, they were doing fine on the exercises, except that they kept forgetting to add accents.)

 

8 - Direct object pronouns.  We recited them in the same pattern as verbs (singular - 1st, 2nd, 3rd person; plural - 1st, 2nd, 3rd person):  me, te, lo/la, nos, os, los/las.  This came with a lesson on word order.  The usual order is S-V-DO just in English:  María lava la toga.   But when a pronoun replaces the direct object, it comes before the verb:  María la lava.  And when the verb is an infinitive, gerund, or command, the pronoun is attached to its end:  María debe lavarla, Maria should wash it; María está lavándola, Maria is washing it; Lávala, Wash it.

 

9 - Irregular verb dar, "to give."  I taught this with a long list of idiomatic expressions that use dar, like dar la hora, "to strike the hour," dar un paseo, "to take a walk,"  and dar a conocer, "to make known."  I used this lesson to introduce the idea of idioms that don't translate exactly, and the technique (from The Loom of Language) of learning to think in the target idiom -- to get it in your heads that whereas English speakers "take" a walk, Spanish speakers "give" one; that English clocks "chime" or "strike" the hour, but Spanish clocks "give" the hour; that in English you "make something known," in Spanish you "give to know" something.

 

 10 - Reflexive and reciprocal pronouns, i.e., object pronouns that refer back to the subject:  me, te, se, nos, os, se.  As in, El gato se lava, "the cat washes itself."  I needed this lesson in order to teach the large class of ...

 

11 - Pronominal verbs, which have a reflexive pronoun as their object.  I felt I had to explain these before we could do any dictionary work, because they get their own entry in the dictionary with the pronoun stuck on the end, and I feared the kids wouldn't recognize them as verbs.  For example, llamarse, "to be called, to be named," so that you wind up saying Me llamo Juan, "I call myself Juan," instead of "My name's Juan."   I gave them a list, sorted into -ar, -er, and -ir families.

At this point I gave them a dictionary and began using words they didn't know in their exercises, forcing them to look them up.

12 - Irse, "to go away," an example of an irregular pronominal.  When you go, you go; but when you go away, you go yourself away.

 

13 - The imperfect tense.  We recited all the forms in all three verb-families.  Thanks to Latin, they already know the difference between imperfect and perfect, so I didn't have to get into that.

 

14 - The imperfect tense and the pluperfect tense.   Since the pluperfect is just made by adding the imperfect form of haber to the past participle of the verb (había lavado, I had washed) the two tenses go together quite nicely into the same lesson.  Thanks to Latin, they already know what the pluperfect is for and how to translate it.

 

15 - Dissecting the noun phrase.  I presented this lesson as a lecture, after which I gave them an open-notes pop quiz.  Here's the gist of it:

• The noun phrase is the part of a sentence that names participants in the action that's laid out in the verb phrase. 
•  All nouns have gender.  They know about that from Latin, and were cheered to find out that there were only masculine and feminine, not neuter.  
• All nouns have number.  
• Nouns do not have case.  (More cheering.)
• Common nouns need a "determiner" such as an article; proper nouns don't.  (Here I discovered that they were rusty on the proper-common distinction, so we veered into a general grammar lesson for a while.)    
• Determiners and adjectives must agree with the noun in gender and number.  
• Adjectives can come before or after the noun, and the placement affects the meaning.  
• The entire noun phase may be replaced by a pronoun.

 

16 - Plural forms.  Rules for making a singular word (noun or adjective) plural.

17 - Feminine forms.  Rules for making the feminine-singular form of an adjective when they know the masculine-singular form.  We compared this to what we know of 1st/2nd-declension adjectives in Latin.

And that's where I stopped.  By the end of that they were translating things along the lines of "Hace cuatro días la niña sufría.  Luego el médico la ha socorrido."  ("Four days ago the girl was suffering.  Later the doctor helped her.")  And "El espectáculo se ha acabado.  En seguida el auditorio ha aplaudido.  Luego lo loaban."  ("The show finished.  At once the audience applauded.  Later they were praising it.")

I think that's not bad for 17 lessons, eh?

Now we're starting something new:  we're using a Pimsleur audio course to work on spoken Spanish. I'm interspersing audio lessons with grammar and translation lessons based on the material in the audio course.  

For example, after the first audio lesson, which introduces the utterances Entiendo ("I understand") and ¿Entiende? ("Do you understand?"), I taught them on paper to conjugate entender, which has regular endings but, like many, many otherwise-regular Spanish verbs, undergoes a stem change ("in the boot", as my high school French teacher called it when French verbs did it)  to make entiendo, entiendes, entiende, entendemos, entendéis, entienden.  This is a recurring pattern, and is necessary to know if you're going to try to find verbs like this in the dictionary.  

After subsequent audio lessons, I did translation exercises based entirely on phrases that had been spoken in the most recent lesson.

I didn't have any goals, starting out, other than to see what would happen, how fast they could learn, if we built on what we already knew from Latin.   I'm really pleased with how it's going.

 

Darwin's liberal arts program.

Darwin is writing about his own ideas for a redesigned "modern liberal arts curriculum:"

Last week I tried to expand a bit on the concept of the Liberal Arts as "the skills of a free man". I described the purpose of the ancient and medieval liberal arts education as being to develop a general and adaptable set of skills that allowed the liberally educated person to understand and reason about the world, and I attempted to contrast this type of education from being trained to perform some one task or set of tasks well.

The classic set of liberal arts is: Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric, Arithmetic, Geometry, Music, Astronomy

Some of these disciplines are defined rather differently now than they were in the pre-modern world, and the modern world presents its own particular challenges to understanding, so I think it's worth thinking a little on how one might update this list.

Darwin goes on to list thoughts on a slightly different set of arts: history and literature; writing and rhetoric; philosophy; language, grammar and linguistics; mathematics; natural science; computer science; and social sciences. Please go and read his thoughts; this post is my response.

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Even though I took a concentration in the sciences in high school, and went on to major in engineering, I appreciate and share the goal of producing broadly educated individuals who have a sense of the way different disciplines interrelate and who have had practice in writing, in forming arguments, and in taking account of the whole human person in their work in the world.

But I don't think liberal arts colleges always succeed in this goal, particularly today. I think there are three major problems here:

• Number one: the leftist political slant of nearly every liberal arts department in the country. Slant is inevitable, but it shouldn't always be in one direction, and departments ought to conscientiously try to correct it. They don't.
  
• Number two: Education isn't broad, general, and adaptable, and it limits the ability of the educated person to think and reason about the world, when mathematics and physical science are absent or only afterthoughts. It's utterly ridiculous to call an education "broad" and "adaptable" when the graduates have only a vague understanding of the physical laws that govern the world they live in; a poverty of knowledge about the human body, the organisms that inhabit its surroundings, and the materials that make those surroundings; and ineptitude with the mathematical language in which we express relationships among all these things.
• Number three: the declining academic standards of those colleges. Some of this is associated with the leftist slant, in my opinion -- not that leftist slants are necessarily less academically rigorous than rightist slants, but "slant" is generally expressed by ignoring whole points of view and areas of study. Theology, Western civ, and military history, once important aspects of their fields, are gathering dust. If it was a rightward slant, we'd see different things ignored. That's part of it. Another part of it is simple grade inflation and reduced reading loads. The physical sciences and engineering just have not suffered from this as much.

To sum up: I don't think a lot of liberal arts colleges really are delivering what Darwin describes as the mission of the liberal arts.

I haven't much advice about how to fix political slant or grade inflation, but I do know something about the sciences and mathematics. And here I will try to strengthen my liberal-education cred a little bit more: Even though in college I specialized in chemical engineering, and even though in graduate school I had to get even more narrowly specialized, at heart I am a science generalist: I enjoy being at least a little bit conversant in everything much more than I enjoyed becoming an expert in a tiny little area of materials science. This is one of the reasons why staying home to educate my children attracted me more strongly than going on to look for work in research, when it was time to make a decision. I could maybe make an argument for a liberal sciences major to complement the liberal arts major: why not develop a generally adaptable set of skills that would allow the person so educated to understand and reason about the physical world and its laws? (Bonus: the objective nature of physical laws insulates such a program, just a bit more, against political slant and grade inflation.) I could even point to my chemical engineering major and suggest that it comes pretty close to actually embodying a liberal science/engineering major, since the curriculum is a fairly broad combination of science and technology areas (particularly if you take biology electives). It's really why I felt so comfortable there as an undergraduate.

Here are some thoughts. I am cribbing a little bit from what I wrote in Darwin's comboxes.

Mathematics. The key to making math work as a liberal art is to think of it as a means of expanding cognitive abilities. It isn't all calculation - it is a means of understanding the world and what is in it, how stuff moves around, interferes with other things, increases and decreases. Many people don't get to see the beauty of mathematics, even if someone has been wise enough to show them its utility.

MrsDarwin wrote in response to that comment,

One of the ways I've tried to make our homeschooling different from my own experience is that I'm trying to present math as a mode of thinking, not just as an exercise in memorization....

I, like Darwin, worked my own way through Saxon Math, but although I learned much about following formulas exactly as they were presented to me, I learned little to nothing about mathematics as "understanding the world and what is in it, how stuff moves around, interferes with other things, increases and decreases"....But that could also be because math and science had never, not even in my early years at school, been presented as anything other than formulas or drudge. I do think that if I had been inculcated with an interest in, if not a love for, math from an early age, my later studies would have borne more fruit. But I also think that having a good instructor would have been key.

Mind you, not every scientist or engineer winds up with the attitude toward math that I have. But my experience was that (except for proof-based geometry and much later, in graduate-level continuum mechanics, which sounds like science and was taught by an aerospace engineering professor but is really math) it wasn't in my mathematics classes that the "beauty" of math happened. It was in science and engineering classes. It is in the study of "stuff" that it becomes clear how math works its magic on it: setting limits on the world, describing how that stuff moves around, increases and decreases. Writing a mass balance on a differential element of a spherical shell -- a basic problem in introductory chemical engineering -- always felt beautiful to me.

Yeah, I am kind of a weirdo. Please don't roll your eyes at me.

That being said, I would think that proof-based geometry would tie in neatly to the liberal arts curriculum. You could easily put a historical emphasis or logic emphasis on it, or even use it to substitute for a different type of logic course. I plan to use proof-based geometry as the main way of including logic in my homeschool curriculum.

But geometry is so useful with such wide application that it goes beyond logic. Geometry, the calculus specific to understanding related rates, and maybe a study of functions -- any of these could be applied to a wide range of intellectual activities.

 

Sciences. If you have to only have one science, I nominate physics. For one thing, it gives you a shot of putting all that mathematics in context -- of working together with mathematics to demonstrate how we use it to grasp the world. For another thing, even elementary Newtonian physics does a good job of demonstrating how things are not always as they seem -- how we become fooled by the specifics around us into misunderstanding general laws. Air resistance and friction and frames of reference create so many red herrings! For a third thing, it's the most "generally applicable" of all sciences. Biology is just chemistry at bottom, and chemistry is just physics at bottom. For yet another thing, it encourages the contemplation of the fundamental nature of the material world. It is the interface of creation.

But since "general" is the aim, it might be better to have a little physics, a little chemistry, a little bio, and then maybe an elective in some other area of science.

How to design such a course in order to create scientifically literate citizens would be instructive. And difficult: to take two whole semesters of the chemistry program, for instance, barely scratches the surface of chemistry. You would want to design it from scratch, not just rely on the introductory material that science majors have to take. You want a "chemistry for liberal arts majors" that isn't just code for "chemistry for people who hate math and need an easy way to get the science credit the stupid college says they have to have." And in many universities that would be hard: the chemistry department will want to save its best teachers for its own students (the chemistry majors). So unless you have buy-in from the department chair, and professors who have a passion for sharing their subject with students in other majors, it'll be so hard to put together a quality science series.

 

Languages. In countries where English is not the spoken language, I would require the study of English for the same reasons that the medievals studied Latin and Greek: it is a modern-day lingua Franca. But here in English-speaking North America, I would advise learning a second language: not so much for the ability to converse in the language or to read its literature, but for the cognitive development and deep knowledge of "how language works" that comes from translating one's thoughts into another idiom. I don't think you can really understand your own language until you have studied a different one for long enough to get its grammar and it's mode of thought. Sure, you could learn about language by studying linguistics instead. I have never taken linguistics, so I can't really judge. But my instinct is to say that you can learn enough of what is generally applicable about language by delving into the process of learning one language well.

Computer science. Darwin had some thoughts about this in his post. I agree with them. If you are going to have a basic understanding of the social forces that shape the modern world, then at this point in history you need to have an understanding of computing. I suggested "a notion of the algorithm" as the fundamental concept around which to build a liberal computing art. Darwin has some more ideas. Whatever you include, I think it would be instructive to include a little bit of computer programming: just enough to demonstrate the thought process that goes into instructing a computer to execute step-by-step instructions. See how a loop works, and an if-then command. Experience the frustration of accidentally dividing by zero. Debug something: discover how important accuracy really is when you are dealing with a machine that cannot guess what you really meant. Understand a tiny bit of what makes human intelligence so unlike machine language, and appreciate the human accomplishment that is inventing computer languages.

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I think what I have written here demonstrates a piece of my educational philosophy, or maybe you could call it a bias, or a theme that pervades my understanding of learning. It is this: To acquire mastery of a skill is a way to acquire generally applicable knowledge.

This has certainly played out in my own life. I could not appreciate the general beauty and utility of mathematics until I exercised my mathematical knowledge in wrestling with physics and engineering problems. I could not have taught myself Latin and Spanish (enough to teach them to children) without the experience I had being taught French -- a specialization! -- to fluency. To the extent that I understand the notion of an algorithm, the process of formulating a problem in the way a machine can understand, and other abstract aspects of computer science, I understand them because I have written computer programs, and struggled to debug and improve them.

I think you can't really learn linguistics until you've learned to speak a language. I think you can't really say you appreciate music until you've attempted to play an instrument well.

You might argue, well, linguistics is more than learning the grammar and vocabulary of one single language. Music is far more than convincing a French horn to emit the notes written on the page. Mathematics is more than a mass balance. And so forth and so on. You need context.

Yes. You need context. But I think it isn't so terribly hard to start with a practical skill and work outward to generalize it. One could argue that the necessary context is provided by acquiring practical skills in a variety of fields -- as mathematics, physics, and philosophy work together to create context for the understanding of creation.

Or we could put it this way. The liberal arts are supposed to educe an individual who has a general and adaptable set of skills. I argue that to be able to specialize -- to be able to dig deeper -- to be able to apply knowledge -- to make the abstract practical and concrete -- to check one's theories against the problem of the physical universe is itself a "generally applicable skill" that is utterly necessary in order to reason about the world.

And you can't acquire that generally applicable skill without practice specializing, without practice developing expertise in something, without practice in "practical skills" here and there, without asking yourself if reality confirms that your thoughts are correct.

Middle-aged.

A couple of days ago BBC News published an article about a recent survey (in the UK, so) that determined that "middle age" begins at age 55:

Never mind the ridiculous language about "research suggests" and "pinpointing," here is the lede:

Middle age starts much later than previously thought - at the age of 55, research suggests.

And Britons do not see themselves as elderly until they are nudging 70, the survey of 1,000 UK adults aged 50-plus for the Love to Learn online learning website says.

Previous studies have pinpointed the start of middle age as early as 36.

The research suggests that as the population ages, new cut-off points are being drawn.

Whatever.  Let's not take this too seriously, but use it as a jumping-off point.

This isn't the first time I've mocked the inflation of "MIDDLE-AGED."   I have been known, for instance, to go around casually calling myself "middle-aged" in order to upset old people.  Basically, as I do for much of the degeneracy in society, I blame the Boomers, who are using their numbers to abuse the language so they don't have to call themselves "old" yet.  What, do you think you are going to live to be 110?

I know, unfair.  These are Brits.  Being a "Boomer" probably means something entirely different to them.  What about Americans?  When does middle age begin for us?  I went googling around and found an interview with Patricia Cohen, the American author of In Our Prime:  The Invention of Middle Age, who was asked:  When does middle age begin?

That’s the first question that everyone asks.

Forty has long been the traditional turning point in adulthood in the West. The New American dictionary defines middle age as “the period between youth and adulthood, generally 40 to 60,” while the U.S. Census Bureau define middle age as 45 to 64.

Extensive surveys reveal that the definition frequently depends on a respondent’s age, sex, class and ethnicity. Those with more schooling tend to mark its onset later, as do those who are older; men think it begins earlier than women. Men between 25 and 34 say middle age commences at 40 and ends at 56, for example, while women between 65 and 74 say it starts at 48 and lasts until 62.

As life expectancy has increased (by more than three decades in the 20th century), people have stretched the ribbon of middle age like a rubber band, extending it into their seventies. In 2009, a survey asked people between 50 and 64 when midlife ended. Most chose age 71.

Middle age is like a Never Never Land -- a place that you never want to enter and never want to leave.

I think we are a little safer in the United States against all that inflation because of the persistence of the "black balloons on your 40th birthday" meme.  The greeting card industry will also help us here.

I tease about the "living till 110" thing, but "middle age" obviously doesn't go by life-expectancy number-crunching alone.   The life expectancy for American men is (as of 2006) 75, for women 81, so let's call it 78.  

• We could suggest that middle age begins halfway through the life expectancy, I suppose -- that gets you to age 39 -- which might be about right -- but it doesn't tell you much about the end.   
• Or we could suggest that "middle age" is the "middle third" of the lifespan -- but that makes it 26 to 52... nope.  You're not middle-aged at 27 unless you are an exceptionally crotchety person.
• Mark suggested it may describe the middle third of adulthood.  Okay then... subtract off the first 18 years and divide the remaining 60 by three, and you get 38 to 58.  This is definitely more promising, but something about the upper end is unsatisfying to me.

"[N]early one in five" of the Brits thought middle age didn't begin until after age 60 (!) but about the same number thought middle age was a "state of mind."  This terminology -- it's all in your head! -- I also find unsatisfying.  Partly because I suspect -- can't prove it, but suspect -- that this is the doing of the "You're only as old as you feel!" people, whose fault is all this "when I'm an old lady I shall wear purple and wear a red hat" business.  

One reason I think this is silly, is, well,

(photo from here)

But another reason I think this is silly is the obvious implication that it's important to think like a young person your whole life, and do your damnedest to feel like a young person (in your heart, dear) as long as you possibly can, and, well... You know what?  There's only so much plastic surgery you can get, and how much pretense you can put on.

The fact is, you're going to die sooner or later, you might as well accept it.   Being old is, in part, getting ready for death, and there is nothing whatsoever wrong with that.  You don't have to go gently into that good night, but you do have to go, and it's possible to do it gracefully instead of, um, the opposite of gracefully.  

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A better definition of middle age, I think, comes from rites of passage and stages of life.  The only thing inherent in its name is its "middle-ness" -- it is between something -- by implication "youth" and "old age," but I think it's something else.

As a mother I'm inclined to think that middle age begins somewhere associated with the child-raising years -- some would say, "When the kids are out of the house!" but I'm reluctant to say so, because with people having kids later that can be quite late indeed.    Unless you want to put your foot down and say that middle age begins at menopause (and that's not an unreasonable place to put it, for women) you could be having babies in middle age, and have them not out of the house until you are old.  

That's not really fair to the people who don't have children, though -- to mark middle age entirely by child-raising.  I would like to give it a more generally applicable spin.

Right now, at 38, in what I think is my early middle age (unless you buy the menopause thing, in which case I'm not there yet) I think the start of it has something to do with confidence.  They are the years when you realize that this is the life you are leading, and (hopefully) by now you are comfortable in it and have developed some skill in it.  

When people fight against believing they are in middle age, I think they are fighting against the idea that the "anything is possible" time is over.   I think it's kind of nice to get past the "anything is possible" time, myself, because the vast array of possibilities are so paralyzing.  I am happy that I have roots now.  I feel that I am hitting my stride as the matriarch of a family.  

I want to believe that this is the start of middle age, in part because -- if it is -- I am off to a seriously great start.  

Minglingken.

The first essay at this link is an introduction to general chemistry, written entirely of English words derived from Germanic roots.  There are no Latinate roots, and no Latinate prefixes or suffixes either. 

I have a great love of both chemistry and of language, and the essay delighted me.  In particular, I loved all the creative neologisms created to substitute for words such as "atom," "chemistry," and even "periodic table:"

For most of its being, mankind did not know what things are made of, but could only guess. With the growth of worldken, we began to learn, and today we have a beholding of stuff and work that watching bears out, both in the workstead and in daily life.

The underlying kinds of stuff are the *firststuffs*, which link together in sundry ways to give rise to the rest. Formerly we knew of ninety-two firststuffs, from waterstuff, the lightest and barest, to ymirstuff, the heaviest. Now we have made more, such as aegirstuff and helstuff.

The firststuffs have their being as motes called *unclefts*. These are mightly small; one seedweight of waterstuff holds a tale of them like unto two followed by twenty-two naughts. Most unclefts link together to make what are called *bulkbits*. Thus, the waterstuff bulkbit bestands of two waterstuff unclefts, the sourstuff bulkbit of two sourstuff unclefts, and so on. (Some kinds, such as sunstuff, keep alone; others, such as iron, cling together in ices when in the fast standing; and there are yet more yokeways.) 

  ...Coming back to the uncleft itself, the heavier it is, the more neitherbits as well as firstbits in its kernel. Indeed, soon the tale of neitherbits is the greater. Unclefts with the same tale of firstbits but unlike tales of neitherbits are called *samesteads*.

...Most samesteads of every firststuff are unabiding. Their kernels break up, each at its own speed. This speed is written as the *half-life*, which is how long it takes half of any deal of the samestead thus to shift itself. The doing is known as *lightrotting*. It may happen fast or slowly, and in any of sundry ways, offhanging on the makeup of the kernel. A kernel may spit out two firstbits with two neitherbits, that is, a sunstuff kernel, thus leaping two steads back in the roundaround board and four weights back in heaviness. It may give off a bernstonebit from a neitherbit, which thereby becomes a firstbit and thrusts the uncleft one stead up in the board while keeping the same weight. It may give off a *forwardbit*, which is a mote with the same weight as a bernstonebit but a forward lading, and thereby spring one stead down in the board while keeping the same weight. Often, too, a mote is given off with neither lading nor heaviness, called the *weeneitherbit*. In much lightrotting, a mote of light with most short wavelength comes out as well.

The article was written by Poul Anderson.  Enjoy.   Two other essays (involving English words of Greek origin) follow.

Postsecondary education questions: 3 ways of being able, 3 ways of being unable..

_{(This post is part of the series on postsecondary education.)}

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Robert A. Heinlein once famously enumerated a set of necessary life skills:

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort  the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly.

Let's take this -- Heinlein's syllabus* -- at face value for the sake of argument, and assume he is correct:  this list itemizes the necessary content of education that prepares for the vocation of "human being."

What does it mean... "to be able to" do the things on this list?

It isn't obvious.  I can think of several possibilities.  Let's consider to what extent I am able to perform some of the listed tasks.

+ + +

Immediately, scanning down the list, I light upon "solving equations."  I can solve equations.   I can solve linear-algebraic systems, all sorts of algebraic equations, ordinary and partial differential equations, tensor equations -- not every kind in the world, but a pretty significant chunk.  I can balance chemical equations too, even the tricky redox ones.  I'd be confident walking into an undergraduate mathematics class and delivering an equation-solving lecture, provided I had a little time to brush up on the specifics.  

We can call that level of skill expertise.  I'm happy to possess it when it comes to solving equations.  Also changing diapers.

But this would be overkill for everything.  Heinlein's pretty clear that expertise in the listed tasks is not what he's going for (the very next sentence is "Specialization is for insects"), so let's consider some things that I'm not actually an expert in.

For example, I would never want to teach an undergraduate class in it, but I can program a computer.  I would put it on my resume without compunction.  I learned BASIC and LOGO as a child, took undergraduate courses in programming, and sat in on graduate seminars in computational fluid dynamics.  I'm competent in only one rather old-fashioned language (f77), but my PhD thesis contains many lines of code in it, plus some other people's code that I grafted on.  So, yes, not an expert, but I am able to program a computer.  I could do it to some extent this afternoon, if called upon.  (Hello, world.)

Let's call that level of skill developed competency.

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In an entirely different sense, I "am able to" set a bone.  The sense is different because... I've never done that before.  I've never watched it done before.  I've never read a set of instructions that tell how to do it.  I've never learned it as part of my job, or as part of a course of study.  I've never sat down and worked out a theory of bonesetting.  If I had to do it in an emergency today, I would likely mess it up badly.

But...

 I'm confident, with reason, that if I decided to learn, I could and I would.  I see value in knowing how.  I have a working knowledge of anatomy, and the ability to learn quickly, and I have administered other kinds of first aid.  I have a firm belief that people ought to know how to take care of themselves and their dependents in an emergency.   I have a book on my shelf about backcountry wilderness medicine.  I could get my hands on more books, maybe even find some instructional videos, and I'm confident I could pass a course in wilderness first aid or maybe EMT training.  

I don't have expertise, or even developed competency in bonesetting.

What I have is a  latent competency.  I value the skill; I have enough background knowledge that I could map out a path to acquire it; I have confidence that I could develop the competency if I chose.

+ + +

Does that mean I can check off everything on Heinlein's syllabus?  If latent competency counts, isn't everybody able to do everything?

I don't think so.  Heinlein says, for instance, that a human being should be able to "conn a ship."  I don't even know what that means.  I have to go look it up.

[pause]

Okay, I guessed that it meant "to commandeer," but I am told that "to conn" means "to direct the steering of; to navigate, as a boat."  

Let me state categorically that I am nowhere close to being able to conn a ship.  I do not even have latent competency at ship-conning.  I don't much like messing about in boats, I have next to no experience with watercraft of any kind, I have very little experience directing anyone over the age of 14 to do anything, and frankly the whole idea frightens me.

It isn't that I don't see the value in conning a ship.  But should I ever find myself at sea, on a vessel whose crew has been stricken by norovirus or pirates or zombies such that some passenger must bravely step up to direct the steering, I'd rather take my chances on some OTHER unknown person being at the wheel.  I'll be sitting in a lifeboat, thank you.  With a PFD.  And someone else who doesn't mind conning a lifeboat.

This, folks, is a kind of incompetence.  

But let's be more specific:  It's prioritized incompetence.  

 Basically, I'm an incompetent ship-conner because I judge it so incredibly unlikely that the knowledge will ever prove useful, and the path to acquiring the knowledge so incredibly convoluted, that I quite reasonably prefer to spend my effort learning other things instead.

In other words, despite accepting Heinlein's syllabus for the sake of argument,  I don't actually agree with Heinlein that ship-conning is a necessary component of my education.  I think it's a kind of specialization, not a basic human skill. 

 + + + 

There's another sort of incompetence that I'd like to highlight, although I will have to appeal to an imaginary person (Mr. Straw-Mann) in order to describe it.  Suppose Mr. Straw-Mann is a confirmed pacifist, opposed to all sorts of violence.  When it comes to self-defense, Mr. S-M always turns the other cheek, and has since he was a child.  

Mr. Straw-Mann is not able to fight efficiently, nor to plan an invasion.   He will not acquire this skill because he disdains it.  His incompetence at efficient fighting is a point of pride.   If the Heinlein Academy requires this skill for graduation, he'll drop out as a matter of conscience.

This would be willful incompetence.

+ + +

Finally, for the sake of completeness, let's postulate a person who, by reason of physical or mental inability, can never develop one or more of the competencies on Heinlein's list.  A quadriplegic cannot pitch manure, at least not the way most of us envision it.  A person with severe language disability cannot write a sonnet.   We could call it natural incompetence; or we could call it simply disability, since that has a gentler connotation.

+ + +

So we have three ways of being able:

• expertise
• developed competency
• latent competency

And three ways of being unable:

• prioritized incompetence
• willful incompetence
• disability.

If we can talk about these different levels of competency, we can more precisely pin down the necessary content of an education, and the necessary preparation for life.

_____________________________________

*I probably should name the syllabus, not after Heinlein, but after his fictional character who, I am told, enumerates it.  But I have not developed the competency to get through a Heinlein book without rolling my eyes out of my sockets, so I'm going to stick with what I knew before looking for the link, i.e., that "Heinlein wrote it."

Mysterious nouns.

Why do we say "the Annunciation" and "the Visitation?"

Why don't we say "the Announcement" and "the Visit?"

I mean, look at the other Joyful Mysteries. Sure, "nativity" and "presentation" are kind of highfalutin words, but with "Presentation" there isn't any common synonym I can think of, fand as for "nativity" I am sure I have heard people announce the third mystery as "The Birth of our Lord" without so much as a hiccup. And come on -- we have never to my knowledge used a fancy word for the fifth mystery. It's "the Finding."

If "Finding" is good enough, and we don't have to say things like "the Location of Our Lord in the Temple" then why can't the first mystery be "the Announcement" and the second "the Visit?" As far as I can tell, Mary is unique not only by virtue of her immaculate conception -- she is also the only person in the history of the English language ever to "visitate" anybody.

Yes, this is what passes for meditation in my brain sometimes. I have to roll with what works.

Fling.

Jennifer Fulwiler has a moving post up today, brought on by an email from a reader who was suffering because after two children, her husband had a vasectomy against her wishes.  

What compounded "Jane's" suffering was how few people were sympathetic to her sadness:

She said that when she tried to talk to friends and family members about the difficult time she was having with the situation, almost nobody wanted to listen. The tone of most of the responses was surprise that she was upset in the first place, and a confusion about what the problem was. "Go take a vacation, and be happy that you're not overburdened with a bunch of little kids!" one relative told her...

[S]he remained surprisingly troubled by the fact that most people didn't seem to think that her story was one worth telling. Eager to know that she wasn't alone, she searched online for blogs or books in which other women in her position shared there experiences, but found few results. Women's websites told the tales of women undergoing all different types of challenges, but none showed much interest in discussing situations like Jane's, in which women were denied children by their husbands. It seemed clear to her that her pain was not deemed valid, and therefore was not considered to be worth discussing.

The comments thread in the post is instructive, and other people (both men and women) are chiming in with stories of their own.  Truly there is a lot of suffering out there that we never know about or see.  

A couple of trolls, natch.  Skip them and move on.

One commenter ("Renae"):

"It’s about accepting and recognizing other people’s loss as loss."

Another ("Terri"):

"It is not just those who don’t stand with the Church on these teachings who can be thoughtless or even cruel, whatever their true intention may be.  This is another example for me that those of us who are Catholic and following the Church’s teachings as it pertains to being open to life and avoiding pregnancies for grave reasons must never be flippant when speaking to others.

I was a little shocked to hear people make judgmental statements about couples with one or two children.  They assumed those couples were not faithful Catholics without knowing anything about their situation.  We never know what other people are dealing with or what suffering is theirs. 

... These teachings are not easy and we must never just fling them at people.  We must share the Church’s teachings with love and compassion.  Our charity must always be even greater than our zeal."

Another commenter pointed out, probably in response to this, that it was possible to talk about the Church's teachings without pointing fingers at individual families or presuming to know their motives, but I think Terri's entirely right.  Even when we formulate hypotheticals, we have to be SO careful not to use "those couples who stop after two children" as shorthand for "couples who stopped being open to life."  And you know you've heard people saying that.

Oh sure, you can say "Well, I didn't mean people with secondary infertility."  Or "Well, I didn't mean people who have very  serious reasons they must not have a longed-for third child."  Or "Well, I didn't mean anyone who yearns for a child but whose spouse refuses to be open to another."  If you didn't mean that you should have said what you meant.  Faithful Catholics with smaller families than they hoped for have enough to suffer, and one of the things that they have to suffer is the knowledge that people presume to know their motives.

Because if you're willing to say "families with two children" as shorthand for "not-so-faithful Catholics," the you're representative of lots of other people who might not say it but who probably think it.

We are supposed to hand on the teachings of the Church, not "fling" them -- a very apt choice of word.  Just throwing it out without any thought to the wording -- well, you sacrifice not only compassion, but accuracy.  (Show me from Church teaching where "two children" is the cutoff beyond which you are presumably open to life.)  

It may take longer to say it, but the only thing that sensitivity and compassion costs you is extra breath.  And if that costs too much, there is always the option of keeping your mouth shut, and letting someone more suited to the task step forward.

"How not to be a creeper" and assorted followup discussion.

If you are at all interested in male-female interaction culture of both the positive and negative variety, how to deal with social awkwardness of both the neurotypical and the Asperger's varieties, how to teach social rules to young people, scifi convention or geek culture, and the like: I would like to direct your attention to a rich and engaging discussion thread at Whatever, the blog of scifi author John Scalzi. (This isn't just about scifi conventions, so bear with me.)

The scifi/geek-con blogosphere has been buzzing somewhat about a perceived culture at conventions in which unwelcome sexual advances and other "creepiness" have perhaps been overly tolerated (I am qualifying with "perceived" and "perhaps" only because I am not a con-goer and cannot give a first-hand opinion of the scene). In response to an emailed query, "Any tips on how not to be a creeper?" Scalzi wrote a post entitled "An Incomplete Guide to Not Creeping," in which he suggested ten rules for interacting with people -- in general, not just at cons -- in order not to inadvertently transgress other people's personal boundaries. Here is a sampler from the middle of the pack:

4. Acknowledge that other people do not exist just for your amusement/interest/desire/use. Yes, I know. You know that. But oddly enough, there’s a difference between knowing it, and actually believing it — or understanding what it means in a larger social context. People go to conventions and social gatherings to meet other people, but not necessarily (or even remotely likely) for the purpose of meeting you. The woman who is wearing a steampunky corset to a convention is almost certainly wearing it in part to enjoy being seen in it and to have people enjoy seeing her in it — but she’s also almost certainly not wearing it for you. You are not the person she has been waiting for, the reason she’s there, or the purpose for her attendance. When you act like you are, or that she has (or should have) nothing else to do than be the object of your amusement/interest/desire/use, the likelihood that you will come across a complete creeper rises exponentially. It’s not an insult for someone else not to want to play that role for you. It’s not what they’re there for.

So those are some overarching things to incorporate into your thinking. Here are some practical things.

5. Don’t touch. Seriously, man. You’re not eight, with the need to run your fingers over everything, nor do you lack voluntary control of your muscles. Keep your hands, arms, legs and everything else to yourself. This is not actually difficult. Here’s an idea: That person you want to touch? Put them in charge of the whole touch experience. That is, let them initiate any physical contact and let them set the pace of that contact when or if they do — and accept that that there’s a very excellent chance no touch is forthcoming. Do that when you meet them for the first time. Do that after you’ve met them 25 times. Do it just as a general rule. Also, friendly tip: If you do touch someone and they say “don’t touch me,” or otherwise make it clear that touching was not something you should have done, the correct response is: “I apologize. I am sorry I made you uncomfortable.” Then back the hell off, possibly to the next state over.

6. Give them space. Hey: Hold your arm straight out in front of your body. Where your fingertips are? That’s a nice minimum distance for someone you’re meeting or don’t know particularly well (it’s also not a bad distance for people you do know). Getting inside that space generally makes people uncomfortable, and why make people uncomfortable? That’s creepy. Also creepy: Sneaking up behind people and getting in close to them, or otherwise getting into their personal space without them being aware of it. If you’re in a crowded room and you need to scrunch in, back up when the option becomes available; don’t take it as an opportunity to linger inside that personal zone. Speaking of which:

Go check it out, it is worth reading, and almost certainly worth showing to your teenagers.

Anyway, the post sprouted a very long and interesting discussion, which Mr. Scalzi has carefully moderated (meaning, he deleted egregious trolls and off-point material), so that pretty much the whole thread is worth reading -- note, this does NOT mean that I endorse every opinion expressed in the thread, just that the remaining discussion, while heated, is mainly respectful and thoughtful. Warning: the discussion may be triggering, as a few people describe past unpleasant experiences.

One of the sub-discussions that I found particularly interesting had to do with people making excuses for individuals who, in their mind, simply lacked the social skills to avoid being "mistaken" for a sexually aggressive creepy person. (Most of these alluded to or mentioned Asperger's syndrome, but others cited cultural differences as the cause.) There ensued a fairly lively debate about the agency of socially impaired individuals. I think the strongest voices came from people who live with and love someone who is so impaired, and who argued that in fact they still need to be held to the same standards of behavior as everyone else, because they are capable of doing so as long as they understand it is necessary.

Another good sub-thread had to do with the responsibility of assertive people (particularly men) to intervene, either as a bystander or especially when the creeper is one of their friends.

Scalzi followed it up with a "Tangential Personal Note" in which he described a personal experience struggling with the temptation to be a creep:

On the flip side of this, I noted that the rules I noted yesterday are ones that I use myself when I try not to come across as a creeper to people I’m meeting. I didn’t use a specific example of a time where I was concerned about being considered a weird, creepy dude because although I did have a story that applied, I hadn’t cleared it with the other person involved. But now she’s cleared it, and now I’ll use it.

Back in 2006, at Readercon(!) I was wandering around the dealer’s room when I saw John Joseph Adams talking to a woman I didn’t know. I knew JJA very casually, so I went up to say hello. The woman he was speaking to was the art director of Shimmer Magazine and her name was Mary Robinette Kowal. JJA introduced the two of us, and Mary and I started chatting and within about five minutes I was aware that I was really intensely attracted to her, in a way that actually kind of spooked me and which I was sure was immediately and clearly obvious, and possibly immediately and obviously creepy.

So here’s what I did...

He goes into detail describing his conscious behavior intended to avoid making the woman uncomfortable, and then explains:

...I mention this for two purposes. One, to make the point that I think the guidelines I set out work (or at least work for me). Two, to make the point that saying that only certain types of men — ugly ones, aspie ones, socially sheltered ones, ones who aren’t going to pay attention to someone offering advice — have the potential to be creepers is kind of stupid. Hi there, I’m generally considered to be socialized, neurotypical and a decent guy. And oh my I had quite the potential to be a creeping assbag on Mary, among others. But I haven’t been, because I’m responsible for my own actions and I realize no one deserves to be creeped on by me even when the reptile portions of my brain are howling TAKE HER TAKE HER TAKE HER NOW. At the end of the day, as regards being a creepy assbag, it’s not about who you are, it’s about what you do.

Since Scalzi was married at the time, and says (in the comments) that he immediately came home and described the events to his wife, there's plenty of food for thought there about marriage and trust as well as about -- for want of a better term -- deliberate nondouchebaggery. The comments there are highly recommended as well.

What do you think about the posts? Is Scalzi's guide a good start? What tips would make it less "incomplete?"