bearing blog

Engineering ethics, from both directions.

I recently discovered a blog that's new to me but has been around since 2006:  Engineering Ethics Blog, written by "Kaydee," whose profile states that he teaches engineering courses at Texas State and that he has worked in industry and as a consulting engineer.  

Engineering ethics is a great interest of mine, coming at it from two directions -- the conventional one, and a different one as well.    

The first and common understanding of "engineering ethics" would be the professional ethical standards of practicing and teaching engineers.  Engineering organizations have their own published codes of ethics (for example, here is the code of ethics of AIChE, in which I briefly held membership before switching my job description to "never worked a day in her life"*).   Engineering colleges routinely offer courses in engineering ethics to their students, although the courses are not always required.  Here is an online, uncredited course in engineering ethics offered through MIT OpenCourseWare.  (I have not reviewed this course and this link is not a recommendation.)

In that sense, "engineering ethics" encompasses questions of serving public safety, of truth-telling in public statements, of refusing to take part in bribery or corruption, of accurate self-representation, and of working within one's own sphere of competence.  

There is another sense in which I, personally, like to think of "engineering ethics."  That is the special perspective and specialized knowledge that engineering training brings to the consideration of ethical questions in general.

Such questions confront all human beings above the age of reason.  They include questions that societies face in balancing diverse interests through public policy; questions of evaluating costs and benefits, risks and rewards in the workplace and in our personal lives; and how specific ethical questions ("case studies," if you will) refine and sharpen the broad principles of moral philosophy.

What do I mean by the "special perspective and specialized knowledge" of engineers?  Emphatically not that the engineer, or any other kind of scientist, has a specially privileged moral sense.  Scientists and engineers are no more likely to make good interior ethical judgments than anyone else.  We are just as likely to be selfish, corruptible, or arrogant.  If all our policymakers were scientists and engineers, we might have more technically informed policy, but we would not necessarily have policy that better served the public good.  There is precious little about "what one ought to do" in an engineering education -- and what there is, appears in the engineering ethics courses.

Part of what I mean by the relevant perspective and specialized knowledge is our expertise in technical matters that may inform ethical decisions.  

• We may not be specially able to tell the public whether we ought to mandate such-and-such an adaptive technology to better accommodate the disabled in public buildings.  But we can tell the public how much the machines will cost, how soon they could be installed, which places they would be more difficult to implement, and how frequently they would require maintenance.  
• We may not be specially able to tell the public whether we ought to ban a particular type of gadget that has fallen out of favor because of some impact its production or disposal has on the environment.  But we can provide a list of feasible substitute gadgets, count up how much the substitutes would cost, estimate how soon new technologies might come to market, consider whether there are alternative means of dealing with the old gadget's problems, and try to predict whether the substitute gadgets will bring worse costs and risks than the old ones.   

My husband, the other engineer on this blog, says about his responsibilities giving technical advice at work:  "I never tell them that such-and-such an idea is impossible, or that it is a bad idea.  That is not my job.  I always tell them how much their idea would cost, and let them make the conclusions."

But another aspect that the engineer brings to ethical problems is our trained approach to problems in general.  It's sometimes maddening for the people who have to work with us and live with us, but we can be accused of treating every problem, from public policy to household budgetary dilemmas to difficult childrearing decisions to friends' marital woes as an engineering problem.  

What are the constraints?  Make a list.  What are the available resources?  Tally them up.  Which pieces of information do we lack?  Take a measurement, go get advice, or make an appropriate assumption along with the necessary caveats.  What are the conceivable courses of action?  Plot them out.  Where are the critical decision points?  Identify them and identify the possible decisions.  

How much could each path cost?  What are the possible benefits?  Who benefits at each stage?  What are the risks -- and what is the probability of each projected undesirable outcome?  Can we live with those possibilities?

It's not that we don't take into consideration people's feelings about their problems.  It's just that the potential effect of feelings  have to be factored into the cost-and-benefit structure.  If you're going to have an irrational reaction to one potential outcome of this decision, then I have to factor your irrationality into the potential negative costs.

We tend to drive nontechnical types a little crazy when we import our approach into nontechnical problems.  But I think it's a good way to approach problems of all kinds, and is one reason why I'm grateful for my engineering education, which has shaped the way I look at all kinds of things, even though (as noted) I haven't worked a day in my life.  At least not recently.

Anyway, here is a sample of posts from Engineering Ethics Blog.

On the unintended consequences of the ethanol-in-gasoline mandate ERISA:

At the time, ERISA was passed, ethanol was the only biofuel that had any reasonable chance of making it into the nation’s gas tanks in a reasonable time frame....

The not-so-advertised reasons for the law have to do with the strength of the agricultural lobby.  The E10 mandate was a tremendous windfall for everybody who grows corn.  While some ethanol from corn was being used voluntarily as a fuel additive before 2007, the mandate caused this use to skyrocket.  By 2011, according to the Mosbacher Institute report by economist James Griffin, 37% of the entire U. S. corn crop went toward ethanol production.  And corn prices soared from $2.50 per bushel up to as high as $7.50.

If the only people hurt were U. S. food consumers (not everybody drives a car, but everybody eats), it would be bad enough.  But the U. S. grows and sells more corn than any other nation, and much of it is exported to poorer countries, where it is a staple in many diets.  While the rise in corn prices was not solely responsible for the worldwide inflation in food costs that led to food riots in many nations in recent years, the timing is suspicious, and there is no question that the ERISA law led to hardships for many poor people around the world who were now even less able to afford to eat....

Unintended consequences show up all the time in considering engineering ethics, and the ERISA mandate has plenty.  The parties who appear to have benefited are:  growers of corn and producers of corn-based ethanol (a lot), the U. S. driving public (a little), and the U. S. overall, from the viewpoint of slightly improved energy security.  The losers include refiners (who have had to fool with the mandate and change their processes), anybody who buys corn (U. S. food consumers, U. S. livestock growers, and millions of foreign food consumers, many of whom are poor), and the U. S. public in the sense that they have had to pay the 45-cent-a-gallon subsidy through the U. S. treasury.  Quite a mixed bag, to say the least.

On the Air France 447 crash of June 1, 2009:

While we will never know why co-pilot Bonin (the one with least experience) did what he did, the fact remains that at 2:10, he pulled the stick back and basically kept it there until it was too late to correct his mistake....

In older aircraft, the two pilot sticks are mechanically coupled together, so only one message goes from the cockpit to the ailerons. If two pilots disagree on what to do with such a stick, they find themselves literally fighting a tug-of-war in the cockpit, and most reasonable people would react by at least talking about what to do next. 

But even in the autopilot-off mode, the Airbus sticks could be moved independently, and the plane responds to the average of the two sticks’ motion. To my ears, this sounds like a software engineer’s solution to a human-factors problem. In the event, even though the senior pilot eventually did the right thing with his stick, the computer averaged it with Bonin’s all-way-back stick, and the stall continued. 

... I hope the software and hardware engineers working on the next Airbus rethink their strategy of independent sticks and averaging. While human-machine communication is important, this accident emphasizes the fact that interpersonal communication in a crisis is vital. That single additional channel of communication through a mechanical link between sticks might have been enough to avoid this accident. 

 

On the show Mythbusters:

Hyneman and Savage are really doing what used to be called “natural philosophy,” back when philosophy really meant the love of knowledge, and not some arcane specialty that you have to get a Ph. D. in to understand, which is mostly what it means today. Before about 1800, most science was done simply because people were curious and wanted to know whether a thing was true or not. There were no huge funding agencies, no boards of proposal review or journal referees—just a few curious guys (it was nearly all guys then) who got together in coffee shops and wrote each other letters about their experiments. And because there was almost no organized industry producing scientific instruments, they had to build almost all their equipment and experiments themselves.

Hyneman ran a special-effects shop before getting involved with MythBusters, and so the very hands-on demands of that type of work (especially before digital technology took over movies to the degree it has) gave him a set of skills that fits very well into the kind of things required by the MythBusters shows. So his lack of formal scientific training isn’t really a disadvantage—instead, he goes about things the way the average guy with time on his hands might look into them. 

Somewhat to my regret, I noted that the Wikipedia biographies of both stars list them as sympathetic with the skeptic or atheist turn of mind. While such a philosophy may be an advantage in their particular line of work, it is by no means a necessity....

The MythBusters people deserve credit for popularizing both science and how to do dangerous things safely. Their latest mishap, although attention-getting, could have been a lot worse, and I’m sure they will be more careful in the future while investigating questions from the past, such as whether a cannonball could really breach a stone wall. And I’m glad they are continuing a long-established tradition of science for science’s sake—even if they are interrupted by messages from their sponsors.

 

_______

*This joke is the property of MrsDarwin.

Our own, and not our own.

Last week, the 13-year-old whom I co-teach two days a week, the daughter of my good friend M., did not come to my house with her younger sister to learn Latin and History with me, or English with my other friend H. She was off all day "shadowing" a ninth-grader at a high school near her home, a well-regarded "classical academy," because she and her family are trying to discern whether high school for her, instead of homeschool, is the best choice for their family next fall. So I gave a quiz in Latin (so she wouldn't miss anything), and her "classmates" (H.'s sixth-grade son and mine) worked on history by themselves -- an ordinary sort of lesson, I saved the art project for the next time -- and we thought about her all day while we were serving lunch and later making tea.

Yesterday, we asked her how it went. "It was really fun," she told me. "The girl I was with was one of those really fun, bubbly types. She had a weird schedule. We sat with her friend at lunch, and the friend had been homeschooled. Pottery class was fun -- I made an ear. I went to an astronomy class, and that was really interesting."

M. told me: "She really liked it. It's only four miles away from the house, too -- she could ride her bike to school."

H. told me with no little pride: "They were studying the Iliad in English class, and she got to participate in the discussion." I found a brochure in their kitchen she had brought home: "Why Study Latin?" explaining all the benefits to logical thinking, future language study, and vocabulary building. I wondered how I -- I mean she -- would do when she took a placement test before beginning school.

If she takes the placement test, I mean. "She isn't in yet. But she probably will, because they have a lot of attrition and turnover between eighth and ninth grade. And of course it isn't decided yet."

There is so much to think about here.

First, the inevitable: Can our kids really be this old? When I met this girl she was barely walking, toddling around with a piece of cake that fell off her plate and that she subsequently trod upon. I watched her learn to talk. She was the little girl whom I looked to to learn what I, the mother of a firstborn a bit younger than she, had in store for me in a year or so. It was bad enough when she turned thirteen last year, but can she really be getting ready for high school work? I guess I had better start getting our family ready too.

Next: if she goes to school next year, I will miss her so much! You might think that it would be more work to teach three than to teach two, but it really is not so. She is so delightful and adds so much to the discussions we have. The kids do a lot of teaching each other, of course, and it warms my heart to see someone so serious about printing labels on her maps clearly and legibly, about making the sketches and diagrams so detailed and beautifully colored. She loves writing verse that doesn't just tell the story, but that sounds elegant to the ear and has accurate meter. She loves composing sentences. And I truly enjoy working with her -- it is a real motivation to create a good lesson, for a young woman who will be eager to do the work and learn from it. I had been planning to teach the kids proof-based geometry when they had all finished enough algebra -- I just know she would love it, all those constructions and careful logical steps, and I was more excited about teaching her and sharing that (admittedly really geeky) passion I have for the subject than I was about teaching anybody else.

But: Whatever is best for her, well, I want that too. I will be so sad to see her leave our little school group. ("She'll come back around three in the afternoon," H. said to me hopefully this morning. "The boys won't be done with their work yet. Maybe she'll want us to tutor her.")

Still, the school exists for the child, not the child for the school. We don't send our children into the schools of any kind to spend hours per day just so they can improve the general environment. We send them to school to learn and grow and to gather, not to spend themselves for someone else's benefit. I know this. Most homeschoolers do. We are familiar with the accusation leveled at us that we, the involved parents, are selfishly keeping our children to ourselves instead of sending then away to strengthen the peer group at the neighborhood public school, instead of sending them out to float a foundering diocesan school system, instead of employing them to prop up the fragile charter-school movement. And of course we hope that the public school system will be stronger, that the diocesan schools will thrive, that the charter-school movement will flourish, because everyone is better off when there are plenty of good choices.

But every family's first responsibility is to its own health, safety, and growth. That is the whole purpose of being in families: to know and be known, to grow and to thrive, protected and cared for as someone's "own." Communities, extended families, even "chosen" extended families like our little tribe, all exist to support those little cores of "own-ness," not to supplant it.

So I want what is best for this young lady who is not mine, even if I have to do some work, letting go and standing back, learning to watch. As with so many other things, she is still teaching me what I have to look forward to.

Gut-level development of doctrine.

On the last post, Darwin makes a provocative comment:

When I wrote about the NFP article over at TAC I found myself arguing with a couple of fairly young guys who were upset that the Church didn't provide Very Clear Guidance on when it was okay to use NFP and when it wasn't, for fear that people would use it as just another way to separate procreation and sexuality.

Coming at the question from the vantage point of 11 years of marriage and NFP use, it seems to me that simply using NFP is in and of itself probably the best way to come to a real understanding of the intimate connection between procreation and sex. The fact that not getting pregnant means not having sex for a good portion of the time will do that to one.

That is certainly the case for me -- I intellectually understood the connection, of course, and was willing to follow the rules, but years of actually practicing NFP did give me that gut-level intuitive understanding.

What about Catholic couples who decide they have a particular call to, as some folks put it, "put their fertility entirely in the hands of God?" I am not talking about quiverfull types who believe they should have as many children as possible, nor providentialists who think the rest of us sin when we use NFP to avoid pregnancy for less-than-deadly-serious reasons, but people who have believe they have discerned a particular call to let the babies come as they may.

Do you suppose that this lifestyle, which does not call for periodic abstinence, also develops the gut-level understanding of the connection as well as the periodic abstinence does?

Or perhaps that such couples usually already "get it" or they would not have made such a decision, heard such a call?

Any readers who have decided to go the no-charts route, did you find that there was a development over the years of your gut-level understanding or acceptance of Church teaching on human sexuality and procreation, or do you think you already "got it" before you set off on that route?

Talking past one another's contexts.

Simcha and Jen have posts up about the difficulty of communicating publicly about NFP given the different assumptions that people bring to the table, which arise out of different life experiences and varying levels of exposure to cultural norms.

Jen:

 ....to some extent this kind of miscommunication is inevitable, because the way secular society understands human sexuality and the way the Catholic Church understands it are so vastly different.

When I re-read the Post article  [in which she was quoted, but not the way she thought she would be] and some of the resulting commentary, I noticed undercurrents of the idea that NFP is the Catholic version of contraception. Most of the posts and comments I read took for granted the following ideas:

• Babies are, by default, burdens to be avoided
• People are entitled to engage in sexual activity without having to think about the possibility of new life
• Parents can and should control their fertility with as much precision as possible, only being open to children when they are absolutely sure they are completely ready

Thus, even when people are sincerely seeking to understand the Catholic understanding of NFP, the questions sound something like:

• How does Catholic teaching help women avoid the burden of babies?
• How does Catholic teaching allow couples to engage in sexual activity without having to think about the possibility of new life?
• How will Catholic teaching allow parents to control their fertility with as much precision as possible, only being open to children when they are absolutely sure they are completely ready?

…And we end up completely missing each other.

(Confession time:  those last three questions really are the ones I was asking when I first studied up on NFP before marriage and then when my husband and I entered marriage together.  It really wasn't until I saw that NFP was really working -- what a relief! -- that I loosened up and began to understand the babies-are-people-not-burdens view, and even that wasn't cemented for me till we had children.  Which doesn't say much for me as a person, except that I am human.  Just like the aforementioned babies.)

Simcha:

In the same way, conversations the Church's view of sexuality are going to be tricky, even for the best-equipped among us.  Say, for instance, that I'm a faithful young Catholic who has been brought up with the understanding that sex is a gift, not a right; that babies are a privilege, not a burden; that marriage is for making children and helping us grow in holiness, not for enhancing our portfolios and giving us a scuba diving partner when we summer in Cabo.

So, confident and righteous, we dive whole hog into conversations about human sexuality, armed with the liberating truth. 

But then we come head to head with someone whose unfaithful husband refuses to abstain. 

Or someone with a short life expectancy, who can't admit of even the smallest risk of conception. 

Or someone who already has three severely autistic children.  Or someone who does't have any extrarodinary physical or emotional trials, but who has simply been reared on the world's view of sex, and for whom any amount of abstinence (never mind providentialism) is a mindblowing impossibility. 

Suddenly, just saying the truth as we know it isn't doing the trick.

 

Keep this in mind.

Now, check out this opinion piece from the Minneapolis Star Tribune a few days ago.  Bear in mind that it is an opinion piece; notice that the writer of the piece (as is his prerogative, it being an opinion column) really only seeks direct quotes from one "side" in the debate, and the other "side's" view is only presented via filtering through other people's impressions.   Bear in mind also that if this was mandatory coming from the Archdiocese, likely the same presentation occurred in other Catholic schools, but we have no news from them.

De La Salle kids have a few words with archdiocese at marriage talk

Go ahead, read it, come back.  (By the way, I haven't looked at the 300+ comments on the article either -- I try to avoid newspaper-site comment sections, especially when they get that long.)

+ + +

Okay, some questions for the audience.

-- What do you think the presenters likely actually said to the students about adoption?  (Not long after the article appeared, a non-Catholic friend of mine sent me a link to the article, asking "What's with the rhetoric about adoption?")  

-- Do you think the archdiocese is at fault for sending people who were unprepared to deal with difficult questioning, or do you think it likely that no presenters on this topic would have been well received?

-- Assuming good faith on the part of the questioners, what is the right way to answer publically difficult questions about the Christian life that are rooted in questioners' life experiences? Is there no way to avoid being taken out of context later, assuming that any public statement will wind up in an opinion piece in the local paper?  Given that there is no way to avoid being taken out of context, is there a way to frame the answers such that one has actually to be misquoted in order to be spun incorrectly?

-- Should the archdiocese have communicated with the students some other way?

Searching for words.

So, I mentioned some time ago that I was going to start working on learning Spanish with the tweens I co-school. I mentioned that I didn't want to do a traditional curriculum because they are already a couple of years into Latin and it seems to me we could save some time by exploiting what they already know. Once you have learned any second language, after all, you are alert to many of the things you need to know in order to learn another one, and there are so many points of contact between Latin and Spanish that it ought to be a fairly easy transition.

I know enough French and Latin, and have picked up enough knowledge about Spanish from various attempts to teach myself, to score 12 out of 12 on this BBC Language quiz ( http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/spanish/gauge/ ). Can't speak it at all, and would like to do better. After quite a bit of research, I decided to work with the kids using my own method -- the one where I teach myself, and I bring them along.

I have two sourcebooks, one scholarly and the other popular.

The scholarly book is Frederick Bodmer's The Loom of Language, http://www.amazon.com/The-Loom-Language-Approach-Languages/dp/039330034X , which blew my mind when I found it in the library. The author comes at it with the perspective of one who was deeply involved in the "international language movement," inspired by an optimistic belief that eliminating the language problem would do away with misunderstandings and, thereafter, all wars would cease. Clearly his vision did not play out, but the way he thinks about language-learning is jaw-droppingly insightful. Plus the book has a decent amount of background information in linguistics, and all sorts of useful word lists and tables which make it really useful, at least if you are setting out to learn a Romance language or a Teutonic language. The writing itself is crisp and clear, if dated.

The popular book is entertaining and somewhat incredible (in the sense that I am not sure he is telling the truth about all of his polyglot experiences). This is How to Learn Any Language http://www.amazon.com/How-Learn-Language-Barry-Farber/dp/1567315437 by Barry Farber. It has some tall-sounding stories, but also some solid-sounding advice on how to tackle a new language: First, get a basic grammar and read about five chapters. Then, get a phrasebook, a magazine or newspaper (one copy of one issue) in the target language, and some audiotapes (or the modern equivalent) and start working your way through the text a paragraph at a time. He has some tips for how to design an efficient flashcard system, how to use spare moments to study, and how to use memory-association visualization, but the main thrust is to attack the language through multiple channels at once: auditory, text, and speech, and also grammar study.

Since his first piece of advice is to learn a little grammar, that is where we are starting: one quick lesson a week, with a little bit of practice making sentences.

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.

Now the only hard part will be not letting my excitement at starting a New Thing crowd out the important work we are doing in intermediate Latin. I have four more weeks till we finish one of our history books, and when that happens we will open up a block of time I can devote just to Spanish -- till then I am itching to move ahead. I have a few more books on order, so at least I will have to wait till they get here.

By the way -- if you, like me, ever decide to use phrase books as part of language learning with kids -- take the time to read the Amazon reviews first and then to "look inside." I was all set to buy the Lonely Planet phrase book for Latin American Spanish when I happened upon a review warning parents that the book is not for the kiddies, as it contains explicit material in the "Romance" section. I had enough trouble with the kids yesterday translating "specta virum in equo retinae" as "look at the man in the queen's horse," which they found hilarious, and I can hardly blame them, but I do not need to burden them yet with phrases like "Touch me here!" or "Faster!" or "Sorry, I can't get it up" or "I never want to see you again."

Although it did make for an amusing image of someone trying to consult his phrase book in the heat of the moment. Or more likely sitting alone on some hostel cot, studying up optimistically so that, if things go well, he won't look like such a loser tourist.

More on forgiveness.

I had a post Asking for forgiveness, some days ago, in which I outline my theory about teaching children to apologize.

 In a nutshell, that stems from the realization that the proper purpose of an apology is to invite forgiveness.  That is what guides me as I figure out how to teach my kids to apologize and to forgive people, and it guides the selection of the words that we use.  

Anyway, today commenter Barbara C. asks a couple of good questions:

1. How do you handle it if the "injured" party just does not feel capable of forgiving...if the hurt feels too big to let go of easily?

 
2. How would you handle those who seem to apologize for their own benefit (i.e. "by expressing the feelings that are inside him, so that the speaker feels his true feelings has been heard")? They do it more to relieve their own burden even if they know that in the process they will be putting a larger burden on the other person.

Of course, maybe I am taking what is meant to be a lesson for children and applying it to my adult problems....(sigh)

 

Here's my answer, tidied up a bit for better bloggery.  

Obviously each question is really two questions:  what if it's your kid?  and what if it's the other kid?  And maybe there's also a subtext of what if it's me, the grownup, dealing with this from other grownups?

1a.  When my child can't or won't respond to an apology with "I forgive you."  Truthfully, my child usually easily say the words "I forgive you" because, I think, they are so well practiced at it.  They know that the sky doesn't fall down if they say it before they "feel" it.  They know that life goes on, and usually the words have helped.  

But if it was one of my children who felt they could not forgive another, I would take that as a sign that the kids need additional intervention before the discussion is over -- maybe my child is reasonably afraid that the behavior won't stop, etc., in which case it is probably time for some redirection to different activities. You can forgive someone and still decide you're done playing with them for the day.  We would stay there and explore it further.  On the other hand, if my child is just being obstinate, well, I don't allow that for the young ones.  If you can say "I forgive you," you do.

1b.  When my child seeks forgiveness and doesn't hear it.

More commonly, it's my child who has apologized and asked for forgiveness, and another child doesn't say the words.  I've been through this one a lot.

• First of all, I teach them to wait until the angry, hurt child has calmed down enough to hear an apology -- no point in apologizing to someone who's screaming in her mother's lap. 
•  After that, the first thing to check is whether the other child has reason to believe that my child is going to continue causing a problem for him!  "Do you think maybe he is still worried you will tease him again?  Have you promised that you will stop?"
• If it's clear that the bad behavior has stopped, I tell my child, "Sometimes people need time to forgive you, and when that happens you just have to wait until they are ready." I might add, "Maybe s/he doesn't know how to say it and will show you instead." With small children, at least, they usually go back to playing eventually.

2a.  The "fake apology" coming from my kid.  Well, young children rarely give "fake apologies," right? The "I'm sorry you took what I said the wrong way" kind? They sometimes refuse to apologize, and they sometimes say "I'm sorry" when they don't mean it -- and that last is something I wholeheartedly support! 

Fake apologies, which have the words "I am sorry" or "I regret" in them but point the sorrow or the regret the wrong direction because they are not grounded in a desire for forgiveness but instead in a desire to continue making a point, are the domain of older kids and adults. People who want to save face.

I have yet to hit the teen years, but I imagine that if I hear one of those coming out of my tween's mouth, I will take him aside and explain that there is nothing wrong or unusual about feeling that you have been misunderstood or wrongly accused, but that the fake apology is never appropriate.  If you really desire to be forgiven (and even if the other person is wrong about you, you should desire his forgiveness because forgiveness is good for him and good for your relationship) you will find a way to express that desire sincerely.

Maybe you will have to suck it up and say "I am sorry" and let the person think it is an admission of wrongdoing. Maybe it is not advisable to admit wrongdoing (there are sometimes legal consequences after all) and if no apology you can offer is accepted, at that point you just have to let it go and try (silently) to forgive *him* for refusing to forgive *you.*

2b.  Other people's fake apologies.   "If someone fake-apologizes to you," I guess I will tell my kids, "the ball is in your court."  

You have the choice to accept it as if it were a sincere apology.  This is called "taking the high road."  It is difficult, but you can have some satisfaction because it is an exercise in humility.  It means you let the other person have the last word, and you let it stand for what it is.  Sometimes the exact choice of words can be a little tricky, though, because what makes a fake apology fake is that it does not, actually, ask for forgiveness, and so "I forgive you" is a non-sequitur.

(Try it:  "I'm sorry you took what I said out of context."  "I forgive you."  Doesn't work, does it?  You see why the fake apology is so insidious?  It deprives both people of forgiveness.  The only logical response is... "...Um... I'm sorry I took what you said out of context, too?"  Or... "I forgive you for being so unclear that I couldn't tell what the context was?"  Logically, the argument continues.)

Anyway, "I accept your apology" might work.

There is an alternative response, particularly if you care what the other person thinks of you.  You have the choice to treat it as an opportunity for more dialogue, chock full of I-statements ("I get the sense that you feel I have misunderstood you. Do you want to tell me more about that?") Past history and expected future interaction are the guide to which approach makes sense, and you can stop at any point and accept the apology -- such as it is -- on the theory that it is the best you will get.

+ + +

One more thing:  I think it is totally appropriate to apply lessons for children to adult problems. That is exactly what we are supposed to do as we grow up:  apply what we have learned in the past to whatever is going on right now. It works really well if the lessons were good. And I think that the purpose of apologies does not change with age.

 

Chicken and root vegetable stew.

This is one of those clean-out-the-fridge soups.  It was just what the doctor (me) ordered when I came down with this horrible cold, and nobody is around to take care of me so I have to take care  of myself.  It is loosely based on a Colombian class of soups called sancocho de gallina (found by googling "chicken root vegetable soup" and seeing what turned up.) The kids even liked it, despite the obvious lack of noodles.

Chicken and Root Vegetable Stew

• 6 cups rich chicken stock (had some going in the crock pot just for this soup!)
• 1/4 c olive oil
• 2 large onions
• 4 boneless, skinless chicken thighs, sliced
• 1 big turnip*
• 4 carrots*
• 5 small red potatoes*
• 1 big green bell pepper*
• 1 tsp dried thyme
• 2 bay leaves

*The exact amounts and types of vegetables probably doesn't matter much, although I would not want to do without potato or the particular mild bitterness of green bell pepper.  Parsnips, rutabagas, sweet potatoes would probably all be very nice.  Some versions of sancocho contain chunks of corn on the cob, and I would totally have added that if I had any.

Trim and roughly chop all the vegetables.   Heat the olive oil in a soup pot and add the onions and the sliced chicken; cook until the chicken is no longer translucent and the onions are just starting to brown.  Add the stock and the rest of the ingredients and simmer until the vegetables are all quite tender.  Remove the bay leaves, add salt and pepper to taste, and eat up.

 

We had this with hot buttered toast.  Superb.

A sense of distance.

Ford was very kind -- he gave the barman another five-pound note and told him to keep the change.  The barman looked at it and then looked at Ford.  He suddenly shivered:  he experienced a momentary sensation that he didn't understand because no one on Earth had ever experienced it before.  In moments of great stress, every life form tht exists gives out a tiny subliminal signal.  This signal simply communicates an exact and almost pathetic sense of how far that being is from the place of his birth.  On Earth it is never possible to be farther than sixteen thousand miles from your birthplace, which really isn't very far, so such signals are too minute to be noticed.  Ford Prefect was at this moment under great stress, and he was born six hundred light-years away in the near vicinity of Betelgeuse. 

The barman reeled for a moment, hit by a shocking, incomprehensible sense of distance.  He didn't know what it meant, but he looked at Ford Prefect with a new sense of respect, almost awe.

------- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

 

My husband travels frequently for business, I think I've mentioned.  I often say that the frequency is just about right; he is generally gone three or four days per month.  Certainly we would like to see more of him, and so I'm glad they aren't more often; on the other hand, since he travels so regularly, the children and I are quite used to it.  "Daddy's-out-of-town" has its own peculiar routine.

On those days, I (instead of Mark) herd everyone into the car and get them to swimming lessons on time; I (instead of Mark) drop the bigger boys off at Wednesday night catechism class and take the younger two to buy groceries before coming back to pick them up; I (instead of Mark) sweep the kitchen and wipe down the counters when the children have gone to bed; I (instead of Mark) make the morning coffee.   Because I do those things, I lose some of my planning time, some of my blogging time; but I've been doing it so long that it is just another kind of normal.  If there is a trip scheduled for the second week of the month, I have to do double school planning on the first week of the month, or else operate a bit more on the fly.  

Other stuff that Mark usually does, I simply don't do.  It's Mark who goes in with the children at bedtime and sits with them, together saying their evening prayer; when he leaves, he reminds them to say their prayers in the evening, and we leave it to them.   Maybe I'm lazy?  Maybe I'm too busy cleaning the kitchen? In any case, bedtime prayers is Mark's "turf," and I don't have any desire to try to substitute for him, at least when he will be back in just a few days.

This kind of normal is not entirely routine, not entirely the same as usual.  If Mark is gone for more than three nights, we will probably have a pizza-and-movie evening, and sometimes we accept an invitation to stay for dinner at a friend's house.  I make dinners the children all like, because the children's appreciation is all I will get:  chili, chicken soup, tacos, spaghetti and meatballs, Caesar salad (yeah, for some reason they all love it, and so do I, so it works out).  

I admit to sometimes serving the kids their dinner and then sending them up to watch movies while I eat in front of the computer screen or engrossed in a book.  After I have been surrounded by people for enough hours, I am desperate for quiet and solitude.  I usually work some such time into the middle of my school day anyway (we call it "break time" and it happens right after lunch), and when Mark is gone I crave it in the evening too.  I don't always indulge myself that way, but I do sometimes.

The last time Mark was gone on a weekend, which is much rarer, I hired a babysitter for a few hours between lunch and dinner on Sunday, just so I could disappear and decompress.  That money was well spent.  

+++

The quote at the beginning, though -- the sense of distance?  

When I say the travel is routine, I really mean it.  We know by heart the schedules of the planes that trundle back and forth between Minneapolis and the two or three Midwestern cities he travels to most.  (He says he barely notices takeoffs and landings anymore, and the one time we went with him, rolling it into a family trip, I was startled to hear multiple hotel workers calling him by name).  

But this week he's in Italy!

It's a slightly longer trip than usual, but that's not the only reason it feels sort of strange.  There is something surreal about waking up in the morning, knowing that overnight one's husband has been whisked 4700 miles away.   I can't quite believe it in my bones; perhaps it is just not part of my evolutionary heritage to really believe that the flesh of my flesh can have been separated, teased apart, and taken so far off in such a short time.  Perhaps if he had been plodding off to New York on horseback, and there haggled prices for a berth in a merchant's sailing ship, I'd get used to the idea in the time it would have taken to happen.

We talk a couple of times a day, and the voice-Skype connection is only slightly garbled compared to a cell phone connection to Ohio or Tennessee or Indiana, and I'm still talking on my same old phone.  Nevertheless there are hours of difference between my clock and his, and there's something uniquely disconnecting about the calls -- I just woke up and you're already done with lunch?  It's midafternoon and you can't talk long because you're exhausted and it's dark and you had a lot of good wine at dinner and you want to go to bed?  

And then there's a third disconnect, along the lines of "you had the local Raboso and the veal cheeks for dinner, and we had nachos." I cannot deny there's some power that one.

But the aspect that sends me reeling the most really is the simple distance:  it's not heartbreaking, nor sad, nor frightening, just simply strange and foreign that this person who is part of me can possibly have gotten so far away, even for a few days.     I feel I ought to be there (and not just for the veal cheeks).  One of these days it may work out that I can come along, and perhaps that may make a difference.

Perhaps the "few days" is the part that is so strange, that a distance so wide can be folded up so small that it almost -- almost -- fits into the spaces of our usual routines.

 

Misremembering beholding.

Have you ever gotten a meditation wrong?  

We have a number of decisions to make right now; some discernment is called for.  I have a busy nature, am always doing something, and so one of the few times that I have for my mind to wander freely is in the pool while I swim; can't listen to music, can't write, so I think.  I was there, swimming, thinking, and casting about for images to meditate on in an effort to bring some insight to my mental processes, and I settled on the Annunciation, and "I am the handmaid of the Lord."

I spent several laps considering "I am the handmaid of the Lord."  I was thinking about how the first response to the angel's greeting is "How can this be?" and then, after a certain explanation, the self-identification, followed  by the assent.   I found it intriguing, the one piece of information that, to the betrothed virgin, is apparently both necessary and sufficient for the identification, the assent.  It was interesting to think about, and then, as I passed from the English to the Latin (Ecce ancilla domini) I realized -- wait, that isn't quite right -- it's not "I am," but "Behold."  

"Behold the handmaid of the Lord."  I knew that, of course, but I misremembered.  

Anyway, Ecce is translated to "Behold" rather idiomatically -- it isn't precisely a command to look upon something, as far as I can tell, and can also mean "Here is..." or something along those lines.

I had to laugh at myself, because I rather think it would have made a difference to us -- perhaps disastrously -- had it come out as "I AM."

[No Title]