bearing blog

New declensions, and a very bizarre analogy that I should apologize for up front.

I updated a few days ago about how I'd recently been picking up the Somali books again, had a new dictionary, etc.  I thought I'd write a little bit more about what I'm up to right now.

...Actually I think many of you would find it fairly boring.  When I attack a new language on my own, I do not start off by learning to say hello or how are you or could I have a glass of water, please.  I prefer to come at it from a number of different directions, probing fairly deeply each time.  And they are not ways that let me have a conversation right away, I'm sorry.

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Mind you, I don't have to do it this way all the time.  When I attacked Italian for the first time a few years ago, I mainly did it through Pimsleur audio recordings, which are very much directed toward useful conversation. It worked rather well, actually, especially combined with some work on Duolingo, which helped me grok the grammar a little more visually.  I got through thirty audio lessons and managed to comport myself relatively well, meaning that people asked me, "Are you Australian?" when I tried to speak Italian to them.  

But neither Pimsleur nor Duolingo has a course yet.  I could take a class at any of several local colleges and universities, but I don't have time to keep up a schedule now.  So I am on my own with books.  I think this is a better use of my time right now, to grasp what I can on my own, because I'm actually reasonably good at taking in grammar and things without help, and I might be able to get myself to a place where, with help, I can move efficiently.  

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For the last few days I've been learning about nouns.  Let me tell you what I've learned.

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Basic grammar point that you might not know if you've never taken Latin or Russian or Somali:  a declension is a family of nouns that change their forms in similarly regular ways according to the job they're doing in the sentence.  Latin has five declensions.  Russian has three, not counting some irregular nouns.  Once you've learned the pattern or two or three that govern a declension, you should be able to predictably spell and pronounce the rest of the nouns that belong to that family.

From my experience with Latin, I've found out that the easiest way for me to learn new nouns is to learn them together with other nouns of the same declension.  I don't have a hard time remembering meanings-from-wordshapes, so learning them in context is wasteful.  It's better for me to learn clusters that behave similarly, so I can associate them with one another.   So I spent some time this past week compiling lists of Somali nouns, first one declension, then another, and so on.  

Actually the lists were a little more fine-grained than that.  Masculine and feminine singular nouns can both exist in the same declension, and behave just a bit differently, so I made separate lists for masculine and feminine nouns in each declension.    I got through four declensions so far.  Somali has seven in all.

One thing that is interesting:  Sometimes nouns switch gender when you pluralize them.  So, for instance, warqád, letter, is feminine, but warqado, letters, is masculine.

Here's a sampling.

Declension 1, feminine singular

• abaár, drought
• beér, garden  (won't have trouble remembering that one)
• daár, stone house
• heés, song
• koofiyád, hat
• jaamacád, university
• macallimád, female teacher
• mindí, knife
• naág, woman
• nabád, peace
• saaxibád, female friend
• walaál, sister
• xeéb, coast

Declension 1, masculine singular

• búur, mountain
• géed, tree
• jídh, body
• réer, family or group of people
• sánad, year
• waláal, brother

 

The difference between walaál (sister) and waláal (brother) is audible; there's a tonal difference.  I know this because I have an audio accompaniment to one of the textbooks I picked up.  The best way I can explain how it sounds to me is this:  of the two a's in the second syllable, you can hear both of them -- it's a long syllable -- and when you hear walaál there's a rising tone, as if the speaker asks "walaal?" Whereas in pronouncing waláal the speaker says "Wal-aal." rather definitively, as if clearly explaining how to say the word.  It almost sounds to me like "Sister?" is the question and "Brother." the answer.

 

Declension 2, masculine singular

• adéer, paternal uncle
• baansíin, petrol             (this is a loanword from Italian -- do you recognize it?  Benzina.)
• baasabóor, passport     (another loanword)
• gaádhi, car
• ínan, boy
• kallúun, fish
• laábbis, pencil                (pretty sure this is also an Italian loanword)
• mádax, head
• saaxíib, male friend       (wonder if this is from "sahib?")
• sác, cow
• súuq, market                   (Arabic loanword for sure)
• xísbi, political party

 

Declension 3, feminine singular

• gabádh, girl or young woman
• galáb, afternoon
• kibís, bread
• maalín, day

Declension 3, masculine singular

• gárab, shoulder
• hílib, meat
• ílig, tooth
• wáran, spear
• xádhig, rope

Declension 4, masculine singular

• áf, mouth or language
• cáan, fame
• dáb, fire
• dhúl, earth
• hádh, shade
• róob, rain
• sháag, tire
• wár, news
• wíil, boy or son

There are noun cases in Somali, but I haven't dug into them yet.  I started with the rules for forming plurals and trying to observe some differences between masculine and feminine nouns.  So far the pattern has been final-vowel stress in the feminine singular, penultimate-vowel stress in the masculine singular, no stress in the plural.  I wonder if that pattern will hold as I learn more nouns.

In Declension 1, plurals are mostly formed by adding -o, or -yo if the word ends in an i.  Also you remove the stress tones.  So gardens is beero and knives is mindiyo.  All the plurals are masculine, even for feminine nouns.

In Declension 2, you also add -o to pluralize (or -yo after i, j, s, or the guttural consonants) and  remove stress tones, but you must double certain consonants first:  paternal uncles are adeerro. All the plurals are feminine.

In Declension 3, you lose a vowel before adding  the o.  So breads are kibso.  And sometimes change a consonant:  teeth are ilko.  And all those plurals are masculine.

 Most fun of all, words from Declension 4, which always end in consonants, are pluralized by adding an a plus a repeat of the last consonant sound.  So mouths are afaf and shades are hadhadh.

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I am hand-writing long lists which I am culling from a dictionary that actually had the declensions marked (not all the dictionaries bother with little things like n. f. , which I find sort of amazing as a language learner).  After I make it through all the declensions, I believe I will re-organize the lists and hand-write them again into further categories, such as the final consonant which affects whether one adds (for example) -o or -yo.  I find that hand-writing the lists rather than typing them, and re-writing them by hand in different combinations, really helps me remember them.  I hope to finish the declensions and their plurals this weekend, and then start exploring how case declension works.

It's the kind of thing that sounds boring to some people, perhaps even unpleasant, but I assure you I find perfectly satisfying.

Like the other thing I did today, which was to take apart the dishwasher with my second son's help, and pick all the goop (and olive pits -- many, many olive pits) out of the crevices of the filter with a tool I scavenged from the middle schoolers' dissection kit.  Extremely tedious.  Extremely satisfying to manage to get hold of an individual string of celery vein that had gotten wrapped around some snag of plastic, and pull it out, a lot of other gunk coming away with it.  

It's a terribly bad analogy, but because these are the two things that describe how I spent my day, you are stuck with them.

I live for these moments, you know?  Hand-writing long lists of words and sensing patterns in them seems to feed my brain little dribs and drabs of dopamine.  Language is cool.  

Sometimes I think I missed my calling, until it's time to clean the dishwasher, I guess.

Topic, comment.

I have been having a very linguistic couple of weeks.

In Latin news, I got myself hopelessly confused while reviewing tenses in subordinate clauses with my oldest son and his study buddy for the National Latin Exam. Tense by sense, tense by relation, tense by sequence -- they're all on different pages of the Henle Latin Grammar, which is concise and good for referencing with its index, but not very good for learning as it has you flipping back and forth from one reference table to another, which (especially when my, er, students are looking at me expectantly) reminds me of trying to solve a multiphase mass-and-energy balance problem on a thermodynamics exam.

So I used some of my abundant free time to make tables of English sentences like "I will ask whether she shouted" and "I have asked whether she will shout" and "I know that you are swimming" and "I knew that you would swim" and "I fought so hard that I was winning" and "I fought so hard that I won" and "I fought so hard that I will win" and "I fought hard so that I would win" and the like, and painstakingly translated them all into Latin making notes about which tense goes where. Now I still do not have them all memorized, but I have a better sense of it -- especially, I have a sense of which sentences will come out right if you make the tenses behave more or less like the English, and which will come out wrong.

Sometimes, if you remember to think them the right way, they translate quite literally. For example, take "I know that you are swimming" and "I knew that you had been swimming." If you remember to think them in your head as "I know you to swim" and "I knew you to have swum" instead, then they go straight into Latin the way they ought to. Scio te natare; scivi te natavisse, with the present and perfect infinitives.

I feel very satisfied about this and should probably laminate the tables.

In French, I finally beat the big boss in Duolingo: I made it through the entire program, all the levels. We'll probably be visiting again this year, and I wanted to brush up on stuff. And now I have none left.

In Italian, I have been reviewing the Pimsleur audio course, hoping to move forward from where I was about three years ago before our big trip. There is a good chance we will spend a little time in Italy, and I am discovering that I can advance pretty quickly through Italian what with all the French, Latin, and Spanish. Almost time to buy a new chunk of lessons!

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I picked up my Somali books again recently after having neglected them for a while. I admit I have not gotten very deep into anything conversational (except practicing saying pharyngeal consonants without giving myself hiccups) because I keep going down linguistic rabbit trails, trying to get an overview of how the whole thing works. This morning my new dictionary arrived and I started to read the grammar overview in the beginning. Here is what happens when I read a grammar overview:

Somali is an agglutinative language.

(Googles agglutinative, reads first paragraph of Wikipedia article, comes to term "synthetic language")

(Googles synthetic language, reads first paragraph, takes notes: "Agglutinative -> synthetic -> high morpheme/word ratio, more-synthetic languages have fewer articles, prepositions, etc.")

Reads next sentence. The basic grammatical categories are: Noun, clitic pronoun,---

(Googles "clitic pronoun" and writes, "Form of affix, meaning of word")

---verb, adjective, verbal adposition,---

(Googles "adposition." Googles "postposition." Googles "English postpositions." Writes: "Ago, notwithstanding, hence, aside")

---determiner, focus word---

(Goes looking for that one used text book I have upstairs that explains briefly about focus and theme-rheme and topic-dominant versus subject-dominant languages)

(Googles topic-comment languages)

(Impulsively buys three used textbooks via Amazon)

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So today's rabbit trail really was, er, focus. My used textbook says: focus determines which part of the sentence contributes new, nonderivable, or contrastive information. In spoken English, focus is mainly communicated by intonation, it turns out; and we sometimes try to do it in written English, with underscoring and capital letters.

The more I learn about different language, the more I realize how sloppy teachers of grammar can get when they are working within a single language, especially one as weird as English. Wouldn't it have been useful to have heard of aspect as distinct from tense? Tense is when the action happens -- you already know that -- aspect distinguishes between one-time actions and continuing actions, the difference between "it happened" and "it was happening," between "I swim" and "I am swimming."

The children's Latin curriculum is good enough, but I have always been bothered by its distinguishing subject from predicate by defining subject as "what the sentence is about." I never really could articulate why it bothered me -- I mean, obviously it is a simplification for children, but it has always felt wrong and not merely oversimplified. Well. It turns out (correct me if I get this wrong, I am a complete amateur) that in English the subject usually is "what the sentence is about," because English is a "subject-dominant" language. But the more generally applicable term for "what the sentence is about" is the topic. And some languages are topic-dominant instead of subject-dominant.

We wind up using the passive voice a lot in English because in subject-dominant languages, the topic and the subject are by default the same. So if we mean to say that the most important item in our sentence (the topic) is acted upon, is the object of some action, we turn it from object to subject in order to keep it in the topic spot. The wall was painted yesterday: I care about the wall and what happened to it, it's not important who did the painting.

Or maybe I mean it that way because we've been talking about the wall, and now I want to tell you something new about it, like its new coat of paint. So the word order becomes a way for me to indicate focus -- the new or contrastive information. In English we often have a pattern of given-new, given-new, when we write sentences. We mention old information, then we add new information. Another way we do it is by intonation: do you want popcorn or soda? I want popcorn AND soda!

Anyway, some languages don't really do the passive voice, and the intonation channel is busy conveying other information. So there is this other structure called topic-comment, in which you say what the sentence is about (topic) and then you add new information (comment). Not "I already saw John yesterday" but "John, I already saw him yesterday." Not "Coffee is a delicious drink" but "Drinks, coffee is delicious." We do this in spoken English: "About that guy? He called me again yesterday" or "Speaking of cars, I mean to buy one soon" but it's marked somehow, nonstandard, as if we are changing the subject.

Somali apparently conveys focus with a particle that is stuck into the sentence next to the topic. I will dig into it some more later, but I admit that the whole "focus" thing got me thinking about whether I can detect the different ways that focus is marked in the other languages I am interested.

I mean, I have known for a long time that in English we can vary the cadence and stress of our words in a sentence quite a bit, even compared to other European languages. In French the length of syllables cannot really be varied much, for example. If you want to say in English, "I have a big dog and a little cat" it doesn't have to take that much longer than to say "I have a dog and a cat" because the big sort of sticks to the dog and the little sticks to the cat; but in French all the words are more equally weighted. So it would stand to reason that we have a certain, normal channel of information in our intonation and cadence, where in French the same emphasis might have to be marked with something else like word choice, repetition, word order.

I really want to go look at some French news articles and Latin texts now and see how the given-new pattern makes itself known. French just because I am more familiar with it, Latin because I know that word order can be shuffled for special emphasis but because it has never been really well explained to me exactly what sorts of orderings signify what sorts of emphasis.

Anyway. That's my Sunday.

 

 

 

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Transcript number 1.

This week my oldest son, now a homeschooled high school junior, needed an "official high school transcript" for the first time.   

(He's applying for PSEO programs next year -- that's "post-secondary enrollment options," i.e., earning college credit and high school credits simultaneously -- and  one local university that's rather selective about its PSEO applicants required it.)

I knew this was coming, and of course I am going to need it for college applications in the fall anyway, so I have been pulling together materials for a while.  

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I feel much more excited and confident about guiding my offspring through the high school years than I ever did about dealing with elementary school or early middle school.    Perhaps it mirrors my own feelings at those ages:  I struggled a lot with fitting in, and with not being able to control my own environment, when I was younger, and don't have many happy memories, but in high school I began to find subjects to delight in (chiefly chemistry and physics, but also French and literature) and what's more significant, people who also liked that sort of thing. It was then that I began to see a light at the end of the tunnel, so to speak.  

Now that I write that, it doesn't seem a particularly unusual story and so it can't possibly be the sole explanation for why I find a lot of elementary school stuff tiresome and boring compared to some of my colleagues who seem to have an endless, envious capacity for crafts and reading aloud and seeing the world as fresh and new all the time.  Perhaps I am the tiresome one!

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The institution whose application we are mailing today, wisely in my opinion, does not wish to see grades issued by a student's parent, so my transcript has no grades.  

To this I say:  Excellent.  

Not only is it a pain to calculate and assign grades to your own child, it's stupid.  Why on earth should a university believe what I have to say about my own child in an application for admission to anything?  Presumably the obvious conflict of interest would be enough to say "you know what?  Just:  no.  We're going to go off the test scores and maybe an essay."  And then there's the question of how meaningful grades can be when there are literally no other students in the class to compare this one to. 

You would think that all the colleges would see the essential worthlessness of grades produced by a homeschooling parent and actively discourage the student from sending any grades issued by a parent.   But I'm here to tell you that, at least as of last fall, several of the colleges which my oldest is thinking of applying for as a freshman not only encourage homeschooled students to submit a transcript with grades, but they require them.  

I will issue those graded transcripts if I have to, but I really would like to include a disclaimer that says, "You know, I essentially made these grades up.  On a rational basis, of course, me being who I am, but a truly rational basis would mean that you and I should both admit that I could give any grade I wanted to this student. And by the way, so could everybody else who chose to go the non-umbrella-school route."  

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So:  this time anyway, no grades.  Don't even send 'em! says the university (good).  But they do want to know what the student's coursework was like, and in particular how challenging it was.  So:  "Home School transcripts should include a narrative of the material a student has covered and a listing of courses they have taken, if appropriate."

So I pulled out all my records for the various subjects that my oldest has worked on for ninth, tenth, and eleventh grade, and I made lists of the textbooks we used and the material we covered.  I asked H., who has run pretty much all of my kids' English literature and composition, for a course summary, and she provided me a nicely detailed one.  I wrote up a set of end-goals for each area of study (e.g., in Mathematics, one of my oldest's goals is "advance to differential and integral calculus by early in Grade 11 in order to apply them to the study of Physics I").  And then I sorted it all out first by topic and then grade level.

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So, not everyone chooses to do it this way -- lots of homeschoolers have a free-form, holistic, or interdisciplinary philosophy of education, where the boundaries of the different areas are soft or nonexistent, and that is fine -- but I am naturally a put-it-all-into-boxes sort of person, and so from the very beginning I set up my son's high school years with discrete courses and credits in mind.   There would be a chemistry class, and we'd do these chapters from this book.  There would be a civics class, and we'd have three meetings a week for thirty-four weeks.  There would be a Latin class, and we'll work through this syllabus published by an umbrella school.  Physical education?  Each session of the indoor climbing team is thirty hours of instruction, and at 120 hours = 1 credit (the Carnegie unit), that means 1/4 credit each session.

When you start off thinking this way, there is definitely a tendency to get boxed into rigid ideas about the boundaries of disciplines.  On the other hand it is pretty straightforward to add up credits at transcript time.

Another reason I have thought this way from the beginning is because of my co-schooling arrangement.  I set up physics and chemistry for a few high school students to learn in a group, facilitated by me.  Their parents weren't watching me do it (at the time, for example, H. was busy at the moment, teaching language arts to 3 of my other children and 2 of hers).  They trust me but they still need a record of what the students learned; after all, I'm not their "official" teacher; more like a tutor to which they've delegated some of the physics oversight.  So from the very beginning I had a weekly schedule for the whole year, and I kept careful records of what we did and didn't cover.  At the beginning of the year I write a course plan with my objectives; at the end of the year I write a new one where I write how I actually wound up making it all work.  And I do give grades, which is not so hard to do objectively with the kind of coursework I facilitate.  (Whether they are representative or not of what the student would be getting in an institutional school, I don't know.  I hardly ever give anyone an A.  I have a deep suspicion that it would depend on the school.)

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 My son and I went to an informational session last week on campus, where you could ask questions of the full-time PSEO advisors and the program admission staff.  I hung back to ask my question at the end while everyone was filing out -- "What exactly are you looking for in a homeschooler's 'narrative transcript?'"

The staffer explained that the point was so that they could understand the scope of the material the student had covered in his classes, and in particular, whether he demonstrated the ability to do college-level work; it is very important to them that the PSEO students do not overextend themselves.

"So," I suggested, "you would want to see a list of the texts he read in his English classes, that sort of thing?"

"Oh my goodness, no, you would not need to go into that level of detail!" he chuckled.  

I looked at him levelly for a moment.  "Supposing I did go into that level of detail..." I said carefully, "would that be a problem?  I mean, would you all hate me if I sent you, er, a rather detailed transcript?"

He assured me that this would not be a problem either, and I went away hoping that if the transcript was an outlier, that it would not at least be the sort of outlier that the office would laugh at.  Because I wasn't about to delete all that stuff I'd written (although I did cut it down).

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One of the things that feels weird about writing out the transcript is that it feels like my son should be writing it.   I rather don't like stories of helicopter parents (and I have enough friends who are college professors that I have heard such stories).   I have a great distaste for filling out parts of applications for my student.  He should do the application himself!  You don't want your parent filling out an application for you, not for anything.

But:  Transcripts are never made by students for themselves.  They are made by institutions for students.  They are sealed in smooth blank envelopes to be transmitted cleanly and with no signs of tampering from one institution to another.  

 I am not the student's educational institution.  I am a mother, the original alma mater.   This identity feels positively warm and sticky compared to the cool, blank, efficiency of the transcript.  And so there is no way I can produce this document and be wholly comfortable with it.  I know the institution is used to a column of numbers, and that from me the column of numbers is no good, so instead they get a document which I can't help but see as smudged all over with maternity.  And that is something that I have never been comfortable with sending out into the world.  I feel I want to run after the transcript with a corner of my skirt and dab it off, except that to do so would give away the truth.

But still, he can't do this part.  I have to do this part, because I am the school.  So I write the damned thing anyway.

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Deep breath.  I open up the transcript file again and read my own deathless prose from the introduction to the Science section.  I want it to be as much like a column of numbers as a narrative description can be:

The student chose to fulfill the biological sciences requirement with a non-laboratory course in evolutionary biology. Introductory college textbooks on evolutionary biology are supplemented with additional textbooks, videos, and assorted readings covering necessary fundamentals of biology and touching on the historical context and social impact of evolutionary theory.

Physical sciences are taught directly by the parent, who holds a PhD in chemical engineering, in a small group of high school students. Because texts are college-level and syllabi are modeled after AP^Ⓡ courses, we have designated these as honors courses.

I am second-guessing myself already (why did I mention the doctorate?  does it make me sound like the sort of person who insists on being called Doctor all the time?  does it make me sound insecure?  will they look up my thesis?  oh no) but at least I am sure have properly formatted the registered trademark symbol.  

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Here's the thing.  It's ... not about me.  There is a temptation to look over it and think that it is, at least a little bit, about me, or at least about me-and-this-kid's-wonderful-dad.  It's not about me.  It's about our son, this particular young man, this bright and earnest and funny young man, and about demonstrating that we all have good reason to expect he won't fall on his face when he takes his first college classes.

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In any case, it's done.  They certainly will have an idea of the applicant's coursework.    Probably several ideas.   I'm glad I had a chance to do this, my first one, under relatively low stakes.   I might be less detailed next time.

As I have five children, however, I must say that I am already wondering if high school transcripts, like baby-picture albums, get progressively less detailed as one moves through the younger children in the family.  You know the trope:  your first child has a beautifully kept scrapbook, your third has a stack of photos in a manila envelope, and -- did you even take any pictures of that fifth child?

I would bet there was a correlation.  

(Except that I never managed to make any baby albums.)

The choice to be civil. (3 and 4)

I wrote about P. M. Forni's book Choosing Civility about a month ago, and I have been meaning to come back to it. In that post I introduced the book:

The first part of the book is a brief reflection on the importance of civility in human relationships both brief and lasting; the middle of the book is the "twenty-five rules of considerate conduct" mentioned in the title; and the last bit appears to be a few meditations on rudeness. The chapters are quite short, almost meditations; each rule is discussed over maybe six pages.

Then I blogged a little bit about the first two rules, "Pay Attention" and "Acknowledge Others."

Today I am going to continue with the next two rules (three if I have time). They are

• (3) Think the best
• (4) Listen
• (5) Be inclusive.

A little foreshadowing: If you are the sort who is already getting riled up with snark in anticipation that number (5) is going to be about diversity, tolerance, gender-neutral language, and multiculturalism, don't have a heart attack. It is much simpler than that. And while you are at it, consider numbers (3) and (4).

Ahem. Let's go on.

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Rule 3 is Think the Best.

Think the best of your fellow humans and act accordingly.... Thinking the best of others is a decent thing to do and a way of keeping a source of healthful innocence in our lives.... In my role as a teacher, my drive and enthusiasm in the classroom owe much to my assumption that all of my students are essentially good human beings, interested in the pursuit of knowledge, and willing to work hard. Believing that they are good, I want to be good for them...

Even outside the classroom I expect that everyone I meet will turn out to be good rather than bad... What I find exciting in a new acquaintance is the thought: Maybe I'm making a discovery here; maybe someone is entering my life who is nice. ...Of course I am aware that not all those I meet can be paragons of goodness. Still, my bet with myself is that they will be nice to me. I think of my goodwill as an unspoken challenge to them...

I like the notion, for those who are unused to giving strangers and interlocutors the benefit of the doubt, of a "bet" with oneself, an "unspoken challenge" to the stranger. It seems to harness -- and make benign -- the energy of a habit of confrontation.

I do not find it too difficult to keep an attitude of good will and expectation of reasonableness towards, for example, political opponents I encounter on the Internet and strangers I encounter on the street (well, except for the occasional apparently-reckless driver -- that always takes me a moment of recollection, and did just now as I had to go back and add the "apparently"). I think this is because of a political belief of my own: I count it essential to the functioning of a polity of diverse people -- essential that we assume good will in our opponents, that we all seek ends that are apparent goods, and that we can appreciate that common striving even as we argue about the rightness and efficacy of various means. I am committed to a sort of political ecumenism, and like all ecumenisms it is impossible without an assumption of good will and reasonableness.

As a parent/teacher it can sometimes be really difficult in the moment. A child misbehaves, or doesn't follow directions, and (especially after some repetition) it can be really easy to jump straight to "This kid is just trying to spite me." And that is not a good thing to jump to. Not that deliberate disobedience doesn't happen ever, but that if you think for ten minutes about it, kids don't have "disappoint and anger my parents and teachers" as an end. Much more likely they hope to get away with whatever they are trying to do without the inconvenience of facing our disappointment and anger! And often not even that. They want a thing and they go about what seems to them a direct way of getting it. And they don't see with the same eyes that we do.

Similarly, and this is something I have to work really, really hard to remember: The child is not making that awful noise -- the one that drives me up the wall -- because he wants to drive me up the wall. The simplest and kindest set of answers to why he has not stopped making the noise is that he doesn't realize he is doing it, doesn't realize I can hear it, or doesn't realize that it is making me crazy. And how hard is it just to ask, "Please, would you stop making that noise, at least here where I can hear it?"

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Rule 4 is Listen.

What prevents us from doing a good job of listening is that instead of focusing on other people, we focus on ourselves and our own needs. This is what we do, for instance, when we interrupt. We just can't sit still—and silent—as someone else speaks, for we feel the urge to seize the limelight for ourselves. Thus we will rudely push others offstage...

Sudden redirections of attention are interruptions as well. Although your interlocutor has completed his or her sentence, this gives you no license to leave it unacknowledged as you rush to utter one of your own. Unfortunately "disregard and proceed" is one of the most common patterns in verbal exchanges, even among friends...[and] very common in the workplace, especially among competitive people.

Ouch. This one hits home. I mean, especially the calling-out of interruptions and disregard-and-proceed as refusals to listen and therefore violations of civility. I have always known myself to be prone to these, but I have often excused myself as being (1) socially awkward (2) impenetrable to socialization in accord with conventionally "feminine" conversational behavior (3) totally unable to prevent my reactions from being readable on my face if I keep my mouth shut.

All of these are true and maybe explain a lot about me, but none of them are excuses for not trying. I mean, just to take the middle example, interrupting and redirecting attention to oneself may be rewarded more often when males do it and punished more often when females do it, but it's uncivil regardless.

Forni very usefully gives three basic components of good listening, which makes it sound almost like a skill that I could intentionally develop:

• Plan your listening. "Make the conscious effort of making listening your goal... Silence is, of course, your tool of choice... Rediscover the power and allure of [your] silence... Eliminate sources of distraction."
• Show that you are listening. "Establish eye contact" [I would add "if you can" -- I find keeping eye contact to be rather difficult and I know many others have it worse than I do]...nod...interject brief expressions...restate briefly what [you] have heard."
• Be a cooperative listener. Forni suggests not rushing to agree or to disagree, but to try to understand, to invite the speaker to focus, to "separate what is important from what is not", and to ask open-ended questions -- not with the goal to satisfy your own curiosity [ouch again], but to help the speaker "achieve a higher level of clarity."
• "Although you may be forming your opinions on what is being said, voice them only if you have a clear sense that that is what your interlocutor expects...and if you are comfortable doing so. The same rule applies to giving advice."

I have certainly been guilty of the assumption that people would not tell me about their problems if they didn't expect me to try to solve them. These components of good listening will serve me well, I think, if I can keep them in mind.

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Rule 5 is Be inclusive.

Part of our identity is shaped by and within groups; within our groups we find shelter, meaning, and direction. Thus attitudes and words that exclude rather than include are rarely funny. In most cases they hurt.

Shouldn't we be allowed to draw boundaries as we go through our everyday lives? Of course we should... become good at defining and protecting our own spaces. But we should be careful never to engage in self-serving, unfair, and mean-spirited strategies of exclusion.

Being inclusive means applying the principle of respect for all persons TO all persons. When it comes time to show respect and consideration to others, we do not pick and choose. Selectively conferred respect is a commonly used weapon in the power games played by men and women of all ages.

I emphasize the last bit in order to show how very simple this rule to "be inclusive" means. In order to be merely civil, inclusivity does not have to get bogged down in certain details. It simply means that everyone gets respect and consideration because they are persons, and for no other reason at all.

There is a certain sort of man who never holds the door open for a woman, insisting it is because he can never tell whether a woman will be pleased or offended, and since you cannot win, then why try? Unfortunately, the end result is often either that the man in question holds the door open for nobody at all (signifying general thoughtlessness), or that he holds the door for women only while verbalizing his discontent with the situation (signifying quite clearly that he thinks of said woman as not just an "other," but an especially unpredictable and unreasonable sort of other), or makes a point of not holding it for women (the same, and also letting the door slam in someone's face).

Me? I'm for holding the door for anyone whose hands are full, who has difficulty opening the door, or who is following closely behind you as you reach the door. But I'm also for assuming good will in the person who has held the door for me (see Rule 3).

There are at present differing philosophies regarding whether we ought to show equal respect to all persons, or whether we ought to show extra respect to certain persons who merit them by birth or by action, or whether we ought to show respect for certain offices through acts that pay visible obsequies to the persons holding them. Some of us may hold our particular philosophy with a strong conviction that the others are not just wrong but harmful and should be argued against. Others of us may hold our own philosophy of respect-of-persons with a strong conviction of live-and-let-live.

I would just like to suggest that, should you be of the former persuasion, the time for arguing against it is not while someone is holding the door.

And that, even if special respect is not due a particular person, no person is exempt from respect and consideration.

The whole book, of course, argues this in general: respect and consider others. The "be inclusive" rule is just there to remind us that humans often do decline to do so on basis of group membership in particular. So: don't do that.

See? Simple.

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Where to find your cross: A repost for Lent.

I wrote this about four years ago, just before the start of Lent.  

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All this spring I've been coming back again and again to this passage from The Imitation of Christ (Book 2, Chapter 12, "On the Royal Road of the Cross").   

What I like about it is that it answers a question I have often had:  But my life is actually pretty good; so many people are suffering so much more than I am; what does it mean to carry my cross when things are going so well for me?

 There is no other way to life and to true inward peace than the way of the holy cross and daily mortification. Go where you will, seek what you will, you will not find a higher way, nor a less exalted but safer way, than the way of the holy cross.

Arrange and order everything to suit your will and judgment, and still you will find that some suffering must always be borne, willingly or unwillingly, and thus you will always find the cross.

• Either you will experience bodily pain
• or you will undergo tribulation of spirit in your soul.
• At times you will be forsaken by God,
• at times troubled by those about you
• and, what is worse, you will often grow weary of yourself.

You cannot escape, you cannot be relieved by any remedy or comfort but must bear with it as long as God wills.

I think this passage kind of functions very similarly to the famous passage from First Corinthians about love ("Love is patient, love is kind...") which we heard in the readings last Sunday.  It's a description that can be thought of as a definition.

Just as "Love is patient, love is kind" can be thought of as implying a definition of love ("Love is that which is patient, love is that which is kind, etc.") or as setting the boundaries of love ("What isn't patient, can't be loving.  What isn't kind, can't be loving, etc.") --- so this can be a sort of description of the cross.

Whatever suffering must be borne is the cross.

Even if it's very small.

The small crosses can be the hardest to bear correctly, because we can brush them off so easily without thinking... and when we do, they -- since they must be borne -- land on someone else.  

Because I was grumbling about some little inconvenience, I've snapped at some poor cashier and ruined her day.   Because I'd failed to plan ahead, I've dragged cranky, tired, hungry preschoolers to the grocery store.  Because I was feeling too tired to cheerfully do the dishes, I've sneaked upstairs and left them for my spouse.

Somebody had to bear a cross here, and in each case it wasn't me.

If we imagine that we don't have any "real" crosses, and wonder why we've been so lucky as to do without them -- disabilities, bereavements, chronic pains -- we can fail to take up the cross we've been sent.

Does your body feel bad or painful in any way, or are you sick or injured?  If you can't make the suffering go away entirely, that can be the cross -- whether you know why you're sick, or whether you don't.

Is there any kind of "tribulation of spirit in your soul" -- any sort of interior turbulence, depression, grouchiness, fear, or any other discomfort, whether from an identifiable cause or whether it seems to come from nowhere?  If you can't quite shake it even after reasonable effort -- trying to gain perspective, count your blessings, cheer yourself up, take your meds -- that can be the cross.

Do you lack spiritual consolation?  Does your prayer seem to do nothing?  Does your meditation yield no fruits?  That, too, can be the cross.

Do your kids drive you crazy?  Do your parents bug you?  Does your spouse annoy you?  Is your co-worker chewing his gum too loudly in the next cubicle?  Is anybody anywhere getting on your nerves?   That, too, can be the cross.

Finally, don't you get on your own nerves sometimes?  Don't you ever say to yourself, "Self, you're an idiot?"

 (This is, in my opinion, the single wisest point in the whole Imitation.  Go read No Exit again:  Sartre didn't get it completely right.  It should have been "Hell is other people.  And yourself too.") 

If it must be borne by somebody, it's the Cross.

The cross, therefore, 

• is always ready; 
• it awaits you everywhere. 
• No matter where you may go, you cannot escape it, for wherever you go you take yourself with you and shall always find yourself. 
• Turn where you will–above, below, without, or within–you will find a cross in everything, 
• and everywhere you must have patience 

if you would have peace within and merit an eternal crown.

It's probably a good idea to look out for these things.

If you carry the cross willingly, it will carry and lead you to the desired goal where indeed there shall be no more suffering, but here there shall be. If you carry it unwillingly, you create a burden for yourself and increase the load, though still you have to bear it. If you cast away one cross, you will find another and perhaps a heavier one. 

It's also possible to choose voluntary crosses, which is part of the point of Lent:  to practice, so that we may better carry the involuntary ones.  

Something to think about as we plan for the next few weeks.