bearing blog

The importance of taking temperatures.

We have had a lot of feelings around here for the last two years.  Feelings of loss, feelings of anger, feelings of relief from time to time. 

In that time, two of my kids have been diagnosed with disorders that bear the names of feelings:  one with anxiety, one with depression.  I've become very caught up in all things "feeling."  There are medications for these conditions, of course, but those don't get you there on their own; therapy is part of it too, sometimes for the individual kids, sometimes including one or both of us parents; occasionally Mark and I have had a session with the child's therapists and without the child. 

Therapy means lots of talk about feelings.

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One of my young people, the anxious one, has been given a diagram called a "feelings thermometer."  I'm told that it goes by other names, with the most clinical-buzzword-sounding being SUDS:  the Subjective Units of Distress Scale (Wikipedia).   

One version of the emotional temperature scale for a younger child.

It's basically a form of "On a scale of one to ten (or zero to ten), how anxious are you feeling right now?" 

You would think that something this simple would not be very helpful, but I've been amazed at how much it's helped. The more reading I do about ways that clinicians use the scale, the more I try to use it in everyday conversations. 

I suspect that one of the reasons it's helpful in our family is just that it yields a number within a number range, which even if it is entirely subjective, is a landscape that...certain people in the family... find to be comforting and reliable, like a well-blazed hiking trail.  

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Notwithstanding the quirks of our comfort zones:  it also gives us a low-impact way to inquire about the well-being of the anxious young person. 

All types of measurement change the value being measured, but some do it more than others.  At the beginning of our journey from "this kid is a worrier" to "we need help if we are going to help this kid" to "this kid is in treatment for an anxiety disorder", any attempt to ask about anxiety tended to create more anxiety. 

Take a seemingly simple question like "How are you doing today" (yes, I know that in many circumstances this question is not perceived as simple).  Sometimes asking it would precipitate a complete meltdown; I think the act of self-examination itself triggered anxiety.   But the number is somehow less weighty, maybe because it doesn't force much engagement with language. 

At first it was difficult for the child in question to nail down the part of the scale, and there was some hemming and hawing, and prompting from us.  But with practice it became a very quick way to check in:  "What's your emotional temperature right now?" gets a numerical response almost right away, with only a few "um"s.

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One thing I found really helpful as I went on reading about how people use the thermometer:   Different parts of the scale call for different kinds of support. 

At the very top of the scale—let's say betwen 8 and 10—the anxious person may be incapable of language-based reasoning.  There's no point in, say, insisting that they just get back to their schoolwork, or that they explain what set them off.  There may not even be a point in trying to talk them down, or reassure them with language.   Instead, depending on what works best with this particular person, it may be time for a cuddle or a hand lightly stroking the back; or an invitation to go to a quiet place and rest, with another or in private; or a suggestion to engage in vigorous activity or in some self-soothing behavior that the young person has practiced and found to work for them in the past.  (more on that below.)

Towards the bottom of the scale—say below 5—even if the anxious person is not totally at peace, they can reason and think and perform tasks, independently or with others.  They can engage in therapy, they can be encouraged to stay on task, they can consciously choose behaviors.  They can also practice deeper relaxation techniques to bring the number lower still.

In the middle, when a moderate amount of stress is being experienced, there is an opportunity to develop self-regulation.  Here is where the young person (as well as their parents!) can learn to notice when the temperature is rising and then do something about it.  Take a break, switch to another task, practice breathing exercises, get up and stretch, try a visualization, get up and fetch something to use as a fidget... all these things are behaviors that have to be learned.  It is here, in the zone of moderate stress, where they can be tried, tested, and practiced; later when the emotional temperature goes through the roof, they can call on these techniques to help bring them down.

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One of the things I have learned by using the emotional temperature scale is that what a kid looks like on the outside is not necessarily a great indicator of what distress level they would report on the inside.  And yes, if you had asked me about this before we were using the scale, I would have said "of course that makes sense, everyone exhibits distress differently." 

But I did not have, then, so much personal experience with how the same person can exhibit distress differently at different times.  A child who appears to be quietly playing a favorite computer game may be, in fact, calm and happy, and often they are.  But a child who appears to be quietly playing a favorite computer game may also be trying desperately to use the computer game to distract from intense internal distress.  A child who is flailing around in the playroom or, grunting with effort, whacking the hanging punching bag with a stick, not answering when called, may be physically expressing anger and distress.  Or they may be absorbed in an imaginary game of swordfighting.   

I often tell the kids, "I can't read your mind; you have to tell me."  I regularly need to remind myself of that as well.

How I know I'm coming to acceptance.

I believe it is necessary and prudent--but I still don't much like being under the stay-at-home directive. 

I'm getting used to it for the most part, and have developed some compensatory practices. For example:   Did you know that you can freeze whole milk in its original plastic container, and thaw it again, and it will be totally fine?  I sort of knew you could do that, but I've never had a reason to do so before.  Half gallons are easier to deal with than gallons.  I built up a six-(half-gallon) buffer in the chest freezer.  Now every week I order one gallon and 1-3 half gallons, depending on how many half gallons we used last week; the half gallons go straight into the freezer and the gallon into the fridge; later, as needed, I pull the half gallons out and thaw them, either overnight in the fridge or in cold water in the sink.

Even though we are able to weather this fairly well in our own house, venturing out only for exercise in the outdoors and the occasional takeout dinner, I don't like it and I don't have to like it.  Every morning I wake up and in the place where my brain always says Let's see, now, what do I have to do today? I get this sinking, it's-not-a-dream feeling instead.    And that's without anyone I know and love really living in peril! 

Only the conviction that sooner or later, someone will be.  And that's bad enough.

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I probably spent the first month in a fog of being alternately pissed-off and anxious, and feeling very stuck there.

The fog is, however, just now beginning to burn off in the late-April sunshine.  I honestly think the improving weather has a lot to do with it.  There are green leaf-buds on the cherry tree now. 

I can sit in the patio chair and put my feet up and read, or watch birds and squirrels, or listen to the next-door neighbors working on constructing the patio behind their half-rebuilt, roofless house, standing open to the elements since the last time the contractors went home for the weekend and never came back.  Their younger children are playing, their older children are helping, while they dig and plant and lay pavers.  We chat over the high fence; we can look down from our second-story windows, right into their walled-but-open-topped living space, and see them doing what they can while they wait to come home.

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Two signs that I've finally started moving on with my life, in the place where I find myself.

(1) I'm starting to close out the school year, at least as far as grades are concerned.  

I know, grades are not terribly important for homeschoolers.  But my tenth-grader needs a transcript this year for various applications, and I'm supposed to include some sort of assessment or grades for some of them.  I try at least to give a sense of the student's relative strengths, and a sense of what has improved over time, not to mention communicating the true fact that yes, this young person has experience being held to some kind of standard.

And I owe an objective assessment to H. for the two teenagers of hers that I have been facilitating through Latin II, geometry, and American history.  So I'll be counting up how many assignments were turned in, how they did on the exams, that sort of thing.

We are not done with the year, not by a long shot.  And we may continue studying together past the ordinary end of the school year, if the summer activities continue to be canceled and there is nothing else to do, at least in those subjects that we've had to cut back on.  But I think that, like lots of other kids around the country, our high schoolers are going to get a grade for the first semester (or maybe the first three quarters) of the year, and then a pass-fail type grade for the rest.  And if that's the case, well, then, I already have all the data I need.  Might as well start pulling it together and writing up the narrative.

 

(2)  I finally stopped moping around and wishing I could go to the swimming pool, Pilates class, and running track at the Y, and started daily strength training and yoga in the house.

I'm trying not to feel embarrassed that it took me about a month to get my head on straight about this.  I'm trying to go easy on myself, because--considering my track record--it honestly isn't surprising that I reacted poorly to having all my plans changed at once. 

(I still can't really bear to go running.  Huffing and puffing out on running paths where I can imagine clouds of exhalations and droplets emanating from every other person I pass--the idea does not appeal.)

Here's where I lucked out.  My teenage son has in recent months taken to weight training at the YMCA as an interesting hobby.  When everything he was enjoying and looking forward to this spring was yanked away from him, he became so downcast that Mark cleaned out a corner of the basement shop/storage room and gave him permission to order a squat cage, bench, bar, and weights.   I turned over my old set of fractional plates and resistance bands, too.  And Mark helped him make a hang board to practice finger grips for climbing.

This was totally the right call, by the way.  He's a lot happier now that he can stay fit for indoor climbing when the gym re-opens again someday.  And it's an hour or so of time he can kill productively while stuck in the house, every day.  Yesterday he benched 200 pounds for the first time, which means that he needs more weight plates; it will be a while before he can get more, as every weight plate in the country appears to be on indefinite back order.   (Next year will probably be a great time to buy a used set of weights.  You heard it here first).

But as for me.... I am also, for the first time, set up to do weight training at home, in the time I have, anytime I want.

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Let's just pause for a moment and inquire why, even as I cheerfully told people that I would get back into lifting as soon as I could find the time to do it regularly enough to be safe,  I never realistically thought of exercising this option--setting up a home weightlifting gym--for my own sake.

All I am going to say about this is that it was not out of any expectation that Mark would object to the cost, or to the use of the space.  I just never took this option seriously enough to let it rise to the top of my consciousness.  But it somehow became the obvious solution when the teenage boy got sad about his gains.

I don't know.  I can psychoanalyze myself some other time.  I just wish I would remember to think things through to their possible ends more often.  There's some kind of barrier in there, and leaping over it is hard for me.

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Speaking of leaping over things--see that wooden box girder over the safety bars in the squat cage?  Mark built it for me so I can reach the chin-up bar.  I went upstairs and asked him to build me a box to put on the floor for me stand on, thinking of the sort of things that Cross-fitters use for box jumps.  He countered with a built-to-fit platform across the safety bars, which he put together for me yesterday morning.  It's got rubber foam underneath to keep it stable on the bars, and it just leans on the wall out of the way when I'm not using it.  It's very stable and lets me stand with the bar just under my chin, so I can use it for leg-assisted chin-ups, which is the only kind I can do at this point.

After a month of not even swimming, I am seriously de-trained.  I cannot use the oly bar for anything except to set it on the rack at the right height to use it for inclined pushups.  (We have an aluminum technique bar on back order.  That will help, if it ever ships.)  I am doing a lot of bodyweight squats, or squats holding a single weight plate in both hands.  Lacking dumbbells, I am doing one-arm rows by piling plates in a strong canvas tote bag.  The ten-pound plates have convenient handles cast into them, so I can reasonably safely press them overhead, one arm at a time.

It's getting easier.  Between that and livestreamed YMCA yoga classes for the off days, I am settling into a lunchtime routine.

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I take my yoga mat downstairs to the basement gym, for friction and cushion on the smooth cold concrete floor.  I lie on my back on the mat to do static stretches afterward, gazing up at the unfinished ceiling, at the row of the family's downhill skis arrayed by size in their ceiling rack, where Mark put them away when we came back from our aborted trip on March 14. 

A thing that is a little daunting about this, that's never far from my mind while I am down there:  I literally do not know what future I am training for.  Training myself, training up the children.  Sickness or health?   Grief or joy?  Emerging, or hiding away for longer?

I don't know.  But I guess I have decided to bet that I'll prefer being stronger, whenever we get there, whatever "there" is.

A tentative distance co-schooling plan.

I texted H yesterday “Let’s talk later,” and then spent some time with a pad and pencil.  It’s difficult right now for me to concentrate; I kept looking up, reaching for my phone, putting it down again.  I was trying to think:  what, after all, is the point of going on with this school year?

But I have been writing, in various Twitter threads and Facebook discussions, comments to parents who find themselves suddenly supervising their children’s education at home.  And in part because the act soothes me, I have been writing things like “It’s okay if you can’t keep up.  Keeping up is a low priority.  The distance learning tools the school sends you are resources to help you.  Use them to help your kids have structure and a sense that the adults are taking care of them.  Use them to help your kids stay connected with their classmates.  Use them to reassure your kids that they are still doing what they are supposed to be doing.   But when ‘keeping up’ becomes a source of stress, step back.  You get to choose what works for your family.”

I don’t think we can “keep up” either, and I don’t think it actually matters in the end if, e.g., we finish the whole Latin book.  (After all, every other kid in the country has been similarly disrupted.)  What we need to do, I think, is just connect the dots from here till when This Whole Thing Is Over.  We can pick up the pieces then, adjust; but these kids need time to get used to this new normal, time to grieve the experiences they have lost, time to make up for the extra stress that we are all living through.   And if they aren’t feeling it, they may pick it up from us, and if they don’t pick it up from us, then we probably need that extra time too.

I just want them to feel that something normal is happening, and to relax into it and do the work we give them, to learn and have the satisfaction of learning.  The dosage might have to be different.  We all need more time.

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Giving ourselves enough time, I wrote at the top of the page, and What do we need?  The first thing to make room for, I decided, was a nice big block of time to connect with friends.  A dedicated time when they could use the computer or phone to play Minecraft or text other kids.  I would ask H if we could coordinate the same time for that.

Everybody needs some exercise and fresh air.  I would like to take a daily walk, as long as it is allowed.  Backyard time for the younger two, maybe encourage the teens to run or to climb in the basement on the climbing wall.

The 16yo needs driving practice, if that is allowed.  If we have a shelter in place order, it might not be.  We will see.

The 13yo wants to bake cakes and cookies and make candy.  I can make room for that, if we ever have a steady supply of groceries again.

I need time to write and connect with people.  Early morning is fine.

In between all those things, what of the school can get done?

 

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I queried the teenagers and they both said they would prefer to meet me in the afternoon and be left to do independent work in the morning.  Fine; I can concentrate on the younger boys in the morning.  Perhaps the online connection time could be from eleven or so until two or so, with a hasty but simple lunch in the middle.

After I called H, and we discussed how it could work teaching each other’s kids over the phone, I went away again and made a plan.

Gone is our block schedule with all day Monday and all day Thursday working together, the other days working apart.  Now we have set aside the hour from 2:30 to 3:30 each day, Monday to Friday, as remote checkin time.  Some of the days it is H discussing English, first the teen boys (who are tenth graders) and then the teen girls (eighth and ninth grade).  One of the days it is me checking in on the Latin students and then trying to do an abbreviated geometry lecture.   One of the days it is split between us: some tenth grade English, some geometry.  (And there is a single check-in she will do one morning with my fourth-grader.)

That decided, I returned to my schedule.  While I teach the youngers, the teens have the morning to do independent work; the computer time starting in late morning can be a carrot, perhaps, to encourage them to complete a modest goal set at breakfast.  The ten-year-old is adept at independent math, so that can be his post-lunch work.  After the remote meeting block, I can check in with each of my teens in turn for their other subjects.

I am positive we will not be moving as fast as we were.  I was having the teen boys complete two history assignments each week.  I am only going to do one to start.  I was doing geography twice a week with the 10yo.  I believe that will drop to once as well.  I think math can continue at about the same pace, but I won’t push too hard.  And I honestly have no idea yet what I am going to dowith Latin, for which I relied heavily on our two ninety-minute sessions of intensive group work each week.  I still have to figure out how to transition to a much more self-directed form of learning, becoming less teacher than tutor.   But I have a plan for this coming week, not a very exciting one, but intended to give me time to come up with something better adapted to our current situation.

Maybe the whole thing will not work at all and we will have to try something else entirely.  Who knows?  But we owe it to them to do something, and owe it to ourselves, too, because too much nothing is not great for anyone.

Science communication in the age of... oh gosh I'm so tired of "in the age of"

I've been thinking a lot about the power of science communication this week. 

Even though I've fallen off on blogging, I think a lot about sci-comm in general... or, now that I think about it, my thinking about sci-comm in general is part of why I've fallen off in blogging. 

When I first completed my PhD and transitioned to full-time attention to raising and educating my own family, I was highly confident that I would never be an academic or a researcher again (and not too sorry about it, although I would miss many corollary benefits).  I had an idea that sometime in the future (but with no urgency, and no plan) I might move into the broad field of sci-comm.  Journalism?   Textbook publishing?   Something to do with education?   It was then, and always has been, a vague idea.  I enjoy explaining technical things to non-technical people:  converting technical language into everyday language, and I think I have a bit of a natural talent for it; I'm untrained, if I ever decided to really make the career change I'd probably seek out some technical communications courses first to brush up on my skills, but it's always floated around in the back of my mind as "the thing I would do if I decided to re-enter the paid labor market."

(Understand, by the way, that I have zero formed plans or intentions to re-enter said market.  It's just a topic that's been on my mind a lot, especially since I decided to follow a bunch of sci-comm professionals on Twitter, who are always tweeting about how valuable it is and generally bumping it up in my consciousness a lot more.  So don't read any of this as hints that I am purposefully researching a career change.)

So why am I not blogging, then.  I guess, the more that professional writing and communication is on my mind the more clogged up I become as an amateur writer.  Sometimes I think about banging out a quick critique of  a news article on a technical topic, or an opinion piece about something or other, or even a close reading of some research article that's making the rounds in the form of bad journalism.    For a long time I was perfectly happy to blather on at length, applying mathematics or chemistry that I learned in one context to situations that are entirely different, evaluating writers in fields far outside the areas where I legitimately have some expertise.  Because I like to have broad technical competence, not narrow and specialized knowledge (I learned that when I spent seven years specializing).  I like to drill down deep here and there, all over the place, according to my interests, and as I learn, bringing other people along with me.  It's simply... fun.

But I've always been aware of the dangers of thinking that because you're an expert in one field, you get to be treated as an expert in other fields.  Even if you count expertise that isn't credentialed -- I believe it is possible, even common, for motivated and intelligent people with a good sense of what they do and don't know to develop genuine expertise outside the gates -- you run the risk of overstepping your knowledge and not realizing it, and that's downright embarrassing when you get called out by the specialists.  The generally nerdy nerd has to be a humble listener, and listen to the specialists.  There is a general technical toolbox that we all share, but the specializers are the ones who generate the majority of the information that we generalists relish, chew on, and digest.

I feel like I can come up with new ways to say things, new ways to organize information.  Occasionally I have anecdotal experiences that are worth sharing, for the purpose of raising questions about how they connect to the wider world of investigation.  I'm not doing original research.  I know this.  But that doesn't mean I shouldn't be able to write about other people's expertise.

Still, I am a little bit choked these days by the fear that I will either overstep my bounds, or appear to be pulling rank inappropriately:   "I have a PhD in something so you should listen to me about this other thing."   The more I appreciate the importance of general science communication, the more I respect it as a profession, the meeker I feel about engaging in it as an amateur.   It isn't imposter syndrome, exactly; there's no particular place that I belong, but feel a secret un-belonging.  It's more the backside of the popular concept of Dunning-Kruger:  I've gone over the edge of Mount Stupid and the valley on the other side is long and flat.

The image comes from here: https://www.psychmechanics.com/the-dunning-kruger-effect-why/

The other reason I think I've been hesitating is because I feel more mixed these days about having a blog that is about a million different things.  There is no way I could separate them and have one blog for recipes and homeschooling and another blog for technical writing and a third blog for theology and canon law and a fourth blog for constitutional law and... The whole reason this won't work (unless I ever do make that career change) is my penchant for general nerdiness.  I am nerdy about recipes, and homeschooling, and numerous technical topics, and canon law, and constitutional law, and language learning, and basically everything I ever think about at any time.  It's unclear to me where the dividing line is between "Personal Musings" and "Technical Communication."  

....aaaaahhhh, there is no such line for me.  I just gotta start climbing the other side of that valley.

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I'll just close here by noting something that I hope the rest of you have noticed, too:  The people who made the various popular versions of the "Flatten the Curve" graph have, personally, probably saved an uncountable number of lives. 

I'll highlight Drew Harris's version below for its unfussy and concise elegance.  This is not the work of an amateur; it's the work of an expert.  But his version nailed the clear communication of the relevant information.

The concept predates Dr. Harris, and other artists made later versions which arguably were accessible to more laypeople and included information showing how ordinary people could "flatten the curve."  Personally, I think his version marks the turning point of the dissemination of this idea.  This article traces the evolution of the idea's presentation from a 2007 CDC publication, through Dr. Harris's chart, to the memes that people are sharing today.

Now go wash your hands.

Two museum days. (I)

On Monday, Labor Day, we headed for the Boston Museum of Science.  I had been there at the 9yo’s age and fondly remembered the giant van de Graaff generators and the lightning show, which to my delight is still running.

This is on the same peninsula with where we are staying in Charlestown, so we walked there.  There is a long viaduct to cross, which took us over a lot of railroad tracks and an exciting construction site.

The Boston Museum of Science is a good-sized museum with a lot of well-designed exhibits.  I think the  designers of the permanent exhibits here have done a better job, on the whole, than the ones at the Science Museum of Minnesota.  They seem to invite kids to sit down and interact for a longer time, rather than running around whamming buttons.

Among the many imaginary jobs I fantasize about having is “science museum exhibit designer.”  I would like to study what sorts of features encourage different sorts of people to spend more time with the material.  

As it is I am only left with a visitor’s impressions, not data, and of course the problem is that I am a particular sort of person, and probably an oddball of a visitor myself.

One example of the kind of thing I think about in science museums:   It seems to me that a linear design that nudges you to pass by things one at a time (deciding at each location on the path whether to stay longer or move on) is better for deep engagement than the sort of exhibit where a big open room has many freestanding stations scattered about.  But maybe the big open room works better when sixty field-trip children descend on it at once.  This museum had a mix of both, though, and they both worked pretty well.  I must say it is a lot easier to go with Mark than if it is just me.

One thing that surprised me:  a number of exhibits involved animated models that in my opinion worked extremely well.  There was a hands-on flow-of-a-river exhibit tucked away in a corner.  From a distance I saw the 9yo playing with it, moving blocks around in the river, and thought, “Oh, it’s like the river model in the Mill City Museum at home, where you build structures in a channel of moving water and see how the flow changes.”  But when I got closer I realized that the river was animated via projection from the ceiling, and switching out the blocks triggered a change in the story the animations were telling.  So—an interactive animation with a lot of physicality.  It didn’t teach the same thing as a flowing water channel wet lab, but it did what it did very well.

 

Another pleasant surprise was that my 5yo, unlike all his siblings at that age, was relatively uninterested in running around whamming buttons to see if anything would happen in less than two seconds.  He wanted to sit down and work his way through things, and spend lots of time on a single exhibit.   Such as working through a lovely little interactive where you get to touch and examine an animal skull, and then (by pressing buttons that let you make binary choices) decide which of three animals the skull came from.  Was it predator or prey?  Have a varied diet or a monotonous one?  Did it have a strong bite or a weak one?

He sat there, with me and later his sister, reading the questions to him, and went through all six skulls.

Another thing he got totally absorbed in was a game where you select from a bin three different malaria-mitigation measures for a population of at-risk individuals, constrained by a rudimentary budget, and find out how well the combination worked based on how many animated mosquitos disappear from the screen.  We had to entice him away.

As promised, we made it to the lightning show.  I was delighted, once inside the Theater of Electricity, to discover that the whole room was essentially unchanged from when I visited in the eighties.  The leaping aluminum disk, pinging into the air and clattering back down every few minutes as museum visitors charged the electromagnet and released it, I had forgotten but remembered as soon as I heard it again.  There is a decidedly old-school exhibit on the history of mathematics tucked into the back:  it has not changed either.  I remember the model of the Mobius strip, a little mechanized arrow clicking along on a track, traversing the whole thing to demonstrate its one-sidedness.   Lots of text and pictures.  Nobody would make this exhibit today.  But I remember it with fondness.

And of course there is the world’s largest van de Graaff generator.  I walked around it, running my hands over the smooth wooden railing, and felt the same as I did at age eight when it towered above me, because of course it still does.  

And my 9yo loved the show, so there’s that.

Later, after a long rest in the apartment, we ventured out in the pouring rain to a pizza restaurant at the other end of Charlestown.  It had a stellar beer and wine list and great food.   We split a few pizzas and salads, and I drank a sour named after a banh mi sandwich and then discovered a Ligurian rosé on the menu, which I never ever ever see, so I had to have that, and it was awesome.

The little guy was still tired, and didn’t have much appetite.  He needed his sister’s hat and a napkin cape to stay warm, and later ate cereal in the apartment.   Hurray for a kitchen.

 

Meta-popular science.

One of my parallel non-fiction reads right now is The Tangled Tree by David Quammen.  It's a history of the understanding of horizontal gene transfer, so it's sort of a meta-story:  how the narrative of the origin of species has changed, especially how the shape and form of the representation of evolution's history as a tree has changed.  It's also a collection of stories about the scientists who worked on, are working on, the rather non-linear development of that knowledge.  It's well written and though I haven't finished it yet, I'm enjoying it and would recommend it.

I'm reading it now because my second son is going to study biology this year with an emphasis on evolutionary biology.  My oldest chose that topic when it was his turn, and it's easy enough for me to repeat it (since I already designed the curriculum), and it's a convenient type of homeschooler biology because it doesn't require a lab. 

(What's less convenient is finding a high-school level textbook.  I am here to tell you not to even try to find a commercial evolutionary biology textbook that is aimed at the homeschool market.  I use an introductory college text that is supposed to be accessible to non-STEM majors.)

The college text is a few years old.  Most of the principles in it are still intact (especially since it is mostly about what happens in the world of multicellular animals).   But I'm aware that the evolutionary tree re: unicellular life has changed a great deal since genome-sequencing got easier and cheaper, and I needed a quick refresher that would bring me closer to up-to-date so I could add some corrections.   

Of the major branches of scientific knowledge, biology is my weakest (I never took a class in it after ninth grade, and my ninth-grade teacher was crappy, those two things probably having something to do with one another).   So I picked up a book written for a popular audience, and I'm enjoying it, and learning enough that I can know when to say "oh, hey, the information going into the diagram on page eighty-whatever has probably been superseded---let's Google that to double check it."  So far so good.

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I pick up popular books about other fields of science from time to time as well, including ones that I'm much more familiar with.  You all know that I have a great side interest in linguistics, for instance, and I periodically read popular stuff about that, especially applied fields like translation.  I have a couple of others going at the same time as The Tangled Tree.  One of them is a biography of Claude Shannon, who (to put it succinctly) invented all the mathematical theory behind data compression.  I got interested in this because Mark was telling me about the math and we became curious about the person who came up with it, and now we're working through it as a read-aloud together.   Another one is a bit of applied educational psychology which I'm reading to see if I can understand one of my offspring just a little bit better in order to help said offspring focus on learning.  I also have a history of the synthesis of the transuranium elements lined up, for after Mark and I finish the Shannon book, maybe for me to read aloud while he drives during our next road trip.

I usually enjoy what I learn from such books.  But I have to tell you, I sometimes put them down with a feeling of unease and disappointment in myself.  It's difficult to put my finger on, but I think it's because I wonder if I have lost my ability (or the required patience) to dig through the literature itself, in a kind of atrophy of mental muscle.

If that's happened, I don't regard it as an interior fault.  There are structural factors that come into play, such as the fact that for the first decade after my transmogrification it was a severe hassle to get hold of academic publications without an academic or industry affiliation.  (And it's not a lot better now, a subject about which I can rant at length, although it's moving in the correct direction.)  And also the nontrivial problem, left to the reader, of arranging the physical space and the boundaries on the scholar's, or the creative's time.   

There's also the sheer volume of the literature---one always relies on word of mouth, social media now too of course, literature reviews that come out in this or that field and that summarize the changing shape of consensus or present multiple sides of an active debate.  The cream (or the flotsam, or even the scum!) rising to the top:  "Have you seen so-and-so's paper?"  Where do you start if you want to go straight to the primary source?  The only thing that makes sense if you value your time, and don't have students to track it down for you, is to begin with the tertiary or higher-order publications that catch your interest, and trace the citations backward.  We've done this with the Shannon book (to some extent), finding Shannon's master's thesis and reading enough of it to be certain that understanding the math behind it very well would require us to brush up with our old textbooks.  It is fun to do, this backwards-tracing, but it requires you to have a certain level of trust in the authors of the tertiaries-and-higher.  And that requires those authors not so much to be honest and smart scientists, but more honest and smart journalists.

+ + + 

Behold the "Gell-Mann amnesia effect," which I unironically lift from Wikipedia:

The Gell-Mann amnesia effect describes the phenomenon of experts believing news articles on topics outside of their fields of expertise, even after acknowledging that articles written in the same publication that are within the experts' fields of expertise are error-ridden and full of misunderstanding. The term was coined by author, film producer, and medical doctor Michael Crichton. He explains the irony of the term, saying it came about "because I once discussed it with Murray Gell-Mann, and by dropping a famous name I imply greater importance to myself, and to the effect, than it would otherwise have", and describes the term in his talk "Why Speculate?" in which he says:

"Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward — reversing cause and effect. I call these the 'wet streets cause rain' stories. Paper's full of them.

"In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know."

The Gell-Mann effect is not a universal phenomenon, and some believe that there is increased distrust in news media when one notices errors in reporting.

 

I'm aware of the Gell-Mann effect, and in the back of my mind as I read popular histories of science, or explanation of this or that phenomena, I've always got this tickle in the back of my mind of:  did this particular long-form journalist get it right?  Am I accepting this narrative because the writing is clear and the presentation is convincing?  Am I actually being misled here?  Would I think this matched up if I went back to the primary sources, the peer-reviewed articles, and formed my own judgment?

And then I don't go back, most of the time, because I have to prioritize other activities in my rather full life.

And I think that is why I feel a little sad when I read these books.  Trained as an academic, I learned how much I don't know.  Being a bit of an iconoclast, and not being hampered by any desire to be a team player, I walk around with a metaphorical mental stamp in my pocket that says "[citation needed.]"    I learned to say:  I do not know enough about this subject to have an informed opinion.  

Years out of the academy, I also have ceased needing to have an opinion on everything.   But I haven't ceased wanting to know enough to have an opinion, and so I feel a little sad that I can't track everything down enough to do so.

+ + +

One way for me to mentally make peace with that slight discontent:  I have developed an even stronger interest in sci-comm as sci-comm, in the way that technical information is adapted to suit the needs and background levels of the various audiences.   I'm endlessly fascinated with the way complex information changes, or remains constant, as it is transmitted to different ears or eyes and minds through different media. 

Taking a step back and evaluating:  is this clear? is this correct? is this maintaining my attention? what is working and what is not?  This is a tool of detachment (I don't have to feel part of the intended audience) and also a way for me to think about what I am thinking.  I'm not sure whether it makes me a good scholar or a bad one, or really if it's just proof of being an ex-scholar; but it makes me feel more comfortable because I feel I've preserved my integrity.  These questions are something I can get at directly and immediately, unlike the content itself.  Of that, I must be satisfied (much more often than I'd like) to take someone else's word for it.

Six short pieces on which language to learn.

A couple of weeks ago The Economist tweeted out a link to an 2012 article from their lifestyle arm, 1843 Magazine, entitled "Which is the Best Language to Learn?"  

(image not clickable)

The caption/link writers were a bit too vague.  I think this for two reasons: 

First, they mention too subtly that the article is aimed at native speakers of English.  Granted, the problem is not entirely on their end, but we can all learn to be more clear from the flood of Twitter comments complaining that English was not identified as the best language .

Second, more pointedly, the tweet suggests that clicking on the link will lead you to an article decidedly in favor of English speakers learning French.

It's not!  It's better than that, and I only wish the editors had made the feature longer.  It's actually six separate pieces, written by six different people.  It's almost like a panel discussion with six speakers, each making an argument for learning their own favorite languages: 

• French
• Spanish,
• standard Chinese, aka Mandarin
• Arabic
• Brazilian Portuguese
• Latin.

The feature has a major structural flaw, which probably contributed to the bad captioning.   The piece ought to have a distinct introduction, followed by arguments for each of the six languages.  Unfortunately, the introduction-writer and the French-learning-cheerleader are the same writer, as if one of the panelists was also the moderator.   He didn't take care to separate these two rhetorical tasks (not only that, but he feels the need to defend French from Chinese in particular, something that comes across as a sort of pre-buttal of the Mandarin fan whose bit appears later).  

And of course, I'd have loved for the feature to have been even longer and included arguments promoting the learning of even more languages.   Even more importantly, I'd have loved to see more attributes of different languages being considered.  

Still, they covered most of the key points to consider, and promoted language learning in general.  All too often, languages are suggested to English speakers merely on the basis of "usefulness," which in practice is rhetorically limited to considering the likelihood that one expects to have economic transactions in the language.   

But there are lots of different reasons to learn languages, and the six "panelists" touch on many of them:

• acquiring meta-language that allows you to understand and use all languages better, including your own
• broadening your cultural understanding in general
• deepening your cultural understanding of whatever particular culture you are most interested in
• grasping, a bit, another way to think about various concepts, say through interesting idioms
• career preparation for conducting international business
• career preparation for conducting diplomacy 
• reading literature
• enjoying the challenge

And what's great about this article is that it acknowledges that different languages fulfill these needs to varying degrees and in different ways.   

And individual learners' tastes and ambitions matter more than anything.  Even the pro-French, Chinese-isn't-all-that-it's-cracked-up-to-be introduction writer says:  "By all means, if China is your main interest, for business or pleasure, learn Chinese. It is fascinating, and learnable."

Beyond a particular interest, though, what are the arguments for each of the six featured languages?

• Robert Lane Greene prefers French, calling it the most global language, with native speakers in every region; it's relatively easy for English speakers to learn, with grammar not very different from ours, and a great deal of vocabulary overlap.
• Daniel Franklin promotes Spanish.  It has an enormous number of native speakers, is a regional champion, is heavily used on the Internet and as an international language, and has great literature and film.  Like French, it is relatively easy for English speakers to learn (and, I'd add, is far easier to pronounce and to spell).  It's also a bridge to Portuguese and Italian.
• Standard Chinese, says Simon Long, has the most native speakers and its economic importance is growing very fast.
• Josie Delap makes an enthusiastic aesthetic argument for Arabic:  difficult for English speakers at first, particularly because of the new script, but extremely rewarding and beautiful to learn (as well as an impressive feat).
• Helen Joyce argues for Brazilian Portuguese on the grounds that it's not very difficult, invites you to visit and work in an interesting, beautiful, and half-continent-sized nation (plus a few other places), and will help you with your Spanish/French/Italian while letting you stand out from people who've chosen those more common second languages.  
• Tim de Lisle begins by humorously stressing the lack of direct usefulness of Latin, but argues that it strengthens your linguistic "core," improves your understanding of grammar and syntax, requires rigor, and (perhaps ironically) claims it makes it harder to bullshit.  Its vocabulary is everywhere and its surviving literature is timeless.  He seems to argue that it is a great pleasure for a particular kind of nerd.

So, across these few paragraphs, we have languages defended because they are easy and also because they are difficult.  Because your language has many second-language speakers, and because it has few.  Arguments based on economic importance, and arguments that concede nearly no economic importance at all.  

It really depends on what your goal is.

+ + +

There are a few more attributes for choosing a second language that aren't mentioned in here, which I would add.   Mine are:

• Ease of accessing resources to learn a specific language in your town
• Number of native speakers living near you
• Closeness to English on the language family tree (which brings a kind of "easiness" that is distinct from the sort Latinate languages have).

I never really thought about these three much until two things happened in our family.  

First, something just for me:  I decided that for no reason other than personal interest, I wanted to learn a non-Indo-European language.  I wanted to explore a grammar that behaved sufficiently differently from the other languages I knew to give me a broader understanding of human beings' relationship to language, and see how different words worked together to create idioms. 

 In Minnesota overall, the non-Indo-European language that's spoken most widely is Hmong; but in my city, Minneapolis, public school students are much more likely to speak Somali at home than Hmong.  (In fact, they are nearly as likely to speak Somali as Spanish.)   That plus the convenience of not having to learn a new alphabet made it an obvious choice.  Not only do I have the chance to encounter native speakers regularly, but there are materials available which have been produced for Somali speakers:  signage, library books, newspapers, a radio station.   So even though my progress is fairly slow, as I work in my spare time through an imperfect text and meet a small study group monthly, I constantly get little affirmations from overheard snippets of conversation, from "thank yous" and "good mornings," and from being able to pick out words from signs and newsprint.  I don't know if I'll ever be able to have a real conversation, but I am enjoying the journey.

 

Second, for one of my offspring, who begged to be allowed to quit Latin.  We all learn Latin at home because (being dead, and pronunciation and conversation unimportant) it's really well suited to the homeschool.  Most of the kids enjoy it, but one of mine... didn't.  He didn't have a particular desire to converse in a modern language either; he was struggling, and he needed something easier, because some language in high school is required for college.  "Anything but Latin!" he told me.  

Well, if "anything but Latin" will do, then I was free to find something that would be relatively easy to arrange. 

I speak French passably, read it fluently, and could probably have scraped together the time to teach it.  But I suspected that "Anything but Latin" also served, for him, as a tactful way to express "Anything but learning more language from you, Mom, who is a complete language nerd and can't deal with the fact that I find this really difficult."

So I looked outward, and discovered relatively inexpensive Saturday-morning classes in Swedish, of all things, within walking distance of our house.

Swedish doesn't hit many of the reasons from the article for why an English speaker would want to learn it.  It doesn't have global importance; its native-speaking population is small and almost entirely living in Sweden and Finland; fewer than 60,000 people living in the U. S. speak it at home (although, granted, a lot of them are probably living in Minnesota).   Finally, Swedes themselves overwhelmingly learn English and have even been called the "best in the world" at speaking it.

What it does have going for it -- besides the convenience of having classes available, and the fact that it is possible to supplement with commonly available commercial and online learning programs -- is ease.    Although there's definitely grammar and vocabulary to learn, Swedish is possibly the easiest language for an English speaker to acquire.  And that is exactly what my son needed.  He has realized that learning a foreign language is something he can do.  And, surprising to both of us, he actually enjoys it.

It's also slightly quirky, an unusual choice for an American kid with no Swedish heritage, and I think he enjoys that.   He had a fun time seeking out and greeting a small collection of very surprised Swedes at World Youth Day in Panamá.  We have a photo of him posing with them, grinning and holding the Swedish flag.

I'm just saying, sometimes making it as easy as possible is the right thing to do.  There is no shame in that.

+ + +

So, to sum up, what I've said before:  Really considering what you'd like to get out of a language, honestly -- whether it's "I want to read cool literature" or whether it's "I just need the minimum possible so that I can get into college" -- is key.

Specialization and generalization.

Yesterday was a very busy and raucous co-schooling day at my house, but it was fun, for a couple of reasons.

The first is a welcome new development for this year:  H and I now have our friend M joining us again after a few years of working through different options, with the one child that she's homeschooling this year.  It's so lovely to have her back with us twice a week; we've really missed her and her kids.  I made taco salad for lunch (general recipe at the end of the post), and M brought apple crisp and cheese for afternoon snack, and we kept the coffee flowing.  Faster now that teen boys drink it.

The second thing is that I have fun things to teach this year, practically all high-school level.  I had to skip geometry today because of an unintentional late start, but I still got to teach one of the enjoyable parts of civics, and a challenging-to-communicate topic in chemistry, and all about relative clauses in Latin.  By the end of the day I was, truly, happy about how I'd done (at least from my end; can't know how well the kids absorbed it all).  I enjoyed interacting with the kids each time, and as I looked back on the day, I was left feeling:  "Hey!  I'm pretty smart.  I did a good job."  Which always feels nice.

+ + +

Mark, too, has been having some successes at work that leave him feeling good.  We were talking about our days last night over dinner out (new "soul-inspired, chef-created" place went in a few blocks from our house; grits and biscuits and collard greens and country ham feature prominently, as well as brioche buns and good craft beer); we talked about them some more over coffee this morning.  A lot of Mark's research and development work winds up being proprietary to his employer, but he occasionally gets to publish with his colleagues:  there are eight patents, for example.  He doesn't have to be secretive about the fact that he's done significant work on prominent and popular brands.  And soon he'll be an author on a new open-access  item that's the culmination of a lengthy collaboration he's really proud of.

"It's very weird to work on the same project for years," he told me this morning.

"I know what you mean," I said.  "I am not sorry that I had the opportunity to become an expert in one very narrow subject area.  It was a valuable experience, to learn how to focus that tightly for so long.  But I am glad that I did not spend my life's work on it."

"I'm not sure if I'm a specialist or a generalist," he said thoughtfully.   "On the one hand, I'm definitely one of the go-to guys in my specific area of work--" [this sentence heavily paraphrased to remove technical details --ed.] "--on the other, I enjoy being the person who generally knows how to solve whatever problem happens to come up anywhere in the process."

"Perhaps you're not all that different in scope from an academic.  I mean, they may be the worldwide expert on one very narrow thing; they do active research on a set of narrowly related different topics; they have to have a working understanding of everything closely related to the field so that they can spot new directions of inquiry and support or criticize their colleagues' work; and they have to stay well-enough grounded in the basics of the field that they can deal with it if they have to teach some random undergraduate class."

I didn't get to hear his thoughts analyzing that one, because he looked at his watch and had to jump up and give me a kiss and run out the door because he had a 7:00 a.m. call to Europe and a meeting across town right after that. 

Me, I poured myself another cup of coffee and wrapped my bathrobe more tightly around myself and settled back on the couch, thinking about writing a blog post in the time before the children wake.

+ + +

Chemistry yesterday was the most challenging to teach, not because I don't grasp the material well, but because the material is not very easy to explain to newbies.  The language that's used by convention seems poorly designed; maybe it's the best we could do, but sometimes you'd like to go back in time and straighten people out before they named things.  ("Ben.  Trust me.  You want to label the resinous electricity as 'positive.'  Not the vitreous electricity.") 

Anyway, I was laying the foundation for understanding electron configurations:  the four principal quantum numbers, how they give a unique "address" for each electron in the multielectron atom.  At one point the teen boys were laughing:  "Wait, the numbers are called n, l, m... and SPIN?"  and:  "Wait, l is also s, p, d, and f?"

["No... l is allowed to have the values zero through n-1.  It's just that when it's zero, we call it s, and when it's 1, we call it p, and so on.  It's like a code.  I don't think the reason why we haven't changed to using numbers is anything other than that it's less confusing to label, say, 3p instead of calling them 3-1 orbitals."  I've since looked it up and been reminded what I had forgotten, that s, p, d, f stand for sharp, principal, diffuse, and fundamental, and refer to groups of spectral lines.  I'll be sure to tell them next time we meet.] 

The whiteboard was a mess, but it made sense.  I loved it.

Then in Latin we read through a long passage of a story from the textbook which was designed to teach them about relative pronouns (qui quae quod, "which/that" as in "the fruit that rotted was an orange") and the use of the same words as interrogative adjectives ("which/what" as in "what fruit rotted?") and demonstrative adjectives (ille illa illud, "that" as in "that fruit was really disgusting") and demonstrative pronouns ("that" as in "that made me sick) and third person pronouns (is ea id, "he/she/it" as in "it totally had to be trashed.")  In all five cases ("the fruit that made me sick"/"the person whose lunch this is will be disappointed"/"to whom can I complain about the fridge?"/"the odor that I smelled is tremendous"/"the bin in which I will throw this is over there").  It's relatively elementary stuff but there was a giant chart on my whiteboard and also some passages in which I had to keep switching marker colors so I could show them how the relative clauses and the prepositional phrases can be set apart from the main thrust of the sentence for easier translating.  And it was all very fun.

And finally there was Civics, where I am going through parts that are not so suffused with gloom and disappointment, but the workmanlike stuff of, having discussed the history first, outlining the Constitution (Preamble.  Articles, I-III in the first group, IV-VII in another.  Amendments:  1-10 in the first group, 11-27 in another,)  giving them the big picture as they get ready to read it straight through for the first time.  All laid out once again on the same whiteboard.

+ + +

I have to think about all of these things, and how to communicate them, and I like that it's languages and politics and chemistry.  I never get sick of it.  I'm not saying I would necessarily have been sick of it if I was concentrating on only chemistry, or only languages, but I do like having to think hard about all three.

Am I a generalist or a specialist?  I specialize in a small group of kids, and I specialize in putting things into terms they can understand.  That's kind of a special skill.  But it requires me to know a fair amount about quite a lot of different things.  Not very prestigious; no publications yet (since I quit academia); but day to day, pretty fun, and I count it valuable to our family.  I suppose that's more important than how it is categorized, and that goes for what Mark does too.

______

*Taco salad:  a lot of ingredients but a relatively simple and low-mess way to feed a crowd with varying tastes.  My crowd had three 4yo, two elementary schoolkids, two junior high age kids, two high school boys, and three adult women.  I do this:

• Put a cup (dry) of brown rice on in my rice cooker in the morning
• brown three pounds of 80% lean ground beef, season it generously with a mild spice mix (packets or your own), and put it in the crockpot with some water to stay hot; when the rice is done, mix that in (the rice absorbs the fat and flavor, and extends the meat some, and also rice served separately gets all over the place).  That will keep till lunch.
• shred half a small red cabbage, chop 1 green bell pepper, and tear up two hearts of romaine; mix
• put out the salad mix and the crockpots with bowls of: spicy pinto beans, plain black beans, sliced black olives, chopped avocado, sour cream, cheddar cheese, mild salsa, hot sauce, and tortilla chips.  Let kids decide what goes in their salad, unless they are four, in which case parents make the best guess.

Prologue.

I am sitting on H.’s back porch in the waning days of summer, watching my oldest son swing a badminton racket. 

He has been playing all morning against the younger kids, both mine and hers, in various combinations.  It is humid out, and the kids are all sweating as they shriek and swing and dive.  The oldest does not particularly like hot weather, but he is grinning.  He comes in, declares it to be terribly hot, gets a drink of cold water, heads back out again.  Plays against the sixteen-year-old boy, against a doubles team of his eleven-year-old sister and her friend, against the eight- and fifteen-year-olds.

Comes back in for iced coffee made by H.’s oldest.  “How hot is it?  At least eighty.”

H. opens a weather app:  “Eighty-one.  Feels like eighty-six.”

“More like, feels like ninety-six.”  He goes out again. 

+ + +

This is the last day we will spend over here before we take him off to college in a few days.   He has spent two days a week with this family since he was born.   H., who used to let him help her bake bread when he was a toddler and I was working on my dissertation, marveled to me, last Thursday, that it’s hard even for her to believe that she will see so little of him from here on out.

+ + +

And what about me?  Is it hard?

Right now the dominant feeling is wishing I could rip the bandage off more quickly.   Preparing the first young person for college (including lots of homeschool-specific tasks, like writing the transcript) has occupied a huge part of my attention for the past year, and I almost can’t bear to think about it for even two more days.   I would like to go now and get it over with.  

I am not, not at all, worried:  he is a sensible young man, and I’ve internalized that he is his own responsibility now. 

I am not sad:  this has always been the plan, it has finished exactly how I hoped it might.  

I am a little surprised at how quickly it went by, and also at this logical amusement:  at the same time, it seems that it take a very, very long time for the youngest (not quite five) to get past the stage where he must be supervised at nearly every moment.  

+ + +

Like all diarists and memoirists, I am an unreliable narrator.  I have been telling my story for years; maybe he was six or so when I started?  Kindergarten, or first grade?  In any case, I still felt fresh out of school myself.  (He was three and a half when I walked across the stage with his younger brother in a a baby wrap.) 

But the thing is, wherever I have written about my son, that first oldest boy, I have not really been writing the story that belongs to me.  My perspective is limited, by necessity and design,

If I myself had been a character written by a master, then the perceptive reader would have been able to see the true story between the lines, the story that managed to elude me even as I spooled it out in my own words.  But I am not so well-crafted as that.  

He has a story, and I am not the truthful narrator, and when I have tried to be one, I have fallen short.  I cannot even see where to bring the seams together, let alone stitch it up neatly for show.  And you cannot look through the seams.

+ + + 

There is a lot to do, to keep busy, these last few days.  Clothes and supplies to buy, paperwork to sign, accounts to open.  I am staying out of his way and watching, watching the birdie fly across the lawn, back and forth.

“Score!” Arms raised in mock triumph.

+ + +

Let me go back to my own story:

The first day of the rest of my life went unrecorded, but it must have been quite soon after I moved in to my freshman year at college, maybe as soon as the first Saturday morning; in my memory the marching band was audible already (because what college story isn’t better with the marching band in the background); one of the guys from down the hall stuck his head in at the door and offered to us freshmen girls in the quad room, as I usually tell the story, tequila. 

But now I doubt myself; from all that I know about the guy now (and that’s a lot), I suspect it was far more likely to have been bourbon.  Did I insert the tequila myself because it connotes more mischief?  Maybe it was tequila, and if so, maybe it was his roommate (the best man) who was there and who offered, actually.  But he did stick his head in at the door, and I did say no, that time.   I am sure of that.

This is what I think of about that first move.  Whatever algorithm put me on that floor of that dorm in that year, and that culminated in (among other gifts) the gift of this tall young man wiping the sweat away and laughing and playing lawn games with his sister and brothers,  whatever made it happen was completely out of my control.  And for that I am thankful.  How could I have planned this?  I couldn’t.  I couldn’t have come up with it in a million years.

And off he goes.  I won’t say to write his own story.  Discover it, maybe.  

Some pragmatic motivation: Thinking beyond the single vote.

 I last posted that, as I prepare to teach civics to a few homeschooled kids next year, I find myself enmeshed in a cynicism that makes it hard to get excited about passing it on.  My old motivations feel too o ptimistic, and until things turn up, I fear I need a different set.

So I am going to try to take a more pragmatic approach to the question:  why are we learning this anyway?  And I will take that approach by starting from a rather cynical-sounding assertion, inspired by Ilya Somin’s work of a few years ago, the book Democracy and Political Ignorance.

 (I have not spent enough time with Somin’s arguments to decide if I am fully convinced by them, but they are interesting and worthy of consideration.  He outlined them in a series of posts,beginning here, on the Balkinization blog some years ago; and in an article for Cato Unbound.)

 Somin argues that, given the complexity of our political system, it takes significant time and effort to acquire sufficient political knowledge to make wise choices about the various options in any given election.    People know this.  They also know that one vote does very little.  That is why they reasonably do not choose to be informed.

In short, here are the assertions:

Most political ignorance is rationally chosen.  

and

An individual voter has virtually no chance of influencing the outcome of an election.

I want to begin by assuming arguendo that these assertions are true, and yet, to articulate a motivation for expending costly effort to learn the content of the high school civics course that I plan to facilitate.

 In other words, either

the information content of the high school civics course is more valuable than most political information;

or else

there are other uses for political information, besides influencing an election with a vote, which make its acquisition more valuable in circumstances where those uses can be exercised.

So let’s take a look at both.

+ + +

I.  The political information content of the high school civics course is extra valuable.

A.  It contains locally tailored information.

First let’s concede that the insignificance of one vote is relative.  As elections become smaller and more local, the power of an individual vote increases.  Your vote is worth many times more in smaller states than in larger states, in municipal and district elections than in state elections, in primaries than in the general election, on obscure and boring referenda than on interesting and controversial referenda.   So, although the chance of swaying any of these may be quite low, it might be rational for a purely utilitarian voter to expend the effort to learn about small and local elections but not about large and statewide ones.  Therefore, one of our principles might be:  Local political information is worth more.

 And indeed, my high school civics course includes local political information.  Since we all live in the same general area, and the class is small, I can tailor my course to the individual students’ districts.  Each of the teens will learn who represents them in the state house and in Congress.  They will develop lists of the most pressing issues in their own community; they will find out when the next municipal elections will be held; they will learn about the local flavor of the national political parties; and they will project which issues will likely be on the table in the first local election of their eligibility to vote (2020 and 2021).  

 But the local information is only a small fraction of the course; and again, even in small local elections, the individual vote has low absolute value.  It’s just that it has more value than in large elections.  So I will have to look for another source.

B.  Rather than information on specific issues, it contains structural information that is useful across many issues and from year to year.

 

We will spend a little bit of time talking about political issues and current events, because there will be times when particular examples will illustrate a greater point.  

But most of a basic civics course is about the structure of the government and how power and responsibility is distributed (and how it might possibly be redistributed  through ordinary channels).  This makes the information more valuable because it applies all the time.  

So, for example, rather than spending a great deal of time on background information that would help students decide how they should vote on a particular issue, in this course students will learn how to determine who can, and cannot, take action on what sorts of issues.

• Which officials are responsible for each issue?
• When are social conditions directly impacted by policies and when are they largely out of the immediate control of politicians?  
• Which branch of government has power over the aspect that you would like to improve?
• Which level of government--local, state, federal--is in charge of this particular problem?
• Whom do you approach when you have a complaint?  Do you contact your congressional representative, your city council member, the mayor, the chief of police, the school board, a judge?  Or someone not in the government at all:  a party official, the local newspaper, your neighbor?
• What's the process for changing the law and the Constitution?  

There are also some conceptual basics, some of which are matters of fact and some of which are matters of philosophy:

• How do checks and balances work?  Is your "obstruction" my "safeguard?"
• A good deal of history:  how did we wind up with a population-based House and a not-population-based Senate?  why are there nine justices on the Supreme Court and not five or twenty-one?   why do we have exactly two major parties?
• Where do rights come from?  Can a right exist if a government has not agreed to protect it?  
• When is it important to make a law uniform across the country, and when does it make more sense to have the law be different in different places?  
• What is the value of compromise? 
• What is the value of tolerance?
• What is the value of a freedom to say and do things that are wrong?
• Is it possible and good to live peacefully with people who are very different from us?  Or should we always be struggling for dominance so that "our" idea of how to live a right life will come out on top?
• What happened, at each step, in the lives of people who had the least political power?

The point of all this is to acquire the habit of thinking a step more deeply and being aware of the tensions that are inherent in the structure of U. S. government.  There is a lot of balancing two goods that cannot perfectly co-exist, or trying to eliminate one evil without also eliminating something good with which it is entangled.  There is a great deal of historical justification of why certain classes of people ought not to be able to access the benefits and protections and rights that are secured by "regular Americans," the definition of which is constantly shifting.

Sometimes the habit of thinking historically helps:   if you know a little about how the sausage was made in the past, then you know to be skeptical about proposed future encased meat products.   The structure and processes of American government were not handed down to us on high, but were put together by human beings--exceptional human beings, no doubt, or such a structure might never have been formed; but unrepresentative in their exceptionalness, and deeply flawed; everyone is flawed, but these folks (being exceptional) were flawed in some systematic and exceptional ways.  They left us a way to change their work, and that is a power for both good and ill.

There are no perfect analogies, and every historical situation is different; still, we can see through some of the rhetoric of the past with hindsight, and developing that habit, maybe we can see through some of the rhetoric of the present.   

I don't have to get too embroiled (or angry) laying out the details of What's Going On right now.   Mind you, it's extremely important to avoid falling into the error that all the bad things happened in the past and now we've gotten over them, so it's not a matter of "back then bad things happened"; it's more a matter of pointing out the continuity of themes of history.   The First Amendment and the Fourth Amendment, the Equal Protection Clause, the opening and shutting of the Prohibition era, the meaning of citizenship, the role of commercial operations in public life, the role of ideas about powers that are higher than government itself, asymmetrical power and asymmetrical freedoms and asymmetrical protections: all these are still in play.

 II.  There are other uses for political information besides the (relatively worthless) casting of a single informed vote. 

 In Democracy and Political Ignorance, Ilya Somin asserts

Only those who value political knowledge for reasons other than voting have an incentive to learn significant amounts of it.  Acquiring extensive political knowledge for the purpose of becoming a more informed voter is, in most situations, simply irrational.  This point applies even in cases when political information is available for free... As long as learning the information and analyzing its significance requires time and effort, the process is still costly for citizens.

 This is true even for highly altruistic and civic-minded citizens, he argues:

the rational altruist would ... seek to serve others in ways where a marginal individual contribution has a real chance of making a difference to their welfare, such as donating time or money to charitable organizations.  By spending time and effort on becoming an educated voter, the altruist might actually diminish others' welfare by depriving them of the services he might have conferred on them through alternative uses of the same resources.

So if we accept all this, and we seek an incentive to learn significant amounts of political information, we must work out whether we have some reason other than voting to motivate us.  I think we do have these reasons.  Let's take a look.

A.  (Trivial use): A course of some kind in U. S. Government is a state graduation requirement.

I include this only for completion of the argument, but it is worth noting because it is important to me.   While homeschooled students do not strictly have to meet the state graduation requirements, it is one of the goals I set for my home school.  The diploma I issued personally to my first high school graduate stated that he had fulfilled all the same requirements that institutionally-schooled students must, and I meant it.  I intend the same for my other offspring.  

B.  Contributing, in a very small way, to the public good of the "informed electorate."

Somin mentions this.  An informed electorate is a public good.  We all consume its benefits.  If the teens expend time and money to become informed, if I expend time and money to teach them, then they and I are contributing to the production of this public good.  The value is offset perhaps by the opportunity cost mentioned above:  we might have expended the same time and money to serve the public in a direct way that is much more valuable.  But these resources would only ever have been used on some homeschool course, after all, and likely another social studies course.   I don't think it's crazy to think that working hard on a civics course might be the most beneficial use that we were likely to make of this aliquot of resources.  

C.  Preparing these teens in case one becomes an influencer.

There are some individuals who can and do use political information to influence society far more than by a single vote:

• journalists
• widely-read opinion writers
• policy makers
• lawyers and judges
• politicians and high-level administrators
• teachers at the secondary and university levels
• wealthy-enough donors to campaigns and to nonprofits

I don't know what these kids are going to do with their lives, but any of them could wind up in a position to have a nontrivial effect on communities through influencing elections and their aftermath.  If they go in a direction that makes that possible, then the public will be better off if they have been well prepared and are informed.  We don't know which young persons will become influencers; but we want all our influencers to be well informed; one way to make that more likely is to give everybody a good, thorough grounding in the basics.

D.  If the subject sparks particular interest, it can be its own reward.

It can be difficult to escape political information; there's a bit of consolation for those of us who are self-described "political junkies," who like discussing politics with like-minded or differently-minded people of good will, and who are intellectually stimulated by keeping up on legal and political news (and perhaps engaging in activism here and there:  citizen journalism, contacting officials, going to town meetings, showing up at demonstrations).   Someone who enjoys political knowledge for its own sake, and for the sake of positive interactions with other people, will reap the rewards of an interesting and accurate treatment in the teen years.   

Furthermore, if I am careful about the attitude that I bring to class and foster among the teens, I can set a good example for how to talk and argue about politics with charity, fairness, inclusivity, and truth-seeking.  That is a worthy goal.

E.  In order to truthfully and convincingly persuade others.

Persuading other people can reach farther than your own ballot, and can even reach into places where you cannot vote, such as in local elections in other states.  It's very easy these days to put your thoughts out there and inflict them on the unsuspecting populace.  Much better for those thoughts to be informed and not ignorant.

As a side note, it may be necessary for these young people to persuade others -- not so much of political information -- but of their own worthiness as an employee, a student, a writer, a thinker, a colleague.  It would be a worthy goal to contribute to their intellectual development and knowledge acquisition as it applies to political information. 

In other words, "so they don't look foolish."

F.  So you can decide where to send your money or spend your time.

Political contributions, like persuasion, can reach outside your own district.  We can support candidates anywhere in the country where we think the dollars will do the most good.  But to decide where the money should go requires rather a lot of political information.  

Knowledge of the structure of the nation, state, and city also helps you decide where to send charitable contributions and perhaps how to spend your volunteer time.  Often charitable donations are a way to respond to the aftermath of bad law and bad policy:  we can mitigate the effects of harmful legislation by directly helping the people who have been harmed by it.  And we can also support nonprofit organizations which are committed to changing law and policy.   

For example, we can respond to cuts in services for the poor by stepping up our individual almsgiving and support of civic groups that work to help them. 

We can support organizations that provide lawyers to vulnerable people, or organizations that argue cases before the Supreme Court on behalf of individuals, businesses, and nonprofits, or "think tanks" that work to shape policy.  But to envision these uses of our money requires considerable political information.

G.  So you can "vote with your feet." 

This is one of the points that Somin stresses the most, since it supports his overall thesis that decentralized federalism is the best system to promote citizen welfare and government accountability:  "foot voting" has a direct and immediate impact.  I have found it to be a fruitful point for motivating my teaching.

[O]ne of the main causes of political ignorance is the fact that it is "rational."  Because even an extremely well-informed voter has virtually no chance of actually influencing electoral outcomes, he or she has little incentive to become informed...if the only purpose... is to cast a "correct" vote.  By contrast, people "voting with their feet" by choosing the state or locality in which to live are in a wholly different situation from the ballot box voter.  If a foot voter can acquire information about superior economic conditions, public policies, or other advantages in another jurisdiction, he or she can move there and take advantage of them even if all other citizens do nothing.  This creates a much stronger incentive for foot voters to acquire relevant information about conditions in different jurisdictions than for ballot box voters to acquire information about public policy.

...It is an option that can be made available to most, if not all, of the population, and individuals' choices are causally effective in a way that ballot box votes are not.  Moving costs and other constraints limit the extent to which participation in foot voting is ompletely equal.  But... these constraints are not nearly as severe as conventionally thought.  And, obviously, individual influence over government policy in ballot box voting systems is also far from fully equal.

Political information can be applied in the students' individual lives to answer many questions which will directly impact their quality of life and their interactions with government:

• Where will you live?
• Where will you buy property?
• Where will you go to school and how will you pay for it?
• Where will you raise children and how will you educate them?
• Where will you do business? 
• Where will you select health care?
• What industry will you engage in?
• In what communities will you perform services?
• Which jurisdictions will receive your sales, property, and income taxes?

The more they can foresee interacting with government at the local, state, and federal level, the more important it will be for them to understand the ramifications of choosing the jurisdiction to live in. 

I could add that the altruistic foot voter can also employ political information in order to decide -- not so much where the economic and political conditions will help them prosper the most -- but where they can do the most good for others.  Particularly for people who are considering going into a career of serving others -- health care, teaching, law, clergy -- acquiring political information may pay dividends not just for themselves but for society at large.

+ + +

I feel like I need to write down a list of these "reasons to do a good job with this" and paste it on the inside cover of my teacher's edition.  I think if I can keep all these at top of mind, I might be able to keep the cynicism at bay.  And maybe it will give me some material for my first, introductory class:  the one where I explain to them all why they are here, and why they should listen to me.