bearing blog

Later, gaiter. (That is: later, we'll know more.)

My favorite mask so far has been the polyester neck gaiter, not worn pulled up in a single layer bank-robber-style over the nose (it's not nearly tight enough for me to feel secure that way), but lapped into at least three layers and with the selvages over my head to create a tight seal everywhere around my nose and mouth.  I showed exactly how I did it, with photos, back in May, partly in hopes to encourage the "tight-gaiter-as-mask" method of wearing it instead of the looser "bandit style."

I listed numerous advantages, and then added:

Potential disadvantages:

• Polyester knit is fairly loose-weave and its specific filtration efficacy is not known.  This is the biggest caveat.  It's one reason why I try to get at least three layers over my mouth and nose.
• Some brands are pricey
• Maybe it will fog your glasses and you'll have to add some wire or something
• It's a little hard to get it just right without a mirror (at least at first)

Give it a try and see what you think.

Repeated Disclaimer:  I am not a professional dispenser of legal or medical advice, and I have not done an exhaustive literature search to determine if there is any other available data regarding polyester knit fabric as part of masks for source control in the community.    

So!  We now have a little bit---emphasis on the little---of data regarding polyester knit neck gaiters, and that little bit isn't good.  In my opinion, the scrap of data is enough to make me at least temporarily uneasy about relying on the gaiters without an added filter, so I've resumed experimenting with cotton fabric. 

In my opinion, it is not enough (yet) to rule out gaiters as an effective option. 

We really need to know more about this, because they are a very popular face-covering right now, and for good reason.  Some people believe it's the only type they can tolerate for long periods, so if it turns out that they are reasonably effective when worn in a well-fitting way, we don't want to lose them as an option.

Let's dig in to the source of this data, which is a very cool study that came out this week and which I have carefully read with some consultation assistance from my spouse, who has professional experience in particulate imaging.

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Here's a typical article's headline and excerpts, this from CBS News:

Neck gaiters may be worse than not wearing a mask at all, study shows

Using neck gaiters as a face covering might be ineffective at stopping the spread of the coronavirus, and could even spread the virus further than not wearing a covering at all, according to a new study. Researchers from Duke University found that the neck gaiter they tested was "worse than nothing." 

"The neck gaiter that we tested did essentially nothing, and worse than nothing, because it appeared to make large droplets into small droplets," Isaac Henrion, the study's co-author, told CBS News. Henrion is also the coordinator of  Cover Durham, a community project to distribute tens of thousands of masks to vulnerable people.

The neck gaiter is a circular piece of fabric that sits around a person's neck and can be pulled up to cover their mouth and nose. The issue with the convenient cover-up is likely not with its design, but with the fabric it is typically made from.

According to Henrion, the study tested a neck gaiter made of a thin, stretchy polyester, which they are commonly made from. Instead of stopping droplets that can contain the virus from escaping into the air, the fabric appeared to turn large droplets into smaller ones known as aerosols....

Duke's study focused on droplet production while talking, as opposed to coughing or sneezing...

While the study did not set out to create a definitive ranking of masks, Henrion said that N95 and standard surgical masks released the least amount of droplets. N95s yielded the best results, and surgical masks came in second, stopping 90-95% of droplets. Simple two-layer cotton masks were effective at stopping 80% of droplets from getting out when participants spoke. 

As for neck gaiters, Henrion stressed that the study was preliminary, and did not conclusively determine whether a gaiter's fabric or construction was responsible for producing smaller droplets. A neck gaiter with two layers of cotton could be more effective.

Without easy access to PPE, many people have turned to making their own masks. The study showed that homemade versions can be effective, but people should be mindful of their mask construction and fit. 

"Further research is needed to investigate the performance of bandanas and neck gaiters, since our study is only a proof of concept for the experimental method," Henrion said.

Martin Fischer, an associate research professor in Duke's chemistry department who took part in the study, told WRAL-TV it wasn't meant to rate different face coverings, adding that "Not all ... neck gaiters are bad. There are plenty good ones out there. It depends so much on the material, on how many layers you wear."

So, if you read all the way through the news article, you do see some caveats.  It's not an irresponsibly written news article; but I'd argue it's focused incorrectly.  This study --- Fischer et al., Sci. Adv. 10.1126/sciadv.abd3083 (2020) --- is not a study of mask effectiveness at all.  It appears to be a valuable and elegant study, but they did not write the paper so that they could report mask effectiveness.    It is a demonstration study of their novel apparatus.

In other words:  

Fischer et al. were not trying to use their apparatus to demonstrate the effectiveness of 14 masks.  They were using 14 masks to demonstrate the effectiveness of their apparatus.

Along the way, though, they did produce some data, which we shouldn't ignore; but we should be aware of its limitations.  

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A much better article about the study, the one that I wish had gone viral in the first place, was published in WIRED.   From the very headline and sub-head, they get the focus correctly where it belongs:  on the apparatus, not on the masks.

Scientists Put Masks to the Test---With A Cell Phone and a Laser

When it comes to blocking germs, not all cloth masks are created equal.  A new, low-cost testing device literally illuminates which ones won't get the job done.

Three cheers for journalist Megan Molteni, who wrote the article!  Three cheers for WIRED, who put all of the above in big type before the colorful illustration!  

I would love for you to read the whole WIRED article, but I'll pull out a section that's especially relevant to the neck gaiter question.  Emphases are mine.

 The neck gaiter, made out of a lightweight, breathable fabric favored by runners and cyclists, let through even more particles than the control group—110 percent relative to wearing no mask at all.

If you’re wondering how that is even possible, you’re not alone. Fischer was similarly stumped. Then he went back and looked at the footage again of himself wearing the neck gaiter. “You can see that it’s not just that there are more particles, but that on average, the particles are much smaller,” he says. His team believes the stretchy, porous material is actually fracturing bigger, heavier droplets, splintering them into tinier particles that can more easily remain suspended in the air.

If that’s true, it would blow up the maxim that any mask is better than no mask, says Kimberly Prather, an environmental aerosol researcher at UC San Diego who was not involved in the study.

But there’s another possible explanation: Maybe the extra particles aren’t all respiratory droplets. Instead, they could be fibers shedding off the material itself. This has been shown to happen before, and would be easy enough to test—but Fischer and his coauthors didn’t. “Splintering would be bad, but we don’t know for sure that’s what’s going on,” says Prather.

She also points out that the sample size for most of the mask testing is precisely one person. The study doesn’t capture all the variability in how people’s face shapes and speaking patterns might affect the effectiveness of different kinds of masks. So, while this project’s results are in line with other, larger, more rigorous studies, one shouldn’t read too much into the performance outcomes of individual masks based on this study alone, she says.

Still, Prather is impressed that the Duke team’s technique can detect particles down to half a micron. Most laser visualization methods are sensitive only to about 20 microns. “That’s a big deal, because this captures aerosols—the particles that come out during speech—not just bigger droplets emitted during coughing or sneezing,” she says. “Keeping it in perspective, I think it’ll be a great comparison tool to look at variability between people, more conditions. There’s a lot of different things you can do with the setup they’ve developed.”

Fischer and Westman also recognize the study’s shortcomings. “This was never going to be a definitive ranking of all masks under all types of conditions,” says Fischer. Doing that would require hundreds, or even thousands, more people testing lots more masks. “What we don’t want people taking away is: ‘This mask will work. This will not.’ It’s not a guide to masks. It is a demonstration of a new, simple methodology for quickly and somewhat crudely visualizing the effect of a mask,” he says.

If you would like an article that is a little more mainstream-web than the tech-web WIRED, you could try this article by Susan Matthews  in Slate.  It's more of a rebuttal to the "neck gaiters are definitely worse than nothing" narrative, and mentions other reasons why it is too soon to draw that conclusion definitively.  And it's written in a conversational style that might get the average person reading to the end. 

And, just in -- that is, a nurse friend shared this on Facebook while I am actually writing this blog right now -- here is an article from ScienceNews that has a bad headline (it isn't a "mask study!" argh) but summarizes everything I've been trying to say.  I'm being scooped in real time!

I do want to emphasize that the study is not a flawed study.  It's a good study!  And the paper is very responsibly written.  Fischer et al. themselves are very careful to explain what their work does and does not show.   It's just that media outlets don't always bother to read that far.

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I have many hot takes from all this, but as a number of them are duplicated in the news articles I've linked above, I'll restrict myself to a few in particular.

(1)  A new, cheap, effective testing method. 

The fundamental advance of Fischer et al.  is to design and describe a low-cost mask-effectiveness-testing apparatus and data analysis method that can be assembled by any research lab and even by your higher-level citizen scientist,  It is not beyond the ability of a bright high school student looking for a science fair project, or a garage tinkerer, if they can manage the data processing part or else figure out a proxy measurement.  

(2) This is the first mask-tester I have seen that actually tests the mask's performance while it is being worn by breathing humans.

Other studies of mask effectiveness have looked mainly at the filtration efficiency, by  (for example) stretching a sample of the fabric over an opening and pumping a mixture of air and saline droplets through the mask.  But the filtration efficiency of the fabric is definitely not the only significant question, and for all we know it might be one of the least important attributes.  We do not know how important the edge-seal around a mask is.  We do not know how tight a mask needs to be.  We do not know if the best mask-shape is different for different kinds of facial structures.  We do not know how well masks perform after they become wet with sweat or respiratory fluids.  We need to know these things, and the only way to find out is to test masks while they are being worn by real people.

(3) Now that an easy-to build apparatus exists, perhaps we'll soon start to see the mask studies that answer some of our questions.  

What we want to see are studies that evaluate a single type of mask in many iterations on many people, while they breathe, pant, talk, sing, cough, sneeze, and shout.   We want them to specifically identify the type of mask it applies to, and no, "fleece gaiter" is not good enough, nor is "two-ply cotton mask" or "poly-cotton blend."  What's the proportion of polyester and cotton?  What's the thread count?  Is it held on by ear loops or head ties?  In the case of a multipurpose face-covering such as a gaiter, is it worn tight to the face and jaw like I always have, or only pulled up over the nose?  I'll just point out that this study mentions three different two-layer cotton masks, and they do not measure the same.

(4)  Certain improvements that could be made will answer even more questions which are not possible with the current apparatus.  Among them:  how important are droplets that come away off to the side instead of dead-center in the front?

The authors of the paper explain that some very important questions literally cannot be answered with the apparatus as described in their paper, but in principle some design changes could close those gaps.  I'll just quote here.

A first limitation is that our experimental implementation samples only a small part of the enclosure and hence some droplets that are transmitted through the masks might not be registered in the laser beam.... The physiology of each speaker is different, resulting in variations of the position of the mouth relative to the light sheet.  Hence, the droplet count reflects only a portion of all droplets... A speaker hole that is sealed around the face would prevent the undetected escape of particles.

From looking at the diagram of the apparatus, I judge that droplets escaping around the edges of a poorly-fitted mask are the least likely to be caught at all.  So if edge-leakiness is to be evaluated, the apparatus will require development.

(5) One possibility:  This apparatus could be used to give a quick estimate of a particular person's particular mask on a particular day.  

My spouse, who unlike me does his engineering for a corporation for actual money, immediately thought of commercializing a similar design as a screening tool.  If it's vitally important that people have to have a mask that functions well on them to enter your building, you could set something like this up at the door and intercept people before they enter.  You could then, in principle, get a quick estimate of how well each person's mask is working for them, relative to a standard of your choosing.  If the mask they are wearing doesn't work well, you could advise the person to adjust the mask fit, or could offer the person a different type of mask.

(6)  It's definitely too soon to shame people who are wearing neck gaiters.

Don't do it.  I, personally, am concerned enough that I'm going to start looking for a comfortable cotton mask that fits me well (previously I had decided that the neck gaiter, twisted into a tight mask conformation, worked so well that I hadn't even bothered with cotton ones).  After all, we might find out that the gaiter really is a poor choice, and I want to be ready.  But we really do not know enough to abandon them, or the maxim that the best mask is the mask that you wear correctly and consistently.  Save your shame for the conspiracy theorists and the people who refuse to wear any mask at all.  We just don't know enough to be sure.

And I'll be frank:  One of the cotton adaptations I've tried so far, and the one that I like best, is to layer the neck gaiter on top of the cotton mask.  It's a little hot, but the tightness of the gaiter securely fastens the cotton mask to my face so it won't budge; destroys glasses-fogging; and spreads the pressure out all over my head.  But you know what?  You can't see that there's a cotton mask underneath.  So if you see me on the street with my gaiter wrapped around the lower half of my face, have pity:  I've got another layer under there.  

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My ultimate recommendation is to watch for citations of Fischer et al. in the literature.  Any paper that reproduces or improves upon their apparatus ought to be citing them, as should any paper that uses the apparatus to do a true mask study.  And if my observations about media coverage of scientific results are accurate, no matter what followup studies they perform, we'll likely never see them go viral again.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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*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.

Unreasonable expectations in design.

True or false:

It is irresponsible and negligent for a parent to take a picture of his or her small child in public, especially at a crowded, dangerous place like the zoo. Every photograph of grinning, sticky-faced siblings, posing in front of the aquarium or the cat house, is evidence of the crime of child endangerment.

Silly?

Well, let's think about what has to happen for a parent to take a photo of her child in public. First the parent has to let go of the child. She needs both hands to manipulate the camera or the smart phone. Then she has to step a few feet away -- maybe a dozen feet or more, certainly out of arms' reach. She has to take her eyes off her charges for long enough to select the proper settings or apps before finally locating them in the viewfinder. Once the picture is taken, she may pause to stow the camera away before returning and once again securing the child in a firm grip.

She lets go. She steps several feet away. She looks elsewhere. It is long enough.

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What I see in the great rush to condemn the mother (it is always the mother) of a small child who crawled into the gorilla exhibit at the Cincinnati Zoo this week: a widespread refusal to believe that bad things can happen to "good people like me." She MUST have done something wrong (i.e., "something I would never do") for a terrible thing to happen to her child.

It's very important for some people to put distance between the grieving and themselves. I see this elsewhere; I often read articles about cycling accidents, because I am interested in traffic safety in my town, and let me tell you, getting hit by a drunk driver when you had the right of way is no excuse: you should have been more aware or you shouldn't have been on that road, you two-wheeled freak. We all know that many cyclists today completely ignore the law. So it goes.

I think we can extrapolate from the evidence (many small children at zoos, the existence of preschool educational programs at zoos) that it is widely believed (whatever some folks may think) that a zoo is a good place to take small children for a fun family outing. So to go so far as to say "well, of course you don't take a 3-y-o to a zoo, that's for older children" is, shall we say, OUTSIDE THE MAINSTREAM of thinking.

The notion that no reasonable parent would ever enter a situation where a 3-year-old might escape her notice long enough to get into serious trouble is a little more understandable, given the low amount of experience that many people have with the wide variety of three-year-olds. Most people only ever parent zero to two of them.

Some commenters who take a position closer to my own have been focusing on "It's not possible to keep your eyes on a three-year-old 100% of the time so they can't escape." I'd like to point out that we don't really WANT mothers (it's always mothers, isn't it) to do what would be necessary to prevent three-year-olds from escaping. Because we would have to do more than just watch them all the time. We would have to grip them all the time. That is why I began by having you think about picture-taking, how it is an utterly normal thing for parents of children to do at zoos, take their child's picture; and how the act of taking a picture contains within it all the possibility that allows for an escaping child.

There's this strange thing about children: they want to explore the world around them. They will pull and actively try to escape you. The zoos, along with science museums and other places that attract children, incidentally, have this odd feature (often, not always) -- they have exhibits here and there that seem to encourage children to explore the environment. "Please touch," they will have signs up for the petting zoo, or they will have fish tanks that are down near the eye level of toddlers, or they will have buttons to push and things like that. It seems almost as if the zoos.... EXPECT there to be three-year-olds with their parents, three-year-olds who are not buckled into strollers! I think the last few times I've been to the zoo I've even seen groups of preschoolers on a field trip, not with their parents, but with teachers and chaperones!

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I'm very sorry that the zoo had to shoot the gorilla. I'm thrilled that they apparently had a backup plan with a "dangerous animal response team" that included a take-down-the-animal plan. This was good planning for a situation that, however unthinkable it may be, clearly someone had thought about it in advance. It's the zoos' job to keep people away from the animals and animals away from the people.

And yet... sometimes people get in.

Isn't it also the zoos' responsibility to protect the animals from people who might harm them? Is it really reasonable to assume that visitors will police themselves sufficiently that the exhibits need not be made secure?

I'm thinking back to the last time a determined adult got into an exhibit (it does happen) and wondering if anyone was discussing whether zoos have a responsibility, grounded in the welfare of the animals, to make it impossible for determined persons to get into the exhibits. I think they do have a responsibility to make it very difficult for a determined adult to get into an exhibit. It is a completely foreseeable risk that a determined adult will TRY to get into an exhibit, and it really ought to be harder for a determined child to get in than a determined adult -- so if the zoos designed to make it extremely difficult for determined adults to get in, it ought to be that much harder for a determined child to get in.

It is a known risk that people occasionally attempt to breach the barriers -- not just children, but also adults. Zoos face a design problem that we should probably acknowledge: their mission is to bring us close to the animals while their responsibility is to keep us separated from them. I have some respect for the argument that this design problem, with its inherent tension, represents a set of risks that is not worth the benefits; that is a value judgment and we can come to different conclusions about it. I don't have any respect for the argument that this design problem doesn't exist.

Without saying anyone was at fault, I'm going to say that the design of the exhibit is probably the ultimate cause of this disaster.

OK, then... why don't you go so far as to say "the zoo was at FAULT," then?

Because design problems that involve inherent tensions between two design goals are notoriously difficult, and designers can act in good faith from start to finish, with the best of analyses, but still bad things can happen. I simply don't know enough details, and likely you don't either.

Is it possible to design a zoo in which all barriers CANNOT be breached? Yes; would people want to go to that zoo? Would those who argue for better habitats for the animals' welfare be pleased with that zoo? It's possible that the designers really did act in bad faith, that they designed an exhibit that they knew was not up to whatever the commonly accepted standards of zoo barriers were at the time. That would be a kind of fault. It's possible that the zoo staff acted in bad faith: that they disabled safeguards that were part of the system put into place by the designers, or that the barriers were not well maintained, or something like that. That would be a kind of fault. But it's possible to have a design that turns out to BE FAULTY (in retrospect) without any person actually being "at fault."

The public may have unreasonable expectations of the designers here. Not that it isn't reasonable to have as your GOAL "no one shall breach this exhibit." But that the public hasn't taken the time to really imagine what the tradeoffs would be that would make it literally impossible for no determined person to breach the exhibit, and they haven't considered that some of the things that make exhibit-breaches possible would make them enjoy the zoo less. Might even make them complain about the poorly-designed exhibits.

Here are some links for your perusal.

Last week at the zoo in Santiago, Chile, a determined man got into the lion enclosure, and the zookeepers shot the lions.

Last month a determined woman got into the tiger enclosure at the Toronto zoo.

This one goes the other direction. Less than three months ago, at the same zoo in Cincinnati, the polar bears breached their first enclosure.

About six months ago, another woman was determined enough to pet a tiger that she got into the enclosure at the zoo in Omaha.

2014. Copenhagen. A determined man entered the polar bear enclosure.

2009. Berlin. A determined woman entered the polar bear enclosure.

In the last link, a zoo official says of the exhibit, "It is already safe... People who want to jump in will always find a way."

For the sake of the animals as well as the people, maybe we should be asking why that is good enough. It simply isn't true that a zoo can't be built with barriers that visitors can't breach. We certainly try to manage it in prisons that hold human beings and in museums that hold valuable artifacts.

To ask why we accept risks is not necessarily to mandate that we remove risks. I respect those who argue that the benefits of zoos aren't worth the risks of bringing the public in close contact with animals. That Even though we don't come down in the same place, they and I recognize that there is a tension between the risks and benefits of zoo design, that it is acceptable to run some risk in order to reap some benefit, if the benefit is good enough.

It turns out that there is also a tension between the risks and benefits of bringing children out into the world. If we are going to cut the zoo enclosure designers any slack here, if we are going to say about those who build barriers to protect the animals "You can't be expected to stop every determined person from getting in," then we also have to be ready to say about all those charged with children, "You can't be expected to stop every mischief that could possibly happen."

In both cases, we could. But we choose not to. Because there are risks in that direction too.

 

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The expert's temptation.

This year in home education, a milestone I've looked forward to:  my eldest son, now in tenth grade, begins General Chemistry.  Also precalculus -- not quite as fun for me to teach as proof-based geometry was, but still, it makes me smile.

For a long time, I didn't expect to teach General Chem at home, even though I'm entirely capable of it.  Because:  labs.  Mark may be quite handy around the house, but I didn't expect him to construct me a fume hood.  And how to dispose of used reagents safely?  And --  all that glassware!  I knew, of course, that one can buy a fully-stocked chemistry kit for homeschoolers; all the catalogues have them.  But I guess I have been a bit snobbish about chemistry:  I never really thought a home-grown chemistry lab could be adequate.  I wanted a proper laboratory experience.

I mean, good enough if you don't have other options, sure.  But we do have other options.  Here in Minnesota, high school juniors and seniors can take courses for credit at a number of local colleges and universities for minimal cost.  (The program's also open to high-scoring sophomores who attend institutional high schools, but not to homeschooled sophomores.  Go figure.)  I have been telling people for years that I intended to have my kids take chemistry in their junior year through the college-credit program, especially so they could take a course in a "real" laboratory.  I figured that we could do physics at home instead.

And then as sophomore year approached, I found myself thinking:  How involved is a first-year high school course anyway?  

I personally racked up a lot of time working with laboratory equipment in high school, it's true.  But now that I think of it, some of that was in the second-year course (yes, I had two years of high school chemistry -- also two years of physics).  And a lot of it was extracurricular activity, such as setting up demos for the summer elementary school chemistry camp, and hours of prep for inter-scholastic science competitions, and sometimes just messing around in the back prep room that joined the two chemistry classrooms.  (Was there really a glass jar half full of mercury on the bottom shelf, glistening dully through a thick layer of dust? Or have I manufactured that memory?  It seems that by 1990 such things should have been long gone.)

Anyway -- what labs do first-year students really do at the lab bench?  Flame tests (not the stupid kind involving methanol, but just putting saltwater-damp probes into Bunsen flames).  Weighing a precipitate to find how close you came to theoretical yield.  Calorimetry -- in practice, this consists of known masses of ice and warm water mixed in a Styrofoam coffee cup with a thermometer thrust through an insulating lid.  I remember the most difficult lab, in the sense of being easy to screw up so that you had to start over and risk being late for English class, being acid-base titration with its impressively towering buret and frustratingly sticky stopcock.  I vaguely remember doing one thing that required a crucible.

Anyway, I spent some time researching, and I found a microchemistry lab kit and manual that began to make me think that we could do an adequate job with the laboratory at home.  Microchemistry:  why didn't I think of that before?   Tiny quantities means less waste, mitigation of safety hazards, and next to no disposal issues.   And after all, there will be a chemistry lab in college.  It's not like this is the last chance the kids have to experience laboratory work.  The fundamental skills of observation, meticulous direction-following, keeping a good notebook, writing detailed laboratory reports are the same everywhere.  

It's the perfect example of how to play to the strengths of this homeschool while mitigating its weaknesses (like no fume hood or convenient hazmat disposal.)

Paper chromatography lab, one of the first in the manual.  With a toddler in the house, the safest place to work is a relatively inaccessible upstairs room with a large table.  A pitcher of tap water and a plastic dish tub serves as a portable sink.  Distilled water comes in plastic jugs at the grocery store.  I purchased a plastic eyewash-station bottle (green-lidded bottle) and sterile eyewash solution from an occupational safety supplier.

 

Microchemistry lab supplies use small quantities, measured dropwise from calibrated dropper bottles and reacted in the tiny wells in plastic reaction plates (there are 96 wells in the plate at my son's elbow).  The reused glass yeast jar contains fruit juice from the kitchen -- one of the liquids subjected to the chromatography lab along with bromophenol blue, copper nitrate, and assorted household dyes.

+ + +

 I'm not just teaching my own son, but two other teenagers.  We meet twice a week for 45 minutes, and if you're thinking, "That's not nearly enough lecturing to teach high school chemistry," you're right.  I wish I had time to teach the teens by lecture 4 times per week.  

If we took two years to get through general chemistry, I could do it; that's exactly how I taught proof-based geometry, which went swimmingly and was a lot of fun too.  The kids studied geometry at half-speed with me for two years, and on the other days of the week they studied algebra at half-speed for two years.  At the end of two years, they had one credit of geometry and one of algebra, just as if they'd done them sequentially.

(It occurs to me now that for future cohorts of children, I might be able to do something similar with science:  Chemistry at half-speed in a full lecture format, while the kids study some other thing at half-speed the other two days of the week:  biology or physics, perhaps.  Two years to do two credits of science.  It could work, perhaps.  H. and I will have to talk about it.  I already have a fully written evolutionary biology curriculum that has no labs, so... it could work.)

As it is, though, instead of following a lecture format, I am following a reading-recitation format.  I am more tutor than lecturer.  With only the barest introduction from me at the end of the previous class meeting, the students read a few sections and work assigned problems (I assign the ones with the answers in the back of the textbook, so they can check their own work).  Then when we meet around my kitchen table, I uncap my dry-erase marker and ask, "Any questions?  Did you have any trouble working any of the problems?"  We work some of the problems together, and then I tell them things like:  The most important thing to remember from this chapter is such-and-such.  Or I tell them a nifty mnemonic (how do I know it's nifty?  My high school chemistry teacher taught it to me, and I haven't forgotten it) to remember which of the gaseous elements are always found as diatomic molecules.  Or I give them a list of ions and molecular formulas that they have to memorize because they are going to come up again and again, and set them quizzes on it until they stick.

+ + +

I'm enjoying something about this that I also enjoyed about plane geometry and am (mostly) enjoying about my son's precalculus work:  Having already set up the schedule so that I know what they are studying each week, I can walk into my class sessions cold.  There are, it turns out, a few consolations for the stay-at-home geek, and one of them is finding out twenty years on that you've still got it,  or at least can fake it in front of newbies.

+ + +

So here's the temptation:  After a few weeks of high school mathematics and science going so well, having put a fair amount of work into designing a course that is rigorous and emphasizes the strengths of the homeschool while mitigating the weaknesses, I sometimes start to think:  Gosh, it's a good thing I've got such an extensive background in this material!  Otherwise how would I ever make sure that my kids learn this?

It's an understandable temptation.  Who doesn't want to justify our past decisions (such as devoting years of our lives to study a field in which we never wind up employed)?  Who doesn't want to feel essential?

But it's one that I am compelled to reject as contrary to my philosophy of education.  Not that it's bad to arrange it so that one's children can learn a subject directly from an adult who's specifically trained in that subject.  This is a great choice!  But -- contrary to what many people imagine -- it is not an essential choice. Being an autodidact has merits too, such as the training in self-discipline, self-examination, and resourcefulness required to find out what one does not know and then to track down the necessary resources to learn it.  Sometimes what's learned on one's own sticks better than what's drilled into one by others.  Probably the optimal mix of an education is one that includes some training by experts along with some mix of self-directed study -- with the exact recipe varying quite a bit from family to family and from student to student.

Even less essential is that the parent specifically be the expert.  Not for nothing am I teaching chemistry and geometry to two other families.  I'm their non-parent expert, brought in in an informal brain-bartering arrangement.  In return, I call on H's skills and (to me) astonishing patience and resourcefulness teaching writing and language arts to all our offspring over the age of four.  Yes, yes, I can write, but can I teach writing?  If I had to, I'd try, but I'll tell you one thing -- I don't enjoy it much at all!

I've also paid money to bring in experts (as in:  music education) and -- admittedly my favorite solution -- I've taught myself subjects so I could turn around and teach them to children.  I'm a quick study, but in principle anyone can do this.  One of the great advantages to this method is that the learning process is fresh in the mind.  Having just learned something presents some surprising advantages to the teacher.

(Something I learned in engineering school:  when a graduate student is not entirely sure that he or she understands a topic, it is a normal occurrence for the student's advisor to assign the student to teach the unsteady topic to undergraduates.)

So, yeah, we subject-experts have to watch how we talk about our expertise to other people, even to other homeschoolers, lest we plant the seeds of the idea that self-teaching is impossible, that experts are always and everywhere necessary.  The answer to "But what qualifies you to teach your own children?" always and everywhere has to be:  I am their parent.  I am motivated to give them whatever they need to see them succeed.   We often look outside ourselves for those resources, but the fundamental resource that powers it all is the resource of self-gift that resides in the very fact that we relate to them as parents are meant to relate to their children:  as mentors in all of life, and education is not really separable from that.

The confidence that learning of some kind is out there to be grasped by anyone with the drive, whatever their immediate limitations, is a fundamental assumption of home education -- and I would say, a fundamental assumption of humanity.  You can do it, if you want, and if your priorities can be so arranged.  It's an optimism that one can never have as long as one is dependent on experts.

Cooperating, not competing, priorities.

That put-on-your-swimsuit-for-your-kids'-sake post that I wrote about has spread its influence throughout the feminine half of the blogosphere, at least the sector* populated by mothering mothers. Elizabeth Duffy, writing at Patheos, had a good post the other day:

One of the swim coaches stood on the side of the pool in a handsome black tank, and she was as plump and dimply as the rest of us, but she stood up straight, shoulders back, making bold demonstrations of each stroke for her pupils. I remember thinking that her confidence paired with an obvious tendency not to take herself too seriously was very appealing, and not just to the eyes.

She was not slouching out of sight, and it wasn’t just because she found the right suit for her body type, or because she had memories to make. She had a job to do, an important one, and she clearly found her work fulfilling enough that she could be at peace with herself and delight in her body’s ability to do its job well.

This is really the way that I prefer to think about it; indeed, though getting in the water and splashing with your kids is important, this it's the reason behind that reason. We're raising kids, and so everything we do teaches them how to be. If we want to teach them what their bodies are good for -- doing and being, as part of their human wholeness; not just appearing and seeming, and certainly not merely things to be used and abused; well, being ashamed of the appearance of our own is only going to teach the wrong lessons.

Too, being focused on the jobs you have to do and the joys you want to have is better than being hyperfocused on What People Will Think When They See Me.

More from Elizabeth:

The irony is, that when a woman of a certain body type or a certain age decides to get thin–I count myself here–you really do end up giving everything else up as your mental energy goes into counting calories, planning meals, and incorporating strategies to prevent yourself from eating. There are many hours spent in the gym, many hours spent working on self-image rather doing things of interest to yourself or of import to other people.

Not every woman who decides to get fit loses their perspective this way, but I certainly have, and I have corroborated my experiences with female friends. When I decide to be thin, I become a very boring person, a stressed out person, someone who only thinks about food and mentally scourges herself for mistakes made when eating.

You don’t usually get to have it both ways–you don’t get to be a skinny woman, and at the same time, a woman who’s happy to sit at a bar and drink pints with her husband. You don’t get to be someone who is fully invested in being thin, and at the same time finds herself interesting enough in her own right to forget occasionally her body and its tendency to grow fat when it’s having fun.

I can also corroborate this. The year that I achieved my big weight loss was a year of absolute concentration and obsession. It consumed almost all my attention. I don't regret it, and I have found the effort to be fruitful in more ways than one -- it was an achievement I had never thought possible, and it opened up all sorts of possibilities for me as well as leading to a lot of reflection on my identity. But it was so costly. Also, I was a very boring person for a whole year except to other people who were trying to lose weight. I feel a little bad for having sucked other people into my vortex of gluttony-shaming.

But I wasn't bored.

I wasn't bored because, to put it bluntly, I am a geek, and I can really get into that which bores other people. Whatever my project, I must love it and dig deeply into it, understand it and analyze it, take it apart and put it together in different ways. This is how I cook, how I gestate and give birth and care for babies, how I educate my kids, how I approach faith. My life is a little laboratory, and it's okay if the results are not repeatable by others because they're highly tailored to my own surroundings. The year that I lost all that damn extra weight and learned to be an athlete was the first year that my own body became the laboratory for the sake of itself.

(And I do call it "becoming an athlete" for a reason. I won't call it just "fitness," it was more than that, an identity crisis was involved. I wanted not just to appear thin, but to feel like Elizabeth's swim instructor, strong and capable.)

So I wasn't bored. And if my spouse was bored, he did a good job of hiding it. We sat at the bar and drank pints together -- only we split them, and he drank more deeply than I did, for that year.

We still share pints that way. And that's emblematic of the difference.

Some friends speculated that it was possible for me to temporarily prioritize becoming an athlete in a way that it might not have been for me today, had I put it off. I was six years younger, I had only three children. And maybe that's so.

But staying an athlete, even an amateur one only competitive against herself, is a priority -- not in competition with the priorities of raising my family and accompanying my husband, but in union with them.

I am married to a person who aspires to be always training for the next goal. His sports are downhill skiing and climbing (both rock and ice); seeing as how we live in the northern plains instead of the western mountains, he's never going to be able to find the time to do either of them frequently enough to excel at either, but he can always be training for his next trip so he can have more options and have more fun. And so he tries to get to the gym three times a week if he can. And so it's something we do together -- not so much the climbing (I have an old wrist injury) but the training. Neither of us has the time to train very well or thoroughly, but it's something we can talk about over those single shared pints.

And since he's a geek too, and also since training involves chemistry and physics that neither of us has ever mastered, we can talk about it over and over and over again. That's a lot of pints.

Athleticism of a certain individualistic type is a family value for us. (It runs in Mark's family of origin; his siblings and their spouses have been runners, mountain-bike and road-cycling racers, equestrians, and collegiate-level wrestlers, along with the occasional dabbling in climbing and downhill skiing.) We are working to pass it on to our kids. That priority meshes with our other family and marriage priorities, so it isn't in competition with them (although it has to be balanced with them: I have to teach and feed the children, and Mark has to go to work). I think this more than anything else is why the changes I made six years ago have remained permanent. They reinforce, and are reinforced by, the other good things I have in my life and want to keep.

_______

*Yeah, I couldn't stop myself from googling just to double check that "sector" was the correct geometrical term with respect to a piece of a sphere, as I knew it was for a circle. Although it isn't quite as satisfying because the arcs that define the sectors of a circle, being one-dimensional, perfectly tessellate the "surface" (i.e., the circumference) of the circle -- cf. pie charts -- but the domed spherical sectors by necessity have gaps between. Unless, of course, there are an infinite number of them in just the right distribution of volumes, much as you can fill a rectangular box perfectly with an infinite assortment of differently-sized spheres.**

 

**Yeah, I finished writing the footnote before I went on to write the rest of this post.

 

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Technology, productivity, and unemployment.

Interesting musing here at Engineering Ethics Blog.

The ways that people make a living today are very different from what they were a generation ago.  In 1970, Detroit was still a bustling manufacturing metropolis, thousands of women earned a decent living as telephone operators, and many newspapers provided employment to linotype operators who spent their days at the keyboard of a clunky pile of machinery that molded molten type metal into sticks.  Needless to say, you will have problems finding a manufacturing job in Detroit these days, and the other jobs are history too....

And we are by no means done...almost half of current U. S. jobs could eventually vanish as they are taken over by "computerisation."

What so often goes completely unmentioned in discussions of technological unemployment, is the question of anthropology: what is your model of the human being?  

I think the model that most secular economists and researchers use is something like this.  All life is basically economic in character, and the ultimate good in this life is a smoothly functioning economy, wherein everyone capable of contributing to it works to the best of their ability and receives in turn the material benefits of their work. That is a nice picture as far as it goes, but as a philosophy of life it's somewhat lacking.

For a completely different take on technological unemployment, you should read one of a number of works that were popular in the 1930s.  Even in the teeth of the Great Depression, writers such as C. C. Furnas in The Next Hundred Years went into optimistic technophilic raptures about how the increasing efficiency and productivity brought about by technological advances would let most people earn all the money they needed by working only one or two hours a day, leaving the rest of the time for leisure pursuits such as art appreciation and charitable work.  

We have certainly gone beyond Mr. Furnas's wildest dreams of increased productivity.  So what went wrong with his vision?

I'm not entirely sure, but one factor seems to be the social consensus of what kinds of work and lives are to be desired, and what kinds are to be disparaged.

 

Go ahead and read the whole thing.   I think he's correct about that social consensus, incidentally, but another piece of the puzzle is -- in my opinion -- the rise of the two-income (or n-income, where n is the number of adults) household in all economic classes.

That's just a link for thought this Monday morning.  See you later!

At your service.

A video detailing something I've never heard of that made my jaw drop.  The Atlantic Monthly headlined their short piece on it, "How 4,000 Men Hand-Deliver 175,000 Lunches Around Mumbai in One Day:"

Dabbawalla from The Perennial Plate on Vimeo.

“Dabbawalla” comes from the term "tiffin dabba," referring to a tiered lunch box and “walla,” a carrier or vendor. As Saritha Rai explains in The New York Times, India’s dabbawalla network originated during the British colonial occupation after cities were flooded with new, regional workers as a way to bridge the distance [both literally and figuratively] between their work sites and their homes. Each morning, after the recipient has gone to work, family members who remain at home (mothers, wives, grandmothers, and sisters) prepare a freshly-cooked meal to be picked up by a dabbawalla, sorted and distributed at railway stations, and hand-delivered to their loved one at the office.

Today, Mumbai is home to approximately 4,000 dabbawallas who deliver tens of thousands of lunches via an intricate, 125-year-old coding system without fail. 

The NYT article is here.

 

Darwin's liberal arts program.

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

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

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

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

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

+ + +

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MrsDarwin wrote in response to that comment,

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

+ + +

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review: The Mind at Work by Mike Rose.

I'm going to stay on the subject of vocational-oriented education vs. liberal-arts education long enough to post a review of a 2004 book I finished reading last night:  The Mind at Work:  Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker by Mike Rose.

This book is a quick read, not too scholarly, and full of anecdotes about the lives of working people:  waitresses, hairdressers, railroad men.  There are also those who teach future workers:  a woman who teaches welding at a trade school, a man who teaches high-school carpentry.  

I was prompted to read this book when I turned on NPR in the middle of an interview with the author on Weekend Edition.  It must have been a rerun, I guess, since the book was released eight years ago.   But I was drawn in by Mike Rose's description of interviewing his own mother at the kitchen table, inviting her to reminisce about her years as a waitress.

The work of Mike Rose's mother, uncle, and other relatives figure large in this book.   It's part family history and part social/educational essay.   Here are some of the themes:

(1) Calling attention to the mental work that so-called "low-skilled" jobs demand of their practitioners.  For instance, the waitress works for tips, so she can increase her income by honing her craft.  A good memory helps.  So do subtle manipulation skills, quick judgment about the priority of tasks, spatial sense, flexibility, and negotiation techniques.  The personal work histories that Rose uses to tell these stories are fascinating to read, a sort of glimpse behind the swinging door, for someone who's never waited tables or built one.

(2) Inviting the reader to look at these workers in a new way that demands more respect than we might be inclined to think.  Rose argues that many  wait staff act as individual entrepreneurs, and that a hairstylist  is a sort of creative consultant.  

(3) The sometimes arbitrary distinction between "skilled" and "semi-skilled" and "skilled" workers; the historical role of labor unions in creating this distinction, and how gender and class have been used to funnel young people into prescribed roles.  (Sometimes the funneling can be a mixed blessing for a group:  he writes that "Girls were channeled into clerical courses," but points out that these were successful in leading to employment.)  

(4)  The artificial separation between "hands-on" or "practical" education, and "academic" education.   There is an interesting part of the book where Rose looks at the work of surgeons; they have, of course, a very technical and practical job involving the skilled use of the hands, but enjoy a much higher status than most other "hand" workers.  It makes for a thought-provoking comparison with the carpenters and welders that make up the larger part of the book.

(5) The mixed bag that is vocational and technical education today.   Vo-tech education might provide a place where a young person, disliking classroom work, can learn to strive for excellence and discover his own self-worth; or it might be a place where young people are shunted too early and where expectations are kept low, and where the intellectual development of the young people on the "job-training track" is unfairly neglected.  Rose writes a bit about his own experiences with the differences between "academic" and "vocational" education (he began high school as a working-class kid on the vocational track, and later moved to the college prep track), but most of this story is told by examples from the teachers and kids that Rose observed in their learning environment.  

Here's an excerpt from the back, criticizing the VocEd system's separation from the academic realm by pointing out a situation where, literally, a student needed to be guided to "see something from the other side:"

...[T]here were no bridging mechanisms...to enable creative interaction, to foster cross-disciplinary discussion that could expand and enlighten, for example, the use of tools or the development of literacy.  I think here of something I saw...that crystallized this... I was watching [Mr. Butler, a teacher,] as he was guiding two of his students inserting windows into a house frame.

They have just placed an assembled window into its space in the frame.  They are looking it over, eyeballing the edges, checking it with a spirit level.  They're following procedure, and everything seems OK.  They're ready to fasten the window in place.  Mr. Butler...asks them to come here a moment, to walk with him around to the other side of the window, inside the house.  "Take a look from here," he says. The boys inspect the edge of the frame---and see the problem.   The plywood that forms the frame on this side of the window assembly has been cut unevenly, and at several places there is not enough wood to receive the nails that the boys were about to drive from the other side.  They are visibly struck by this, say they wouldn't have thought of this.  But, geez, now that they see it....

In many ways, this is a small thing...But it also could be thought of as a metaphor for the vocational-academic divide.  Though a routine move, and though utterly functional...this strategic shifting of physical location represented for me the shifting in perspective that is such a key element of intellectual development.  It contributes to the solving of problems in many domains, to a more complex understanding of human behavior, to adopting a point of view in literature and the arts.  A lot could emerge from this moment.  The day-to-day at the...job site was full of such episodes, and their cross-disciplinary potential was, for the most part, lost to the English teacher or the psychology teacher, sealed off by the physical and conceptual barriers in the curriculum. [emphasis mine]

The result is separate professional spheres, each narrowly defined.  And it is the academic curriculum, not the vocational, that has gotten identified as the place where intelligence is manifest.

I think this episode is a good one to pull out, particularly as Darwin and I continue our banter on the meaning, utility, and limits of the "liberal arts education."  The episode with the window -- thinking of a "shift in perspective" that is literal and using it to jump off and think of metaphorical shifts of perspective -- is pretty emblematic of how I like to say that my technical education serves me as a "liberal" education.  I have a toolbox of metaphors and allusions too:  mine contains concepts like Schroedinger's cat, "black boxes," diffusion, parallel and series, material and energy balances, instabilities, damping, deformation, boundary layers.  Problem-solving of all kinds.  I call on the mental associations linked to concepts like these every day.  

I think much of this book would be a good assignment for a high school student.  There is certainly material there that might encourage thoughtful consideration of one's future, but more importantly, I think the anecdotes serve to inculcate respect and admiration for the people whose work (often behind the scenes) contributes to our health, safety, leisure, and comfort.

The chapters on vocational education are probably worth reading for any educator -- including the homeschooler.  I have gotten so used to thinking of vocational education as a good solution to much of the education bubble's excesses, that I had forgotten to consider how it really plays out in real schools, where the "academic" and the "vocational" sphere are completely isolated from one another.   But in  the homeschool, we can round out the liberal arts education with a good dose of skills training, or we can make sure that our trades-minded children still receive a firm grounding in classical liberal arts.  We don't have to make the trade-offs that the institutional schools have had to make -- nor the mistakes they've chosen.

 

Unintended consequences.

One of the, shall we say, interdisciplinary topics I can really geek out about is unintended consequences.  

I first got interested in it with respect to engineering.  I like disasters.  No, I don't really mean that I like disasters, but they fascinate me.  I'm always grumpy with news coverage of bridges falling down and malfunctioning airplanes, because the news coverage always stops after it's done with all the human interest stories, and there's never a big fanfare when the NTSB comes out with their final report and explains why and how it all happened.  

Sometimes the cause of things falling down is a fairly uncomplicated error, triggered by the sudden application of unusual circumstances (like the 35W bridge collapse here in Minneapolis -- an underdesigned set of parts failed 30 years into the bridge's life during a massive resurfacing project which altered the loads on the bridge) or a perfect storm of errors (like the Gimli Glider story from 1983 that I linked to just a few days ago).  But I am particularly interested in bad things that result from good intentions:  unintended consequences.   

(Actually, the Gimli Glider story is a bit of an example of that:  the accident would not have happened had Canada not decided to convert to the metric system, which (one assumes) was a well-intentioned policy change.)

I have a good book on the topic of unintended engineering consequences somewhere here at home.  It's called Why Things Bite Back, which is all about technological fixes that create bigger problems than the ones they were intended to solve.  There are also a few examples among the case studies of failures in Henry Petroski's To Engineer is Human.

But I'm also interested in unintended consequences in law and policy, and unintended consequences in social engineering.  What put me in mind of these today was a post at the Volokh Conspiracy about the abuse of privacy law:

New Hampshire is one of about a dozen “all party consent” states.  The federal government and most states are “one party consent” jurisdictions, where recording is legal if one participant agrees to it. ... Recently, though, these laws have mainly protected the police, who’ve used the laws to arrest bystanders for making cell phone videos of police conduct.

Judging from the outrage such arrests have sparked, it’s safe to say that protecting police from public scrutiny is an unintended consequence of this privacy law. (As I’ve pointed out recently, that is not the only unintended consequence of all-party consent laws.  They’re also bad for computer security. In most states, I can hire someone to screen incoming messages for malware, and as long as I consent to the monitoring there’s no legal problem.  In all-party consent states, though, there’s a real risk that I need the consent of the malware sender before someone can screen his incoming message.)

...Privacy laws are largely efforts to regulate technology.  Some new technology comes along, and we don’t like some of the changes it is likely to bring.  The privacy campaigners tell us that we can keep the good parts of the technology and ban the bad.  So we adopt a new privacy law based on some principle that sounds good to us at the time. 

All-party consent laws, for example, responded to cheap taping equipment by adopting the principle that both parties should agree before their conversation is recorded.  It sounded good at the time; after all, wouldn’t any other rule encourage treachery? Then, gradually, cheap recording technology spread, and it became easier and easier to violate the law.  After a while, the principle that sounded so good a decade or two earlier began to seem a little artificial. Our internal privacy expectations had changed, but the law hadn’t.

Inevitably, violations of the law proliferated, to the point where the violations didn’t feel like wrongdoing.

When law-breaking is widespread and unapologetic, the authorities can pick and choose whom they prosecute.  Is it any surprise that they choose to prosecute people who inconvenience the authorities? Or that the laws end up being used to bolster the status quo? ...[H]aving laws on the books that are widely violated because they no longer fit our actual sense of right and wrong practically invites abuse by those in power.

The point of having laws is to punish, stigmatize, and prevent behavior that is widely accepted to be wrong, and to do so fairly.  Once a law is technically broken by lots of people, it is eventually only used by the powerful and privileged to punish people who threaten them.  If that isn't an unintended consequence I don't know what is.

It occurred to me I could use an "unintended consequences" category, so I'm creating one.