A CCCCC for me

Posted on October 12, 2015 by Andy

Well, I’ve made another course correction. After posting the list of measurement topics, the next step in my math relearning project was to collect and post links to online sources that discussed them so my readers could refer to them as they read my notes and I’d have less to write. So I started collecting. As usual, it was taking a depressingly long time. There were a lot of topics, and I was collecting too many sources per topic. I only wanted to spend a couple of days on it, not the week or more it was clearly going to take at that rate.

But while I was collecting links, I noticed something. Several of the resources I was finding were organized around the Common Core standards. I had read the math standards for grades K-8 a while back to get ideas for what my curriculum should cover and how I should order it, but after that I’d opted to try to streamline my studies. Common Core splits math into several domains, such as algebraic thinking, geometry, and measurement, and then covers most of them at every grade level. I wanted to try to clump the material together more to keep the presentation simpler. In the realm of pre-algebra I’d progress through number sense, measurement, geometry without calculations, the arithmetic operations, rational numbers, geometry that used arithmetic calculations, and basic statistics.

The trouble is that math is a complicated, interconnected subject, and while clumping is possible, it’s harder if you’re also trying to build math up gradually from its most basic concepts. And actually my plan was to cover the basics of each topic and then return to the topic in more depth periodically as I covered more advanced topics that related to it, so the clumping wasn’t going to be all that simple in the end. In any case, all of this takes a lot of thought and time, too much time for my purposes.

Well, the resources I was collecting brought my attention back to Common Core. Here was a program for math education that built up the concepts from the basics, and it was already being used to organize several sources’ teaching material. That’s a lot of thinking I wouldn’t have to do myself. After only a little wrestling with the question, I decided Common Core would be my new organizational scheme.

I wanted a single resource that would serve as my home base. I would read it to get the main ideas of each mathematical topic in a Common Core order, and I’d fill in the details with other research as needed. After some Amazon searching and a trip to the library, I settled on The Everything Parent’s Guide to Common Core Math Grades K-5 and the companion volume for grades 6-8. I ordered them. Then I, characteristically, did some more searching and, uncharacteristically, cancelled my order.

What did I find? It was this blog post by Crazy Crawfish, a parent who had tried to help his child with her math homework. In some ways it was a typical story of a confused parent complaining about the new way of teaching math. It was different in that it was more extensive, related the political background of the issue, and had a long comment section with some good discussion. It also had a lot of photos of the homework, which included the curriculum’s branding, a familiar name–EngageNY. EngageNY seemed to collect the new kinds of math instruction that perplexed parents. It was the kind of instruction I wanted to understand. It seemed like good place to start.

I’d run across EngageNY in my earlier searches and had noticed it included some downloadable lesson plans, but a second look revealed that it didn’t just have a few. It offered an entire P-12 Creative Commons Common Core curriculum! Thousands of pages of complete and well-organized course material available to download and use for free. I’d found my home base.

Common Core might have problems. It certainly has critics. I might examine the debate and write about it someday. But I don’t have kids with educations to worry about, and most of the criticisms don’t apply to my project, so it’ll be a while. As far as I can tell, Common Core is good enough for my needs.

I’m not sure what I’ll post for this reorganized project, maybe just my questions and random observations, but I’ll at least provide a list of the main sources I’ve found. That’ll be my next update. I’m especially looking for shorter treatments for people who don’t want to sift through a whole curriculum.

Before I get to the EngageNY curriculum, I’m reading the Common Core progression documents from Achieve the Core. They follow the development of each domain across the grades. These will give me an overview of the subject matter so I’ll know where I’m headed, and since they’re organized by domain, they’ll make it easier to see connections I might miss in the grade-oriented approach. The progressions are sort of what I was trying to accomplish in my clumping exercise. The progression documents are shorter than EngageNY, but it’s still a lot to read, around 280 pages. I’ll be on it for a few weeks. But at least it’s a few weeks on all of K-12 math and not only basic measurement. After that I might take a break from math to work on some of the projects I’ve been putting off.

Posted in Math relearning, Site updates | 4 Comments

Just a list of math words

Posted on September 28, 2015 by Andy

As recommended (by myself to myself), for the measurement chapter of my math relearning project I’ve posted a list of topics to cover (post-time version). It does have footnotes to help me find the topics in my main sources, but nothing more. It feels like enough for a post.

In addition to the reasons I mentioned last time, I’ve thought of another benefit to a breadth-first approach to projects like this one. I tend to lose perspective when I’m diving deeply into part of a topic. I get bogged down in the details and quickly feel like this is the most important topic in the world and I can take as much time as I need on it. Well it isn’t, and I can’t. Hopefully taking a broad view on a regular basis by treating the subject matter in layers will help me keep a sense of the relative importance of all the pieces.

Posted in Math relearning, Projects, Site updates, Writing | 1 Comment

Experimenting with iterative writing

Posted on September 18, 2015 by Andy

Okay, two problems. I’ve gotten bogged down in my math relearning project, and I haven’t been posting once a week like I’d hoped. I think I can make progress on both problems if I change the way I’m doing the project. The problem with it is that I’m trying for both breadth and depth, and I tend to take a depth-first approach to life. That means I try to cover everything I can about one topic before I move on to the next. It takes forever. I was hoping I could do one chapter every week or two, but for measurement it’s been over a month already.

When I’m honest with myself, breadth is more important to this project than depth, because I need to learn a bunch of math to accomplish my goals. I’ve been aiming for depth because understanding helps with memory and problem solving and because understanding the more basic concepts helps you understand the more advanced ones that are based on them. But beyond a certain point understanding math at a deep conceptual level is more of a bonus than a requirement.

So I want to try covering each section shallowly at first and then adding layers of depth in later iterations. That’ll let me cover more ground faster and let me post more often. Surveying what people have already written is quicker than figuring out what things mean and how they all fit together on my own. With the depth-first approach I have trouble knowing when I’ll feel done enough to post. For example, you’d think measurement would be a straightforward topic, but no, at this point I’m sure it would still be weeks before I thought my writing was in a postable state. One reason it takes all this time is that math is somewhat unfamiliar territory to me, so I have a lot of concepts to think through, and it’s tiring. Imagine excavating this large ant colony without the benefit of cement. The way I’m thinking through this project feels like that–delicate and time consuming. If I can break up that work over a longer time and make a lot of it optional, the project will feel more possible. Since I’d be moving faster through the material, I’d also feel freer to take breaks to address other projects. I’ve used a similar iterative approach before, but with math relearning it feels like a different level of challenge.

Another benefit of taking an iterating, breadth-first approach is that it’ll be more practice with the idea of sharing imperfect, incomplete work. That’s a trend these days, if you hadn’t noticed. I picked it up from agile software development a few years ago. Release early, release often. That means the software (or whatever) won’t have every feature you want right away, and it’ll have bugs. It’s not that completeness and perfection are bad. It’s that they can get in the way of accomplishing things when less is really good enough for the purposes of the work. It’s an interesting philosophy-of-life conflict though: Which is better, quality work or getting things done? Similarly I ask myself if I want my online work to represent final products and reflect professionalism or to represent processes and reflect personalism (or do I want professional processes or personal products?). Clearly I’m picking the personal process quadrant, for various reasons. But I’ll explore all that another time.

I’m thinking the iterations will look something like this, probably with some of these clumped together:

  1. A list of topics to cover
  2. A list of references for further reading (sources for the list and results of searching with the list’s terms)
  3. A list of objectives for skills and maybe knowledge
  4. Headings from the topic list in somewhat random order with a sentence or two to summarize or introduce each section
  5. A list of open questions
  6. A full discussion for each section with footnotes (can be posted one at a time)
  7. The sections reordered more logically
  8. Revised section texts to reflect the new order (and whatever other changes I think of)
Posted in Math relearning, Productivity, Projects, Site updates, Writing | 2 Comments

Back to math

Posted on August 10, 2015 by Andy

After a long detour, I have finally returned to what I consider my main project these days, relearning math. The latest phase still dealt with meta-issues, some fundamental features of math that will probably come up repeatedly through the rest of the project. Hopefully once I get into actual mathematical operations, I can move more quickly. Here are the updates:

Next I’ll finish the section on numeration systems in Number Sense and then move on to Measurement.

Posted in Math relearning, Site updates | 2 Comments

Words are magic

Posted on July 11, 2015 by Andy

Here’s something I just wrote in my journal, lightly edited for blog purposes. I’m posting it because I thought it was an interesting idea that I could share easily (not too complicated or personal), and sometimes I like to see how people work, so I thought I would do a bit to return the favor. Also it would raise my post count for this week. 🙂

Working on an ebook about parenting yesterday got me thinking again about ways to respond to people, in this case sanctimonious people like potentially the hypothetical parent in the book. Later I was thinking about group discussions, especially among people who strongly disagree. I started thinking of them as a puzzle, possibly some kind of graph problem. I was possibly thinking of them along the lines of Tall’s knowledge structures, since I’ve been trying to wrap my head around his theory of math thinking.

The common thread between these two trains of thought was that I was looking for the right words and attitudes to convey to the other people that would make the situation work, bring it to the goal I wanted. It brought up a thought that’s crossed my mind before, that words are magic. This time I’m expanding it to all communication, since I’m seeing the relevance of nonverbal messages. But for brevity I’ll let words stand for all of it, or I’ll use the word messages.

Words affect other people. They can even affect the speaker. If I’m unclear on something or unsure of it, articulating it can make me clearer or more sure. Or it makes it clearer to me how plausible I find the ideas I’m articulating. Maybe I feel conflicted about saying the words, and so I find I don’t believe them at all. Words can also lead me into the emotional state surrounding the words I’m saying, like when you tell a story and you get wrapped up in it.

So whenever you speak, or even whenever you’re visible to someone else, you can think of all your verbal and nonverbal messages as magic spells you’re casting on the other people. They may be strong or weak, but they’re all having some effect.

Now, these message spells can be counteracted by messages from other people. You can have message battles and picture them like wizard battles in Harry Potter. Maybe someone tries to control you with their imperiousness and you counteract it with your own imperiousness. Now that would be fun to watch. 😉

It occurs to me that the idea of message spells and battles would be a good way to design scenes in a story. Who’s trying to influence who how, and how is that influence working or being fought against?

Posted in Communication, Journal entry, Writing | 2 Comments

Hypnosis and Immanuel prayer

Posted on July 8, 2015 by Andy

For several years I listened to a lot of recordings of hypnosis inductions. I wasn’t trying to be hypnotized, and I rarely followed the instructions–I just found them relaxing. But as I listened, I learned a bit about what hypnosis was for and how it worked.

A few years after I started listening to those, I got involved in learning and practicing a couple of prayer ministries: Theophostic first and then Immanuel. These were facilitated conversational prayer methods that helped people find emotional healing.

At some point I noticed that these prayer ministries looked a lot like the hypnosis sessions I was listening to. They seemed to overlap on some central features, such as a state of deep concentration. I felt vindicated in this observation when after one Immanuel session she facilitated, our trainer noted that the recipient’s dazed demeanor was because Immanuel prayer is an altered state of consciousness.

So I decided to read a hypnosis textbook based on academic research and find out the real scoop on what hypnosis is, what it does, and how it’s done. I had two purposes. One was to examine the overlap between hypnosis and mindfulness meditation so I could learn how to concentrate better. And the other was to compare hypnosis to Immanuel prayer to see what Immanuel practitioners might learn from it. Immanuel prayer is a work in progress, and if it shares important features with a field as extensively researched as hypnosis, that sounds to me like an opportunity to develop the ministry further.

I’ve posted the results of my analysis on the wiki here: Hypnosis and Immanuel Prayer. It’s sort of a rough draft. I skipped over some issues that deserve attention, I hardly cite any Immanuel references, and it could use some editing. But other projects are calling for me, and hopefully the article will be enough to get someone in the Immanuel world interested in looking into the issue.

Posted in General | 2 Comments

Weird things are fun

Posted on June 26, 2015 by Andy

While I’m finishing up my current main project, I thought I’d post something about a side interest. Every once in a while I go through a phase where I learn about a bunch of weird things. It’s usually the paranormal, but I also include more normal categories that I just find strange, such as undeciphered codes. It had been a long time since one of these phases had come around, but I’ve had a couple in the last month or two.

So on the wiki I’ve started a list of some of my favorite weird things. It’ll grow over time. This list is specifically for historical or pseudoscientific weird things that people claim to be true. It’s not for religious or philosophical weirdness or for speculative fiction. I’ll make other lists for those sometime later. Even if you’re not into the paranormal or conspiracy theories, there are plenty of regular mysteries on the list that might interest you. I even put them first. So take a look. I promise your sanity won’t dissolve … right away.

Posted in Site updates, Weird stuff | 5 Comments

On Caring

Posted on June 3, 2015 by Andy

Over the past few years I’ve watched my social skills decline from neglect, and I’ve decided that this year I want to start reversing that course. But I want to do it in the context of a larger project that’s been on my mind, a study of the nature and methods of care. That includes topics like listening, hospitality, etiquette, condolence, love languages, Nonviolent Communication, and any other practice that expresses a concern for the well-being of other people. Way too ambitious, like most of my projects, but I at least want to start exploring that territory.

For my first steps down this path, I read a little book with big ideas called On Caring by Milton Mayeroff. I didn’t want to spend months on it at this point, so I just wrote a summary and put it here (here’s the version from the time of this post, if the article has changed a lot by the time you read this). If that looks interesting, maybe you’ll want to pick up the book. It’s only 100 pages, though it’s the kind of book you’ll want to read slowly.

Meanwhile, as usual, other projects have been pushing their way up my priority list, and I will immediately be dropping this project for those. I’ll come back to it later. That’s just how things go with me.

Posted in Caring, Projects, Site updates | 2 Comments

Death and life as usual

Posted on May 30, 2015 by Andy

I watch a lot of YouTube videos. They’re mostly Let’s Plays, footage of video games being played while the player talks. I let the videos run in the background while I do other things. It’s my version of listening to talk radio while I work.

One of the Let’s Players I used to watch went by the name of SlainMagic. His real name was Alex. He was British and mainly played Minecraft. I liked listening to him horse around with his friends, and I admired the organized way he ran his channel. It was one of my inspirations for getting back to work on my site last year.

Around the middle of last year he quit YouTube to concentrate on school. Fortunately, he left his channel up with all its videos so people could still watch them. I was sorry to see him go, but his reasons were good, and he still posted on Twitter here and there, so to a degree he was still around.

But a few weeks ago I was catching up on one of his friend’s videos, and at the start of his latest, he told us that Slain had died in a skiing accident. Disturbed, I paused the video and did a search, and it seems it’s true. It happened in early March. I found tribute videos with comments that explained the situation (“Remember Slain Magic, R.I.P” and “#RememberSlain,” and the related videos include others), then later some messages on Twitter. In these posts I saw a mix of sorrow, affection, acceptance, and even a kind of hope.

I felt sad, though somewhat distantly. I’d interacted with him a little through YouTube and Twitter, but I didn’t know him very well. For all my positive regard, I considered him an Internet acquaintance. Still, especially in the first couple of weeks, his death invaded my thoughts at random times. I felt bad for his family. I can barely imagine having a family vacation turn so abruptly to tragedy. And I felt bad for him. The violence of his death weighed on me, and his life was so short–17 years. Occasionally I do feel tears welling up.

Even though I was an ocean away, and I only barely knew him, and almost no one I know has watched even one Let’s Play, somehow it felt wrong to let my life go on normally when something this wrong has happened in it. I wanted to post something to tell the story so someone I knew would know. Sometimes someone just needs to know.

* * *

If this were a eulogy, I would stop there. Sometimes a life that has ended deserves to stand on its own without extra commentary. (A eulogy would also be more about Alex and less about me.) But a main purpose of my site is to let me think out loud about the parts of life that confuse me, so I have more to say.

In spite of this event and my feelings about it, my life goes on. I work, watch TV, read comics, laugh with my friends. I’ve posted something on this before. But especially in the week or two after I learned about it, whenever I thought about Alex, I wondered if life as usual is really allowed.

This happens whenever life hits me with a personal tragedy or a deeply felt problem. I look at the bad that I feel in contrast with the good I felt before, and I land on the same question: Joy or pain–which is more real? This is another way of asking a more practical one: Given that bad things have happened and they can’t unhappen, is there a reason I shouldn’t give them all my attention for the rest of my life? I always have the sense that the happiness I felt before was a veneer I layered onto life. It was based on an illusion that nothing too bad was happening or would happen. Then the problems broke through that layer and went on to strip it all away. This feeling is accompanied by a sense that the goal of life is a state of utopia, and so if any problems arise that interfere with that state, eliminating them becomes the highest priority.

But I think my choice of words in that first question isn’t quite right. I’m not really comparing pain and joy. I’m comparing pain and ease. In ease I’m including everything that makes life feel light, whether in a fun sense or a restful one. The answer seems obvious at first glance. My veneer-of-happiness image is correct, and pain is more important and lasting than ease. Pain sinks to ground level, where we live, and it pushes ease to the upper reaches of the atmosphere, out of our grasp.

But the past few years have given me a different answer. When we introduce the twin emotions of actual, deep joy and rest into the picture, the contest has a new winner. We can call this new molecule of emotion well-being, though I’ll call it joy for short. It’s like oxygen. Unlike the helium of ease, it descends to our level, and while it doesn’t completely displace the carbon dioxide of pain, it makes the air breathable.

How do we access this well-being? I think a simple starting point is gratitude over the things in life that are good, especially the life-giving parts of our relationships with other people and with God. Along with gratitude we can intentionally spend time with those good things so we’ll have more experiences to appreciate and so those experiences will be recent. I think nature and people are especially good choices, things that are deeply real and supportive. Being in the middle of those good experiences can give us space to be ourselves without the fear of rejection. That means we can do the grieving we need and process our pain until we can make sense of it enough to keep living.

What does this say for ease or even the mundane activities of life as usual? Do they still have a place in a world of such weighty pain? I think they do. This question becomes more complicated the more I consider it, but I’ll save the detailed analysis for a later essay and give you my basic thoughts so far.

My first thought is that joy, pain, and ease all relate to each other, so ease isn’t an extra thing that’s out of place in life. First, ease is the goal of grieving, to a certain extent. The pain of a loss never completely leaves, but over time it recedes enough that life can go on more freely. Second, ease and joy support each other. You can draw on the small enjoyments of life to exercise gratitude and build joy, and joy counteracts pain enough that you can forget about pain from time to time and enjoy life’s more superficial pleasures. Third, ease eases pain. It gives you a break that can give you space to breathe and recover a bit and maybe gain a new perspective on what’s troubling you. It’s like taking a hot air balloon ride to feel the exhilaration of flight and look at the ground from the sky for a while. Fourth, pain can enhance joy. Part of your enjoyment of life’s good things might come from the fact that other parts of life aren’t going well, making the parts that are better more precious, or the fact that you didn’t have this good thing before, and now you do. It’s true that this relationship between pain and joy can be twisted into something harmful, but I think that done right, the relationship can be beneficial.

My second thought is that given that everyone encounters both joyful and painful events, a healthy and caring perspective on life will involve being in touch with both pain and joy and addressing them in appropriate contexts. Actively ignoring one or the other would have some harmful side effects. For yourself, it clearly doesn’t help to live in pain all the time, and it also doesn’t help to deny that painful things have happened to you. And for other people you interact with, it’s at best thoughtless to ignore their pain or joy (unless your pain is greater). A much better approach is attunement, joining people in their joy and pain in a way that strengthens both them and your relationship with them.

Societies have ritualized some of our expressions of pain and joy to give them a definite time and space–funerals, weddings, anniversaries, and so on. They’re like niches in the walls of life in which we put shrines to its important events. But they don’t cover everything, and people are free to create their own practices to attend to joy and pain. For my part, I’ve written this post, and I’ve started a list of people in my life who have died. That way I can look at it every once in a while and remember the place they had in my life and in the lives of others who cared for them.

I’m planning to think and write a lot more about these and related issues when I do my caring and coping projects, which will have many phases and subtopics. That will probably be the subject of my next post.

Posted in Caring, Coping, Death, Life Model, Life updates, Projects | 4 Comments

Pregnancy is weird

Posted on May 10, 2015 by Andy

Until it happened to one of my friends in college, I didn’t think much about pregnancy. Before then the most I did think about it was the two other times my mom was pregnant, and then I was just looking forward to having a new person in the family. After that I only had occasional contact with pregnant women. But in college, I was around my friend more often, so it gave me more chances to ponder it. And what I remember observing is that pregnancy is a really bizarre idea.

Most of the time when we encounter another person, we know we’re addressing one person. But when that person is pregnant, we have to throw out that assumption, because no: The person we are confronted with is in fact enveloping a whole other person.

Now, you could argue that pregnancy is not weird because it happens to millions of people every day and is necessary for the survival of our species. But I would reply that just because something is common and essential doesn’t mean it isn’t weird. Weirdness comes from taking one state of affairs to be normal that’s different in some fundamental way from the weird one. In this case the normal condition is having one person contained in one body. The weird one is having more than one person in a body.

I think that most people secretly know that pregnancy is weird, because with only some small changes, the idea of two people in one body can be used in a narrative for dramatic effect, usually to disturb the audience. For instance, when the extra person (or creature) is a murderous parasite or when it has a fully developed mind of its own, especially when it’s hostile.

As much as I would like to believe my emotions reflect the objective truth about life, I grudgingly admit it’s important to note that weirdness is completely subjective and relative. Something feels normal to you when you’re used to it and comfortable with it and maybe you take it for granted. With enough imagination and effort, you can probably get yourself to see anything as normal or as strange. For an easy example, if you pick any word in your native language and say it many times in a row, it’ll temporarily lose its meaning for you and seem like merely a strange clump of sounds. And if you’re exposed over and over to something that’s outside what you’re used to, over time it can feel normal.

This is especially important because sometimes people’s everyday lives will seem weird to you, but you have to treat them like they’re not. Take conjoined twins. Some people in real life share part of a body long term, and these people should be shown the same care and respect as every other person. It’s worth the effort to learn to see them as normal, or at least not the kind of strange that would lead you to mistreat or neglect them.

Along those lines I would like to point out that weird doesn’t always mean “bad.” Weirdness usually comes with some other quality. I see the strangeness of pregnancy as a funny type of weird–interesting and kind of surprising but harmless and even good. Those science fiction examples were a creepy weird–you might feel threatened by them. And sometimes the weirdness is wondrous, such as most things that happen in astronomy and theoretical physics. I think a little of that kind shows up in pregnancy too.

All of which is to say, happy Mother’s Day!

Posted in Holidays, Thought, Weird stuff | 6 Comments