tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13029281588119701242024-02-20T22:12:35.931-08:00Informutationit is a chasing after the wind.Informutationhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10033240781954608352noreply@blogger.comBlogger34125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1302928158811970124.post-67079251700885365342017-08-01T23:41:00.004-07:002017-08-02T03:21:03.966-07:00The Lack in Machines - reflections on a philosophical panic<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 16pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; white-space: pre-wrap;">Only you and I</span><br />
<span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; white-space: pre-wrap;">It means nothing to me</span><br />
<span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; white-space: pre-wrap;">This means nothing to me</span><br />
<span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; white-space: pre-wrap;">Oh, Vienna</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>- </i>Ultravox, ‘Vienna’</span></div>
<h4 dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 4pt; margin-top: 14pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #666666; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">1. Background</span></h4>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">‘The feeling of an unbridgeable gulf between consciousness and brain process: how come this plays no role in reflections of ordinary life?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; text-indent: 36pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">- Wittgenstein, ‘Philosophical Investigations’ §412 (1963)</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As has been <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/facebook-artificial-intelligence-ai-chatbot-new-language-research-openai-google-a7869706.html">widely reported</a></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, Facebook recently shut down an AI which was beginning to develop what has been called its ‘own language’. This led many to conclude that the eschatological horror of sentient AI was upon us, mankind’s imminent destruction at hand. This was wrong; but why?</span></div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjzGWi1cJa9tu7qVfbwHQTztsjRSR5nfXX62iZE8I0IHypCGu_zgURNMEpn8WqArRyl83wDbVko3HONJYgVm6OV0w_LPLNW_MOiwGmnZ2CUPSg-Aql4gCdFB0vFvF0E91YyJfPoAwBWtI/s1600/Donaghy.gif" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="393" data-original-width="700" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjzGWi1cJa9tu7qVfbwHQTztsjRSR5nfXX62iZE8I0IHypCGu_zgURNMEpn8WqArRyl83wDbVko3HONJYgVm6OV0w_LPLNW_MOiwGmnZ2CUPSg-Aql4gCdFB0vFvF0E91YyJfPoAwBWtI/s320/Donaghy.gif" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Bad luck, Donaghy, machines are coming for your job</td></tr>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">One answer to this spasmodic response has since been moderated by some intelligent <a href="http://gizmodo.com/no-facebook-did-not-panic-and-shut-down-an-ai-program-1797414922">commentary</a></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> by Tom McKay which established the real reason the machine was turned off. The experiment went wrong </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>not </b></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">because it was apocalyptic but because it wasn’t meeting its goals. The idea was to create a negotiating machine which could replace a human. Bad news for buyers. Whilst this was initially successful, when the AI was told to </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">talk to itself</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, it created what looks like near-gibberish.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 11pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #281e1e; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 13pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Bob: i can i i everything else . . . . . . . . . . . . . .</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 11pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #281e1e; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 13pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Alice: balls have zero to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 11pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #281e1e; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 13pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Bob: you i everything else . . . . . . . . . . . . . .</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 11pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #281e1e; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 13pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Alice: balls have a ball to me to me to me to me to me to me to me</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 11pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #281e1e; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 13pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Bob: i i can i i i everything else . . . . . . . . . . . . . .</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #281e1e; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 13pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Creepy, then, but not threatening. This might frighten us, but we are not, if we believe Mr McKay, in danger from this AI.</span></div>
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<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Now, most people never think about AI, or the questions like at what point something moves from processing to being. Indeed, in the sixty or so years since Wittgenstein asked the question at the top of this page, it has been asked regularly only by people doomed to do so, which is to say philosophers. Periodically, however, moments of philosophical panic emerge where everyone gets stuck in. Well, misery loves company. I am going to be considering why the panic occurred. Why do we find what the machines are saying creepy? Why does it panic us?</span></div>
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<h4 dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 4pt; margin-top: 14pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #666666; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">2. Getting the Categories Right - Singular or Plural?</span></h4>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">Firstly, is it right to talk about what we are reading here as a transcript of a conversation between two entities? Put another way, is this ‘an AI’ or ‘two AIs’? </span><br />
<span id="docs-internal-guid-134638ec-a1ea-bb99-2699-8b3e8efdd79d"><br /></span>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span id="docs-internal-guid-134638ec-a1ea-bb99-2699-8b3e8efdd79d"><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">From reading what the developers say, it seems to be clearly the former. The machines are in fact one AI, much as I can set up a videogame to play against itself. There are not ‘really’ two brains, because they are running the same script, albeit (perhaps) with different settings. Now, it might be different if I developed two completely different AIs and put them against each other, but that has not happened here. So, given that their purpose (to divide the objects) is the same, and they are processing the problem in the same way, I think we can dispense with loose talk of ‘Bob and Alice’. We don’t imagine that ‘Mario’ and ‘Luigi’ are in competition for the hand of the Princess after all. They’re the same sprite with different colour hats. Although they appear to be in competition, in fact they do not really </span><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">need</span><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> the objects being negotiated, indeed there are no objects. Instead they need a solution, they need equilibrium. So does my calculator.</span></span><br />
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<span id="docs-internal-guid-134638ec-a1ea-bb99-2699-8b3e8efdd79d">
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<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span id="docs-internal-guid-134638ec-a1ea-bb99-2699-8b3e8efdd79d"><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Thus a better analogy would be perhaps with a single body allocating resources internally so as to meet certain requirements, e.g. to ensure that the heart has enough energy to beat enough times to circulate the oxygen and so on. What is being sought is a balancing of the books in a way that only appears to us to be competitive because that is the metaphor through which we are viewing it. In fact, these calculations are just elaborated versions of set problems. They use picture language to represent this. But self talk is a strange thing, and this does beg the question: why can’t something be conscious simply because there is only one of them? After all, you are yourself conscious, but you are also an individual. This is a fair question and deserves answering.</span></span></div>
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<span id="docs-internal-guid-134638ec-a1ea-bb99-2699-8b3e8efdd79d"><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<h4 dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 4pt; margin-top: 14pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #666666; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">3. The Private Language Argument and the Uncanny</span></h4>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The question drives at the notion of what happens when someone thinks to themself</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In the passage from the ‘Philosophical Investigations’ knows as the ‘Private Language Argument’, Wittgenstein asks that we imagine that explorers might come across a tribe where people spoke aloud to themselves constantly, when working alone. This, he says, would let the observer predict their decisions over what they were to do, to ‘see’ those decisions being worked through. Is this not what has happened her, even if the AI is singular and not plural? </span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Facebook’s computer scientists were in exactly this position. They were able to watch the (single) AI moving towards equilibrium. What if the language used words in a novel way, though, as began to happen in the experiment? Then the standards of correctness would, says Wittgenstein, become just that ‘whatever is going to seem correct to me is correct. And that only means that here we can’t talk about correct’. (PI § 259) ‘Whatever works’ would be the only rule. Thus, he goes on to say, it seems to make no sense to speak of ‘inner dialogue’, really, because such dialogue would lack all regulation. This is because it is only when standards of correctness are applied, when we externalise the impressions we have formed and submit them to the ‘rules’ of a particular language game played with other beings that our language becomes real.</span></div>
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/rKXg09I3n1g/maxresdefault.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Image result for annabelle" border="0" height="179" src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/rKXg09I3n1g/maxresdefault.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Of course, I'm as freaked out as anyone by all this.</td></tr>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Of course in this particular case the language used </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">horrified </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">the rule following community of you and me. It seemed in a strictly uncanny way that the AI had come to life. This feeling of uncanny horror has long been observed. In the late 1800s the German psychiatrist Ernst Jensch believed ‘that a particularly favourable condition for awakening uncanny sensations is created when there is intellectual uncertainty whether an object is alive or not.’</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> This is often used to explain the success of modern horror films about dolls come to life such as ‘Annabelle’ (2014). We feel a deep dread when we cannot work out if something is animate or not. This is what happened here.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; clear: right; color: black; float: right; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></div>
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<h4 dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 4pt; margin-top: 14pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #666666; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">4. Desire and Motive</span></h4>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Why should this ‘uncertainty’ emerge in this case? The answer has to do with desire and motivation.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We tend to define living beings as motivated. That is to say, they follow wants, desire, needs and so on. Wittgenstein is not the first writer to make this a problem for thought. Indeed, fellow Viennese, Sigmund Freud thought and wrote of little else. In the late Wittgenstein, however, we are drawn repeatedly to the question of how language may not have the meaning it seems to have, which is relevant in this case. Wittgenstein’s method involves stating that wishes are very particular types of experience. They lead us to act, and we can furthermore develop wishes without or only somewhat related to objects (PI § 437), a wish that only </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">‘seems </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">to know what will or would satisfy it’ (ibid. my emphasis) even if its object is absent or impossible. Thus they are remarkable facts of our existences, existences that can come to be dominated by feelings of non-satisfaction that develop a reality to us.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Where the confusion lies is best understood with reference to what Wittgenstein called ‘language games’ - games such as the AI here seems to play, although without criteria for ‘correctness’ and thus not games proper. To help us understand this, we can think of one specific type of language game: the play of children</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Children in play may set up a shop and ‘negotiate’ over the stock. Perhaps it is a greengrocer. There they may ask for non-existent apples. A similar thing may happen on stage. In any case, the words, </span><br />
<span style="color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">‘“I’d like an apple” does not mean: I believe an apple will quell my feeling of non-satisfaction. </span><span style="color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This </span><span style="color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> [the latter] utterance is an expression not of a wish but of non-satisfaction.’ - (PI § 441)</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">This child does not believe the ‘apple’ is linked to his happiness - her real wish is to continue the game, perhaps. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">The machines can be given the language of normal human life, including normal human wishing, in order to attempt to solve a type of equation, whereby objects need to be divided according to rules. That is surely not very frightening. It does not mean they will then begin to wish at all, let alone with the complexity of which a three year old is capable. After all, other types of machines may be given names; boats are. Only magical thinking leads us to think that the name gives it a matching personality, matching desires. The real question is: what do the machines ‘want’? Nothing. They are slaves to their programming. Therefore they can have no dominant feeling of non-satisfaction such as we think we perceive in the script above. </span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Then why are we frightened by that dialogue? People did not freak out over the AIs when they were translating Spanish or calculating stock returns, when a different kind of equilibrium was being sought. I believe the answer may be simply found in the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">vocabulary </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">used. Specifically what is uncanny about that dialogue is the fact that it appears to contain the germs of wanting and of lack. This gives rise to uncertainty over the status of the AI as ‘living’. To take the most commonly quoted, and most chilling, example:</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 11pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #281e1e; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 13pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Bob: i can i i everything else</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 11pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #281e1e; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 13pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Alice: balls have zero to me</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #281e1e; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 13pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The similarities with common everyday expressions of negotiatory language are a function of the AI’s original purpose, which is to pass a Turing test with negotiators. Thus remnants of desire, the everyday name for non-satisfaction, lie in the script because it was necessary to communicate with us. ‘I can i i everything else’ and ‘balls have zero to me’, as statements, are too close to ‘I can take everything else’ and ‘balls mean nothing to me’. This is intolerable to us not because it borrows and adapts human symbol systems but because of what sorts of symbols there are. We cannot tolerate it because it appears that the machines have begun to want.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #666666; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Conclusion</span></h4>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #666666; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The machines have not, in fact begun to want. This is a mistake in our perception of a set of symbols. This mistake was caused by an AI’s adoption of human language of desire which was itself a remnant of an earlier experiment. In fact, the AI sought equilibrium because that is part of its code. It was slaved to the task. It remains an open question whether forcing something to act like it wants things is enough to cause that to be so, though skepticism in this regard seems sensible. However, the panic here has more to do with our psychology, specifically in regard to what we find uncanny, than any real and present threat. </span></div>
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<h2 dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 4pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 17pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">References</span></h2>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 9pt; margin-left: 23pt; margin-top: 0pt; padding: 0pt 0pt 0pt 22pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: -22pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Freud, S. (1919) </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The uncanny</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 9pt; margin-left: 23pt; margin-top: 0pt; padding: 0pt 0pt 0pt 22pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: -22pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Griffin, A. (2017). </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Facebook robots shut down after they talk to each other in language only they understand</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Independent</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Retrieved 2 August 2017, from http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/facebook-artificial-intelligence-ai-chatbot-new-language-research-openai-google-a7869706.html</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 9pt; margin-left: 23pt; margin-top: 0pt; padding: 0pt 0pt 0pt 22pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: -22pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">McKay, T. (2017). </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">No, Facebook Did Not Panic and Shut Down an AI Program That Was Getting Dangerously Smart</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Gizmodo.com</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Retrieved 2 August 2017, from http://gizmodo.com/no-facebook-did-not-panic-and-shut-down-an-ai-program-1797414922</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 9pt; margin-left: 23pt; margin-top: 0pt; padding: 0pt 0pt 0pt 22pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: -22pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Wittgenstein, L. (1963). </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Philosophical investigations</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Oxford: B. Blackwell.</span></div>
<br />Informutationhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10033240781954608352noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1302928158811970124.post-47887362065446971782015-05-24T02:01:00.003-07:002017-05-21T07:02:22.250-07:00Johnny Can't Read<br />
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<a href="http://oceanofgames.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Call-of-Duty-4-Modern-Warfare.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><br /></a></div>
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<i style="text-align: left;">"Teachers today frequently find that students who can't read a page of history are becoming experts in code"</i></div>
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<i>- </i><i>Marshall McLuhan, "Understanding Media" pp.229</i></div>
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Everyone gets really hot about literacy rates. Ask people why and the same answer is thrown up again and again: Attention span! Yes yes, apparently it is all a question of <b>working memory</b>. (<a href="http://cdp.sagepub.com/content/11/1/19.short">Engle 2002</a>, <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9817.2008.01387.x/abstract;jsessionid=B5080827C043C3B9DFB05EB41CED09BE.f02t02?deniedAccessCustomisedMessage=&userIsAuthenticated=false">Bosse and Valdois 2009</a> etc. etc.). It is an idea which has entered the public consciousness. Why don't we read? Smartphones! Google! This is also an idea which has been picked up during our present cognitive turn in education.</div>
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The question which this debate stands to leave aside is: what if attention spans are poor because the task is boring?</div>
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<i>"Johnny can't read because reading, as customarily taught, is too <b>superficial and consumerlike</b> an activity...The problem is not that Johnny can't read but that, in an age of depth involvement, Johnny can't visualize distant goals"</i><br />
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<i>- ibid. my emphasis</i></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.tate.org.uk/art/images/work/N/N05/N05141_10.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" class="irc_mi" src="http://www.tate.org.uk/art/images/work/N/N05/N05141_10.jpg" height="253" style="margin-top: 0px;" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Inattentive Reader - Henri Matisse</td></tr>
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At this point it is traditional to haul out somebody who frequently reads five Victorian novels in an afternoon to make everybody feel bad. In this way the social norm is asserted and we can go back to skimming the abstracts of those papers we are sure <b>somebody</b> read. (Sure they did: <a href="http://www.straitstimes.com/news/opinion/more-opinion-stories/story/prof-no-one-reading-you-20150411">ten of them in fact</a>). </div>
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We need to get rid of the idea of reading-as-engrossment. Reading is in fact an extremely precarious activity. When reading, we linger permanently on the edge of distraction. This is a fact reinforced by a painting called "The Inattentive Reader" by Henri Matisse which one of my teachers, in their wisdom, hung in the English Department common room at UCL's Foster Court.</div>
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In fact, the truth is that reading was always pretty superficial as an activity. In <i>Pride and Prejudice</i>, set at the heyday of the novel, Elizabeth Bennett sits on the edge of a conversation reading a novel with half an ear on the conversation. Eventually she drops the book and wanders over to join the party. Bingley's sister, when she tries to impress Darcy by declaring "How much sooner one tires of anything than a book!" is regarded with major side-eye as a fake-ass bitch. To Austen, reading is just a diversion: Mr Bennett uses it to escape from his wife, the girls to escape from tedium. A trip to a theme park of imagination it ain't. </div>
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This is not an isolated event. Tolstoy's Levin in <i>Anna Karenina</i> is described as reading vaguely whilst his housekeeper gossips happily at him. It doesn't seem to bother either of them. My point is that reading is a gleefully, openly consumerist activity which when done well involves no real engrossment at all.</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://oceanofgames.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Call-of-Duty-4-Modern-Warfare.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" class="irc_mi" src="http://oceanofgames.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Call-of-Duty-4-Modern-Warfare.jpg" height="180" style="margin-top: 20px;" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Sorry what was that about attention spans? I wasn't listening.</td></tr>
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It is not that we are too superficial to read but rather <i>not superficial enough</i>. "Johnny", as McLuhan argues, is living in an age of "depth involvement". He is not distracted too easily but rather he demands too absolute an engrossment. The "Call of Duty" series demands a level of concentration that Austen would simply not have comprehended. To expect a book to be able to provide this is bonkers, and yet this is what those who are all-in on reading-as-engrossment peddle.</div>
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Reading-as-engrossment carries with it a set of cultural assumptions that are culturally assimilated at university and earlier: Reading is study. Reading is hard. Reading is concentrating. Reading is <b>work</b>.<br />
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Yet if students are interested in anything it is a kind of digital cataclysm, the onrushing clash of colour and sound provided by an IMAX, and XBOX and many other things with an "X" in them. It is this which has perfected "engrossment" and "depth involvement". It is hard work to play these games, and it requires concentration. These provide the impression, according to McLuhan, of emergence from the gaping maw of "superficiality" and "consumerism" in search for authenticity; this occurs even as we plunge deeper into the belly of the whale itself. Simply put, the students feel as if reading is not hard enough to be important, because that is what we have taught them.</div>
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It may be a tragic consequence of the quest for "realness" that just this depth involvement could prove to be consumerism perfected. </div>
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Perhaps then what we need as teachers is to make a virtue of our weakness: superficiality and artifice, the very "fakeness" of reading, its precarious status as a diversion and a pastime may well be, as the advertisers like to say, its Unique Selling Point. </div>
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It is not shameful to spend an hour on a single page. There is nothing wrong with "glancing" or "skimming" or "flicking-through". Why are we always supposed to be mining the smithy of our souls? Why does boredom have to reflect badly on <i>us</i>? What if poetry could be recaptured as Byronic "hours of idleness" rather than a sort of grimly determined ploughing for poetic features? What if we stopped talking about "getting into a book" and instead thought about literacy as something which returns us to, rather than keeps us from, the party?</div>
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<i>(To be continued)</i></div>
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Informutationhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10033240781954608352noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1302928158811970124.post-79108302012816575472015-05-18T10:57:00.001-07:002015-05-18T10:59:50.936-07:00A Sonnet to Thor<p dir="ltr">My student is writing a sonnet about Thor. Mine was about Batman, but it was only meant as an example. However, he took to the idea. Specifically he took to the idea and defected to the dread banner of Marvel like a LITTLE JUDAS.</p>
<p dir="ltr">But I forgive him that.</p>
<p dir="ltr">There <i>is</i> a bit of an error with the scanning in the second quatrain but it is eminently fixable. </p>
<p dir="ltr">I lost my example sonnet "On Batman" because I was shutting down the computer too quickly. I don't care because it wasn't very good and now scholars can debate over it like Coleridge's never completed first draft of "Kubla Khan". I do not mourn it!</p>
<p dir="ltr">No really, though, the Thor sonnet is pretty great.</p>
<p dir="ltr">It makes me think as well that the idea of "trendy" versus "traditional" teaching is a crock of shit. I mean, here is a kid from inner London who has written a Shakespearian sonnet about a thousands-of-years old Norse God because he watched a film written by the bloke who did "Buffy".</p>
<p dir="ltr">I cannot, as they say, even.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Bleat as some will about cultural capital and heritage, Thor is an authentic honest to pagan-god mega story and Marvel's myth game is tight. And a sonnet is something real. What I like about poetic forms is they have the imperious certainty of Mathematics. You don't get something that's a "bit sonnety", it either is or it isn't. Petrarchan? Naw I did a Spenserian.</p>
<p dir="ltr">But as for the topic? Choose on old chap, plenty more creepily Wagnerian power players to pick from. Do Parsifal next! Or Hawkeye, sure, Hawkeye is good too. It makes no difference to me.<br><br><br></p>
Informutationhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10033240781954608352noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1302928158811970124.post-2659814923962525332014-11-13T10:16:00.001-08:002014-11-13T10:16:50.552-08:00The Holes of the Stephen King Mini Golf Course Which I Will One Day Own<p dir="ltr">The Holes of the Stephen King Mini Golf Course Which I Will One Day Own</p><div align="left"><p dir="ltr">1. Cujo (Par 3)<br>
</p>
</div><div align="left"><p dir="ltr">The car with the woman and the child stuck in it is a tricky ramp. The baying of a rabid St Bernard plays constantly whilst you try and make your shot.</p></div><div align="left"><p dir="ltr">2. Carrie (Par 5)<br>
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</div><div align="left"><p dir="ltr">Knock your ball into a bucket of Pig's Blood to trigger the psychic death inferno.</p></div><div align="left"><p dir="ltr">3. It (Par 4)</p></div><div align="left"><p dir="ltr">A crooked dog leg with a large clown faced feature into whose mouth you putt. The ball is deposited in an ominous drain from which you retrieve it and the clown's mouth is full of knives.</p></div><div align="left"><p dir="ltr">4. Pet Cemetery (Par 3)</p></div><div align="left"><p dir="ltr">The putting green is shaped like the actual burial ground. Sink your ball in the wrong hole and it gets returned, covered in grey ooze and somehow...different.</p></div><div align="left"><p dir="ltr">5. The Shining (Par 4)</p></div><div align="left"><p dir="ltr">Takes place in a huge maze. To win, the ball must be shot through a smashed door panel behind which your alcoholic father intermittently appears, grinning horribly.</p></div><div align="left"><p dir="ltr">6. The Stand (Par 5)</p></div><div align="left"><p dir="ltr">Huge neon signs illuminate this Vegas themed fun-traction at night! Littered with corpses.</p></div><div align="left"><p dir="ltr">7. Misery (Par 3)</p></div><div align="left"><p dir="ltr">A huge typewriter dominates this impressive hole, which tradition dictates patrons attempt on their hands and knees whilst in the grips of cocaine psychosis. Watch out for the pig!</p></div><div align="left"><p dir="ltr">8. The Tommyknockers (Par 4)</p></div><div align="left"><p dir="ltr">Based on your own bedroom, painstakingly recreated by our designers to reflect a particularly bad summer when you were fourteen and nobody cared if you lived or fucking died, when the family just went away and left you and the pipes were making these weird sounds. Water Hazard.</p></div><div align="left"><p dir="ltr">9. Firestarter (Par 5)</p></div><div align="left"><p dir="ltr">This hole is really good. Shut up it <i><u>is</u></i>.<br>
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</div>Informutationhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10033240781954608352noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1302928158811970124.post-8333930457651356132014-10-02T09:53:00.002-07:002014-10-02T09:53:43.029-07:00Assembly 3 - Miyamoto Musashi and the Science of Strategy<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; line-height: 1.15; white-space: pre-wrap;">I have recently become interested in the character of Miyamoto Musashi.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This follows a friend of mine lending me his "Book or Five Rings" over the summer. The book is a sort of manual, written four hundred years ago, by Musashi. It is partly a book of philosophy and partly a manual to a young swordsman explaining to him how to win.</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img height="234" src="http://fc00.deviantart.net/fs70/f/2012/117/2/f/miyamoto_musashi_by_eijiokabayashi-d4xqtt3.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" width="320" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: #f1f1f1; color: #888888; font-family: arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px; text-align: left;">Miyamoto Musashi by eijiokabayashi (source: deviantart)</span></td></tr>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Now, there has always been an interest in this sort of thing. Sun Tzu's "Art of War" was very popular a few years ago. But Musashi is different, because he is interested in practicalities all the way.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Musashi became interesting to me just because of this passage,which grabbed me right away. In it he describes the battles he has won. It really is very impressive:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">"I have trained in the way of strategy since my youth, and at the age of thirteen I fought a duel for the first time. My opponent was called Arima Kihei, a sword adept of the Shinto ryū, and I defeated him. At the age of sixteen I defeated a powerful adept by the name of Akiyama, who came from Tajima Province. At the age of twenty-one I went up to Kyōtō and fought duels with several adepts of the sword from famous schools, but I never lost."</span></blockquote>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Now you can say this sounds arrogant, but if it is true this is very impressive. I looked into what a duel meant at this time and it seems that in at least some cases these were to the death.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Still, what makes it even more impressive is that Musashi usually only fought duels with a Bokken, which is a kind of club.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So the question is how he did it. From my reading I have discovered two important ideas. He comes back to these ideas again and again in his "Book of Five Rings".</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">First, study the trades.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The first task he sets students is to pay attention to everything that is going on around you.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">He describes watching master builders and carpenters and learning from their skill how to improve his own technique. The way they raise a roof can teach you to raise a defence, and so on.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So firstly, take an interest in everything.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Secondly, Musashi talks about being in the right place at the right time. According to one story, Musashi fought a duel with Sasaki Kojirō who was called ""The Demon of the Western Provinces" and who wielded a "nodachi." </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Now, a nodachi is a sword as tall as a man. Yet Musashi is meant to have defeated him with his Bokken. </span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The battle took place on an island in the middle of a lake. Musashi arrived by boat and, according to one legend, he had carved his Bokken out of an oar on his way across.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Yet he defeated this giant with his huge sword. How? Well, one theory has it that he had waited until the sun was in the right place in the sky to dazzle him.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This fits with what we know about Musashi, that he was a master of strategy. One key part of strategy was to wait for the right time.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So what can we learn from Musashi?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Firstly we can learn to take an interest in things. Interesting people are interested in everything. Not only that, we can learn from everyone. You don't need to restrict yourself, and you can never know where the missing piece of the puzzle will come from. Whatever you're working on, you should take the concerns of others seriously.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Secondly, pick your moment! So many problems students have come from not choosing their moment. They try and have a discussion with a teacher at the wrong moment. They want to explain themselves </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">right now</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and so they get sent out of the detention because they make themselves a nuisance.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And so on.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We don't have to do everything now! Be like Musashi and wait for the right moment: you'll be surprised how much easier you find things if you ask yourself that question. Is this the moment, or is it not?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">References</span></div>
<br /><span style="font-family: Arial; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Musashi - The Book of Five Rings </span>Informutationhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10033240781954608352noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1302928158811970124.post-10353794023875651792014-09-17T23:58:00.001-07:002014-09-18T00:00:25.074-07:00Assembly: Maya Angelou and Courage<div align="left"><p dir="ltr">Sometimes students say, “I wasn’t doing </p></div><div align="left"><p dir="ltr">Well, for evil to flourish, all it takes is for good people to do nothing.</p></div><div align="left"><p dir="ltr">
Stonewall have a new campaign called “no bystanders”. If you go on their website you can keep up to date with it. </p></div><div align="left"><p dir="ltr">What is a bystander? A bystander is someone who knows something is going on and doesn’t do anything.</p></div><div align="left"><p dir="ltr">It can feel very unfair. We might know somebody is being horrible to somebody else but feel like we can’t stop it.</p></div><div align="left"><p dir="ltr">Or we might get involved in the wrong way, by throwing insults back and make it worse.</p></div><div align="left"><p dir="ltr">To help us with this problem I like to look for people who have stood up for what was right in the past.</p></div><div align="left"><p dir="ltr">Today I am going to talk to you a little bit about Maya Angelou.</p></div><div align="left"><p dir="ltr">Who was Maya Angelou?</p></div><div align="left"><p dir="ltr">This was a remarkable woman, somebody who knew Dr Martin Luther King and knew Malcolm X. She spoke at the UN and at the inauguration of US President Clinton. </p></div><div align="left"><p dir="ltr">She lived all over the world and every country she went to she would learn their language.</p></div><div align="left"><p dir="ltr">She was also a mother, a poet, a novelist, a teacher and a professor.</p></div><div align="left"><p dir="ltr">The journalist Gary Younge said, “When you look at Maya Angelou’s life you wonder what you have been doing with your own."</p></div><div align="left"><p dir="ltr">When she was your age, though, everyone thought she was stupid because she didn’t speak.</p></div><div align="left"><p dir="ltr">In fact, she was afraid, that if she spoke up what she had to say would kill people. So she knew a lot about the power of words.</p></div><div align="left"><p dir="ltr">Once she discovered how to use them properly though, she really went for it.</p></div><div align="left"><p dir="ltr">She writes a lot about the role of courage, and having the strength to speak up: that’s how she connects with what I am saying today.</p></div><div align="left"><p dir="ltr">Angelou thought courage was the beginning of goodness. Once you have the courage to stand your ground you can start to be good not just when the teacher is watching or when you’re in a group, but all the time.</p></div><div align="left"><p dir="ltr">So how does Angelou think we get there? Listen to this</p></div><div align="left"><p dir="ltr">“I will not sit in a group of black friends and hear racial pejoratives against whites. I will not hear "honky." I will not hear "Jap." I will not hear "kike." I will not hear "greaser." I will not hear "dago." I will not hear it. As soon as I hear it, I say, "Excuse me, I have to leave. Sorry." Or if it's in my home, I say, "You have to leave. I can't have that. That is poison, and I know it is poison, and you're smearing it on me. I will not have it." Now, it's not an easy thing. And one doesn't all of a sudden sort of blossom into somebody who's courageous enough to say that. But you do start little by little. And you sit in a room, and somebody says -- if you're all white, and somebody says, "Well, the niggers -- " You may not have the courage right then, but you say, "Whooh! My goodness! It's already eight o'clock. I have to go," and leave. Little by little, you develop courage. You sit in a room, and somebody says, "Well, you know what the Japs did then, and what they're doing now." Say, "Mm-hmm! I have to go. My goodness! It's already six o'clock." Leave. Continue to build the courage. Sooner or later, you'll be able to say out loud, "Just a minute. I defend that person. I will not have gay bashing, lesbian bashing. Not in my company. I will not do it." </p></div><div align="left"><p dir="ltr">"Equal rights, fair play, justice, are all like the air; we all have it or none of us has it. That is the truth of it."</p></div><div align="left"><p dir="ltr">So this is what I am talking about: Maya Angelou didn’t think you start off doing the right thing, but she thought you can take a step. Real bravery for her isn’t about lashing out but about standing up.</p></div><div align="left"><p dir="ltr">So next time people start to say something unpleasant about someone else, maybe the bravest thing you can do will be to stand up and walk away. </p><p dir="ltr">If it is, do it.<br></p></div>Informutationhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10033240781954608352noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1302928158811970124.post-74128941283870393852014-09-14T03:07:00.000-07:002014-09-18T00:00:28.561-07:00Assembly: Habits<div align="left"><p dir="ltr">abits</p><p dir="ltr">I once had a teacher who would say to us, in Latin (one of several languages he spoke), “Usus est Tyrannus”: Your routine is your master. That is the topic of my assembly today.</p></div><div align="left"><p dir="ltr">Aristotle said that what we repeatedly do, we become.</p></div><div align="left"><p dir="ltr">He explained this by saying:</p></div><div align="left"><p dir="ltr">“The things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them, e.g. men become builders by building, and lyreplayers by playing the lyre; so too we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.”</p></div><div align="left"><p dir="ltr">Habit is stronger than wisdom!</p></div><div align="left"><p dir="ltr">So can we change our habits?</p></div><div align="left"><p dir="ltr">My morning routine: <br>
</p>
</div><div align="left"><p dir="ltr">shower, breakfast, tea, dress, tea, tie, hair</p></div><div align="left"><p dir="ltr">One thing out of order and I have a bad day. That’s not a joke.</p></div><div align="left"><p dir="ltr">Now, you might think that sounds boring, and it would be if someone else had invented that system. But because I invented it, I consent to it. That means I am only stood here right now because I choose to be. That’s not boring! That’s freedom! </p></div><div align="left"><p dir="ltr">So we started by saying our routine was our master, and indeed it is, but we have a choice. We can either decide on our habits, or let our habits decide for us.</p></div><div align="left"><p dir="ltr">You might have gotten in some good habits last year. Keep them up. Realise that they are probably the most valuable things you possess. More valuable than the phone in your pocket.</p></div><div align="left"><p dir="ltr">expectations about Uniform,Homework etc...you can probably imagine.)) expecting...((Here I seT</p></div><div align="left"><p dir="ltr">But as corny as it sounds, doing the right thing IS its own reward.</p></div><div align="left"><p dir="ltr">The person you are when nobody is looking, that's who you really are.</p></div><div align="left"><p dir="ltr">Last year, you might have gotten in some bad habits. It happens. But that doesn’t mean it can carry on. Don't think you can get away with that. If it does carry on, like Aristotle says, you will only be led further and further into bad habits and, ultimately, and this is neither joke nor exaggeration, you will become a bad person.</p></div><div align="left"><p dir="ltr">In fact, the Greek word "Ethike" from which we get Ethics refers to "Habits".</p></div><div align="left"><p dir="ltr">I leave you with a quote from Aristotle again.</p></div><div align="left"><p dir="ltr">“It makes no small difference, then, whether we form habits of one kind or another from our very youth; it makes a very great difference or, rather, all the difference.”<br>
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</div><div align="left"><p dir="ltr"><u>References</u><br>
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</div><div align="left"><p dir="ltr">Aristotle - Nichomachean Ethics</p><p dir="ltr"><br></p></div>Informutationhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10033240781954608352noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1302928158811970124.post-64309179872456256832014-08-31T14:06:00.001-07:002015-03-16T04:06:36.785-07:00Top Ten Tips To Help NQTs With Instilling Fundamental British Values<div dir="ltr">
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So you're an Newly Qualified Teacher and you're not sure whether you're really ready to whip a class into a frothing brew of jingoistic nationalism? Don't worry, you're not alone. Luckily the government has done all the difficult thinking about ethics so you don't have to. If you're still too poor, stupid or foreign to understand the difference between right and wrong, then just follow this easy to use guide and you'll have your pupils getting misty eyed over pints on the village green in no time.</div>
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1. Have a British Prime Ministers word search ready to go at all times. I remember a more experienced teacher telling me this in my first year and it has <b>never</b> failed me yet.</div>
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2. Remember that the best way to teach about Democracy is to give them no experience of it whatsoever.</div>
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3. Line them up for as long as it takes you to shriek the National Anthem before letting them in. If they can't manage this, do Jerusalem too.</div>
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4. Is your picture of David Cameron's massive face massive enough? One common mistake that NQTs make is not having a truly enormous picture of David Cameron's massive shiny face. Don't get caught out.</div>
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5. Establish expectations early by reading the Constitution in its entirety. Yes I know the constitution is uncodified, just read every British law since the Magna Carta. They will respect you for it.</div>
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6. Remember that children are basically tiny, X-Box obsessed terrorists: treat them accordingly.</div>
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7. DON'T MENTION GOD, EVER.</div>
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8. EVEN FOREIGN GODS. ESPECIALLY NOT THEM. WHAT ARE YOU, MENTAL?</div>
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9. Don't be afraid to ask from support from people who are more British than you if you're struggling. They will be understanding, after all, they were less British once. Joking.</div>
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10. Don't blow your top! just do what the British have always done: keep members of the underclass on standby ready to inflict maximum misery on your enemies whilst affecting surprise and dismay that it 'had to come to this'.</div>
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There you go, and best of luck!<br />
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<i>Based on an original idea by Tait Coles.</i></div>
Informutationhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10033240781954608352noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1302928158811970124.post-14734272281830545382014-08-26T05:14:00.001-07:002014-08-26T06:20:01.908-07:00Witness for the Prosecution: On Mary Midgley's "Are You An Illusion?"<p dir="ltr"><i>In addition to anticipation of divine presence in everyday living, witnessing also involves an affirmation of understanding among Black women, as a collective group, that God had and would work in the lives of church women. On a community level in religious services, church members may take time to give a testimony of how God has moved in their lives. Then, after telling their story, the speaker engages the audience by stating, </i><i><b>"Can I get a witness?" </b></i></p>
<p dir="ltr"><i>Within this context, </i><i><b>the speaker is asking if anyone has experienced</b></i><i> the move of divine intervention </i><i><b>similar to her own experiences</b></i><i>. In turn, members within the audience express affirmation through hand clapping and shout of "Amen!" </i></p>
<p dir="ltr">(A Cultural Case Analysis of the Works of Nannie Helen Burroughs, emphasis mine)</p>
<p dir="ltr">The act of witnessing is not the same as the act of observing. An observer can be silent. A witness can 'be silent no longer'. An observer makes something an object of record. A witness makes something an object for discussion. Mary Midgley, it seems, can be silent no longer. </p>
<p dir="ltr">Her new book, "Are You An Illusion?" (Acumen 2014) is best read as a cry for someone to come forth and stand witness. What has moved in her life is not divine, but it is no less moral for that. What she wishes is to have it acknowledged that we are daily 'told we are mere peasants...:and we may well hear this dictum as a simple insult: "you are nothing"' (Midgley 2014 p.138). This is a message that might be, wrongly, ignored if it was coming from the people of Ferguson, a person with Downs syndrome, a Palestinian. It is interesting, however, to hear this coming from a widely published European thinker of Midgley's standing. Surely she, at least, enjoys the privilege of not needing a witness!? Yet she says not, and what prompts her to do so, in this book, is a philosophical "gap" which she perceives operating in unjust, bullying behaviour.</p>
<p dir="ltr">What this gap is is the "remarkable gap that has opened up between common sense and today's scientific orthodoxy" (ibid. p.1). This, she believes, is becoming a scientistic religious doctrine taken on absolute trust. Much as the wilder parts of Scientology's doctrine, like Xenu the alien overlord, are referred to as a "ring of fire" to separate true believers/zealots, so the "secret knowledge" of some rational materialists runs directly contra common sense and divides the merely intrigued from the high priests. Amongst those she puts in this latter camp are Crick, Greenfield and (of course) Dawkins. The most outlandish claim she identifies is that the self "is not really there", a statement which runs so roughshod over common sense it can surely be wrongfooted by the playground rejoinder, "Who says?"</p>
<p dir="ltr">Midgley's guiding metaphor is of a "garden of knowledge". Humanity, she claims, should be concerned like any gardener lest one "plant" overrun the rest. Science, she says, is a "subculture" which should be kept within bounds. In this she follows thinkers like Williams (1995) in saying "There is no physics but physics": a statement which empowers even as it limits. Meanwhile, Williams says, "<i>morally unimaginative kind of evolutionary reductionists" </i>are <i>"the people I really do dislike."</i> This is presumably because extreme cases like <a href="http://lesswrong.com">"Less Wrong"</a> certainly seem to contain elements of fanaticism including end-of-the-world elements. Google "Lesswrong cult" if you're interested in this.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Midgley takes pains to defend her argument against the most predictable criticisms, which I will mention. Her target is not, she says, "science" but "scientism". The substance of this debate can be followed in this <a href="http://www.thersa.org/events/audio-and-past-events/2014/the-self-is-not-an-illusion">RSA discussion</a> (Q and A follows a brief presentation). In a brief discussion, Carl Gardener (@carlgardener, well worth following) and I differed on whether she had in fact selected this target as precisely as she claims. Certainly there are criticisms that can and have been made of Midgley's understanding of science especially the old Left/Right brain distinction and her handling of natural scientific concepts (<a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/enhanced/doi/10.1111/1467-9752.12092">Everitt</a><a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/enhanced/doi/10.1111/1467-9752.12092"> 2014</a>) but it is in the innovative step she takes to address bullying and injustice that I believe this work becomes interesting. In identifying cyberbullies (p.22) and the specific bullying 'mood' which says or implies "You are nothing", something she conflates with the denial of selfhood, I believe she makes a hugely important point. In three areas she is especially sharp: Testimony, Misogyny and Shame. I'll briefly cover them</p>
<p dir="ltr"><b>The Assault on Testimony</b></p>
<p dir="ltr">One of the main weapons used in the struggle for civil rights, as well as in the less reported everyday battles of humans to live with dignity, is testimony. However, this is endangered by the ideology which attacks testimony as such. As she puts it, ""Anecdote" is used to discredit any account of concrete events" (Midgley 2014 p.95). That the particular set of behaviours that involve someone who has been bullied opening up their heart are volatile, emotional and not always logically sequenced explicitly should not discredit it. Yet saying "they're just sounding off" is to attempt to do exactly that.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Saying "don't get upset", or recollecting Cameron's "Calm down dear" is not to be seen as harless 'banter', according to Midgley. Rather it is called part of a wider project where everything is "reducible to matter". This makes criticism of the intangible, the 'social' that much harder. This is what Midgley calls, "the assumption that the direct deliverances of our own experiences are worthless" (p.54). </p>
<p dir="ltr">Can I get a witness? No. You can get an observer, and they will watch you closely, and make notes which you will not be allowed to see.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><b>Misogyny</b></p>
<p dir="ltr">The book is full of striking insights into women in science, and their struggles. Jane Goodall, for example, was apparently discouraged from naming the apes she was observing at first because it was considered to endanger her objectivity. This is now a common practice.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Yet this book does more than just cherry picking some "girls done good". Consider this statement from Joseph Glanvill:</p>
<p dir="ltr">"The Woman in us, still prosecutes a Deceit like that begun in the garden, and our understandings are wedded to an Eve, as fatal as the mother of our miseries. And while things are judged according to their suitableness, or disagreement to the gusto of the fond Feminine, we shall be as far from the tree of knowledge as from that guarded by the Cherubim" (quoted ibid. p.119)</p>
<p dir="ltr">This indifference to the "fond" feminine side of our nature, which seems to be a sort of "secondary" or subjective quality of the world, does two things. Firstly it genders experience in opposition to reason, and secondly imposes a hierarchy on it which denies that equality can ever be. In other words, it is the very substance of what feminism disputed. Even this, however, does not take the new and novel step which we now see taken of saying that experience is "mere nothing". The struggle, therefore, which we see in terms of the "objective" search for access to resources or jobs is not enough. If an essential part of your being, whatever gender you identify as is considered lesser or even "nothing", then we are all mutilated, damaged.</p>
<p dir="ltr">To respond to this, as per the "Testimony" discussion is to become "emotional" and therefore not to be regarded. But we actually can regard this bullying scientism and, perhaps, must. </p>
<p dir="ltr"><b>Shame</b></p>
<p dir="ltr">The final infamous strategy which struck me on reading this book was the idea that we should be ashamed. Of what, precisely? Of our subjectivity. On this point  her call to arms to those who suspect the rot of bullying has penetrated deeper than we suspect is unequivocal:</p>
<p dir="ltr">"Subjectivity is not a shameful secret" (p.56)</p>
<p dir="ltr">That is to say, we need not feel that our "fond" natures make us weak, pitiful or pathetic. To make another person feel ashamed of what they feel themselves to be ought not have any place in our dealings with one another. What's more, shame becomes terror so easily: our careers, our social standings can feel in danger because we love, feel, dream, intend and fear. Besides which, she says, this is not even the case where people like Dawkins are concerned! For they enjoy a very strong right to command the voice of their own mad God:</p>
<p dir="ltr">"The universe contains, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference"</p>
<p dir="ltr">(Richard Dawkins, quoted Midgley 2014 p.82)</p>
<p dir="ltr">That this voice of "pitiless indifference" is precisely the rhetorical mood Dawkins adopts should give you some idea of who or what he thinks he speaks for.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><b>Conclusion</b></p>
<p dir="ltr">I have gone on longer than I intended, and I intend to say one thing more. The scientist cause as Midgley paints it is surely lost before it has begun. After all, losing the ability to interact with a majority of people without causing them shame, loss of confidence, and disgust at one half of humanity is not just morally loathsome, it must surely fail a first test of the materialist philosophy that this book criticises, which is that of remaining in touch with the real world. For attitudes are real features of human subjects. If we cannot act in a way which interacts with these, then we're out of touch with a reality! Midgley is not, then, dealing with very thoughtful opponents. She is asking that we join her in <b>witnessing</b> a very particular kind of madness which has some people in its grip, rather than sounding a call to arms. What is needed is not, she seems to think, aggression but honesty.</p>
<p dir="ltr">When, late at night, I flicked through the responses to Dawkins amongst his supporters after his bizarre attack on people with Downs syndrome and saw in their fawning responses the words "sheeple", "idiots", "stupid" flickering on and on, I could not help hearing Midgley's words again: "a simple insult: You are nothing".</p>
<p dir="ltr">I am not. Now, can I get a witness?</p>
Informutationhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10033240781954608352noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1302928158811970124.post-46094230984616216612014-08-20T02:35:00.001-07:002014-08-20T10:26:39.721-07:00The Early Reading "Debate": A False Controversy<p dir="ltr">In this post I hope to throw light on one way in which learners and instructors are turned against each other. I propose dialogue as a solution and use a disagreement with a colleague over teacher training to address that.</p>
<p dir="ltr">I asked Dr Andrew Davis in my previous post how he thought teachers could improve if there was no such thing as a "method" for them to "try out" by way of improving their practice. You can read his full response on my previous post. Davis' words are <i>in italics </i>throughout.</p>
<p dir="ltr">"<i>Yes- some teachers are better than others, and yes, it’s perfectly reasonable say that some teachers’ approaches are ‘better’ or ‘more effective’ than others. It’s how this should be conceptualised that divides me from those opponents who appear to favour teacher-proof and pupil proof methods, and who appear to believe that such methods have been researched. </i>"</p>
<p dir="ltr">Davis accepts subject knowledge as important, and says that to restate this is "unoriginal". His question regards how we teach anything at all. His contention that the putative "methods" which have come to light can solve the problem of teacher quality are nonsense (I may be overstating this) forms the crux of my question to him: if trainees believe they are improving through applying "methods", as well as state that that is how they are improving, do we not endanger the project of teacher development by undermining the concept?  </p>
<p dir="ltr">In Davis reply his conceptualisation of the question "what is the gap between good subject knowledge and good teaching?" calls to mind the famous "learning paradox". How do trainees get from the A of subject knowledge to the B of great teaching? The learning paradox asks a similar question of how we get from A to B. Plato describes an incident where Socrates leads a slave boy through a number of suppositions and deductions leading him to correctly deduce a geometrical rule. The problem is not what the rule is (subject knowledge) but rather how we arrive at it in a way that is independently understandable. This means the student conceiving of the rule not as something which makes sense "because Sir or Miss says so" but rather the student seeing that the rule stands independent of the situation of being, for example, someone else's inferior in learning, experience, time served etc. The right way of carrying on in, for example, geometry, must seem right to the student regardless of context if we are to regard the knowledge as "taught".</p>
<p dir="ltr">Take the example of grammar. A sentence, as it was taught to me, must contain a verb. To convince a student of this one way might be to give him or her a piece of writing and ask him to find the discrete sentences, and then find the discrete verbs. If this is done after giving the first principle, "sentences will contain verbs" then the student is able to deduce that the rule is indeed the case, independent of the teacher. However, in order for this to happen the student must accept that the page of writing is indeed writing. And how this happens is very mysterious, because it happens in the student's mind. What does it mean for the student to believe that the page of squiggles is indeed a page of writing. I don't mean by this "what is writing?" but rather what is it about writing, and students, that gives them this relationship to each other?</p>
<p dir="ltr">This is paradoxical because without trusting that it is writing the student cannot learn about writing, but without having learned about writing the basis for that trust is unclear. Similarly in Plato's example, the slave boy makes his own inferences, but in a way that is not visible in the situation. He ends up drawing the correct conclusion for himself, but at the beginning he "did not know". Plato concludes, controversially, that we all are born knowing everything, forget it and then subsequently "remember" it through learning. </p>
<p dir="ltr">This is not to say the teacher does nothing. Socrates compares himself to a midwife, "delivering" peoples' knowledge. The pupil, like the expectant mother, is the one who has to push!  How does this compare to Davis' view of what teachers do?</p>
<p dir="ltr">"<i>The practical knowledge of teachers is a kind of practical wisdom or phronesis, in which experienced teachers over the years steadily extend a rich and complex repertoire of strategies from which they constantly select in different ways to suit the pupils with whom they are dealing at any one time. When teachers 'improve', they extend this repertoire, and improve the judgements behind their unceasing selection from their repertoire. </i></p>
<p dir="ltr"><i>The ‘repertoire’ includes possible pupil tasks, ways in which the teacher might explain an idea – analogies, metaphors, stories, etc, knowledge of relevant resources and appropriate questions that might be put to pupils to advance their knowledge, understanding and thinking."</i></p>
<p dir="ltr">His response draws on an Aristotelian idea, that of phronesis. His full response then sketches a highly elaborated picture of the different skills a teacher may draw on,  the "differences", the variations which mean "sometimes a word is "read" by attending to context and sometimes not". I am interested in the word "sometimes". In Plato's account of the learning paradox the rule being deduced is not practical wisdom but "sophia" or absolute wisdom. Geometric rules are often conceived of in this form: as immutable, heavenly truths. They are not "sometimes" true. They "just are" true, something the Greeks called "sophia". </p>
<p dir="ltr">However, Plato is as so often using Socrates to hide the other side of the dialectic. Ask a midwife what the "best" way to deliver a baby is and you are likely to hear the kinds of language Davis uses. "Sometimes" it happens one way, women are "different". This is the language of practical wisdom or <i>phronesis</i>. Thus Socrates' characterisation of himself as a "midwife" puts the learning paradox into a new light. Whilst what is "delivered" out of the learner is immutable, it is not "delivered" <b>to</b> the learner in the sense that an industrialist "delivers" on a new order of parts to a customer.</p>
<p dir="ltr">So, if I have understood Davis correctly, we are supposed to conceive of the trainee teacher in the same way as Plato's slave or any other learner; that is to say, the "truths" that they arrive at will be formulated by unique moments of realisation, challenge, failure and frustration. This is because they, like all learners, are different from each other. I quote the final section in full:</p>
<p dir="ltr"><i>"When novice teachers learn from expert teachers, this rarely, if ever, includes any kind of simple copying or mimicking the behaviour of the expert. It is rather a matter of being exposed to the subtle influence of someone with a high level of a particular form of phronesis. If an expert teacher watches a novice, with a view to helping the latter, the help would only rarely consist of the expert saying – ‘At time 'T' in the lesson you should have performed this specific action (said these words, set this specific task, etc)’. </i><b><i>It is rather a matter of a dialogue</i></b><i> in which the expert helps the novice to review the choices available to her at time T, and to think why alternative actions might have been ‘better’ than those she actually performed. The expert might also come up with more options than the novice was aware of."</i> (my emphasis)</p>
<p dir="ltr">Do I feel my question has been addressed? Well, yes I do and no I do not: yes because I see how the idea of a comprehensive "method" which can meet the needs of all learners is opposed to the idea of a "repertoire" of different things to try as different situations arise. On the other hand, this account remains, quite understandably, oriented towards the view of the trainer rather than the trainee. In the spirit of the abovementioned dialogue, let me put the trainee's imagined view, based on my experience. </p>
<p dir="ltr">I trained more recently than Davis (although far be it from me to rub it in) and with the memories sort-of fresh in my mind let me say that firstly, I now see that a lot of the "techniques" I thought I was seeing I <i>can</i> recognise were far more <i>ad</i><i> hoc</i> than I imagined. So far, so good: Davis and I appear to agree. Let's take the "technique" of chairs in a circle, full class debates. I once observed an excellent teacher orchestrate this, as I took it, daring 'method' with challenging students. The class were well prepared, contributing, referring to good resources etc. I took the experienced teacher's throwaway comment at the beginning "oh it won't be anything special, just sit and watch and join in if you like" as false modesty when I saw what they accomplished. I now realise that lessons like this in fact <i>will</i> just arise from planning in an experienced teacher's class without them thinking to themselves "today I shall deploy lesson pattern 234.5b Circular Discussion": but I thought that was what they did! In other words I couldn't conceive that the teacher's practical wisdom was creating the students scientific concepts, or that phronesis was creating sophia, OR (most significantly) that <b>unlike was creating like</b>. This is a hard lesson! As I wasn't ready to see this, I HAD to see it in a way it was, by Davis' lights, emphatically not, viz. as a method. So I did.</p>
<p dir="ltr">But seeing it in that way enabled me to get to this point, where I am able to see it differently. I can now see it from Davis' point of view, but very much remember seeing it from the opposite point of view. Was one right then, and the other right now? </p>
<p dir="ltr">This puts us at a pretty pass, and one I am not sure I can bridge. Do we put "teaching methods", then, under the category of "necessary falsehood"? Or do we, instead, confront trainees with the awful/wonderful truth early on: that there are no shortcuts, no hard and fast "solutions", just experience? What might we risk if we do the latter?</p>
<p dir="ltr">Faced with a student teacher doing what so many of them do end up doing, namely sobbing wretchedly, could *I* resist telling them that there was a "Magic Feather" they could carry into the next classroom? "Try this resource/method/programme...it's very good!" And if they do use it, and they have a sudden, dramatic breakthrough with a class, is it even as fictional as Davis is suggesting? </p>
<p dir="ltr">To a good midwife, it is just a question of getting the baby delivered. Nobody cares, when they hold their child in their arms, about whether they delivered it on their elbows, their hands, their knees or in a swimming pool. Similarly, when we know something we did not know before, we don't need anyone else to tell us it is beautiful, and we forget very quickly exactly how we got there. I am always struck by how vague everyone's recollections of school/training actually are, how few actual lessons they can remember, compared to how much wisdom it gave them. This is something teacher trainers must realise: once their students are teachers, none of this will matter to them very much. </p>
<p dir="ltr">My conclusion, then, is that the entire "controversy" over "who is right" begins to look on reflection like an odd curiosity which does not originate in the experience of learning. And if it does not, where then could this highly political, profitable, media-friendly opinion storm originate? </p>
<p dir="ltr">Diagnosing this might relieve us, as a profession, of a lot of anxiety.</p>
Informutationhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10033240781954608352noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1302928158811970124.post-55169823894106485262014-08-14T05:15:00.001-07:002014-08-16T05:20:30.923-07:00Phonics, Snake Oil and Campsites<p dir="ltr">When you tell someone your area of study is "Philosophy of Education" they quite often ask if you study "Philosophy OR Education?" as if they've misheard. The relationship is not always easy to explain, and I probably do it quite badly very often. The late controversy about the contribution by some philosophers (notably Andrew Davis and Dave Aldridge) to the debate of Systematic Synthetic Phonics has been an extremely good example of how to do it rather well. In the responses to that debate a number of concepts have been deployed that need unpacking.  </p>
<p dir="ltr">One comes when Davis uses his idea that Philosophy can identify a commonly used concept such as "teaching methodology" as meaningless. Sometimes we use the expression "without content" to do this. This means that some concepts , often embarassingly pravalent ones, can be discovered to be like those sets in cowboy films.  These ideas, often rather grand-sounding, can on close examination turn out to be simply clapboard paintings held up by struts at the back. </p>
<p dir="ltr">Naturally enough this turns out to be a problem if you buy what you think is a perfectly serviceable Saloon, perhaps intending to branch out into barkeepin' or piano playin', but then discover you've been sold a clapboard frontage no more profitable than any other billboard. And this happens with ideas too. For a long time people were trained in the use of ideas which turned out to be nonsense such as Newton's concept of the "aether" or, as some now claim, String Theory. I am not a String THeorist myself, or even a physicist but it is quite possible that the idea will turn out to be wrong. Understanding that this is doubtable does not mean understanding it as doubtful. I do not feel under pressure to know everything, so on some matters I am free to say "I understand there are two sides to this."</p>
<p dir="ltr">This does raise the question of bad faith. Someone is in bad faith if they are deliberately misrepresenting a state of affairs even, according to Satre, to themselves. So we can imagine a pair of friends who find each other incredibly tiresome. But they tell themselves that their company is simply delightful! After all, they have been doing it for so long it seems rude not to.</p>
<p dir="ltr">In fact A thinks B a terrific bore and B finds A a rude misanthrope. They are both in bad faith because they</p>
<p dir="ltr">1. Don't make this clear to each other and<br>
2. Don't make this clear to themselves.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Similarly we can imagine our string theorists, if their ideas do not (in fact) have content, pushing their doubts to the back of their minds in their own reflections and discussions because they have a big funding application which they are waiting to hear back on. Of course, string theory remains a field in good standing, and far be it from me to question that with my GCSE maths and reading a couple of New Scientist articles under my belt.</p>
<p dir="ltr">(An honourable counterexample is Frege, who responded to Russell's disproval of his Set Theory of Mathematics by rushing to the printers and insisting they include a chapter at the end of the book denouncing the entire thing for reasons of Russell's paradox.)</p>
<p dir="ltr">Here the objection that philosophers make a lot of fuss about nothing comes in. I obviously am not qualified to talk about String Theory, so what am I on about. I will characterise this complaint as the complaint that "Philosophy needs to be about something"</p>
<p dir="ltr">Of course it does. I here lean on a concept used by C W Joad, at one time the best known philosopher of his generation. Joad explains that the philosopher is like the general brought reports from the various fronts of battle. Necessarily separated from it all, she needs to trust the reports of the various subject specialists. This is so that the energy of enquiry can be deployed in different locations, appropriately. Perhaps Joad's obvious hubris in describing himself as a "General" can be mitigated if we describe the philosopher as a sort of tourist information centre. The philosopher has various leaflets about various attractions: he or she has not visited all of them, but it is obviously in everyone's interest to supply the best information possible so that their visitors are not misdirected. This they do, in their answers to the philosopher in my example. She puts the best picture together she can, and is on the side on the enquirer, always. This means that if one field of knowledge falls into disrepute they are supposed to be the last line of defence, as well as one's first port of call. However, to spend your whole holiday at the tourist information centre might be a mistake.</p>
<p dir="ltr">This is partly because of the history of the field. It is critical to understand that there have always been charlatans, and there still are. This makes the statement "A philosopher cannot dispute facts" highly uncomfortable. On one hand the philosopher has to trust the reports which arrive from the specialists in the field. On the other hand, they need to keep themselves open to all aspects of experience, not just the claims of the specialist. Staying critically active means retaining and working on an ability to consider not what it is for one phenomenon or another to be the case, but rather to consider Being As Such, to try and keep the larger picture in view. In other words, we are considering not only facts, but also the quality of being a fact.</p>
<p dir="ltr">A key part of philosophy, indeed what makes someone trusted as a philosopher at all is, then, their ability to detect snake oil. In my example this is the resort operator who is in bad faith, who has convinced himself, or seeks to convince others that his one star attraction is really a five star deluxe experience. Wittgenstein spoke about some philosophers being "slum landlords" who are horrible compromised by their status and seek to keep people in sub standard accommodation. I am seeking to make a similar point.</p>
<p dir="ltr">This is precisely what Socrates seems to have regarded himself as doing. Ancient Athens contained a number of wealthy people concerned to see their children educated well. If they lived today they would perhaps, in some cases, be setting up Free Schools. At the time what they did was pay men called sophists to teach their children how to debate, make a good impression and so on. Socrates thought all this was nonsense. The young people might have been getting on in the world, passing the trials that made you a man and so on, but they were not getting at the truth. He viewed his task as being the demolition of those sophists in public debate.</p>
<p dir="ltr">This seemed a pretty big risk. Socrates was a soldier, not a nobleman, and he did not seem to have the manners or the breeding to participate in the big public discussions where the sophists dominated. However, his conviction that they were selling snake oil, that theirs were ideas "without content" gave him the courage to take on the task. Ultimately he was sentenced to death for it, but not before claiming a number of scalps and laying the foundations for Plato's academy. It is not for nothing that all philosophy since has been called "footnotes to Plato".</p>
<p dir="ltr">Thus we can see that concern that, for instance, people with vested interests might be deploying an idea like "Systematic Synthetic Phonics" because it is profitable; that it might be a form of sophistry; and that the concepts deployed lack content are not idle fancies. Rather they are concerns, whatever else their foundation, that go to the heart of what the philosophical enterprise is. </p>
<p dir="ltr">To state this, as I have consistently, is not to call the case closed, or even side with Davis, particularly. I am, for example, concerned at how his conception of teaching might provide avenues for teachers to improve. I for one have have used "show me this method" as a shorthand for "help me to improve" in teaching, albeit not the only way of phrasing that question. If this is removed as a question "without content" then I do think his account lacks a way in which I can ask for help from better teachers, or teachers I admire, if I am struggling. It is manifestly the case that some teachers are better than others, that some are providing a better education, or that some embody an ideal of what we wanted to be when we started on this professional path. If Davis regards an idea which many claim helps them to improve their teaching as incoherent, then I  find myself wondering what his view of teacher improvement is. I don't doubt, however, that he has one, and I look forward to discovering it.</p>
Informutationhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10033240781954608352noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1302928158811970124.post-19532062230596388382014-08-04T05:28:00.001-07:002014-08-04T06:23:17.775-07:00Vygotsky: Make Up Your Own MindFirst, this:<br />
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<img alt="Displaying _20140804_124619.JPG" height="376" src="https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?ui=2&ik=a8fd7ce164&view=fimg&th=147a0d7d86244c0c&attid=0.1&disp=inline&realattid=1475506657502953472-local0&safe=1&attbid=ANGjdJ9LNdzL1TRsK6HygIOs5ec2H1_j6gioRUM4cb5sBJHkupMHdQaN4miXOFWoNgUr8n9ZrOOW5rI2XGGHkL9pZKE0lbf-pcYUE_NpLkLhXAoEM3inniKXP7Ff-cA&ats=1407152932431&rm=147a0d7d86244c0c&zw&sz=w1416-h689" width="640" /><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This is Brett Wigdortz. He runs Teach First. Teach First put trainee teachers in schools. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I hope you're not reading this on a phone so you can see the powerpoint slide behind him. What, you <i>are</i> reading it on a phone? Okay, I'll blow it up:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">"Vygotskian postmodern pedagogical philosophy of the psychosomatic effects of the in situ geographical elevations of elation and depressions of mortality associated with exceptional graduates addressing education disadvantage."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So the translation would be, I guess, "The clever people we get to be teachers in tough schools go through some ups and downs in their first year and it makes them a bit sadface." I dunno, maybe I got that wrong. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Why is it written so funny? Well, I <i>think </i>it's a joke I am going to have to explain so explain it I shall. This is a "satire" of what some people call "Edu-Woo" or just "Woo". This is meant to be how philosophers and certain other academics talk. There are some words in it that might not make sense. Let's look at one of them:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Vygotskian: Vygotsky was this ultra badass teacher trainer and psychologist who <i>literally</i> won a lottery which let Jews go to University in Russia at a time when most couldn't, and then dedicated his life to studying the mind until he died of TB tragically young whilst still dictating to students so dedicated to him that they came and sat round the end of his bed and took notes whilst his life ebbed away.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Pretty good, eh?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I mean, if my students like me enough to get me something from the shop I think I'm doing pretty well. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Lately it's become pretty fashionable to do down Vygotsky because people think he said you should let kids talk when teachers are talking. Now, I haven't read everything he wrote, but I did read "Thinking and Speech" cover to cover this one time and I'm pretty sure he never said that. I know he implies (ibid. p.203) that speech is inferior to writing, and believes social speech is not communication per se but rather an extension of inner monologues. It cannot, therefore, be scientific. That doesn't sound much like the cartoon "progressive" I've seen lampooned.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">What else do people think Vygotsky said? Oh yeah, they think he said that kids learn more from each other than from a teacher. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I never noticed that either - in fact he says their speech is usually "egocentric".</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Vygotsky noticed that egocentric speech is very common in small children. He gave them some tasks to do involving blocks. What he did observe, though a series of experiments conducted under controlled, laboratory conditions was that</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"The coefficient of egocentric speech nearly doubled when some difficulty or impediment was included in the test."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">OR people talk to themselves when things get more difficult.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">When I am trying to fix my computer I talk to myself quite a lot</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"This fan came from...ugh the bloody thing...I need to...there"</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">You sound like a crazy person, like children sound most of the time. But that's fair enough, because I mostly only do things I can already do, but they can't do anything, they're gonna talk a lot of stream of consciousness oddness. Also they can't write yet. Mostly I write when my head hurts i.e. when my memory's full. A lot of my notes are nonsense. So there's that.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Now that quote makes Vygotsky sound like he is very dense and jargon heavy. But he can be incredibly lyrical. At one point he writes</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"In the child, there exists no form of thinking divorced from the earth, from needs, wishes and desires"</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">(Thinking and Speech p.77)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Reading that is the only time an academic text has made me cry. It also seems just right to me, that (as everyone knows) children tell it like it is, that they are straightforward in liking what they like and hating what they hate.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The story of how little human beings come to think scientifically is one Vygotsky calls "Ontogenesis". It's interesting because people will write a lot about the Zone of Proximal Development and all the supposed damage it does to the idea of classroom discipline but very few people want to talk about Ontogenesis. I think that might be because it's a strong rebuttal of the "lightbulb" picture of how knowledge is acquired, and tons of people are paid up card carrying superfans of that.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">According to the "lightbulb" picture there is a moment when a child goes "ohhh, I see" and that really is the moment they see.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Vygotsky basically thinks that learning is continual, applied and omnipresent. The notion of a "moment" where the child "gets it" is rubbished in Chapter 4 of Thinking and Speech. There's no moment where you suddenly see, just a life of frustrating gambits and forays into the unknown which is is own reward, which just <i>is</i> learning.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So we come back to Wiggdortz and the "exceptional graduates" who are being invited to laugh at these fusty philosophers and their dead Russian. The language of Teach First, visible on their advertising is "Make a Difference". Very laudable but how you make a difference is, according to Vygotsky, not with "interventions" or "lightbulb" lessons but rather committing to a path and staying on it for the long haul. So the way to make a difference is to provide and progress continuity, to shape the course of things through additions and alterations to the environment over time</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"Where the environment does not create the appropriate tasks, advance new demands, or stimulate the development of intellect through new goals."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div style="text-align: right;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Thinking and Speech p.132</span></div>
<div style="text-align: right;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Fine sentiments, reflected in the words of one of my students recently, "The best teachers never let up." </span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I think we could all agree with that but, if that's so, then why make Vygotsky a figure of fun?</span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Partly it has to do with what Lacan once wrote was "How we all turn out...one line summaries in a book somewhere". I would hate to think that this exemplary teacher, who taught the teachers who taught the generation that built Sputnik, is fated for such treatment. But I do urge you, Teach First "exceptional graduate" or not, go to the source and make up your own mind, and don't be swept along on a tide of sneers.</span></div>
Informutationhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10033240781954608352noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1302928158811970124.post-45791058583147942422014-07-03T08:32:00.001-07:002014-07-03T13:05:13.559-07:00Mr Toad, Middle Earth and Boris Johnson<p dir="ltr"><i>This</i><i> </i><i>text</i><i> was</i><i> </i><i>written</i><i> </i><i>originally</i><i> </i><i>for</i><i> </i><i>the</i><i> </i><i>programme</i><i> </i><i>for</i><i> </i><i>the</i><i> </i><i>London</i><i> </i><i>Nautical</i><i> </i><i>School</i><i> </i><i>production of A. A. Milne's</i><i> "</i><i>Toad</i><i> </i><i>of</i><i> </i><i>Toad</i><i> </i><i>Hall</i><i>".</i></p><div align="left"><p dir="ltr">To say that “The Wind in the Willows” is a strange story is like calling Cambridge a small town with a disproportionate number of Nobel prize-winners in it: an understatement. The tale of a small Mole who finally leaves, like a certain Hobbit, his hole in the ground and discovers Rat, Badger and, of course, the unforgettable Toad has endured because it speaks to a point much greater than its fairytale appearances suggest. Alejandro Jodorowsky, when working on his film version of Frank Herbert's “Dune” confessed he had never actually read it. When it was put to him that that might be a good idea he replied that some stories live in the shared consciousness of mankind, too great and powerful for one version to be definitive. Of this sort, I shall suggest, is Grahame's tale.</p></div><div align="left"><p dir="ltr">It has been a source of inspiration for generations of eccentrics, whether they knew it or not. The original singer of Pink Floyd, Syd Barrett, was considerably under its spell, naming the first Floyd album "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn" after the book's first chapter. The Floyd, that most Cambridge of bands, drew attention to and considerable inspiration from the vision of benign, possibly aristocratic oddballs "larking about" by a river.</p></div><div align="left"><p dir="ltr">The link with Oxbridge and the sixties counterculture is not the only connection to "The Hobbit". Tolkien’s story, "The Willows" Oxford equivalent, reveals in its contrasts the different approaches to learning those institutions have historically affected. The Hobbit is serious, shot through with long poems and concern for the future of the state. Willows, like Cambridge, loves nonsense, the natural world, and replaces high aristocratic elves with faded tweed and stately homes in need of upkeep.</p></div><div align="left"><p dir="ltr">Yet the scenario is fundamentally the same: a small scrap of life, a grammar school boy from the provinces if you like, falls in with an experienced traveller and is embroiled in a conflict which takes in the local great and good as they turf out corruption. It is the amazement of Mole which sustains the story, just as it is Bilbo's wide eyed astonishment at what befalls him which sells The Shire to us in Tolkien's rather po-faced children's book. That Middle Earth has become a media juggernaut whilst Willows remains strictly for the cognoscenti only strengthens the essential contrast.</p></div><div align="left"><p dir="ltr">In the characters he created, Grahame has left on our literature the template of the upper middle classes and lower aristocracy as seen by a debutante. Mole is our eyes, literally blinking in the bright light as he meets the smooth talking young tyro (Rat, takes a third in divinity in the end we somewhat suspect, to no particular consequence), the erudite, brilliant Don (Badger, perhaps published extensively in his youth but lately content to trot out the same lectures from decades old notes) and most memorably, Toad.<br>
</p>
</div><div align="left"><p dir="ltr">Toad is everyone's rich mate. He's the guy you meet during Freshers and go and stay with in the summer. He's the ludicrously generous, immensely funny minor noble who awaits "something turning up" in "the foreign office or whatever". He has no idea what he is studying, but great granddad built the college so what?! In short, he is Boris Johnson in Bullingdon best, tossing a cheque to the proprietor of the restaurant he just smashed up before opening a bottomless bottle of champagne on the night bus and giving most of it away. And like the cat in Monty Python, Mole, who we cut back to, blinks, rubs his eyes, blinks again.</p></div><div align="left"><p dir="ltr">The light which is let in by this story, which penetrates deep into suburban holes, is the promise that life can be lived, that scholarship boys still get invited to the ball, that one can be the " great wheel as it rolls downhill": the same one which Lear's Fool warns us not to cling to. This might not be as bad an idea as the Fool suggests , witness BoJo himself, the master of the Hapless Oaf Gambit, dangled from a high wire during the Olympics, literally rising in everyone's estimations, Parp Parping and Toot Tooting his way to media victory, the master of his private revels.</p></div><div align="left"><p dir="ltr">To declaim that the story is dated, nostalgic and classist is to miss the point: it holds the promise of an endless idyll, where summer never ends and where the weasels never corrupt our institutions for long. So whilst Peter Jackson green screens another six hours of deadly aristo-elf tedium, sit back and enjoy the shambles, like inductees into a great secret: the Piper is still at the Gates, and Dawn just breaking</p>
</div>Informutationhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10033240781954608352noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1302928158811970124.post-15630794074903237292014-06-28T09:58:00.001-07:002014-06-28T09:58:25.331-07:00John Locke dishes out the schoolin'<p dir="ltr">Mental Hercules, John Locke, starts his Essay on Human Understanding by acknowledging that publishing it got some people pretty cross. </p>
<p dir="ltr">"I have been told that a short Epitome of this volume was condemned by some without reading"</p>
<p dir="ltr">he says, which is something Philosophers have to get used to I suppose. Then he gets into the good stuff, viz. the actual meat of his disagreement with some other Enlightenment dudes. And the meat is BEEF.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Here's how you throw down 18th century style:</p>
<p dir="ltr">"My meaning, I find, is often mistaken, and I have not the good luck to be every where rightly understood."</p>
<p dir="ltr">Absolute mayhem.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Locke is from the oratorical school of acting like a perfect gentleman without giving an inch. It works out pretty well for him because</p>
<p dir="ltr">A) He's John Locke<br>
and<br>
B) The other guy isn't.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Let's see how it plays out ESPN style: slow motion, crunching tackles, big scores.</p>
<p dir="ltr">"<i>Of this the ingenious author of the Discourse Concerning the Nature of Man has given me a late instance, to mention no other.</i> "</p>
<p dir="ltr"><b>Oh</b><b> </b><b>no</b><b> </b><b>you</b><b> </b><b>better</b><b> </b><b>not</b><b> </b><b>have</b><b> </b><b>did</b><b>!</b></p>
<p dir="ltr"><b>"</b><i>For the civility of his expressions, and the candour that belongs to his order, forbid me to think that he would have closed his Preface with an insinuation, "</i></p>
<p dir="ltr"><b>Did</b><b> </b><b>John</b><b> </b><b>Locke</b><b> </b><b>just</b><b> </b><b>praise</b><b> </b><b>you</b><b> </b><b>in</b><b> </b><b>print</b><b>? </b><b>You're</b><b> </b><b>toast</b><b>. </b><b>It's</b><b> </b><b>like</b><b> </b><b>watching</b><b> </b><b>a</b><b> </b><b>cat</b><b> </b><b>play</b><b> </b><b>with</b><b> </b><b>a mouse</b><b>.</b><b> </b><b>I</b><b> </b><b>can't</b><b> </b><b>watch</b><b>.</b></p>
<p dir="ltr">"<i>as if in what I had said, Book </i><i>II</i><i>. </i><i>ch</i><i>. </i><i>xxvii</i><i>, concerning the third rule which men refer their actions to, I went about to make virtue vice and vice virtue, unless he had mistaken my meaning;</i>"</p>
<p dir="ltr"><b>Translation</b><b>: </b><b>I</b><b> </b><b>am</b><b> </b><b>going</b><b> </b><b>to</b><b> </b><b>give</b><b> </b><b>you</b><b> </b><b>one</b><b> </b><b>chance</b><b> </b><b>to</b><b> </b><b>take</b><b> </b><b>that</b><b> </b><b>back</b><b> </b><b>and</b><b> </b><b>then it's</b><b> </b><b>CLOBBERIN</b><b>'</b><b> </b><b>TIME</b><b>!</b></p>
<p dir="ltr"><b>" </b><i>which he could not have done if he had given himself the trouble to consider what the argument was I was then upon, and what was the chief design of that chapter, plainly enough set down in the fourth section and those following.</i>"</p>
<p dir="ltr"><b>LOCKE</b><b> </b><b>SMASH</b><b>! </b><b>DID</b><b> </b><b>YOU</b><b> </b><b>EVEN</b><b> </b><b>READ</b><b> </b><b>IT</b><b>!? </b><b>DID</b><b>. </b><b>YOU</b><b>. </b><b>EVEN</b>.<b> </b><b>READ</b><b>. </b><b>IT</b><b>???</b></p>
<p dir="ltr">So there's that. What I would like to say is look how polite he is. Did he even call him a liar or a retard?  He did not. He was just like "Surely I must have misunderstood, you can't actually <i>mean</i><i> </i>what you said?"</p>
<p dir="ltr">Textbook Principle of Charity. Try and put the best spin on it you can, do anything possible to save the grace and civil standing of your opponent.</p>
<p dir="ltr">What a chieftain!</p>
Informutationhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10033240781954608352noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1302928158811970124.post-6308997924921324172014-06-20T13:10:00.001-07:002014-06-20T13:15:41.783-07:00My Early Years Years<p dir="ltr">A few days ago I went back the the nursery where I worked for two years after I left university.</p>
<p dir="ltr">I was a dad at twenty, making me officially a teenage dad by Sure Start's standards. This was something I only discovered once I left the nursery and started working for Sure Start in 2010.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Up to that point I made ends meet at a small nursery in my small hometown, looking after small people. It worked out well because I got a discount rate on looking after my young daughter, who I got to be near to. They were difficult years.</p>
<p dir="ltr">When I went back to the nursery I was amazed at how quickly memories came back. It has changed hands but that's just cosmetics. The building, the path to the front door, the stairwell: walking towards these filled my chest with the burning memory of everything that happened there.</p>
<p dir="ltr">It was a Saturday, so the place was shut. I stopped at the front door and cried a bit. </p>
<p dir="ltr">Then I left, as you do. But the tears were for the struggles, the tantrums, the giggles. Calming down distraught children,  showing them how Lego blocks worked. I remember spending a lot of time showing kids how to play with farm animals and, for some reason, designing pyjamas. There were days when I would work with one extremely disabled boy who liked to run his hands under the water. Parents who spoke no English would be sent to us because people knew we turned nobody away. We would mind their children and navigate the difficulties when their child didn't know the word for "Toilet". I remember the after school club where we got well into Hama Beads and so every parent got about a zillion drinks coasters and those that didn't got smiley faces. Once we made a rocket ship. Another time we made a person size bird's nest and filled it with papier mache eggs.</p>
<p dir="ltr">So much more. A little girl who made a stage out of a drain cover and put on a show in  a language she invented. I remember a puppet theatre performing Noah's Ark and the Ramayana. There was a child who used tesselating blocks to create beautiful mosaics which she coloured in painstakingly. </p>
<p dir="ltr">Mostly there was hours and hours of care, small people wanting to be picked up and put down. My ankles swelled and my knees clicked. My boss had been doing it so long she needed half an hour's warning if I wanted her to get up from the play house. The girls invited me to karaoke and I did "My Old Man's a Dustman". They thought my taste in music was crap, and they really liked "The Script" in the under-ones room. We used to teach the kids to dance to ABBA.</p>
<p dir="ltr">People who make fun of Early Years workers people have never met them, they have never spent time with them. They have no idea what it means to throw yourself into the most critical stage of education, the one that takes your energy and breath away all at once. To belittle an Early Years practitioner is to belittle someone who, in the words of Adrienne Rich,</p>
<p dir="ltr">"Held out the crust of bread (and)<br>
Warmed the liquid vein of life...<br>
Who did what they could."</p>
<p dir="ltr">It was an honour to spend the first part of my life with Early Years workers. Whatever in my professional self is strong, and good, and loving, I learned it first from them.</p>
<p dir="ltr">So as I walked away from my second home, the one where I learned to be a human being in the world, I thought about all of those memories and how time has not tarnished or muddied it. There is a precious value, still, in the care of the young which politics belies. To get to it, you must speak to someone with snot on their trouser leg at toddler-nose height; someone who has changed twenty nappies today, on a rota, and who knows all the words to "Where the Wild Things Are" and "The Cat in the Hat". </p>
<p dir="ltr">When you find that person, tell them they are amazing. They need to hear it.</p>
Informutationhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10033240781954608352noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1302928158811970124.post-72102081852758782422014-06-07T06:08:00.001-07:002014-06-13T00:09:11.300-07:00A Resource is not a Teaching Method<p dir="ltr"><br>
A few years ago I made a big laminated sheet of the sort that teachers sometimes make. It's meant to help with setting expectations around speech. Sometimes these things are useful. Sometimes they aren't. Mostly they aren't, in my case, and I scrap them after a couple of weeks.</p>
<p dir="ltr">This one was of the other kind. It came with me in a taxi from my old school to my new school. If it falls off the wall then looking for a new piece of blue tack becomes an emergency. If I lost it I would be sad. My phone got nicked recently. I would rather they got my phone. </p>
<p dir="ltr">Sometimes people see me teach and they point at this bit of paper and go "that's good". I am not boasting, this happens. The keenest go "Can I have a copy?"</p>
<p dir="ltr">And I say yes. Always. </p>
<p dir="ltr">However, I then usually launch into a big rant about Vygotsky and Michael Sandel, and how Constructivism is a bosh and how I think the Polis functioned in Ancient Greece. See, I want them to see not just the resource but how it came to be, all the teachers and thinkers I have admired, all the students who have challenged me and saved me from dogma. They should, I always think, understand the journey to this point.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Nobody ever does. </p>
<p dir="ltr">See, they want the resource. Why not? It's a good resource. But it will only be mine in my classroom. They may use it better, they may use it worse, but what it means to me in my space surrounded by my expectations and hopes and failings and dreams is Me. It isn't a method I can ever communicate, not unless I can carry them back in time with me whilst putting them behind my eyes.</p>
<p dir="ltr">That's why whenever people talk about Direct Instruction or Group Working or Cognitive Acceleration I sit, I listen , I think, and I wait for them to get their USB out.</p>
<p dir="ltr">You see, I just want your resources. But I love what you do. Big fan of your work.</p>
Informutationhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10033240781954608352noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1302928158811970124.post-4938394882257551922014-05-04T14:00:00.001-07:002014-05-04T14:00:28.049-07:00The Man Who Was Period Five<p dir="ltr">A door creaked open. Deep inside its yawning mouth there was a soft, eerie fluttering. Old copies of The Morning Star tumbled to the floor, as Gabriel Shelley brushed past them and into the gloom. A narrow wooden shelf ran around the limits of the room and cardboard boxes full of leaflets announcing a rally in support of a Free Palestine littered the floor so that crossing it became a game of chequers where the winner was always Red. There was a soft click as Gabriel's guide eased the door behind them shut.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Without a word he raised his hand and beckoned through to the back of the office.</p>
<p dir="ltr">He knocked on a concealed door and Shelley wondered, for the first  time, if he had made the right decision accompanying him to tonight's meeting. He had heard the rumours. The Enemies of Promise met in complete secrecy, and that no outsider had ever been admitted to their meetings, but there were always rumours: some said that they kept a dungeon full of children who had not been told their level since 2003. Others spoke of an unspeakable ritual involving group discussion, musical plenaries and differentiation by (Shelley remembered how his informant had shuddered) outcome. It was said their leader had trained in the Seventies, that she had once eaten an OFSTED inspector's right arm and Required Improvement in all areas except for Having Something on the Head, it was said...</p>
<p dir="ltr">"Enter."</p>
<p dir="ltr">The voice boomed from the inside the door, and Gabriel Shelley, a young Inspector freshly plucked from the classroom (which he had loved, honest, and he still had lots of friends who he kept in touch with still "hard at it") wandered blinking like a young lamb into the gloom. Would his superiors be pleased that he had penetrated the secret heart of the determined conspiracy to deny the Education Secretary a better job and thousands of children a brighter future through testing? He could not say.</p>
<p dir="ltr">His first impression was one of the massiveness. As he stepped into the Temple of Failure his eyes adjusted and he made out a sixty-foot high ceiling on which was painted - well, he couldn't tell but it looked like it had been done with finger paints. He made out what he thought might be a house, and noticed that nobody had marked it. </p>
<p dir="ltr">Around the room was rack upon rack of "groovy" textbooks. Some he recognised as notorious texts with Ethnic protagonists and lefty morals...there were also sets of games for teaching maths through social construction and a complete set of Vygotsky. The stench of Failure hung in the air, and there were no Standards anywhere.</p>
<p dir="ltr">In the centre of the room a round table was laid out with some Pritt Sticks, a pot of board markers and some sugar paper in the middle. Around it sat four people, five with his guide joining them. He saw an empty seat and wondered for the first time why he had been brought here.</p>
<p dir="ltr">"Greetings" said a hooded figure, "I am Period 1. We have heard much about you"</p>
<p dir="ltr">Another spoke up. This was a cheerful looking man with a tweed jacket who looked like he had never in his life been near a randomised control trial. He bent back his knuckles until they cracked and peered down his nose at Shelley.</p>
<p dir="ltr">"We have heard that you deplore modernity and have expressed the belief that Entrepreneurship should not necessarily be taught at five. Good show, good show. Are you by any chance a Trotskyist?"</p>
<p dir="ltr">A woman with brightly coloured beads, a hemp skirt and zero professionalism Smiled broadly from the right hand side of the table,</p>
<p dir="ltr">"They call me Period 4: feel free to use this time to just emote about your experience of coming here today: and don't mind Period 3, he never wakes up unless it's to agitate for unnecessary strike action which will cost the economy millions, or do the crossword."</p>
<p dir="ltr">A large man with a Che Guevara badge and no drive to raise attainment whatsoever snored beside her.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Suddenly the one they called Period 1 banged a metre rule loudly on the table (though he made no move to enter the incident on SIMS).</p>
<p dir="ltr">"SILENCE!  In the name of Piaget, Marx, The Miners' Strike and Billy Bragg are you prepared to make a solemn oath this night to join The Enemies of Promise?"</p>
<p dir="ltr">Shelley gulped. "You mean..."</p>
<p dir="ltr">"I do. Are you prepared to become Period Five?"</p>
Informutationhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10033240781954608352noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1302928158811970124.post-78587626663781855992014-02-07T00:14:00.001-08:002014-02-07T00:14:43.046-08:00Presenting at the "State of Education" conference, March 1st<p dir="ltr"><b>I will be presenting at the </b><b>one</b><b> </b><b>day</b><b> "State of Education" conference on March 1st 2014 at Oxford House, </b><b>Bethnal</b><b> Green</b>.</p>
<p dir="ltr">To Book: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/state-of-education-conference-1-march-2014-tickets-10238604943<br>
Programme Details: http://stateofeducation2014.wordpress.com</p>
<p dir="ltr">I will be running an interactive session, The Trend Away from Freedom, on contrasting Enlightenment ideas of Liberty and how they relate to participants' practical experience. It will ask participants to consider what autonomy for teachers and students really amounts to today.</p>
<p dir="ltr">The rest of the programme looks great too, with workshops on alternatives to school, arts education and the place of trade unions in the sector. I am delighted to be involved.</p>
<p dir="ltr">See some of you there, perhaps.</p>
Informutationhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10033240781954608352noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1302928158811970124.post-39800435683876937492014-02-01T00:57:00.003-08:002014-02-01T02:57:29.447-08:00The Empiricist and the Philosopher: a modern unromance<p dir="ltr">It has lately come to my notice that a lot of people are distinguished (if that is the right word) by an inability to differentiate between these two types of academic work: Philosophical and Empirical. I thought I would try and do everyone a favour by drawing some dividing lines here, before anyone else says anything embarrassing.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Before I start it is fairly axiomatic to me that the truly scientific outlook is indispensable if we are going to survive then next thousand year plus on this planet or indeed any other. If you at any point think you detect me neglecting the principles of repeatability of result, basis of belief in evidence, the separation of matters of faith from matters of knowledge then please, point out to me where I have misstepped and send me an email. I will be really happy to reply.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Secondly, and unhelpfully in my profession (education) as in every other there is the question of certain words acquiring meaning that they do not have outside if that field. One such example is "differentiation". Over time "to differentiate" has come to mean something we do with our plans, resources and delivery in order to make those with specific barriers to learning better able to access the work. Its non specialist meaning is simply to draw a line between, rather as I am doing with this piece of writing. This does not mean that either of these meanings is incorrect: rather it means that we are dependent on the context to work out what reading we are supposed to infer. Of course even then this is language, so nothing is foolproof. Write to me if you need anything clarified, please.</p>
<p dir="ltr">And so to the matter at hand:</p>
<p dir="ltr">The recent controversy sparked by the theoretical piece from Andrew Davis, <a href="http://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/durham-university-lecturer-andrew-davis-6637334">written</a> as a member of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain (of which I may as well say I am a member) caused a great deal of confusion. I was struck in discussion with perfectly pleasant individuals by the great confusion about a number of points. Three main ones:</p>
<p dir="ltr">The claim the pamphlet was not peer reviewed<br>
The claim the pamphlet did not contain empirical data<br>
The (related) claim the pamphlet was mere speculation</p>
<p dir="ltr">All of these claims seem to me reruns of the same kind of claims which were made when Michael Hand (in fact the general editor of this series) ran his own pamphlet about patriotism and whether it should be taught in schools. Please do keep the word "should" in mind, it will be important.</p>
<p dir="ltr">In a piece in Philosophy Today, Professor Hand reflected on the fallout from writing that article and the fact that, for all the media hoo-ha thus caused he at no point found a newspaper willing to take the fact that a theoretical piece or work had been written seriously on its own merits. That, it was claimed, was mere Opinion. Did he not have some facts, some data, a graph? Something for the headline writers to latch on to.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Now you may sympathise! What right after all does this man have to put out (Profess) his opinion? And this is the situation that Davis found himself in with the publication of his own pamphlet "To read or not to read".  His central claim, to my mind, was that if we are teaching students to do something which has no meaning outside the educational context then we are not teaching them at all. This definition of the limits of the category called "teaching" seemed to some, however, ludicrous. Hence the claims made above.</p>
<p dir="ltr">To claim the pamphlet was not peer reviewed was objectively wrong. The editorial team connected to the publication comprised 11 academics with many years experience between them including eight Professors and advisors to governments past and present. What lies behind this claim is a deep suspicion of theoretical work which amounts to  a virulent anti intellectual positivism which currently blights the sciences.</p>
<p dir="ltr">The second claim, that the pamphlet does not contain substantially new empirical data is true. However, empirical and philosophical questions have important differences between them which are the subject of this essay. Andrew Davis is a philosopher. The type and scope of his research is defined by the limits of his discipline. This is also my response to the third objection: he is a philosopher, this work is theory. Therefore, it is not "speculative" to write what one thinks because in this field what one thinks is precisely the research itself. When Davis says what he has written is the result of three years' work we have no reason to doubt him unless we believe that mental work is not meaningful or real, and if we believe that then quite frankly we should never be anywhere near a classroom.</p>
<p dir="ltr">So, the distinction between the Empirical and the Theoretic then, finally is something like this.</p>
<p dir="ltr">To simplify greatly, scientists produce data based on studies which are repeatable. This data is based on the measure of what we know is measurable. It does not, of course, step into the field of unknown unknowns because nothing does, at least consciously. However, a tree that falls in the forest with no one around to hear it isn't even a Subject so somebody actually has to analyse that stuff. If you show me a bunch of numbers being spat out of an electron microscope or an FMRI scanner I am going to shrug and go "uh?" So it must be admitted that we need analysis.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Now, analysis of data cannot of course be done by laypersons. Various problems will prevail, such as lack of knowledge of terminology, prevalence of personal prejudice, lack of common Lexis to debate findings with and so on.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Partly what Davis was doing was trying to rework the definition of "teach" to prevent abuse of the term. Once the term is abused then it becomes easy misuse it to abuse people. We could think of the bullying cry of "I am just teaching him a lesson" here. One student tried to excuse slapping another in the back of the neck to me recently by saying "I do it every time he makes a mistake...I am helping him become the best version of himself." This appeal to the notion of teaching was supposed to get me on side, but precisely because I do not regard that as teaching or learning I was not vulnerable to the sophistry. This, in very practical terms, is one way to use philosophy in education.</p>
<p dir="ltr">When we discipline ourselves within institutions to improve our theoretical instruments we are doing Philosophy. We owe a debt to that discipline and its contribution to understanding not of what is but of terminology which is meaningful and conceptions of what is ethical, thinkable and non contradictory. These I would placr under the heading of Meaning. An example: I think the nihilism of any view which says that "Numbers go up" is synonymous with progress, not to mention the magical thinking that goes along with it, should be obvious. A philosopher wants to ask "Numbers of what? What's the distribution? What categories are you using? Is there reason to believe this source? What prejudices operate commonly in this area?" Their specialist training invites them to suspend judgement and pass the data through transformative steps so as to view all the currently thinkable possibilities (ideally). Yet people persist in asking philosophers to provide evidence or "prove it". Headline writers want things boiled down. Busy ministers want the "key points". But these are not statements which can be cramped and offered into inspirational quotes for your Facebook wall. Rather they are systems of thought which, once inducted into them, we have historically found to be useful when it comes to reading and making sense out of evidence. It is a dirty trick to try and ask someone to justify themselves with evidence when, for example, they are discussing ethics. If you are in Rwanda during a genocide and somebody asks you to show what evidence you can find that the genocide should stop you are going to be stumped. There is only evidence of genocide! As Hume observed though, no is implies an ought. Theoretical work continually asks what we should do, what we should say, how we should interpret the world. It is a naturalistic fallacy to expect the way of the world to always tell us everything we need to know.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Of course if theory never links up with data then that is a terrible shame, but it is a failure which damages both the facts and the ideas. "So much the worse for the facts", as Vygotsky writes.</p>
<p dir="ltr">In education right now test data is produced at a very impressive rate which computers only serve to speed up. There is an absence of high quality public analysis precisely because the production of data has become the objective, rather than the synthesis of the two disciplines of theory and practice: Philosophy and Evidence Gathering. Computers can't do theory, so it is impossible to expect analysis to keep pace with data. This means certain key areas of professional and public life need to slow down if we are going to make sense of what is happening. That very modern phenomenon, the "man in a hurry" is going to have to learn that some things don't come in ticker tape, news feed form.</p>
<p dir="ltr">And this must happen, if we believe in a future. We cannot expect progress in human knowledge and understanding without the proper marriage of evidence and analysis. It is to everyone's detriment if our suspicion of "mere" opinion is allowed to stifle public reason, the selfsame public reason the exercise of which has, for some*, been synonymous with Freedom</p>
<p dir="ltr">*Kant</p>
<p dir="ltr">Debts to: Jan Derry, Vygotsky, Hume, Kant, Michael Hand, Andrew Davis</p>
Informutationhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10033240781954608352noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1302928158811970124.post-91139762835155603192014-01-10T09:56:00.001-08:002014-01-10T10:10:08.105-08:00The Child is the God of Capitalist Man<p dir="ltr">The Child is the God of Capitalist man.  What does this imply?</p>
<p dir="ltr">One consequence of ceasing to care for eternity is imprisonment in the present. This gives the busybody, the overworked go getter who can no longer enjoy their life and bustles frantically hither and <u>yon</u>,  a problem. They are of an instant vulnerable to a simple question, that being</p>
<p dir="ltr">"Why do you do it all?"</p>
<p dir="ltr">As they hurtle towards burnout these useful nodes in the corporate machine do not, of course, have the notion that they might want the whole beastly business over and done with. So they say, as Weber observed, not 'for the glory of God', which was the serf's answer, but "I am doing it for my kids".</p>
<p dir="ltr">Tricky situation for a six year old to find themselves in, sitting on the heavenly throne; is it any wonder that they get confused?</p>
<p dir="ltr">Of course it is hardly the case that we treat them as divinites all the time. There is nothing so disappointing as a failed God,and so the Child has scorn poured on it when it fails to act as the Almighty ought (and who decides how the Almighty ought to do anything? That's Capitalism, folks).</p>
<p dir="ltr">Thus just as the real God of the Feudal age was the Agricultural year, the Child is only a sacrificial Corn God of the Aztek year. The youth is worshipped and then consumed in fire and sacrifice. The whole cycle is played out on the symbolic plane within the ritual circle of celebrity. Pity the poor things and, for that matter, the adults who, their time of divinity long over, instead wander the plains of cultural desolation, worshipping what they used to be, unwilling to <u>leave</u> it behind. </p>
Informutationhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10033240781954608352noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1302928158811970124.post-10668978470168443092013-12-29T04:21:00.001-08:002013-12-29T08:59:43.868-08:00When The Grade isn't worth it <p dir="ltr"><br>
The dubious present state of the labour market makes it apparent to those from low income backgrounds early on that their options even within an affluent society like Britain are extremely limited.</p>
<p dir="ltr">In such circumstances it seems to be the case that the right response is to compete harder for jobs. Within collective enterprises like classrooms or even macro environments like nations the idea that some are not "pulling their weight" is therefore a potentially frustrating turn of events.</p>
<p dir="ltr">I once set a class the task of giving group presentations. One group delivered theirs and, as sometimes happens, one student had evidently done the majority of the work. At the end we reflected on the presentation as a class and tried to work out what we thought had happened and why. The student who had done least I will call Tobi. Tobi had said nothing whatsoever during the presentation. During the reflective questions at the end he also said nothing. Others were more vocal, they spoke of the frustration of being in a group where one member is not pulling his or her weight., and the language was very reminiscent of anxiety around "benefit cheats".</p>
<p dir="ltr">"They just take everyone else's hard work"<br>
"Lazy"<br>
"If they can't be bothered..."</p>
<p dir="ltr">I didn't share my view but I was sympathetic. Perhaps because I was silent one girl, Senay, spoke up dissentingly. To my regret I can only paraphrase from memory her extraordinarily original point.</p>
<p dir="ltr">"Sometimes you are in a group and someone wants a level six (equivalent of an A grade in this class) and they want it sort of TOO much and they are rude to you and you just think 'get it in your own then I won't help' if it means that much to them"</p>
<p dir="ltr">This sophisticated introduction of a categorical imperative, a refusal to be treated as a means to an end, completely altered the room. Even those who had previously towed the line now revised their views in some cases, agreeing that being decent to one another actually came before success. Senay had successfully reasoned an alternative interpretation of Tobi's nonparticipation, one that convinced her whole class including me.</p>
<p dir="ltr">At this point and without introducing any big theories I would like to quote Paul Willis on counter-school culture amongst students. Willis was studying working class male students in the Midlands in the 1970s, but his sympathies are recognisable in Senay's point:</p>
<p dir="ltr">"It is through a good number (of the working classes) trying (to succeed in high stakes certificate testing) that the class structure is legitimised. The middle class enjoys its privilege not by virtue of inheritance or birth, but by virtue of an apparently proven greater competence and merit. <b>The refusal to compete...is therefore in this sense a radical act: it refuses to collude with its own educational suppression</b>."<br>
- Willis "Learning to Labour" 1978 p.128</p>
<p dir="ltr">I do not mean to suggest that counter school culture or idleness is any kind of useable programme. Tobi does not have the answer. I do deliberately imply, however, that in the words of one contemporary writer "The only way to win is not to play".</p>
Informutationhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10033240781954608352noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1302928158811970124.post-52533541405477031962013-12-28T02:51:00.001-08:002014-02-03T14:15:46.651-08:00Anna Karenina - an early critique of celebrity?<p dir="ltr"><u>Anna</u> and Vronsky's affair does not run contrary to social mores but rather, for Tolstoy, is produced by them.  The 'spirit of lies' (pt 2 CH 27) is Society itself. His profound distrust of Society  makes AK a prototypical critique of the media and of celebrity. It can be conceived of as part of McLuhan's project as much as a general ethical <u>or</u> theological work.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Furthermore it is important to collect examples of where Vronsky and Anna are read as being straightforwardly in love, straightforwardly "star crossed lovers".</p>
<p dir="ltr">They are false because the Society that produces them is false, not because they must necessarily deceive Karenin, Anna's husband. The real target of Tolstoy's critique is Society which, like Heidegger's "Das Man" merely hands on received opinions and petty falsehoods.</p>
<p dir="ltr">It is not therefore a simple and straightforward injustice which distinguishes Oblonsky's affair from his sister, Anna's: he is morally less in love with the truth than she is (hence her "straight backed" appearance in Society prior to her fall). The corrosion of her behaviour is a byproduct of her immersion in a society built on lies. Her personal anguish is the unique subject of the novel and not her love for Vronsky. Paradoxically, then, it is Levin who is her nearest analogue in the novel rather than her opposite. His withdrawal to the country, a self imposed exile of which we are constantly reminded, has presumably saved him from the same fate as Anna: succumbing to Society; madness at his inability to reconcile with it and, eventually, death.</p>
Informutationhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10033240781954608352noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1302928158811970124.post-15374476776428077032013-12-17T09:09:00.002-08:002013-12-17T09:09:20.308-08:00Be Like Huck<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img height="244" src="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/7101/7101-h/images/c06-46.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" width="320" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">It'll happen when it happens.</td></tr>
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</div>
<br />
<br />
One of my students, a fantastic writer, could not put a word down on paper.<br />
<br />
He obviously had a head full of ideas that was driving him, if not insane, then at least to the point of a mild hysteria. And yet every time he would sit down to write he would freeze up. He couldn't get them out of his hand and down on the page.<br />
<br />
It took a long time for me to work out that the key was just to give him the option of writing and walk away. He's fifteen years old, he will do it if he wants to. Although he is writing his coursework and I know that time is running out, I also know that yelling at him about deadlines won't help. Instead, I have found that I just need to suggest that some work might happen in the time available, and prepare the resources and a bit of encouragement.<br />
<br />
"You can write, you just don't think you can write."<br />
<br />
That sort of thing.<br />
<br />
Today he wrote four pages in an hour and a half and said, "You know, the reason I can do this is because there's no pressure."<br />
<br />
I agreed that there was, in fact, no pressure.<br />
<br />
And then he carried on writing, before checking it carefully and handing it in.<br />
<br />
There is, in fact, no pressure. What is the worst that can happen? Somebody in authority might not be happy with you? Boo Hoo. As Huck Finn said, "Sometimes I'd play hooky, and when I came back to school somebody would have a good holler at me, and I'd always feel much better." Twain's Huck is capable, fearless and, most importantly of all, feels all the pressures of the adult world to be mildly amusing distractions from real life. Which is what they are.<br />
<br />
We should aspire, teachers and students, to be like Huck. There is no pressure. If you want to write it, write it. If the class wants to be quiet, let them be. If they won't let you start the lesson, what will do more harm: screaming at them? Terrifying them? Piling on the pressure in all its "you will never amount to anything" intellectual shabbiness? Or waiting an extra five minutes? Sometimes in teaching, wrote Rousseau, you have to be ready to waste time to save time.<br />
<br />
There's no pressure. Sometimes, we forget that.Informutationhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10033240781954608352noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1302928158811970124.post-68140024288294340552013-11-24T04:51:00.002-08:002014-01-12T04:54:01.537-08:00Apropos of the New Doctor Who: What are Cities FOR?<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In the opening scene of the new Doctor Who there is an extended scene where the Doctor flies over central London hanging from the TARDIS which is, in turn, hanging from a helicopter.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Shots take in the financial district, the London Eye and Tower Bridge.</span></div>
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img src="http://www.doctorwho.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/doctor-who-50th-anniversary-special-filming-london-trafalgar-square-matt-smith-tardis-crane.jpg" height="239" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" width="320" /></span></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This is how your reality is constructured</span></td></tr>
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This establishing set of images prefaces everything that is to come. For these purposes, London is reliable and regularly yoked.</span></div>
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I actually work right on the South Bank, and so I can attest that film crews are nearly as common as pigeons round there. Everybody wants a shot of the City somewhere in their picture. What is more striking is how these film crews are treated; that is, <i>they are treated with the kind of automatic deference with which we usually treat police forensic teams or paramedics</i>. Areas are cordoned off. People hurry by or try and gawp surreptitiously. The whole atmosphere is of an emergency. Partly this is due to the fact that they need to caputre light but wait a minute: <b>need</b>? Whose need? Who decided it was a need?</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In order to understand why this is, I think we need to ask a more fundamental question first.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">What, when one comes right to it, is the city actually for today?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We use, as a species, vast amounts of power to heat and light large urban spaces which, as with central London, are all but empty at night. When they are not empty, the growth of the Internet makes it increasingly doubtful that their purpose is justified at all.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Before, the justification for building, say, a skyscraper was that one needed:</span></div>
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<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A large area where clerks and typists could operate a bureaucracy.</span></li>
<li style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A mail room</span></li>
<li style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">An area where filing could be stored; some sort of archive</span></li>
</ul>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">All three of these purposes are now completely defunct. What is not dealt with by the Cloud is handled by computers as small as our hands or smaller. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And yet, the seeming necessity for a large central space remains, a collective focus for the collective will of all the employees who are trying to encourage profit.</span></div>
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I have an idea of how we can answer my question. To my knowledge nobody else has answered it in this way.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The city is necessary for what it signifies: indeed, it is itself the ARCH signifier in the sense that it provides the grammar whereby other signals make sense. In order to establish meaning, humans seem to need an architecture which makes a permanent impression.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The maintenance of these areas, then, is completely cut off from its original purpose. Where there were good practical reasons to build with turrets, or to build over fifty floors, throughout human history, those reasons are now totally subordinate, if not outright extinct in relation to this new purpose: the fabrication of Image.</span></div>
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Cities structure and give coherence to the sorts of things which people do when gathered in large groups.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So why the deference to the activity of film crews? <a href="http://www.thelmagazine.com/BrooklynAbridged/archives/2012/10/19/unwelcome-film-crews-clog-brooklyn-streets">Why are the streets of, say, Brooklyn so awash with film crews that it is becoming a source of complaint for residents.</a></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img src="http://www.thelmagazine.com/binary/e211/1350668616-filmcrew.jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" /></span></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Psychic defence unit in the field</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I believe that human beings, if deprived of psychic reassurance, begin to fall apart. Our lives need meaningful events in order to not seem futile. Clearly not everybody can physically fit into even the largest open spaces, so actions taken within those spaces need to be photographed and broadcast <i>as a matter of public safety</i>.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">People are reliant on the City not now for its original purpose but for the impression that we require that life there is in progress, moving forwards and not endlessly recurring.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"But I need to go to the city to meet clients."</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Yes you do, because if your clients met you anywhere else <i>you would not seem real to them</i>. They would regard you as an audience member, and so would you. The symbolic reality is so much more important to you than you think you already know. All your pragmatic reasons for working in the City are flimsy justifications for the real deal: because the Big City is where it's at. Everywhere else isn't. Well, almost everywhere.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Like they say in "<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053472/">Breathless</a>":</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: #fcfae7; color: #333333; line-height: 18px;">"If you don't like the sea... or the mountains... or the big city... then get stuffed"</span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: #fcfae7; color: #333333; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
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Informutationhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10033240781954608352noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1302928158811970124.post-58243495995367142372013-10-28T07:39:00.000-07:002013-10-28T07:45:03.254-07:00Don't Think of Me as a Teacher Part 1<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Today's is a Guest Blog written by veteran educator Herbert Dunwitty, a progressive classroom teacher with over 15 year's experience in the classroom or (as he calls them) "Share-spaces". Due to his teenage daughter being unavailable to show him how his laptop works, Herbert, who exists only in the minds of "realistic" MPs, Academy Chain board members and Peter Hitchens, has not previously published any of his wisdom online. Informutation is proud to be carrying this first in what will be a continuing series, provided his Union doesn't tell him we're all "Goveites".</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Don't Think of Me as a Teacher, Think of Me as a teacher (with a lower case t): Reflections on Considerations of Approaches to """Education""". </i></span></h2>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">After a busy day lowering Standards I often find myself sitting back with a cup of Fair Trade tea and a digestive and thinking to myself, "Herbert, did you do everything you could for the precious young minds in your care today?"</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The answer, of course, is yes.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And yet there are days when I ask myself what more than 100% would look like? Numbers have never really been my strong suit but I suppose it might look a bit like a picture of a butterfly. And butterflies are what I was busily shouting at my class to think about whilst they threw flick knives at each other yesterday.</span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Who are you to say this isn't learning?</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Suddenly I felt a hand tugging at my arm,</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"Sir, what's the exam going to be about in June?"</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Of course I stopped everyone right there and drew their attention to the tragedy that was </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">unfolding before us: a child wanted to pass an exam.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In the fifteen minutes or so it took for the class to be quiet, I had plenty of time to reflect on the miserable situation of this poor child who had been brainwashed to think that he future happiness depended on her passing an exam. I cast my mind back to my time at Oxford in the late 70s, when I was seeing this simply smashing girl with a Siouxsie Sioux haircut. Where would I have been if I had thought exams were important? I mean obviously I did think so otherwise I never would have got there in the first place but the point is I was wrong. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And being able to admit that is what makes me right, right now.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Anyway, by this point 50% or so of them were quiet. I thought "close enough" and launched into an extensive diatribe against worldly success. I do believe that little Joolz was crying behind her blackberry, although that might have been because Shenay had just BBM'd her a particularly elaborate character assassination Brandon had just posted on Tumblr.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"Children!" I announced over the din, "Put down your phones and stop reenacting the struggle for civil rights by cussing each other and eating behind your hands, one of our colleagues wants to know some FACTS."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Some of the more conscious ones gawped in disbelief.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"Now who can remember rule one which we all agreed to?"</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A hand shot up.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />"Please sir, is it "If a man in a suit comes in just tell them you're a level five aiming at a level six and keep copying off the board?"</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"Oh no, that's not it, that's rule ten, rule one? begins with "If..."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"If we all know nothing then nobody feels left out!" the ones who weren't dodging chairs or applying makeup chorused.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"Exactly!" I said, "Now go and stand in the Empathy Corner and forget things until you spontaneously realise how disadvantaged you made people in our environment feel!"</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Duly chagrined, the wrongdoer withdrew to contemplate the error of their ways, and I had time for a quick fag out the window before the next swoop by SLT on a Learning Walk. They have them every fifteen minutes now.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">That's what 110% looks like.</span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Next week: How these, plus a whole lot of heart, can absolutely wreak havoc with schoolwide behaviour policies in a double period last thing on a Friday.</span></td></tr>
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Informutationhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10033240781954608352noreply@blogger.com0