tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-90368592024-03-14T01:59:59.424-05:00General Epistles of Jacobus the ScribeJacobus the Scribehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11618447585764484499noreply@blogger.comBlogger80125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9036859.post-45411803844869303962016-08-26T09:44:00.000-05:002016-08-26T09:44:13.275-05:00Never Hillary/Trump? Johnson, not McMullin<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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I don’t know when it happened.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Maybe it was 8 years ago when Obama won his
first presidential election.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Maybe it
was when Bill Clinton was in the Whitehouse.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Maybe it was right after the last election.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Whenever it happened our shadow government, “the owners” as Carlin
called them, decided that Hillary Clinton was going to be
the president of the United States.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Full
stop.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Maybe the decision was made at
each of these time points, but just with more resolution as to the timing and
method.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The back room details can’t be
known, but the public process can be observed and all the folks with money and power are working together to anoint her.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
After looking at the process and outcome of the Democratic
primary, I think most people have accepted that to be the case, at least as far
as the Democratic Party was concerned.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What some people
might not realize is that the Republicans, particularly in the person of Mitt
Romney have been working towards the same goal.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This may seem like an odd thing to say, but
let me lay out the story for you that started to form in my mind when the Republicans
were down to three quasi-viable candidates, but became absolutely clear when
Romney gave his speech rejecting Donald Trump.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Since the true origins of this sort of thing are never
visible to schmoes dependent on internet news stories, one of the earlier parts
of this story was Romney’s decision to have one of his campaign funding
summits to cultivate contacts
between GOP presidential hopefuls, party officials, and funders.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><a href="http://beta.deseretnews.com/article/865630682/GOP-2016-field-still-scattered-after-Mitt-Romney-summit.html?pg=all">http://beta.deseretnews.com/article/865630682/GOP-2016-field-still-scattered-after-Mitt-Romney-summit.html?pg=all</a><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was a sort of like he was playing match-maker
for a political party that didn’t have a strong personality that could
rally the voters and remain in the party mainstream.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Romney and the RNC gave no serious effort to narrowing
the field and the result was a long list of possible, but unsatisfactory
candidates, each with a hodge podge of strengths and drawbacks so as to
thoroughly divide the voters.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Whatever
was going on in the secret meetings, the most abecedarian of mistakes had been
made.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Everyone knows that you divide then conquer, and yet here the Republican
leadership had successfully divided the party themselves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Somewhere in the midst of all this Donald Trump joined the
panel and began flexing his reality T. V. muscles in the debates to draw the
media’s shocked attention.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This of
course won him tremendous free campaigning, while the more reasonable
candidates with greater potential to attract the growing number of independent
voters quietly dropped out of the race one-by-one.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A telling event regarding the strategy was
Bill Clinton’s conversation with Stephen Colbert on Late Night where he
suggested that Trump’s run would be a strategic boon for Hillary’s
campaign.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lC-U5xiFjs">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lC-U5xiFjs</a><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Here was a candidate that could stir up
enough interest to take the primary, but would be too scandalous to win the
final.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
With the increasing absurdity and scariness of Trump’s
antics and popularity, Mitt Romney called a press conference to put a stop to
this evil candidate once and for all.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>However, in his speech he did very much the opposite.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Romney’s failure to endorse another candidate
guaranteed that the voters for Trump’s competition would remain divided among
themselves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Thus by rejecting Trump with
his words, Romney guaranteed him the nomination with his actions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Round two: divide and conquer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/04/us/politics/mitt-romney-speech.html?_r=0">http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/04/us/politics/mitt-romney-speech.html?_r=0</a>
(One of the relevant bits comes up at around 5:22.)</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Without getting into the details of the shadiness, the
manufactured consent, that got Hillary the Democrat nomination, voters in both
parties have been clearly <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/22/politics/2016-election-poll-donald-trump-hillary-clinton/index.html">left
terribly unsatisfied</a> with the candidates they’ve been gifted, except for of
course a few radical weirdos.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So where
can the Bernie-bots go to get their peace-mongering candidate?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Where can conservatives go that at least
tries to pretend to be mentally balanced?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Gary Johnson, we turn our lonely eyes to you.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Socially liberal, fiscally conservative: this is a platform
that, in spite of the way it irritates many philosophically pure libertarians
(those folks can never be satisfied), it is in fact a much better match for the
actual views of real live Americans than the “major party” contenders offer,
and the Libertarians are already on the ballot in all 50 states.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not only that, the polling numbers appear to
be creeping towards qualifying the candidate for the major election debates,
the real chance to show the American people how much he agrees with them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/news/2016-by-the-numbers-will-gary-johnson-disrupt-clinton-vs-trump-race/">http://www.cbsnews.com/news/2016-by-the-numbers-will-gary-johnson-disrupt-clinton-vs-trump-race/</a><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As it is, a growing number of GOP politicians
are coming to endorse Johnson’s candidacy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><a href="https://alibertarianfuture.com/libertarians/representatives-from-ten-states-have-endorsed-gary-johnson-for-president/">https://alibertarianfuture.com/libertarians/representatives-from-ten-states-have-endorsed-gary-johnson-for-president/</a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The chance of a win is still low, but a lot of people are
counting on the possibility of pushing the election onto Congress as a way of
protesting the corruption of our system.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It is in this context that for the third time we get to see the
political right divide and conquer its voters to ensure Hillary her presidency,
and again with close connections to Mitt Romney.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This third division depends on the
peculiarities of the Mormon voting bloc.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Aside from the state where he was governor, Utah is one of the
few places where Johnson has a strong chance of capturing the electoral
votes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Between Romney’s
anti-endorsement, Trump’s crass behavior, and the vague threat Trump presents
to religious freedom in the U.S., <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/10/us/politics/mormons-trump-utah.html">Mormons
are largely in the lurch, looking for a third party option</a>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Johnson offers a good option for the
staunchly red state due to his fiscal conservatism, small-government mind-set,
and respect for the Constitution.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>According to Mormonism, <a href="https://www.lds.org/scriptures/dc-testament/dc/101.77-80?lang=eng#76">the
Constitution is a divinely inspired document</a>, not quite scripture, but more
than a merely human product.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As it turns
out this respect for the Constitution is an important part of the context that
is being leveraged by Romney affiliates to cut Johnson’s chances of threatening
a Hillary win.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
There’s a prophecy among Mormons that a time would come when
the Constitution will “hang from a thread” and that it will only be supported
by Mormon Elders.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Because of this
prophecy there is a large number of Mormons who, given the chance, will always
vote for a Mormon candidate.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Throughout
the primary campaigns such people regularly made Facebook posts expressing
their hopes that Romney would change his mind and run.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Of course a Romney run seems ridiculously
improbable now, but such voters have received their Mormon candidate anyway. <a href="http://archive.sltrib.com/story.php?ref=/lds/ci_6055090">http://archive.sltrib.com/story.php?ref=/lds/ci_6055090</a></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Evan McMullin, whose exact ties to Romney aren’t totally
clear from the information I’ve gathered, is at the very least being funded by
some of the same groups that funded Romney’s campaign.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In any case, he’s got the squeaky clean
Mormon image, and makes his talking points hitting all the right tone to sound
like a moderate Republican / local Mormon church leader, so his appeal to the
Mormon voter is totally predictable.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But
for the most part, as a candidate, he came pretty much out of nowhere.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His particular “nowhere” should, with about
two seconds of reasonable thought, send up about a hundred red flags in the
minds of anyone who wants to vote against the kind of governmental corruption that
Hillary represents.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Specifically, his
primary claim to qualification for the presidency is his work in the CIA and
later as a policy director for House Republicans.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is clearly a guy who is enmeshed in the
military industrial complex that is working so fervently to ensure that the
U.S. is never not at war again, and that the Middle-east will never become
stable enough for self-determination and peace.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>And to add icing to this he also spent some time working for the
Investment Banking Division at Goldman Sachs, so you can add that to his
probable entaglements.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In essence,
except for something like Obamacare, you can pretty well imagine the
far-fetched presidency of Evan McMullin would be the same thing as a Clinton
presidency in terms of policy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And of
course the press seem to be on board, because whenever they talk about McMullin
they magically forget that there are already two third-party candidates with
much higher chances for challenging the Hillary-Trump matrix and pretend Gary
Johnson doesn’t exist.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Look here
disaffected Republicans!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is your
only guy!”</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/08/08/evan-mcmullin-can-t-beat-donald-trump-but-he-can-make-sure-he-loses.html">http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/08/08/evan-mcmullin-can-t-beat-donald-trump-but-he-can-make-sure-he-loses.html</a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="http://www.salon.com/2016/08/14/evan-mcmullins-presidential-run-could-potentially-blow-up-the-republican-party/">http://www.salon.com/2016/08/14/evan-mcmullins-presidential-run-could-potentially-blow-up-the-republican-party/</a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"></span>Whether he knows it
or not, and I imagine he does, McMullin’s only job is to divide voters and make
sure Hillary wins.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>
Jacobus the Scribehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11618447585764484499noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9036859.post-58668717060324260022009-12-04T14:40:00.001-05:002009-12-04T14:43:25.255-05:00Hooray for Texas?<span style="font-size:85%;">Currently I'm working on one of the final papers I have falling due with the end of the semester. The assignment has to do with designing an evaluation, and I've been planning to look at the impacts of some kind of state curriculum mandates. This has led me to look around for any states with interesting recent changes in their curriculum policy. Anyway, I stumbled upon Texas as having started some interesting new graduation requirements this year that I'll probably be looking at for my paper. That is all fine and dandy, but why do I express this ambivalent reserved hopeful excitement? It is because of one of the many other things that happens to be buried in this bill. <br /><br />In a strange mood to fool around with graduation policies, the Lone Star State has decided to run an early-readiness graduation pilot program. Colleges and universities are being solicited to coordinate with school districts to invent an assessment system that can facilitate early high school graduation by giving students an opportunity to demonstrate that they are ready for college, ostensibly at any point during their high school careers. Why is this potentially a ridiculously awesome thing? Because at its base, compulsory secondary education is oppressive and this can create an opportunity for some willing and able people to escape it. This is also cool because it is the first time I've heard of a policy plan that sought to inquire about what people really need to learn from school that can in turn inform future policies about what the schools require. Granted, “need” here is defined as including achievement levels in core-curricula and readiness for continued education. However, as I've learned time and again since I began teaching, successive approximations of the goal are something to rejoice over. Now there are lots of other doubts that hedge up my joy. What sorts of attitudes and expectations are the universities going to bring to the table? If the findings are good are Texans really ready for a radical policy maneuver that would be implicated by this? How would the teachers' unions respond if this proliferates enough to threaten job security? Et cetera. But either way it's something to keep the ol' eye-ball on. </span>Jacobus the Scribehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11618447585764484499noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9036859.post-43112739843183662962009-11-07T16:45:00.001-05:002009-11-07T16:47:06.471-05:00Secrets<span style="font-size:85%;">This writing grows out of observations I've made recently in several interactions I've had with other people. There exists in here a principle that I think could be of real benefit to many people in developing their spiritual lives.<br /><br />The scriptures have it that the works of God are done in the open for everyone to see and know, but the devil uses secrecy to hide all of his efforts. In 2 Nephi 26 we have: “ there are also secret combinations, even as in times of old, according to the combinations of the devil, for he is the founder of all these things; yea, the founder of murder, and works of darkness. … For behold, my beloved brethren, I say unto you that the Lord God worketh not in darkness. He doeth not anything save it be for the benefit of the world; for he loveth the world.” In Acts 26 Paul declares before Agrippa “This thing was not done in a corner.” And one final reference from Amos 3:7 “Surely the Lord GOD will do nothing, but he revealeth his secret...”<br /><br />Understanding this principle Ignatius of Loyola gave some clarification for its application to the work of discernment of spirits.<br /><br /><blockquote>[The evil spirit] acts as a licentious lover in wanting to be secret and not revealed. For, as the licentious man who, speaking for an evil purpose, solicits a daughter of a good father or a wife of a good husband, wants his words and persuasions to be secret, and the contrary displeases him much, when the daughter reveals to her father or the wife to her husband his licentious words and depraved intention, because he easily gathers that he will not be able to succeed with the undertaking begun: in the same way, when the enemy of human nature brings his wiles and persuasions to the just soul, he wants and desires that they be received and kept in secret; but when one reveals them to his good Confessor or to another spiritual person that knows his deceits and evil ends, it is very grievous to him, because he gathers, from his manifest deceits being discovered, that he will not be able to succeed with his wickedness begun. (Spritual Exercises, Rule 13 for discernment in the First Week.)</blockquote><br />Now there are a few things that I would like to point out about this teaching and it's general implications. First, it may be noted that for most of Christianity there is a certain understanding of a need for confession with regards to sin. This is not what he's talking about here. He's saying that the enemy desires us to keep even the ways in which we are tempted a secret and that by revealing the secret to someone else we unmask the villainous plan and obtain some power over the temptation. And this goes beyond just temptation. It includes trials of any kind. How often do people afflicted with spiritual trials in life keep them a secret either because they are ashamed or feel like they shouldn't burden another with their problems? And yet the argument here is that this tendency towards secrecy is a method of diabolical deceit.<br /><br />The second point to observe here is that the instruction leaves plenty of room for exercising wisdom and judgment in the manner of revealing the secret. There is no injunction to be completely open and make all temptations and trials public. There is no rule that one should confess to persons directly involved in the problem. It simply states a confessor, or another spiritual person. For example if a trial exists around angry feelings towards a family member, it is not necessary to reveal this to the family member if it is liable to create unnecessary problems in the relationship. One may safely choose to reveal the issue to a friend or spiritual leader and thereby gain strength against the enemy.<br /><br />The third point deals with how it is that this process works. There is something about a secret that it does interesting things to the mind of the person who harbors it. In the case of secret emotions as temptations, it can be very difficult for a person caught up in them to see and understand them with clarity and objectivity. However, the second that one reveals them to another person there is the opportunity where one can hardly help but consider them from an outsiders perspective. It is an automatic human process that we model in our own minds what we expect others to think when we are communicating with them. And should the hearer be sufficiently spiritual, they can provide actual feedback, the sum of which will uncloak the deceits being used against the afflicted and destroy their influence.<br /><br />A fourth point can be made in the fact that Ignatius does not specify the gravity of the “wiles or afflictions” in question. Though I think it can be seen clearly that this principle applies to help in preventing one from following through with temptations to commit serious crimes, I believe that it can also apply to smaller struggles according to the judgment and perception of the person in question. I read recently that sometimes just having an opportunity to talk to another person about one's spiritual life can be such a relief that what were before great trials seem diminished even to non-existence. It was recommended that when this occurs one ought to reveal the secret anyway and thus more completely destroy the temptation.<br /><br />Finally I enjoy this passage from Doctrine and Covenants 123:13-14“... we should waste and wear out our lives in bringing to light all the hidden things of darkness, wherein we know them... These should then be attended to with great earnestness.”<br /><br />Just something to think about. </span>Jacobus the Scribehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11618447585764484499noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9036859.post-38711764424670181632009-09-23T23:21:00.003-05:002012-08-21T14:38:04.405-05:00Metallica's “Wherever I May Roam” as Cultic Hymn in the Mysteries of Hermes<span style="font-size: 85%;">So far I have not been able to discover an actual mystery cult in worship of Hermes or Mercury. It seems that this divinity may be associated too much with other mysteries (eg. as Corvus the messenger in Mithraism and as the psychopomp escorting Persephone to and from Hades in the Eleusinian mysteries). This seems strange in that this god is associated with many things that are particularly apropos for a mystery religion. His early forms were frequently related to fertility, his images frequently phallic. He often functions as a sort of liminal being, standing as a mediator between the mortal and the divine, the living and the dead, and males and females. He was patron of all sorts of common folk particularly those involved with travel and exchange.<br /><br />The primary identifying characteristic of a mystery religion is that it consists largely of a set of ritual dramatizations that are kept strictly secret by those who have been initiated into the cult. These rituals somehow functioned to provide the initiate with knowledge and some kind of magical appointment (sometimes by means of a sacred marriage) in order that they might attain some advanced form of afterlife. With such celestial goals in view, several of these mysteries and their antecedents possessed a particular interest in astrology. In the hymn “Wherever I May Roam,” several characteristics common to mysteries can be observed, characteristics which indicate Hermes as a focus for the cult. The first line of the hymn is repeated twice and represents both an element of mystery religion and an association with Hermes.<br /></span><br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: 85%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">And the road becomes my bride</span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: 85%;"><br />Inasmuch as the mysteries were held under great secrecy, very little detail is known for certain about the rituals that were contained there. So, I cannot comment on the likelihood that a marriage ceremony would have been a part of the initiation. However, it is generally considered quite probable that initiations consisted, among other things, of rituals providing purification. The concept of purification appears in a couple of places in our hymn starting with second line.<i>I am stripped of all but pride</i>It is interesting that the initiate's bride is “the road” this suggests the embarkation into the cult which may be represented as a road as such mysteries often involved the devotee progressing through a series of levels or grades until they had learned every rite in the whole system. It is also reminiscent of the road that the deceased may traverse into the higher realms of the afterlife. This aspect of the road also indicates the relationship to Hermes whose interest the roads were. <i><br /></i></span><br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: 85%;"><i>Only knowledge will I save</i></span><br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;"><i>To the game you stay a slave</i></span></div>
<span style="font-size: 85%;"><i><br /></i>In addition to the ritual sanctification, most mysteries seem to have carried a gnostic component to their soteriology. The knowledge of the mysteries is the critical difference between the celebrants of the cult and the population at large. Such knowledge is the mechanism by which greater stations are obtained after death. This type of salvation is also a liberation and in the case of this Hermetic cult the abandonment of home and goods contributes to this liberation. It seems that the freedom to live as if at home, comfortably and on balance in any situation is the measure of freedom and salvation the Hermeist obtains as seen in the following lines.<i><br /></i></span><br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: 85%;"><i>and my ties are severed clean</i></span><br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;"><i>The less I have the more I gain.</i></span><br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;"><i>Off the beaten path I reign.</i></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;"><i>...</i></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;"><i>Anywhere I roam,</i></span><br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;"><i>where I lay my head is home.</i></span></div>
<span style="font-size: 85%;"><br />One indication that this hymn is related to a cult of Hermes is embedded in a string of epithets: Rover, Wanderer, Nomad, Vagabond. It may be that these terms refer to four grades of the Hermetic mystery cult. However, they are succeeded by the line “<i>call me what you will.”</i> This suggests that the terms may be appropriately tied to any individual in the cult according the will or inclination of outsiders, regardless of rank. This concept of wandering is carried over in the following line:<i><br /></i></span><br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: 85%;"><i>Under wandering stars I've grown.</i></span></div>
<span style="font-size: 85%;"><br />This is particularly appropriate in such a mystery on two grounds. First it shows the object of the initiate's emulation in the celestial sphere. It also suggests a connection to Hermes in that his planet is the fastest and most wandering of the lot.<br /><br />One interesting connection with Hermes is one of the abilities that the devotee claims to obtain from his observance of the rites and their associated asceticism.<i><br /></i></span><br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: 85%;"><i>free to speak my mind anywhere</i></span></div>
<span style="font-size: 85%;"><br />One may remember the Lucan account in the New Testament of the Apostles Paul and Barnabas preaching in Lystra. When a crippled man was healed, the people believed Barnabas to be Jupiter, but Paul they thought to be Mercury on account that he was the greater orator. The ability not only to speak one's mind, but to speak it well and in strange company would be an ability quite consistent with a tradition worshiping Hermes. <br /><br />The final evidence for the song “Wherever I May Roam” to be considered a hymn of the hypothetical Hermetic mysteries is found in the final lines. It is the culmination of the system's salvation doctrine and arguably implies the patronage of Hermes both in his role as psychopomp and due to the passage's traveling motif. <i><br /></i></span><br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: 85%;"><i>Carved upon my stone,</i></span><br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;"><i>my body lie, but still I roam,</i></span><br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;"><i>wherever I may roam.</i></span></div>
Jacobus the Scribehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11618447585764484499noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9036859.post-12966918473225103792009-08-16T18:32:00.002-05:002009-08-16T18:46:41.322-05:00A strange parable that went too far<span style="font-size:85%;">March 1996 – Brunhild has been in estrous and seems to have influenced the rest of the troop with her mood because the other females are showing some tumescence. The males, Brian and Borris, have been approaching her. She's allowed them to mate, but has shown real signs of dissatisfaction with them. After one mating with Brian she hit him in the head with her hand then chased him off with a stick. He's gotten to be old enough that he cannot properly defend himself from a female as forceful as Brunhild. Each time Brian solicited her she walked off until he presented her with a small pile of figs. When he attempted to force himself on her, she began screaming and then<br />Barbara with one or more of the other junior females came running in and the group chased him off. <br /><br />April 1996 – Brunhild's estrous has come to its end while several of the other females including Barbara, have come to mating. Most of the younger ones have been passively accepting couplings from Brian and Borris. However, Borris has been somewhat more abusive with the females lately. It seems that this may be related to the appearance of a younger sexually mature male from another troupe that has been hanging around. In fact both Barbara and Brunhild have met this male to exchange grooming out of sight of Borris. This has led to both of the senior females mating with this new male, who absconded from the troupe after each event. <br /><br />Barbara was observed to be grooming Benjamin (the young foreign male) when she walked in front of him displaying her swellings. Benjamin approached as if to mate with her and she sat down, denying him access. He also sat and began grooming her when she got up again and began walking towards the troupe. Benjamin followed her, increasing his pace as if to catch her. Just as he nearly caught her, again she quickly sat down. Benjamin hooted a bit in frustration and resumed grooming her. Again Barbara got up, but this time ran toward the troupe and Benjamin got up to follow. As he ran though, Barbara came within sight of Borris. Benjamin seemed to detect this because when she stopped running he stopped chasing and crouched down in the leaf cover. Benjamin watched her closely as Borris noticed Barbara and approached. Barbara allowed him to mate with her as she frequently turned back to look in Benjamin's direction. At this point Bridget joined them and also mated with Borris. And as Benjamin watched Brandy also approached and mated with Borris.<br /><br />Late that night, there was sudden commotion, several of the troupe were screaming while at least one male and probably two were going from tree to tree shaking them and beating on the trunks. There was no visibility but at one point there was the sound like a large stone hitting a tree and breaking it and there was the sound of one chimpanzee repeatedly screaming but gradually moving away from the camp. <br /><br />In the morning, Borris was found dead. He had suffered severe head trauma that seems to have been associated with a large rock nearby that has blood splattered on it. Several of the females were making soft howls consistent with mourning as they touched Borris's body, lifting his arms and watching them flop back to the ground. There was no sign of Brian. However, Benjamin was quite present, always within sight of the females. Occasionally one would join him and engage in grooming. <br /><br />Over the course of the next few days eventually all the females had substantial time to spend in grooming and mating with Benjamin. Most of them have been at the peak of their tumescence and have proven quite willing partners to this new and apparently able young male. <br /><br />August 1996 – Just as with Bridget last month, Benjamin attempted to mate with Brandy, who is in estrous. However, Brunhild and Barbara got in between them. Brunhild with her stick chased Brandy off and Barbara, who is currently pregnant, solicited Benjamin to mate with her. Benjamin at first complied, but with slow, seemingly resigned body language, instead walked away. Benjamin sat under a date tree as Buster and Bruno stopped wrestling to practice their grooming skills on this elder male. <br /><br />December 1996 – It seems that Benjamin has had enough. After months of Brunhild and Barbara interfering with his attempts to mate with the younger females, he's abandoned the troupe. He's been gone for several days, certainly longer than his norm. Though it is uncertain where he's gotten to, it seems probable that he's working on joining a different troupe where his mating opportunities will improve. Most of the females in the group seem unhappy about this situation. Bridget and Brandy sit silently and stare, ignoring their young as much as possible. Meanwhile Brunhild goes back and forth terrorizing the other females with her stick. She even went so far as to attack Barbara with it. <br /><br /><br />March 1997 – In the past month, two roving young males have approached the troupe, which is feeding much further to the north than they did last year. It is not quite clear how or why but neither male chose to stay, despite the very easy access to females in the absence of any resident alpha male. The first one mated with a few females that presented their swellings to him, including Brunhild and Bridget. After finishing this task, he left and never returned again. The second one, approached Barbara in the forest and seemed to be checking her out, mostly by smell. Then, suddenly he hit her in the head several times, chasing her in a circle. After tiring of this exercise, he rested and ate for a minute, then left. Brunhild has not gotten any less surly with the others since Benjamin left. And the effect of her abuses are starting to show as one of the youngest adult females, Bertha, has left the group with her six-month-old daughter, Beryl. <br /><br />November 1997 – It has been 8 months since any matings have occurred in the troupe. From April to the present there have been 6 males that have approached them, but for reasons that aren't clear, these males left in search of another option. Though 5 of them left without much incident, the 6th one to come made a scene by lifting and throwing large rocks and tearing branches out of trees while hollering at the females. The day after the second of these visitors, Bridget was observed leaving the group to follow in the same general direction taken by that male. In fact, one-by-one the females have been sneaking off into the forest with their young until now the only adults are Brunhild, Barbara, and Beverly. There are also no males remaining among the juveniles because they all left with their mothers. <br /><br />There was a big fight. Brunhild and Barbara with their daughters were feeding on figs in the same tree. It started when Brunhild began shaking the branch that one of Barbara's daughters was hanging from. Barbara quickly climbed down from a higher branch with her teeth bared toward Brunhild's location. Brunhild backed up onto a different branch, grabbing her daughter and started to climb down, fleeing the furious Barbara. Slowed by the young one on her back, Brunhild was quickly caught by Barbara and the two of them tumbled to the ground. Brunhild was badly injured and limped away with her daughter. It looked like she may have broken her left leg. Beverly, having no young of her own, coached Barbara's two daughters down from the tree where the three of them mourned Barbara for several hours. Beverly then took the two young ones out to find food, but in a different direction than Brunhild. </span>Jacobus the Scribehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11618447585764484499noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9036859.post-43825276080138420762009-08-09T20:32:00.002-05:002009-08-09T21:21:13.565-05:00Two Stories of the Sword in Retreat<span style="font-size:85%;">As some may be aware, yesterday I returned from retreat. The experience provided great spiritual benefits and a pretty good opportunity to train physically. The grounds of the center are large and verdant with great expanses of plush lawn. I don't know how others feel but, lawns are among my favorite places to practice martial arts. The grass provides a contact that is ideal in both softness and support for techniques that involve kneeling or tumbling.<br /><br />One evening while practicing sword forms I noticed a an observer half hiding behind a shrub he happened to be browsing. The two-point white tailed buck would stare intently at me for a moment and then return to whatever leaves he was partaking. As I continued to train, I noticed that one of his antlers was broken or deformed, and that they were both still covered in velvet. He had been coming gradually closer as he'd been eating, watching me quite carefully. <br /><br />A lot of the forms I practice these days end with a kind of jumping attack. As I was working I tried not to pay too much attention to the deer in that I didn't want to make a sudden change in behavior and chase him off. That being said, as he got within about 8 or so meters, the jump was sudden enough that he would slightly spook. But seeing that despite my sudden movement and the sound of landing, I was not making any attack against him, he'd jerk back a couple of feet and then approach the spot where he originally was. <br /><br />This pattern continued for two or three more forms when he seemed to become more comfortable with this strange thing walking around in circles swinging a stick. Eventually he eased his way to within about 5 meters, where he watched as if enraptured by my spectacle, pausing occasionally for a bite of grass. As he walked around to the other side of me from where he was, I came around to another jump. This time, the tension was too much for him to handle and he bolted off. I was reminded of certain American Indian groups that historically forbade warriors from eating venison because they didn't want to be infected with the animal's timidity. <br /><br />The next evening I had the opportunity to enjoy the company of a different order of wildlife: mosquitoes and horseflies. The reality is that I was a great attraction to such creatures every time I went outside, but at this particular time it had particular significance. <br /><br />One of the tricks for dealing with flesh-eaters and vampires was to just keep moving. As long as I was moving around and my sword was swirling over and around my body they were more or less deterred from harassing me. This was great motivation to train with alacrity. Combining my efforts with the humidity and heat I found myself quite exhausted at the end of my set of forms. <br /><br />It seems like I've heard somewhere that insects, mosquitoes in particular, detect their victims by means of body heat. So when I stop and sit down from my exertions, I imagine my body must have registered as a giant infrared beacon promising a hot meal. The sudden swarming I received alarmed me. In order to shoo off my foe I started to swing my sword in a spinning motion over my head and nailed my target. The end of the sword's handle clipped me a bit and left me with that subtle ringing sensation one gets when hitting their skull into a hard object.<br /><br />Humiliated by my pathetic show of swordsmanship I stood up and started walking back towards the center to shower and move on to my next spiritual exercise. After I got a few steps though, to my surprise I found a stream of blood starting to drip off of my nose. <br /><br />The pain of my self-attack had not been so bad that I should expect the injury to be serious, it was only a bit of a twinge. All the same, there is something about those cherry droplets that can impose a sense of urgency, especially when you cannot see the source. In fact because I couldn't see the cut, I hesitated a bit before realizing that I needed to put pressure on it to stop the bleeding. So there I was trying to juggle a pair of socks, a sword, and a water bottle, while putting pressure on </span><span style="font-size:85%;">some random spot where I might have broke</span><span style="font-size:85%;"> the skin, and trying to not drip blood all over everything. <br /><br />In this state I walked, playing an awkward form the little tea pot, back up to the door where I have to punch in an access code and pull it open. Still though the bleeding has definitely slowed I keep thinking about how I want to get through all this without anyone seeing me. Consciously I didn't want to terrorize some poor old Jesuit with my blood covered face, but really I didn't want to have to explain to anyone what happened.<br /><br />By some miracle I made it through the door with all of my stuff and without leaving any little rubescent spots on anything. I turned down the corridor and found myself closer to the bathroom than I'd been to the deer when popping around the corner in a slightly Irish accent came: “Good God man! Are you all right?”<br /><br />“Oh yes, it's not bad at all. I just need...”<br /><br />“The bathroom? It's right through there. What happened? Did you fall?”<br /><br />“No, no. It's alright. I just hit myself in the head with a stick.” </span>Jacobus the Scribehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11618447585764484499noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9036859.post-15760392237353747082009-05-31T10:46:00.004-05:002009-08-09T21:26:08.169-05:00A Problem to be Avoided<span style="font-size:85%;">This may seem like kind of a strange or perhaps even uncomfortable subject for me to broach but, it has been on my mind a bit lately. Recently a young man that I train marital arts with asked something about my opinion on abortion. He's of a different spiritual and religious background than I am obviously, and in the moment of surprise at the question and a hope to not create offense for him or his parents, I flubbed a pretty feeble response.<br /><br />In general I subscribe to the belief in the sanctity of life and that with a few exceptions abortion is, in short, bad. At the same time I understand and respect the fact that many people do not share my religious convictions on such things. Also, being aware of infanticide as a low-tech alternative that appears throughout the ethnographic record, I'm somewhat inclined to be sympathetic with the staunchly pro-choice.<br /><br />Curiosities surrounding my religion are a common point of discussion with my students. This has naturally included issues of sexuality, and the boys have time and again made it quite clear to me that the concept of chastity is too extreme for them to consider seriously. Something I read from Barak Obama recently reminded me of what I had to say to them about abortion some time ago. He referred to the controversy around the Notre Dame commencement saying, “Maybe we won’t agree on abortion, but we can still agree that this heart-wrenching decision for any woman is not made casually. It has both moral and spiritual dimension. So let us work together to reduce the number of women seeking abortions. Let’s reduce unintended pregnancies.”<br /><br />In my class, I asked the boys to consider the view point of their girlfriends and hookups. I asked them to think about what a pregnancy means to the person who is pregnant.. In biological terms alone the process is difficult both physically and emotionally. To terminate this process prematurely, for any reason, can only complicate matters by imposing a difficult mix of conflicting feelings. With these consequences in mind I come to the same short answer for the question of abortion that I would give to any young man regardless of his religion or lack thereof. If he has any respect or concern at all for the young woman who loves him or trusts him with her body, he will do whatever is necessary to ensure that she never has to come to the point where an abortion would be an issue.<br /><br />It is not the culture of my students to think about things in these terms. With a few exceptions, they often regard females as objects to be exploited for whatever selfishness comes into their heads. Some of these students have become fathers, and it's interesting to see how the models provided by their own fathers are predictive of the students' ambivalence towards their children. It's one of the great and terrible feedback cycles of the world. In any case, whether a boy has become a father or has had a scare of becoming one, it almost always comes out that he's been cavalier about the whole business and chose self-interest and laziness over responsibility. Despite knowing better and having all that might be needed available he has still chosen to deal with things conveniently rather than prudently. The idea that some form of foresight or self-control might be a component of true manhood seems too elusive too often. He even fails to get things right in a world with Plan-B.<br /><br />What I'm saying here doesn't really describe what I think about abortion. It is more a philosophy of action, or if I dare say it: wisdom. Whatever beliefs a person may have about the complex relationships between spirit and body I feel quite safe in commending that every man, regardless of age, who is unprepared for fatherhood should commit himself to never afflicting a woman with the necessity to make such a “heart-wrenching” choice. </span>Jacobus the Scribehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11618447585764484499noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9036859.post-5096517050336775642009-05-26T10:06:00.001-05:002009-05-26T10:08:51.489-05:00I just don't know what to say.<a href="http://www.theonion.com/content/news/report_increasing_number_of">http://www.theonion.com/content/news/report_increasing_number_of</a><br /><a href="http://www.boston.com/news/local/breaking_news/2009/05/fire_breaks_out_1.html"><br />http://www.boston.com/news/local/breaking_news/2009/05/fire_breaks_out_1.html</a>Jacobus the Scribehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11618447585764484499noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9036859.post-26347781211616516682009-04-28T21:09:00.002-05:002009-04-28T21:21:08.113-05:00Mnemosyne is a Fickle Crone<span style="font-size:85%;">What a fragile thing the human memory! Lately I'm experiencing a great deal of difficulty with my memory on a couple of levels. First, I'm just not accessing things. It could be the hinted beginnings of age or it could be sleep deprivation, but I cannot count the times in the last couple of weeks I wanted to say something, new precisely the right word for it and yet really struggled to drag it up. I blame this partly on the range of vocabulary I get to hear and use in my work. Let us just say that it seems likely that my lexicon has not been getting its proper work out. I expect that things will improve as I return to school this fall.<br /></span><p></p> <span style="font-size:85%;">The other memory issue I'm having is created memories of information. I have these memories of specific passages I've read that I've wanted to use in some things I've been writing lately. Some of this information I've gone back to look for using computer search engines. I've been careful to choose careful wording for my searches because it was something special about the wording that made me remember the information in the first place. Frustratingly, it turns out that in too many instances I can find nothing. I would like to blame the software, but as I've gone to the labor of rereading some of the texts in question I've not found any support for my cause. It's kind of frustrating in that I don't like being forced to question that I know what I know.</span><p></p> <span style="font-size:85%;">I recently read a book that describes how easy it is to create false memories and to even implant them into the memories of other people. It's a process that's been demonstrated to occur in judicial and clinical contexts. Both of these are quite frightening. In the first, people can be falsely condemned and punished for crimes they haven't committed based on the testimony of a witness with a false memory. In therapy people have created delusions of trauma which have led them to engage in behavior that has created real trauma. It's a pretty serious mess. One of the things I find interesting about it is that often people substantiate their belief in their false memories by reciting a lot of detail about whatever their memory is. Some research though, has indicated that such details are lavishly created from thin air by the person with the implanted memory. </span><p></p> <span style="font-size:85%;">I've observed the process happen accidentally with my students recently. I set to them a certain assignment to find some information and then report back on it. When the students actually looked for the information they didn't find any to speak of. But with the passage of time, they've created memories of all sorts of details that they could never have gotten from their sources and some which don't even exist. </span><p></p><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">It's also a process I've seen them use deliberately from time to time. Some relatively bright students can retell stories about things that they are in trouble for in such a way that it becomes easy to doubt what you've seen with your own eyes. If you're not vigilant you can start questioning or even recreating your own memories and let someone off with the benefit of the doubt. At one point I was trying to come up with a way that I could use this process back on them to accomplish some useful learning or something but, nothing has really come to me yet. </span>Jacobus the Scribehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11618447585764484499noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9036859.post-81906323511624936012009-04-28T19:53:00.002-05:002009-05-09T16:12:02.197-05:00Random stuff to look at<a href="http://www.penikese.org/almanac/TidingsFeb09.pdf">http://www.penikese.org/almanac/TidingsFeb09.pdf</a><br /><br /><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpaQ0d4vFDk">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpaQ0d4vFDk</a><br /><br /><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTF6uO8z-1w">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTF6uO8z-1w</a>Jacobus the Scribehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11618447585764484499noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9036859.post-17805344206218911452009-03-24T19:28:00.003-05:002009-05-09T16:20:17.358-05:00Back from the Cave<span style="font-size:85%;">It has been a long time since I last wrote. I'm not sure if I ought to apologize for the lapse or for bringing it to an end. There are several reasons for this. One is that the major events and forces in my life lately have not been things that I could speak of too easily for several reasons. They either have had to do with clinical issues on the island I haven't felt comfortable discussing, various political issues, or personal spiritual and psychological events. <br /><br />At any rate, I probably should announce that I have been accepted into graduate school. If it is not exactly what I hoped for more in accordance with my expectation I was accepted for the masters program rather than the PhD. One of the main motives for applying for the doctorate program was that acceptance guaranteed full funding. As it turns out it seems quite likely that I will be able to obtain sufficient funding that I will be just fine with doing the masters. It also turns out in hindsight that this may be fortunate in that I may be better able to revert to an earlier plan where I could get the skills I want from this program and then apply them in a different context of research more closely focused on what I'm interested in at a different school for the doctorate. <br /><br />On a completely different topic, I've had a recent unfortunate experience that certain people would surely consider me an idiot for. I get health insurance through my work, a fact that I've felt some irritation about from time to time particularly the fact that only the last couple of years I've been required to have it by law. As everyone knows it's not cheap and I've been paying for it the last four and half years and haven't in that time seen a doctor once. I'm a decently fit person and have found that I've got a pretty functional immune system. Anyway, I recently got sick in a somewhat serious way (a strange bug I think one of my roommates brought back from Mexico) such that one of my coworkers talked me into having something done about it. So anyway, having not seen a doctor since I moved out here I really had no idea who I had as a primary care physician, or if I even had one. Turns out there was a doctor that had been sort of chosen at random when I first signed onto the plan but because I had never been seen by her before, she refused to see me until there was an opening in about a month. So, eventually we found a walk-in clinic that helped me out. However it turns out the insurance company may not cover the cost without getting a referral from the primary care physician. I again called her office to ask if they would provide a referral and was rejected again. At the end of the day, I realize that this situation is really my fault for not taking care of all this a long time ago. At the same time I'm more irritated by the fact that I've basically been giving my insurance company money all this time for what may turn out to be nothing in return. </span>Jacobus the Scribehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11618447585764484499noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9036859.post-35353996536090328392008-10-24T20:52:00.001-05:002008-10-24T20:57:33.739-05:00My recent field trip<span style="font-size:85%;">A while ago when I was looking for a place to live I looked around on-line to see if I could find any monasteries. No, a monastery was not my first choice or what I was really looking for in a place. I was just getting down to the wire and figured, hey, it worked for me once before. It took a little bit of doing to tell you the truth. I found a few convents without too much struggle but eventually came upon an Episcopal monastery near Harvard and an Orthodox one in Brookline.<br /><br />After one negative experience in an Episcopal church and a couple of good ones with the Orthodoxy, I developed a bit of an interest and resolved some time ago to try and check the place out. Their website indicated that they were pretty hospitable and allowed people to come join with them for their liturgies. They also sell pretty cool icons. So, wanting an icon or two to decorate my room and a chance to hear vespers again, I took a little trip out there.<br /><br />Getting there was a bit of a hassle because the train next to my house is pretty inconsistent and the bus connection I needed is pretty infrequent. I ended up walking the distance from the stop where I got off the train because the bus was not on schedule. It was one of those situations where the bus is so late that it was running with the next scheduled bus right behind it.<br /><br />I was a bit nervous about this situation because I had timed things pretty closely and wanted to be sure to have enough time to get my pictures and still be on time for the service. As all the monks are actually supposed to attend all the liturgies this seemed especially important. Anyway, I arrived and found the monastery on a nice plot of land with some lawns, and a few fruit trees.<br /><br />I approached to find that it would be pretty easy to sneak up on the place. There were a few monks milling about outside. They had long gray beards and loose black habits that were obviously intended for working in. Also their hearing was not too good. I was obviously out of place and as long as I was unseen I was also unnoticed. In fact I got to the door of the main building right behind one of the monks, almost stepping on his heels who stepping inside wouldn’t have known I was there except he unexpectedly turned sideways to genuflect and kiss an icon of Mary in the vestibule. He asked what I was there for. I explained that I wanted to purchase an icon or two. He asked if I knew where they were. When I denied it he said, “Well go on in then. I knew I’d seen you here before.”<br /><br />Fortunately there were more monks inside and another seeing the stranger asked what I wanted. He showed me the room where they keep the stuff they sell to visiting public. It was very little like a storefront and seemed more like a kind of small library but in place of books were wooden plaques. After finding the two I wanted the brother said that since it was my first time they would offer one to me as a gift and only ask payment on the other. When I attempted to pay for them both, persisted in his refusal and gave me permission to stay for vespers.<br /><br />While waiting for the service to begin, a particularly elderly chap in a wheel chair, Father Thomas, approached me about my dress. Having calculated my clothing according to what I’d observed in various churches outside of Mormondom I was a bit surprised to discover that I was supposed to have a long-sleeve shirt for the worship. Father Thomas pointed out a coat rack covered in them near the main entrance. I felt fortunate to find one that fit well enough without any hassle. It was about this time that folks started to gather to the sanctuary.<br /><br />It was difficult for me to identify the sanctuary at first. I was expecting it to be a much bigger room, something like a chapel. Though it wasn’t a monastery the closest experience I’d had to this was my retreat at the Campion Center. The chapel there was comparable to the Cathedral of the Madeline in Salt Lake. So, I was expecting something on that scale.<br /><br />In addition to the size I was surprised because it was not a single room but two rooms. If you are unfamiliar with Orthodox churches they position the altar behind what they call a panel. The panel is supposed to emulate the veil in the ancient Hebrew temples placing the altar in the location of the Ark of the Covenant likened to the Holy of Holies. In this sanctuary the panel was proportionately large enough that it made not just a visual but a completely physical separation. The place where one would expect to be space for a congregation there was one row of benches and the participants in the service were in fact spread through a total of four rooms, two of them outside of sight of the panel and the brothers singing the rite.<br /><br />Now whenever, I visit a religious service that I’ve never seen before, I create a certain set of expectations based on my previous knowledge and experience with that and similar religions. These expectations are frequently violated as was the case with this one. Vespers I had seen before, and wanted to attend because I enjoyed a simple service focused on a kind of singing back and forth between the priest and some selected men in the church. Although these things did happen, the rite here was much more elaborate.<br /><br />One of the things that surprised me was the similarity between this and the rites in the Buddhist temple where I lived. Certain of the chanting, in tone and repetition, resembled that which is done at Shim Gwang Sa. These monks also performed repeated full-prostration bows that differed by touching their heads to the floor each time. Also their hands were planted on the floor in the form of fists. I, in my ignorance, placed myself in the main room of the sanctuary with the cantors at the front of the panel. It also turned out that this was the room where the icons were to which all the monks cycled through making these bows.<br /><br />For much of the service I felt a bit in the way while trying vigorously not to be and pay attention to the singing at the same time. In the midst of it occurred to me that it was somewhat difficult (for me at least) to detect God through the elaborateness of everything going on. The fact that I was blatantly out of place didn’t help my perspective much. However, toward the end one kind of cool thing happened. Instead of just standing awkwardly outside of the rites I was invited to awkwardly participate.<br />At the end of the service a priest, for some reason I think he was the abbot, stood with a cross at the head of a line of monks and visitors blessing each one in turn. Being an outsider and trying to stand out of the way in this cramped space, a gentleman named David invited me to get in the line in front of him. I communicated my reluctance and he insisted, instructing me on what to do. “Kiss the cross. Kiss his hand.” The priest then touched my head with the cross and I stepped out of the room.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">You can check them out at <a href="http://www.thehtm.org/">http://www.thehtm.org/</a></span>Jacobus the Scribehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11618447585764484499noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9036859.post-88555169799058926862008-10-09T17:24:00.003-05:002009-05-09T16:08:11.151-05:00Producing the Game<span style="font-size:85%;">Well, here goes a bit of a story. Many months ago I had a student who like to play Magic the Gathering. This was rather unusual because this nerdiness made him such an outlier on the Island bell-curve that his post-graduation success is not a shocking surprise. Anyway, with the foul geekiness on the island and the relentless boredom our T.V. and drug conditioned students experience, several of them got to playing it out of despair for entertainment. As they did I observed something quite magical. These guys, however difficult a time they had in school, were learning a bit of game strategy but more shockingly some pretty complicated and weird vocabulary. They learned this vocabulary without even realizing it and without any sort of complaint or resistance. It was tough vocabulary too: terms like Incendiary Zubra, or Archaeo Evangel. Anyway, it inspired me as to a way that I might be able to get students to learn more biology, including the big ugly words. You see, I had observed time and again that often the word was the thing. "Why in the world should I go to the effort to even try to sound out, let alone understand a term like Mitochondria or Endoplasmic Reticulum?" <br /><br />Along with the learning of vocabulary it occurred to me that a great many biological processes work in ways that a game could be designed to model them. For some reason I cannot understand, the vast majority of science education games are designed like Trivial Pursuit or something where the players merely practice regurgitating memorized science facts. I thought it a ridiculous shame to not accomplish the learning of information as well as develop a comprehension of biological processes.<br /><br />Anyway, I made an initial aborted effort at a game based on the ETC in photosynthesis. That did not fly at all. Eventually I came around to this card game that models cells competing for resources in the environment with reproduction as the ultimate goal. Anyway, I've been working at this for some time and I'm now on my third major revision of the game. The second revision focused on getting more interaction between players. This third revision has been designed to simplify a lot of the game and make the cards less wordy.Jacobus the Scribehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11618447585764484499noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9036859.post-20789498918629032112008-08-30T20:00:00.001-05:002008-08-30T20:02:25.298-05:00The Place v4.0<span style="font-size:85%;">Well, I’ve been living here working at this job for four years and now I’m about to move into my fourth place. The events which have been leading up to this have been making me many things but happy. However, as soon as it is all over I may actually prefer my new situation. </span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><br />The first major disappointment about this move relates to the fact that we really didn’t see it coming. I think it was pretty close to the last legal day that our landlord decided to tell us that he was going to renovate and not renew our lease. This was a pretty big surprise because he had given us every indication that he was intending to renew up until that point. In May he sent us an e-mail indicating he wanted a reassurance from us that we were planning to stay. He was responding in part to the fact that one of our roommates was moving out and arranging for a sublease to take up his spot for the remainder of the term. When the new guy signed on and moved in he had gotten the word of mouth from our landlord that the lease would be renewed and that the new guy would be able to sign onto it. So…it was kind of a bombshell. <br /><br />This whole thing hit me particularly hard (maybe not as hard as the new guy) for a couple of reasons. First, I’d been planning to stay here for a while so I’ve sort of been in settle in mode. I’d bought a couple of pieces of furniture and some kitchen equipment. I’d been in the process of planning a refurnishing and redecoration of our dining and living rooms to make them more satisfactory for social gathering. In addition to settling, I had spent my summer in temporally and pecuniarily expensive ways. Taking almost two months off of work to take a couple of classes left me without any vacation time and a handy fifteen-hundred dollars. Oh… well.<br /><br />The next adventure came in trying to find a place. It took me a few apartment tours before I figured it out but, do you remember that whole housing loan crash stuff? I could be wrong, but I think it might have something to do with the annoying increase in rental rates. Another fifty to one-hundred dollars in this neighborhood would’ve landed me with a room two-thirds the size of this one in a cramped apartment with no storage space and inferior subway access. <br /><br />After some frustrated hunting around and trying miserably to somehow find a place while disappearing to the island for week here and a week there, I lost one such place (though newly renovated with new kitchen appliances) which I had signed up for including and earnest deposit when my potential roommates insisted the landlady reject me. You see, they called me the night I was leaving to go the island and left a voice mail asking me to show up for a meeting, one which was to have occurred in about an hour of when the phone call was made. I didn’t get the message until well after but, had to get to work. A couple days later I got the call that this precipitated my being dropped. This completely sucked because it left me with one week to both try to find a place, pack, etc. <br /><br />This led me to discover another reason why my landlord’s timing was less than favorable. Some people might argue with me about this point, but I like to think of Boston and the surrounding area as being kind of like one really huge college town. So… if you are in a college town looking for a new apartment for September 1, well you might be able to imagine what a race that has been. The choices become very slim very quickly. In one instance I went out some considerable distance from my home for an appointment to see a place that had already been rented out before the agent and I got there. <br /><br />Anyway, I’ve got a place secured now. Strangely enough it may turn out to be a better situation than I could have planned. It’s near a neighborhood that I used to like to hang out in. The rent is cheaper than where I am and includes utilities. A nice point. The apartment has less space but, it should work out. Also, the kitchen has a dishwasher. So… that’s about all I know right now. I may write more about this move after it’s over.</span> <br /> <br /></span>Jacobus the Scribehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11618447585764484499noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9036859.post-21629293616723608002008-08-16T21:48:00.005-05:002008-08-16T22:17:48.144-05:00Playing with the Hooch<span style="font-size:85%;">I know that this post is only going to be so interesting to most people. In part because it is a report of something that was mostly a failure, a failure that has been a long time in development. For quite a few months I have been collecting the hooch off of my sourdough culture with the long term goal of attempting to distill the ethanol out of it. </span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">For those who don't know, let me explain a little bit about what I mean. Hooch is the liquid solution which rises to the top of a sourdough culture that has been allowed to sit for a week or so. It contains mostly water but also some of the substances that are biproducts of the sourdough fermentation process. The bacteria in the culture produce various sorts of lactic and acetic acids that I'm neither equipped or qualified to identify. This is the stuff that gives the sourdough its sour taste. It also happens to make the culture acidic enough that nasty, unwanted microbes can't live in it. The yeast, of course, produce more water and some alcohol, mostly ethanol to be exact. </span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">So anyway, I've been collecting this stuff for a long time and filtering it (a process that has been a major hassle) saving up to have about half a gallon in order to try out this protocol I found on-line for distilling box wines into sort of Franzia brandy. This method involves cooking the liquid at a very low heat in a big pot. The idea is to keep the temperature low enough to vaporize a lot more alcohol than water. You cover the pot with a bowl or inverted lid to catch the vapors and drop the condensate back into a glass in the center of the pot. The idea is that alcohol and water vapors will collect on the surface of the bowl-shaped lid and drip from the lowest part of the surface of the bowl and fall in the glass. The bowl is filled with ice to cause condensation. </span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_uomxlRhKct4/SKeXNT-Rj-I/AAAAAAAAACc/ts2m9C89emc/s1600-h/distillation.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5235319346797055970" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 311px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 205px" height="245" alt="" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_uomxlRhKct4/SKeXNT-Rj-I/AAAAAAAAACc/ts2m9C89emc/s400/distillation.jpg" width="351" border="0" /></a>It kind of worked but not really. The failure was all my fault in that I left and forgot the experiment and let it overcook. From the smell in the house I think I just boiled off all of the alcohol. However, a distillation did take place. You should be able to see in the picture posted here that I did successfully separate something from the solution. It just happens to be plain water. The clear glass on the left is the water that came out with a slight bit of vinegar in it. The brown liquid on the left is quite sour. Anyway, I'm a little disappointed but, quite impressed with the contrast in coloring and flavor here. </span><br /><br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">So, the question is: Will I try it again? Can't really say. The success and reason for failure are encouraging that I could be more successful with another go. But when I think of how long it took to accumulate the hooch... I hesitate. Maybe I could come up with a way to make it faster. Maybe, I'll just move on and find something else to try.</span>Jacobus the Scribehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11618447585764484499noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9036859.post-78178301894132283602008-08-14T10:44:00.003-05:002008-08-14T10:46:06.307-05:00Check this out.Watch this video and tell me this isn't both ridiculously amazing and pretty creepy at the same time.<br /><br /><a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7559150.stm">http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7559150.stm</a>Jacobus the Scribehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11618447585764484499noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9036859.post-28167557846065710532008-07-28T20:17:00.004-05:002008-07-28T20:51:31.597-05:00A Little Innovation... Maybe<span style="font-size:85%;">A few years ago I read a book that really inspired me with respect to possible research avenues I could pursue in education. It's called "Religion Explained" by Pascal Boyer. He creates an interesting argument for the neurological basis of religion. A central feature of his argument is that religious myths and ideas are memes that have some tenacity as cultural elements being passed on within a society because they have features that make them especially memorable by creating a form of cognitive dissonance. It occurred to me that there may be a lot to learn about effective education models by exploring the indoctrination practices of religions. One type of religion that particularly interests me is the mystery cult, which indoctrinates devotees through a system of religious rituals and dramatizations. So... for some time I've been thinking about and planning a mystery to induct my students into that would teach them something about biology.</span> <br /><span style="font-size:85%;"></span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">Originally I got two students to learn the ritual who would then help me the next day to induct the rest of them. There was some skepticism and resistance at first. Partially because my co-conspirators anticipated a negative or destructive response to the process. This was of course a major concern I'd been carrying around all along. However, after rehearsing the ritual a couple of times and then showing them meanings of all the symbols, some of this concern was resolved and success seemed more likely. </span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"></span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">Anyway, the next day we tried it out and in the effort to give each student a chance to be a direct participant, we tried to go through it a few times. At first it worked out but as they became too comfortable with it, one particular student decided to deliberately mess it up during his turn at participating. The larger group also served to provide lots of opportunities for mutual distraction, particularly during the phase where the symbols were explained. </span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"></span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">Anyway, it didn't turn out perfectly. However, it did turn out well enough that I think I need to explore this idea a little bit more and try to refine it. </span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"></span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">If you are interested you can link to a pdf of the full text of the ritual here: <a href="http://www.geocities.com/osiris_dragon/kingdom_divides.pdf">The Ritual</a> or if that doesn't work you can link to it through here: <a href="http://www.geocities.com/osiris_dragon/index.html">My Downloads Page</a> </span>Jacobus the Scribehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11618447585764484499noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9036859.post-49790701277668994102008-05-25T16:55:00.000-05:002008-05-25T16:56:56.149-05:00School of Gardening<span style="font-size:85%;">It isn’t very often that my students take an interest in gardening. Oh, sure. Most of them ask me if I can teach them how to grow weed. That isn’t really the same thing but, they wouldn’t be able to succeed in that anyway. The problem is that taking care of plants requires attention, patience, and the kind of mindfulness geared towards caring and protecting rather than impulsively destroying. These are traits that very few of my students ever exhibit. Their lack of these abilities is so severe that even if I were to teach them how to grow something as attractive and desirable as their intoxicants, all but a very small number of them would fail.<br /><br />As an illustrative example, I have one student now who likes to water the plants in the greenhouse. A few times he filled a bucket of water and dumped large amounts onto the pots washing large amounts of soil out onto the ground. Realizing this wasn’t working, he decided to fill containers holding the pots so full with water that the peat pots the plants were in began to turn to mush and several of the plants died. You see, it was easier to just dump large amounts of water into a large container than it was to carefully pour just a little water into each pot’s plant. <br /><br />We do have one student now, however, who does seem to have some investment in the garden. He has been involved in most of the plantings and has taken a certain amount of ownership for them. The first few beds he planted had sprouted lettuce and spinach, which had impressed him as a real product of his labor. On a certain day he went into the garden to admire his work and check on its well-being when he discovered something that horrified him. Something had been tearing up his lettuce plants. <br /><br />He was horribly confused that this could happen and determined that the rabbits must have done it. For some reason he did not quite understand the seedlings had been pulled up and left lying on the ground right in front of where they had so recently been growing. He was confused. What could he do? <br /><br />Taking a closer look at the scene he noticed that someone else had been there before him and after the rabbit, who had attempted to replant some of the uprooted victims. Desperately he tried to continue this task himself but soon gave up in frustration. There were too many plants and he felt uncertain about the survival of those he attempted to save. Those that remained he left sitting in a ball on the garden bed. <br /><br />Eventually he came in the house and told me the story. He expressed his desire to kill rabbits for what they had done. Finally, he asked me what could have done such a thing. I answered, “I know exactly what happened to your lettuce. I pulled it up.” The energy in the shocked expression on this enervated pothead face was the joy of my day. I explained, “We need to thin the rows.”</span>Jacobus the Scribehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11618447585764484499noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9036859.post-66371695372045601692008-03-24T06:43:00.004-05:002008-05-25T18:35:15.642-05:00My students and their PFCsWell, I'm sitting here getting ready for another week out on the island of misfit boys. Our population recently went up to the max and the last week out had me pretty exhausted at the end of it. It is amazing what a difference even one kid can make to the state of things on the island, having three new kids is pretty remarkable. Curiously compared to other times we've had this much change I haven't really seen much in the way of chimpanzee fighting for the top of the heirarchy. This is rather unusual and perhaps says something about the type of kids we have these days.<br /><br />I'm not really looking forward to going out to the island. I often feel this reluctance, most especially when there are certain risks regarding my proposed learning activities for the week. The last week I went out I thought that I had the perfect stuff planned for one of my most advanced students and he didn't take to it at all. He's one of the few students I've had in recent months who is studying algebra. During previous weeks I'd noticed that he did a lot better when I released the various algebra techniques one relatively small bit at a time. In this particular instance I had found a text that broke up certain work in solving fractions into pieces that were small enough that it would have annoyed the piss out of me when I was in high school, but it seemed to be exactly the kind of steps that he would be able to do and figure the whole thing out. The problem was that it was just enough for him to start having trouble remembering to do all the stuff he'd already been working on. It's that magical point where things get hard and the student starts calling the math work "gay" or "stupid." A kind of irony when it is usually the student who feels stupid at that point. It also seems to be one of two points that my students seem to fairly consistently run into where some kind of real cognitive deficit seems to rear its ugly head. This is the point where we've maxed out the kid's working memory capacity.<br /><br />I've been reading up on this whole working memory thing lately and it seems that it correlates very strongly with all kinds of intellectual tasks including the sort of reasoning tasks that mathematics requires. The issue is being able to keep simultaneously in mind the ultimate goal of the problem solving venture, a mental roadmap of how to get to that goal, and the performance of the operation immediately at hand. As the road map gets more complex or has more steps added to it, or the immediate operation gets more complex the sort of mental blackboard gets cluttered beyond the individual's ability to read it and they start making mistakes that they actually know better than to make. One way of dealing with this problem is to develop what's called automaticity. Automaticity is the ability to perform certain mental tasks automatically and without thinking. This is the kind of thing marital artists train for in forms practice. It is also the thing your elementary school teachers were trying to give you with all those timed times tables tests. Really the only way to develop automaticity is to do the same things over and over and over a million times. This is something my students really resent me telling them they need to do.<br /><br />Interestingly working memory is supposedly trainable. There have been a couple studies that have shown that people who practice at it and work on memory tasks of increasing difficulty can improve their working memory and show improvements in all kinds of reasoning tasks. It is one of the few things that can be taught that demonstrates a good deal of transfer into other tasks. The classis way of training this is the old electronic Simon Says game where you have to remember the sequence of flashing colored lights. Another is the Memory card game where you have to remember the location of matching pairs of cards that have been revealed one at a time.<br /><br />With this in mind I've started up a regimen of memory training tasks for our evening study hours on the island. Sadly I don't think that it is going to be enough to make the kind of difference that we'd really notice. (This whole business underscores another reason I believe we need to rethink our entire system of education, but I digress.) Anyway, I'm giving it a shot and it seems that it has been effective to the point that the kids were willing to do it for a while. They're getting bored of the old task though and so I'm going to shift over to another task.<br /><br />I mentioned earlier that there are two points of cognitive deficit that my students seem to be regularly afflicted by. If the first is diminished working memory the second is abstraction of proportional reasoning, or maybe just proportional reasoning. This is something that I don't know that much about. How this manifests itself though is that you can demonstrate to a kid with physical objects the concept that if you cut it into halves and then fourths that 1/2 is the exact same amount as 2/4 and they still don't seem to get it, and they certainly can't generalize it to proportions in general. This is a mystery that has been a nuissance for a long time and I really haven't gotten any closer to figuring it out. What I've found myself doing is teaching kids how to work out these and other sorts of fraction problems over and over. Somehow, I always come back around after enough time to giving students the exact same work that I've already given them, they've worked out all the problems but still can't remember how to do it. It may be that part of this is derived from them not having obtained automaticity in division. It may also represent something related to their behavioral problems. If a person cannot intuit about proportions in math can they understand proportionality in behavioral choices and outcomes?Jacobus the Scribehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11618447585764484499noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9036859.post-21833992799087538862008-03-01T20:58:00.002-05:002008-03-01T21:02:14.217-05:00More than a feeling?<span style="font-size:85%;">When I was a kid we used to swim in a series of geothermal pools at the base of a volcanic hill a short drive east of town. The place was called Warm Springs, which seemed kind of inappropriate in that the water almost always seemed really cold in summer time. In winter time, however, it never froze (at least not to my knowledge) and it would frequently fog up half the valley. <br /><br />Anyway, there were a few summers when it seemed like we went swimming there almost every day. I was a rather mediocre swimmer and I kind of enjoyed the chance to invest some mediocre efforts at some mediocre improvement. I also liked taking snorkeling gear which I inexpertly used to check out the guppies people had released from their fish tanks as well as the rocky bottom with the sorts of things that at the time only Huck Finn and I could have considered treasures. It was also exciting for the mystique of an abandoned mill for processing minerals or gravel or something mined from mountains out on the western end of the valley. From a distance it looked to me like a ruined castle with a giant green hand painted on a little rock face overlooking it. Eventually I learned that the hand was in fact a representation of a marijuana leaf, but I digress. <br /><br />On one certain bleak summer day I had been out there swimming with my siblings and a couple of cousins. I call the day ‘bleak’ because it was one of those times when the sunlight has a way of coming down that makes everything look washed out and more barren than usual. At the same time every breeze on our wet skins made the water feel that much colder. It must have been one of those summers we went every day because I remember us getting bored with it sooner than usual. The weather may have been contributing to the fact that I just couldn’t get interested. <br /><br />So we packed up our gear and our towels and what not and climbed onto the back of my grandmother’s little steel-blue Dodge pick-up so she could drive us back into town. My ears were filled with water producing an eerie sense of balance and an otherworldly half-deafness. As we bounced off the dirt road onto the highway I noticed that my shoes were missing. In those days I ran around barefoot most of the time and had developed some pretty terrific calluses so it was really easy for me to not notice the absence. A strange and uncomfortable sensation started to form in my gut because of it and I asked to go back and look for them. <br /><br />We went back and looked around. I couldn’t find the shoes and the worry in my abdomen wouldn’t subside. There wasn’t much area to check for them so the search didn’t last long and we again left for home. The strange feeling didn’t go away and I started to identify it as a weird combination of guilt and fear. It’s not the usual kind of fear like that of heights or social anxiety. The fear seemed to me to be more of a supernatural kind of thing. Lovecraft wrote that he tried to create fear in his writing that was not corporeal but confronted the reader with a dread for the chaotic possibilities of an infinite cosmos. I think the fear I experienced was something like that, as if by losing my shoes I had somehow angered unknown gods and should shortly fall victim to the torment of their earthly instruments. I imagined some kind of witches with my shoes in hand using them in a ritual to slowly pick apart my mind like a knitter picking apart some mistake in the scarf she’s making. </span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"></span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">The reason I tell this story is because it is the first time I experienced this feeling. It comes back to unsettle me on rare occasions and has done so recently. I purchased the Planet Earth series with my favorite wildlife documentary guy David Attenborough. I took it down to Woods Hole. I’d been showing some of them to the kids and lent them to one of my coworkers to see. One of the disks has come up missing. It was a bit expensive and the fact that I lost part of the set has me feeling a bit guilty. But as with the shoes, the disappearance is so far inexplicable. These facts make the connection pretty obvious and provide some context for explaining the dread I feel. Even so, it seems like too much for the magnitude of a problem like a DVD or a pair of shoes. Maybe the witches really are at work. </span>Jacobus the Scribehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11618447585764484499noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9036859.post-61714295312349837012008-01-23T09:17:00.000-05:002008-01-23T09:18:04.568-05:00The Struggle that has been January<span style="font-size:85%;">I feel a little apologetic about the fact that I haven’t written any posts in a while. I’ve been busy in some of the most frustrating of ways. I think I heard this concept from Susan: something about paying only the minimum on all of your credit cards of life. That’s what it’s been like for a combination of reasons. <br /><br />Getting back from Utah, I was asked almost straight-away to cover a half shift for someone on the island. The week after that we had our half-week shift for the magical semi-annual shift-shifting shift. So in the end this has been the first real week off I’ve had since the holidays.<br /><br />Normally that isn’t such an unusual or problematic thing except for the other things I’ve been pressed to accomplish in my piddly little periods of time off the island. The main point of work and frustration has been getting some lessons ready. I’m in a spot with the maths where it isn’t a problem for me these days. I’ve been doing the 4th grade through Algebra II thing for a while and I think I’ve got a good working curriculum going on. The problem lately has to do with science. <br /><br />Right now I’ve reached a critical mass of students with really poor reading skills and my usual winter indoor science curriculum is pretty reading intensive. It in fact requires a certain amount of independence in student reading and researching. As far as I’m able to assess right now half of my students are below the third grade in their reading levels and they have serious struggles reading material as basic as a newspaper article. 16-year-old kids can’t read the paper. It’s really frustrating. <br /><br />This being their situation it occurred to me that perhaps the best service I can do them as a teacher is to try and create my science curriculum for them in such a way that they will secretly be really improving their reading abilities. It seemed pretty reasonable to me. I’m kind of a scientist. Most of the scientific work I do involves reading stuff. Surely there are ways of making them read and learn science at the same time. Right? <br /><br />I believe there are but I have yet to discover them. There is a perennial problem in teaching special education, something I’ve mentioned elsewhere on this blog. It is the issue of kids who can’t read good detecting that you know they can’t read good and giving them work that they feel is for little kids. It is the shame obstacle. <br /><br />For whatever reason, I cannot find literature on biology related topics at a second grade reading level composed for teenage audiences. I’ve spent a few hours at the library. I found a book about integrating literature and science instruction, but in browsing it the suggestions for doing it were all pretty commonsensical and all the suggested readings and activities were for elementary school. Readings recommended as being biology related at the lower levels tend to not have any kind of technical information at all. They are usually cutesy illustrated stories about planting a seed and it growing into a tree or the chicken egg hatches and the chick makes noises and eats grain. On the other end are those that are designed to be for kids with lots of good illustrations and information but the language and vocabulary are still too advanced for my students. <br /><br />So, I’ve been angsting, stressing, and vexing about this stuff with most of my time off and end up going back to the island with yet another couple of episodes from “Planet Earth” with Sir David Attenborough. (I should add that it is a pretty darn good series though I prefer his “Life of ….” or “Life in ….” videos.) And then I leave the island feeling like maybe the kids learned a little something about biology but their reading isn’t getting better. Furthermore I’m not really helping my more advanced students as much as I should be. It appears that I’m going to be moving on to creating a science curriculum more like my math where I have to work with each kid at his own level. This is going to be so much work. <br /><br />I have thought many times that the whole field of special education could benefit tremendously from the availability of materials that are sensitive to the delicate egos of students such as mine, that very low level academic skills could be developed using materials designed for an adult’s interest and “dignity” if you will. Whenever I get to thinking along these lines it crosses my mind that I might produce some such material but… wow. I think someone could spend their whole life doing things like that, and it’s not really what I intend to do with mine.</span>Jacobus the Scribehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11618447585764484499noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9036859.post-70758385740137731132007-12-04T12:52:00.001-05:002007-12-11T14:59:09.091-05:00Some Student Poetry<a href="http://bp0.blogger.com/_uomxlRhKct4/R1WWh1IC6sI/AAAAAAAAACU/x1vW2zRQVWA/s1600-h/west_poem.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5140180057653963458" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://bp0.blogger.com/_uomxlRhKct4/R1WWh1IC6sI/AAAAAAAAACU/x1vW2zRQVWA/s400/west_poem.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><span style="font-size:85%;">I'm not poet or critic of poetry but, I was a little surprised by this piece from one of my students. I think he was assigned to write something about Calcutta.</span> </div>Jacobus the Scribehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11618447585764484499noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9036859.post-1439457154849917612007-12-03T09:15:00.001-05:002007-12-03T09:16:36.100-05:00Trip PlansI have scheduled the following flights for the forthcoming holiday month. <br /><br />Boston to Salt Lake City<br />12/13/07<br />5:02 pm - 8:35 pm<br />Delta<br /> Salt Lake City to Boston<br />12/27/07<br />9:40 am - 4:12 pm<br />DeltaJacobus the Scribehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11618447585764484499noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9036859.post-44893977655498478892007-11-25T14:27:00.000-05:002007-11-25T14:41:45.630-05:00Photos from New York<div><div><div><a href="http://bp0.blogger.com/_uomxlRhKct4/R0nNyTp0SAI/AAAAAAAAABU/yu5_0PCxe3o/s1600-h/obelisk.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5136863114145581058" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://bp0.blogger.com/_uomxlRhKct4/R0nNyTp0SAI/AAAAAAAAABU/yu5_0PCxe3o/s320/obelisk.jpg" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:85%;">This is of course one of the so-called needles of Nefertiti. A total misnomer by my way of thinking in that it is a monument to Ramses. Which one I cannot say though it has a sort of interesting formula for the text calling him "Horus the bull" at the beginning of each column of text. I found this in Central Park and at first thought it looked like it was a cement replica but, low and behold it's granite. Upon discovering that it was the real thing I was a little distressed at first because the first face you can see in the little area where it was put up has most of the inscription worn off of it. I feared that it had suffered all that damage by being moved from the nice protective desert to the acid rain of the east-coast of the US. Turns out however that it had been too worn to read on that side since the time it was first placed in NewYork apparently as a sort of gift from an Egyptian government official during the late 1800s. I played a few tricks with photoshop to make the inscription more legible but, I'm not sure that in this size version of the picture you can see that on this side of the obelisk the writing is almost perfectly intact.</span></div><br /><p></p><span style="font-size:85%;"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5136863449153030162" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://bp2.blogger.com/_uomxlRhKct4/R0nOFzp0SBI/AAAAAAAAABc/TFx0WUP47JQ/s320/mask.jpg" border="0" /><br /></span><div><span style="font-size:85%;">This is a huge wooden mask we saw in the American Museum of Natural History. It was a pretty cool mask but I thought I liked it most for the fact that one of the names for it was the "Fun Mask." It's the sort of thing that starts a chain reaction of thought through Peter Murphy's cabaret version of "Fun Time" to the discovery of one of the coolest things I've seen in a while: </span><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dBcE3i_VhE"><span style="font-size:85%;">Special Peter Surprise</span></a><span style="font-size:85%;"> If only Keegan were here to share the joy of this one.</span></div><br /><br /><div><span style="font-size:85%;"></span></div><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5136864097693091874" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://bp1.blogger.com/_uomxlRhKct4/R0nOrjp0SCI/AAAAAAAAABk/paPnK0QOTpc/s320/c_park.jpg" border="0" /> <div><span style="font-size:85%;">This here is a photo by Jed of a pond in Central Park. Isn't it lovely?</span></div><br /><div><span style="font-size:85%;"></span></div><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5136864424110606386" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://bp1.blogger.com/_uomxlRhKct4/R0nO-jp0SDI/AAAAAAAAABs/TrMKd0O_jeU/s320/liberty.jpg" border="0" /><span style="font-size:85%;">My obligatory picture of the Statue of Liberty. The smog you see is all quite real. Here I imagine her not so much as welcoming new people to a free country as waving good-bye to all of us as a society for deserting her as a principle.</span><br /><div></div></div></div>Jacobus the Scribehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11618447585764484499noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9036859.post-47708643646531173632007-11-03T14:17:00.000-05:002007-11-06T10:09:03.154-05:00The Issue of School Choice<span style="font-size:85%;">I am frankly very disappointed in the vibe I’m getting that Utah voters are turning around and deciding to revoke implementation of the voucher system. If you are planning to vote on this issue I think that the first thing you should do is read </span><a href="http://le.utah.gov/~2007/bills/hbillenr/hb0174.pdf"><span style="font-size:85%;">HB 174</span></a><span style="font-size:85%;">. It has come to my attention that there are people on both sides of this issue who are promulgating exceptionally nasty and deceptive misinformation in order to lure people their respective ways. I’ve heard that the media debate is surprisingly intense. I’m sure you already know that this is a huge experiment that the rest of the country is watching closely and people in other states have been contributing lots of money to weigh in for which ever side they support.<br /><br />As for trying to make some kind of fair or insightful argument for why I think you should vote for it… I cannot at the moment do a very good job. As I look at this bill and consider all of my experience working in schools this whole thing looks like a no-brainer to me. I cannot find one honestly good substantial reason for the general citizen to vote against this voucher system. The way I see it is that it boils down to exactly one issue. What do you imagine the role of a school is? If you think schools should be maximizing learning you must maximize the potential for choice. If you think schools should function to control and regulate the behavior of young people so they pop out regressed towards the mean in everything they do, then vote to support the hegemony of public schooling. If you honestly believe in the fact that humans are all unique individuals with unique sets of talents and weaknesses then it should be plain to you that all of these people have different educational needs. No single model of school can meet the needs of everyone. It is not logically feasible. It is a road to assuring mediocrity, which as I translate it means wasted human potential. But, some honestly believe that is what our society needs. We need to put everyone together all the time, at every level, and for every academic task. If we do this, then everyone will suck together and no one will be able to point and say, “Hey it’s not fair, those black kids are doing better than those Hispanic kids!” (I'm going to refrain from my diatribe about race and the obfuscation of cultural relativism.)</span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><br />Many are trying to put the impression across that the only flavor of private school is the blazer and tie prep school. This is very, super, friggin’, wicked wrong, the place I work being an extreme example. It is also a perfect example of another reason people need to be able to have choice in where they send their kids for school. Some kids have special learning needs. There are many kinds of such needs. The popular thing these days is to try and force every classroom teacher to learn how to work with and provide what’s needed for all of these needs. This is unreasonable. Just as trying to force the same learning situation on every bloody student makes them mediocre, doing this to teachers makes them mediocre in what they can provide for your kids. I have realized in my own development as a teacher that I have the potential of going from absolutely brilliant to bumbling moron in about 7 minutes, the time it takes for the periods to change and for me to get another batch of kids with completely different learning needs. (These days this is more like seven minutes for me to get into my lesson for the day. Different rant for a different day.) Private schools have a power that the public schools tend not to have: specialization and sometimes specialization in providing services for students with special needs.<br /><br />Part of the magic secret here is something that I think is going to become my slogan or mantra or catch phrase or something: learning is voluntary. You cannot force someone to learn. You can encourage and provide opportunities. You can even encourage to the point of torture but, ultimately learning is an act of will. As much as possible I suggest letting individual students and their families exercise that will, especially when it comes to something that influences a person’s life and happiness as much as their education does.<br /><br />So… it’s up to some of you folks. What’s more important: maximizing human potential or universal conformity?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">Forgive me if certain parts seem kind of hysterical or confusing, I'm famished and not functioning very well. Also I want to point out, this is open for debate. If you think I'm wrong and have some argument that you think is convincing post it up here by all means. Be forwarned that I will gladly listen, discuss, and refute where appropriate. </span>Jacobus the Scribehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11618447585764484499noreply@blogger.com3