Wednesday, May 30, 2012

to be king or not to be king...

I learned something today that will save me a lot of personal struggle if I ever find myself in a throne as a king with a kingdom to rule.

I have deduced that it matters not whether I rule with fear or love. The diversity of all the people I rule over will assure that the outcome will be the same.

If I rule with fear, the majority of people will obey because they are afraid. But there will be enough people who cannot be manipulated by fear and over time they will either start a revolution against me, or stab me in the back, depending on their position.

If I rule with love, the majority of people will obey because they also love. But again there will be enough people whose heart is too hard for love and over time they will either convince enough people to revolt against me because I wouldn't see it coming, or stab me in the back, depending on their position.

So If I ever find myself a king, I have two choices, and it matters not how I perform them, only that I choose one. I can either 1 - give my throne up and run away hoping no one follows and kills me, which will surely happen, or 2 - be whatever kind of king i feel like being and have as much fun as i can before I am killed, which will surely happen.

You see I must choose one and stick with it, because the only mistake you can make as a king is to sit on a fence.  If I stumble around with my choices, the majority of the people will neither be afraid of me, or love me and therefore they will revolt against me because I am not fit to be a king.

Thursday, May 24, 2012

Punctually expected

Consistent punctuality is something that is evident in only certain personalities.  So why is it an expectation of all people?  Why is being a-punctual a bad thing?  If one kind of trait is expected of all people, than it is also expected that everyone has the personality that places value on that trait.

That is just ridiculous.

No one would ever expect everyone to be the same, so why do we place these loaded expectations on certain traits?  If you value punctuality, it MIGHT mean you have a methodical, robotically efficient personality hence you value traits that express similar efficiency.  But to place that expectation on other people whom you by default would never presume have your personality is just.........ignorant (in the way you don't smile with child-like adoration, but grimace with adult frustration and immature hatred)

With this logic, it seems the only way to be just and fair to everyone is to expect nothing.  To expect anything.  To expect everything.  This is fine for say the first-second-maybe third time you meet someone,during that awkward getting to know each other phase, but if you live any relationship with an open world, streaming girth of expectationless acceptance, you fall into the same contradiction introduced in the beginning.  Because by expecting nothing, you are by default expecting anything, and that means that person has to be everything to fulfill your expectation.

So like a F1 race car, we come back to where we started.  The only way to manage a relationship is to expect from people what you will.  And if they don't fulfill, gather your balls up, and move into another playpen without any expectation that you will meet someone who fulfills your expectations.

How I teach

I walk in.  20 eyes stare at me.  I do nothing.  They begin to get anxious.  Still nothing.  Then they get restless.  Nothing.  The eyes start to do something.  Looking around, looking away, closing, refusing to open, THEN!!!!  I smile.  The eyes stop and return to me.  I look at one pair and say in a hearty voice from Santa's belly, "I am Happy", those eyes look away but this time they are accompanied with a smile.  I notice 9 other smiles have joined company.  I take my hand and wipe my smile off my face and make a fist.  I now have my smile in my hand - not on my face.  I do not say this figuratively in any extent of the word.  I HAVE my smile in my hand.  I point to my fist and raise it with a bellow before battle, "I HAVE A SMILE IN MY HAND!!!!".  My kids look around with a mouth that understands but eyes that don't.  I then meet each pair of eyes with mine as if scanning for something I need.  I see it.  And I throw my smile at the face below those eyes.  Those eyes are now partnered with my smile, and the game continues.

Why I don't watch movies.

I don't read fiction.  And I just figured out why.  I don't like movies.  There is no reason to try.  My life is already full of poetry and bliss.  Just talk to a friend, or give your mirror a kiss.  Why would I spend a hour reading some beautiful prose about how in Korea they separate trash in neat little rows.  When I could spend that same hour discovering something new about why I am me and you are you.

studying VS. knowing

You realize you want to be a foot doctor.
This means you have to learn to be one.

This means you have to undergo a long series of processes, all of which lead to becoming a foot doctor, and all of which are divided into 2 sections.

Imagine each process as an ice-cream cone that you eat backwards, cone first.

The cone part is studying the particular information which upon completion will allow you to eat the ice-cream part, knowing.

Once you accumulate all the needed knowledge, you will have learned to be a foot doctor.

Lets paint the picture even brighter.

One of the processes of becoming a foot doctor is understanding the anatomical structure of the body, particularly that of the foot .  Let's now divide this process into our backwards ice-cream cone.  First you must munch through the cone and study information about the body that satisfies the requirements of your target knowledge, and once that occurs you can enjoy the ice cream or;  know the target knowledge.

As long as the target knowledge is something you desire, the process of munching through the tasteless cone shouldn't be a problem.

This is where most popular forms of education break down.  Education has decided that the ice cream part is no longer important.  All student needs for success is a bunch of tasteless cones, so it pummels students with books and graphs and vocabulary until the brain thinks it is Muhammad Ali.  The whole time the student is hating every second of their "learning" experience because he has nothing to look forward to.  He thinks no ice cream is waiting for him .

Then there is the other extreme, giving a student a target knowledge and just letting them run free without any form of guidance or direction.

This is equivalent to plopping a huge scoop of yummy ice-cream (coneless) on a students face and expecting them to consume it without getting a drop on their collar (while their hands are tied behind their back).  They will enjoy the ice-cream because they like it, but they will make a huge mess trying to consume it, and they won't even be able to effectively consume it all.  lots of it will get on the floor and their clothes.


A long lost balance is needed.  We all love ice cream, but it is very difficult to enjoy completely without a cone.  We all love knowing new things, but we need the cone of study to keep all our efforts focused.  But when the emphasis of learning starts leaning towards the studying part more than the joy of knowing part, we walk away with a bitter taste.  too much bitter makes us believe there is no sweet.

Thursday, May 17, 2012

GODDAMMIT!!!!!

I'm playing a game called SWTOR.  It is a MMO.  It is my first MMO.  Of course being something new of the which I knew nothing about, I started out wiping like a window cleaner.  But after practice, practice, and of course practice, I fine tuned my DPS, I learned to steer my AOE from any CC, I balanced my heals with energy output, learned to maneuver my toon between mobs without pulling any aggro, and figured out what to need and what to greed.  I still have a lot to learn and a lot to consume, but I have gotten on my feet.

I can't claim all this progress as my own.  Many hands helped me open many doors.  But what tickles my curiosity is not the how I learned, or the with whom, or the why, or the what.  I don't care about any of that because that is all useful for just me.  I care about the one thing that every single living thing shares in our many learning endeavors.  I care about Where.

I didn't go to a classroom and listen to a teacher explain what LFG means, or how to tank.  No single person taught me anything about where or how to spec.  I didn't learn from listening.  I learned from living.  Where?  In the MMO world you doofus!!!!  I made my world the MMO world.  I learned to understand the tech differences between a Sorcerer CC and an IA CC not by reading about it, but by, in the heat of battle, experience the failure of not knowing, thinking about it, talking about it, and figuring out what the possible answer could be, testing it, examining the result, and then learning.   You tell me which way is more effective, but more importantly more enjoyable. 

So why do we all hoard into universities, and listen to pompous pickle heads talk about how they think the we should learn what we like?  Why do Language academies flourish like the salmon of Capistrano when all they do is drill contextualness grammar into children's head with a jackhammer?

I can think of an answer for each of those questions, so don't post comments like "well we need a degree from a university to prove to a company we are worth hiring"  or "well our children need to practice English so they can pass the entrance exams and get into good high schools and colleges", because if you do, I will just ask "Well why do we need a degree in the first place?  Why is there a test in the first place?  And if you answer to those questions is anything besides "business", you should go back to school.

Business has taken the goal, the JOY, of learning, and packaged it into a pretty box with a price tag that reads something like "your parents entire marriage (or at least the fun part of it)" or "Your entire early adult life"      (depending on what culture you belong to.)

 As long as babies can become fluent in a language before they ever step foot into a classroom, there will never be a reason we should.

You see, i wouldn't be so heated about this subject if that victims of it chose to be victims (guess that why they are victims).  The victims of this learning holocaust are young kids who are forced to go to school because their government tells their parents they should, or teenagers who are forced to go to language academies because their culture tells their parents they should, or young adults who are forced to go to a university because their family tells them they should.  The victims are all people who grow up with a distaste, salty hatred for learning before they even understand what learning is.  they equate studying with a whip, and reading with a dark looming shadow.

If they came out of this vacuum sealed pressurized pouch of pain with an practical idea of how this world worked and a substantial amount of experience to sustain their first few steps into the real life, then I would have no complaints.  Suffer a little to learn a lot.  nothing wrong with that.  BUT THEY DON'T!!!!  It is ridiculous.  the average human learns absolutely nothing from every second spent in a classroom that they can actually apply in the world.  Why?  BECAUSE A CLASSROOM ISN'T THE GODDAMN WORLD!!!!!!  yet we make our entire education system out as if it was.  I can tell you all day that touching a hot stove will burn you, but you will never learn until you feel its heat, and experience its pain.

The idea of a school had to have been born from good intentions.  Why would I let my loved ones suffer through the same things I did when I can share with them my knowledge and maybe help them bypass some pain.  that is beautiful, if that is how it was today then i would have nothing to say.  but it isn't.  today is full of people who want the world to recognize their knowledge so they make kids buy their books and prove to them they understand with tests.  HOW THE FUCK DOES THAT TEACH PEOPLE ABOUT THE WORLD!!!!!

My logic says, if you want to learn how to survive in this world, you have to learn IN this world.

The thing that pisses me off the most is that all I am saying would be whole-heartedly agreed with by the very people who teach in these universities.

Friday, May 11, 2012

curiosity pattern

Patterns are my cheesecake when I shouldn't have any.  I love looking for them, and when I find one, I love dissecting it on my brain table to see what is inside.  Its like playing an adventure game.  They are everywhere, you just have to think enough and bring the seemingly random pieces together to see their underlying pattern.   underlying is the key word here.  lying under everything you see is a pattern.  A pattern that transcends all physical differences you see with your eyes, all logical differences you see with your brain, and all emotional differences you see with your heart.  A mountain ridge in all its random ridgyness is as related to the hair on my arm as butter is to bread.

I found another pattern, this time in relation to my life long question of how to teach people to love learning.

here it is:

A child is curious because it wants answers to everything it doesn't know which is everything.

A teenager is not as curious because it knows all the answers to what it didn't know as a child and it thinks it knows everything

An adult is curious because it wants answers to the news things it didn't know as a teenager.

An elderly isn't as curious because learned all it didn't know as an adult and it thinks it knows everything

So the patterns we see here are all correlated with the ages of each generation and the emotional outlook of life.  Children being the babies of the young generation are curious because of a lack of knowledge pertinent to them.  Adults being the babies of the old generation being curious because of a lack of knowledge pertinent to them.  Teenagers being the adults of the young generation having not as much curiosity because they know everything they didn't know as a child.  Elderly being the adult of the old generation having not as much curiosity because they know everything they didn't know as an adult.

If you were to graph out the level of curiosity with the progression of age, there would be a steady up and down roller coaster-like pattern throughout the entire life-cycle of a typical human.  It would start out high as a child with an arsenal of needed knowledge, gradually go down with each discovery of new knowledge, then gradually go up again as new needs of knowledge are discovered and again go down as each new need is satisfied.

There has to be other patterns and theories that can be deduced from this.

anything you can bring to light would be awesome!!!!

Wednesday, May 9, 2012

Give a man a fish?

"Give a man a fish, he eats for a day. Teach him to fish, he eats for life."

We have all heard this before.

The origins of it are a matter I would love to discuss, the efforts of which would become of such a length that I fear I would lose you all to the purpose of this post.  The purpose of this post is to analyze my recent understandings of the many social implications of the above quote.

The concept behind that little gem of a metaphor is applicable in an innumerable amount of circumstances.

How can you all apply it to your life?

This is how I have applied it to mine. I am a teacher. I spent the first year of my teaching career pulling my hair out. Once I was bald, I sat there staring at this pile of brown that kinda looked like this:
I thought about quitting.  Usually when something causes me to bald from frustration, I would cease putting energy into that thing.  But I decided to keep marching on.  Maybe because I have no where else to march, not quite sure.  But luckily I found my niche in the teaching world.  Little did I know my niche was just a hallway to my true purpose.

I have developed the personality and ability to be a killer kindergarten/young elementary teacher.  I woo my students daily with different personalities, interactive games, actively engaging songs and dances.  I have the child's mind down to a science.  The science part is precisely where I found myself most intrigued.  Why is it so easy for me to teach little kids?  And why did it get more difficult as they got older?  It seems they have just simply lost the desire to learn.  If so, what happened during the development of a child where they lost their desire to learn?

That is the key point.  That is where I stopped enjoying being a teacher for the second time.  I realized I was just helping my kids learn for one day.  I was giving them a piece of candy.  But they didn't know how to get candy themselves.  They needed me to be there. I didn't like that.  I didn't feel satisfied knowing that as soon as my class is over, it was like I wasn't even there.

"Once you learn to enjoy work, it is no longer work"

My dad has been saying that to me my whole life...never has it ringed more true than now.

Culture morphs and mutilates people's minds into focusing all their energy onto what they are learning, and not learning itself.  The likelihood of always learning what we naturally like is so low that it makes so sense to only find happiness in those things.  And since we can't be happy with things we don't like, we need to focus on something different.  It is something that has taken my almost 3 decades to understanding, despite my father's constant reminding.  Let me paint a picture.

I am a builder.  Also in my spare time I enjoy animals.  Building is my job.  Animals are my hobby.  Does this mean I only enjoy building things that house animals?  of course not, my job and my hobby are 2 seperate things, not to be confused with each other.  This doesnt mean I will not find extra joy in building a zoo, or an aquarium.  I enjoy building anything, but I extra enjoy building things that are related to other things I like.

I don't see any difference with the above example and any child in school.  Every child has their hobby, but every child has their job.  It just happens that every child has the same job title: student.  both are important and necessary for happiness, but it seems children only let hobbies give them happiness.  As they grow older something happens to them and they start to look at their job of learning as a student as boring, stupid......forced.  These emotions allowed because they are in no position to worry about the emotional connection they have to fulfilling the requirements of their job because society only expects them to pass the next test, not enjoy passing the next test.

How would similar emotions affect our builder?  If our builder went to work with a horrible attitude every day, and hated building UNLESS he was building something he had an emotional connection to, How long would he keep his job?  He wouldn't have a job to keep.  Of course this doesn't happen because it is likely the builder likes building which is why he chose to become a builder.

Children didn't choose to become students.  Society decided it for them.  That has to be the main reason for the general bitter taste left in every child's mouth when they hear the word "homework".  If they had chosen their current profession as a student, logic would lead us to believe the majority would enjoy learning more.

The same can be said about the relationship with the majority of adults and their jobs.  The amount of Liquor stores littered around every metropolitan are proof.

So adults and children alike generally don't enjoy their jobs.  This is an interesting pattern that I have decided to expound upon in another post.