Before you can learn, you have to admit that you don’t know.
We live in a society where there are rules about what one is supposed to know by a certain age. Or in a certain environment. If you’re an educated individual, there are sets of information you’d better possess. What if you don’t know these crucial bits of data? Shame on you.
That’s what it’s all about: shame.
We, as a society, manage to shame people into hiding their lack of knowledge. If two people are in conversation and one is dropping names of political figures that the other hasn’t heard of, would the other person ask the speaker to clarify?
How often have we heard: “You know what that is, right?”
How often have we nodded along when we had no idea but felt too embarrassed to admit it.
The fact is it’s not the knowledgeable person’s fault, either. How’s she or he to know that you don’t know? If you act like you know and you act well, the other person will never feel the need to explain and they shouldn’t have to.
What we need to do is to remove the pressure of having to know. We need to teach that lack of knowledge is not a bad thing. Lack of willingness to learn, maybe. But not lack of knowledge.
I am often not afraid to admit what I don’t know. There are a million things I don’t know and I am really dying to learn. If I don’t tell people that I don’t know, they will never take the time to explain it to me and I will never learn. The fear of not getting the chance to learn is what motivates me to admit my lack of knowledge. Somehow I lack the necessary shame.
I don’t know why, but I certainly wish everyone did.
When we’re young, we’re not expected to know so it’s easy to ask. Sometimes people explain even before we ask. But somewhere along the line, we reach a point where expectations rise and we stop asking. Instead we learn to play along. To act like we know.
Which is why we will never actually know.
Previously? Color.
One of the fundamental creeds of writing is telling versus showing.
Imagine you’re reading a novel and the writer has the following line:
“She must be out of her mind,” said Jennifer. She was angry.
What do you know about the character? Well you take the author’s that Jennifer’s angry. You don’t really have proof, with the possible exception of your added voice to the words. If you read it in an angry manner, you might feel okay about taking the author’s word for jennifer’s state of mind. But if you read it ironically, you might be surprised when you hit upon the word “angry”. Depending on the sentence, you might even have to go back an reread.
Now take this sentence:
Jennifer stormed into the room. “She must be out of her mind,” she hollered. She slammed her schoolbag on the table and turned on the TV.
Okay so it’s not the most elegant prose you’ve ever read, but the author didn’t come out and say that Jennifer was mad, yet you got the idea. Why? Cause you could see Jennifer “storming” into the room and “hollering” and “slamming her bag” those are all signs of anger. The reader can play it out in his mind and figure out that Jennifer must be mad. You haven’t “told” the reader what to feel; you’ve let him experience it firsthand.
The same strategy can be used in teaching. It’s the fundamental difference of being told how things work and seeing how things work. Especially in topics in the sciences, since we have real world examples of how things work, firsthand knowledge can’t measure up to a few lines in a textbook. No matter how many times I tell you that a chemical solution is very acidic, as soon as you dip the litmus strip into it and it turns red, it will carve a place in your memory. And it’s important that you dipped the strip and not me. You figure it out all by yourself. You deduce. You conclude.
Same idea applies to basic math, instead of saying two plus two equals four, why not line up two balls and then add two more and ask the student count? This way it’s not as if you’re divine and just imparting knowledge, but you’re showing people how they can derive their own, correct, conclusions. I think that we tend to remember firsthand experiences much more vividly than information we’re told.
Maybe it’s cause we don’t inherently like to take other people’s word for things. Humans always observe the world around them. It’s in our nature. And maybe in the processes of letting the students or readers come to their own conclusions, you elevate them to the same level as yourself. You show them that they’re intelligent enough to figure it out.
In the end don’t we all like to be treated as equals?
Previously? The Obvious.
Can you light a bulb with a battery and a wire?
Really? How?
It’s amazing how little attention we pay to things that are part of our day to day experience. We often focus on the task at hand and pay little attention to the peripherals in our world.
For example, let’s take this question: “If you wanted to see more of yourself in a mirror, do you move backwards of forward?”
Go ahead, think, I’ll be here.
You thought it through? You sure? What’s the answer?
Nope. It’s not “you have to move back.”
The fact is no matter how far back you move, you still see the same amount of yourself in the mirror. Trust me, you can test it out.
Isn’t it amazing that we use mirrors every single day, but we never really notice that? When we look in the mirror, we’re busy concentrating on our task: brushing our teeth, combing our hair, etc. But we don’t wonder much about how the mirror works.
Mostly because we don’t have to. If it’s not broke, don’t fix it, right?
I think we could all benefit from looking harder at the world around us. Maybe I feel that way cause I’m surprised when a basic assumption I make turns out to be wrong. At the age of twenty-six, I believe I should know about fundamentals of how the world works or at least how things I interact with on a daily basis work. I don’t mean that you should know how each chip of a computer works, but how does electricity work, or mirrors, or cameras. Those are pretty fundamental.
Here’s another question for you: if by some way we were able to create a room that was completely dark, could you see an apple that was in that room? What about after ten minutes?
Let me know what you think, you might be amazed at the answer.
Most of us take these fundamentals for granted. Most of us are never taught these core functions well. Most of us never had to light a bulb with a battery and wire or sit in a completely dark room. Most of us never cared to look at a mirror just to see how the reflection is affected by the change in the distance of the source. Most of us either don’t care or work off of some, and often incorrect, assumptions.
Buy maybe you’re much more observant than I am and have learned all the basics. In that case I look up to you and think you’re amazing.
Because you’ve conquered the ideal of looking beyond the obvious.
Previously? Categorical Imperative.
The night before her philosophy paper was due, my college roommate swallowed the two Vivarins that came in her Freshman box.
In our first week in college, we each got a box with the ‘essentials’. A small box of shaving cream, a razor, a pack of advil, tampons, tooth paste and a toothbrush, deodorant and a pack of Vivarin. Two years later when I became a Resident Assistant, I tried to get the Vivarins removed from the package but I lost. Well, that’s another story for another time.
My roommate ended up pulling an all-nighter but her brain was completely asleep yet the chemicals wouldn’t let her body cooperate. So she couldn’t write her paper and she got no sleep. The next morning, she felt like shit. And she still had a paper to write.
My first all-nighter was to guard the fence. At CMU, we have a tiny fence that’s outside one of the main buildings. Much of the campus-event advertising is done through painting this fence. The rules are that you need to guard it all night, before you can paint it. So my organization got a tent and we spent the night by the fence. A perfect college experience.
All-nighters are exactly what college is about.
Thanks to a full load of classes, real good friends, several jobs, and unquenchable energy, I spent many all-nighters in my four years. To be fully honest, most of them had nothing to do with homework. I was having too much fun, I enjoyed being around the people and sleep seemed to be a waste of time.
Since graduation, I have pulled one, a single, all-nighter. It was during my very first year in New York, when I was chatting with friends on the computer and working on my 3-D trumpet. I modeled and rendered it all that night. I’d been working on it on and off for a long time but I kept getting it wrong. The energy I got at three in the morning and the excitement of talking to my friend, allowed me the concentration to actually get it right.
I can’t seem to stay up all night any more. By the time my watch says eleven, my eyelids are heavy and I struggle to make it to bed. It might have something to do with getting up at seven, or that I’m six years older now, but I think it’s just that I’m lacking the environment.
The enticing setting.
I miss school. I miss the friendship, the chatting about everything, even the work. But most of all, I miss the all-nighters. The wee hours when your body is tired but getting its second wind. When you’re giddy and laugh at everything. When you don’t care that you’ll be dead tired tomorrow.
When you just do it cause it’s fun.
Do you remember your first all-nighter?
Previously? Reality.
A random stranger walking up to me and handing me his number while my dad and I are opening a bank account.
A phone conversation where he keeps saying “cool” which simply means between cold and warm to me.
Buying a football game magazine which cost five dollars for ten.
Watching my best friend kiss the freshman picture book.
Bouncing my first check ever. Groveling to the bank to not charge me.
The tray of constipation.
Having my portrait drawn by an art student.
A terrible eighteenth birthday where I find out my crush has a crush on my roommate. And then ten people spending the night in our room.
First time I earn money.
My roommate hollering to me that my alarm is going off.
Our first answering machine recording, made up from parts of songs.
Dammit! I will fuck you!
Painting the fence. Movie nights in DH2210.
Dropping out of sorority rush on day two.
First time I kiss a boy whom I’m not dating and don’t get called the next day.
My first Halloween.
Waking my friend up at three A.M. to start studying for our history final. And non-stop studying for the next two days.
A summer living in Theta Xi.
A night spent sleeping in the hospital’s waiting room.
All nighters. Mountain Dew. Diet Coke.
Spending ten hours in the cafeteria talking. Yuk yuk.
Talking someone out of a depressed suicidal mood.
Taking more than twice as many classes as acceptable. A dean, offering to pay for my class, if only I agree to drop one.
Getting drunk and discovering that I take off my clothes when I get drunk. Never getting drunk again.
Interviewing.
Bell Labs. First real job.
Email. Tons and tons of email.
Friends. Lots and lots of friends.
Teaching. Learning. Crying. Laughing. Growing.
I loved college.
Previously? Happie News.
It’s amazing to me how many people use words without really thinking about what they’re trying to say. Especially adjectives and adverbs, we’re so fast to pile them up. One of the guys I work with always utters the word “interesting” which makes my skin crawl.
It’s not that I don’t like the word interesting, it’s just that it means nothing whatsoever in the context in which he uses it. I say, “One of the reasons we want to split up these services is to ensure we can have deals where each tranche can offer a different product.”
He goes, “Hmm, that’s interesting.”
Huh?
Recently, especially during this seemingly unending design phase, interesting has become my least favorite reply. “Strangle” isn’t the right word, but it’s the first word that comes to mind. (that’s what I get for reading Choke in one sitting.)
I’ve also been thinking about the use of “intelligent” a lot lately. What do you think qualifies someone as intelligent?
Since I am a programmer and grew up with a strong math background, I’ve always heard people tell me that my ability to add up two numbers in my head quickly makes me intelligent. Or the fact that I scored high on the Math SATs and GMATs. I must be intelligent if I know how to code or if I did well at school. If I can speak several foreign languages. For some reason, people surrounding me have always associated intelligence with either math or sciences.
What about people who are extremely good with history or geography? Are they not intelligent?
How about artists and musicians? Poets?
People at the top of an artistic field are often referred to as geniuses. Leonardo Da Vinci was a genius. But then again, so was Albert Einstein and I don’t think his artistic skills were well developed ( though I could be wrong about this as it’s just a guess). So genius, I think, is used for people whom we consider at the very top of their field. Someone at an extraordinary level. Which gives me the warm fuzzies cause it doesn’t seem to discriminate on topic.
Intelligence, however, doesn’t work that way. At least not in my experience. You’re a genetic engineer? You must be intelligent. You wrote an award-winning fiction novel. Well, you’re great but not necessarily intelligent. It just doesn’t seem all that fair.
I must say that I have the highest respect for people who know the words that show up in the GREs. I’ve been trying to memorize some of those words and my brain simply refuses to cooperate. The math and analytical sections are no problem at all but as soon as I hit the antonyms, I’m ready to give it all up. I don’t need a PhD that bad. Really.
If intelligence was all about math and analysis and GREs were supposed to test your level of intelligence, why have those stupid words at all?
Now I know you’re telling yourself that I have two flaws in my logic. One being that I assume the GREs are worth anything. And you’re right. I don’t think they are and I think that’s pretty common knowledge. But I was just using it as an example and not as a basis for my argument on why non-math and science oriented topics should also be included in measuring someone’s level of intelligence.
The other flaw you might want to point out is that I assumed that a strong vocabulary isn’t a sign of intelligence. And that’s exactly my point. What is intelligence? What makes you define someone as an intelligent person?
I guess I define it as someone with strong deduction skills, a solid and well-rounded set of knowledge and an ability to apply the knowledge to their life and work.
What do you think? Tell me.
Addendum on june 24: this article seemed to be adressing exactly the issues I was trying to raise, so I thought you might find it interesting.
Previously? Alone.
How common is common sense?
I’ve always thought that the idea behind common sense is that there is a well of information out there somewhere that all humans are somehow tapped into. Or even something genetically transmitted from parents to children.
At least that’s how we behave when we run into someone who we think lacks in that department. We wonder, ‘where was this person raised, in outer space?’
So I’ve been thinking about what goes into what we consider common sense. I tried to think of examples of what I consider common sense and see how and where I learned them.
The first one that sprung to my mind was the ‘make sure to be aware of your surroundings when you walk’ idea. Anyone who’s been raised in a city knows that it’s crucial for your personal safety to know this bit of common sense. It’s extremely common, however, for a small town person to not have this bit of information, which is something they quickly learn once they’ve been in the city for a few days and are mugged. (Okay, so I’m exaggerating a bit.) It looks like we pick up some amount of common sense from the environment in which we’re raised.
On a similar topic, I’ve worked with a girl who never notices subtle hints. If I’m upset and ask a friend to go for a walk, she’d jump in and say “Can I come along, too?” Not that we didn’t like her or enjoy her company, but she didn’t seem to realize when it wasn’t really appropriate for her to invite herself. I kept wondering how she’d managed to make it through her teenage years without having been totally burnt. Learning when to talk and how to act is a series of common sense tricks we pickup from our family and surroundings. These bits of information sometimes sting so hard that we never forget how we developed this piece of “common sense.” (And we rarely forget the “friends” who taught us this lesson first hand.)
Another example I came up with was building common sense through education. As I learned American Sign Language, many of the signs seemed common sense to me and so I’d retain them easily. Same for Japanese grammar. Even math felt like common sense to me. It seemed the more I learned, the more stuff appeared to be common sense.
Here’s what I think it all comes down to: common sense is a combination of what you learn from your environment, family, friends, books, school and all your deductions from this knowledge.
Next time you meet someone who seems to lack what you consider common sense, remember that it’s not a centralized resource pool in which we can all tap.
Just like most anything else in life, it stems from personal experience.
Previously? The Itch.
One of the biggest drawbacks of my architecture teacher, and believe me she has many, is her lack of knowledge in any areas besides her own.
She spends the entire class reading to us about the lives and works of architects whom she considers most influential in the evolution of modern architecture. She does seem to be knowledgeable in that specific area, but if you dare ask anything about Eastern architecture she’s clueless. Same goes for programs relating to architecture. Not to discredit her completely, she does read and bring to class stories relating to architecture from papers or magazines. But overall, she seems to be totally focused on her own little world.
My Florence teacher, on the other hand, is the total opposite. He teaches us literature, history, arts, music, religion and everything else relating to the subject of the course. You can tell he’s so fascinated by his subject matter that he explores all facets of the field. He knows the symbols in Dante’s work, the inside stories between Dante and some of the mentioned characters, the works of art relating to Dante’s stories, the mythological stories mentioned in the poem, the operas based on those stories and the music people played at the time. Talk about well rounded. He doesn’t just tell you the stories. He tells you the different conflicting stories and gives us his opinion on which one might be true.
Compare that to my architecture teacher who has never heard of some of the most famous Eastern architects. Can you truly say that she’s interested in her subject?
I have the same pleasure with my Human Brain teacher. He is almost equally well versed in physics as he is in biology and psychology and paleontology. His anecdotes add color and dimension to the lectures, making the subject matter so much more fascinating. He also is aware of all recently published information on any of his topics, which for a class on the human brain is crucial.
One of the biggest disadvantages to getting a doctorate is that is makes you concentrate on one teeny tiny issue for several years. It’s about depth, about specializing. I think the future of the world is in interdisciplinary connections.
Learning one field without having any knowledge of the other gives us such a limited and skewed opinion. The world is an amalgamation of all these topics. Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Math, Politics, Law, Literature, Languages, Geography, History, and many others all exist in the world simultaneously. What’s the point of knowing one in a secluded way?
Especially since they’re merged in nature and in society.
Previously? Humility.
Today was the last day of my sign language class. The classes at my school go until level eight and I just finished level seven.
At this high level, most of the grammar and basic concepts are long covered. We spend the class time on vocabulary and deaf culture. One of the reasons sign language vocabulary is harder to learn than most other languages is cause it has only one-way lookup. A dictionary can only tell you the sign for a specific word. If you watch two people signing, you can’t take note of the sign one made and look it up in the dictionary. The only way to learn the meaning of that sign is by asking that deaf person. If you make a note of the sign and ask another deaf person, you’re likely to have missed a subtlety of the sign or the context, which would change the potential meaning of the sign immensely.
Even more frustrating than acquiring vocabulary is understanding deaf culture. There are so many aspects to a hearing person’s life that we take for granted. One of the discussions we had last week in class was about a deaf person going to the emergency room. Imagine your friend bleeding and you’re both deaf and you need help. Trust me when I say that it’s overwhelmingly frustrating. Or imagine being mugged and you approach a police officer. The possibility of getting immediate help is completely nonexistent for deaf people in a hearing world.
My firm hired its first deaf employee a few weeks ago. She is a network specialist. When you enter my firm, there is a four-month training program that is organized to prepare you for your job. After she was given interpreters, the girl insisted that she needed note-takers as well. I know that, initially, the coordinator thought that the girl was being picky and greedy. The fact is we take for granted that we hear with our ears and write using our eyes. We don’t need to look at something to be able to write it down. Deaf people hear with their eyes. If she’s watching the interpreter, she can’t take notes. Any second she takes her eye off the interpreter to write, she’ll be missing words.
Tonight, our teacher took my class to a restaurant after class. She told us that we’re not allowed to speak, so we can have a better understanding of what the world is for her, as she’s deaf. The six of us walked into the restaurant, signing and laughing and we were lucky to have a waitress who had a deaf mother so even though she knew Polish Sign Language, she knew enough to help us out.
The little trip made me realize more and more about what I take for granted. Sitting there, I knew that at any moment, I could speak if I got frustrated enough. I could explain what I really wanted to say with one word. Instead of having to use paper or mime. No matter how hard I try, I will never truly be able to live in the shoes of a deaf person, cause deep down I’ll always know that I have the choice to opt out while real deaf people don’t.
Previously? Intentions and Expectations.
I don’t believe in the idea that there are a few peculiar people capable of understanding math, and the rest of the world is normal. Richard Feynman at an interview with Omni magazine
I’ve always believed in the theory of “there is no such thing as can’t.” Each time someone claimed I couldn’t do something, I’d work incessantly and accomplish it, just to prove them wrong. I never liked the idea of others claiming they could judge the range of my capacity.
Any human’s capacity.
I’ve often wondered if there is such a thing as human capacity. Are we all born with a set of abilities or do all babies come to the world with the same set of competences and somehow, some people learn to tap into this well of knowledge better than others?
I guess like most nature vs. nurture questions, the answer lies somewhere in between. It’s highly likely, to me, that there is some kind of genetic wiring that allows for one baby to be more artistically inclined than the other. It’s also plausible, even probable, that two babies with equal capacity in this area might not grow up to have the equal artistic ability in practice. One baby might have parents who recognize this inherent talent early on and they may hire the best tutors for the child early on, expanding and honing this skill while the other kid’s parents are oblivious. Therefore, in my mind, it makes perfect sense to say that both nature and nurture have an effect in the resulting genius.
The fascinating question, however, is whether such a genius can be the result of mostly nurture. What if I don’t have these special genes that make me an amazing artist? (Let’s call these the Leonardo genes.) Can I still be a master painter without the Leonardo genes? What if I worked with people who had these genes and I practiced night and day? Are you saying that even if I made it my sole purpose in life, I couldn’t become a Leonardo without his genes?
What a depressing thought.
I often suffer from lack of perspective. When I see something amazing, I get overcome with despair that I am incapable of producing such a thing. I’m not talking about achieving an outcome at the level of a Leonardo or a Nobel Prize winning physicist. Some amazing drawing someone my age did. Some program a fellow teammate wrote. Some idea a teenager had that’s truly unique and clever. I see all these as achievements within my reach and I feel depressed that I am incapable of producing such outcomes. I don’t mean to say that I feel animosity or jealousy towards the originator of it. On the contrary, I have huge respect and admiration towards them. I just feel bad that I couldn’t be such a person, too.
Therefore the idea that genius cannot be learned is upsetting to me and I refuse to believe it. If I can’t hope that by hard work and determination, I can reach just about any goal, I might as well lose hope.
And I don’t ever want to lose hope.
Previously? Taboos.
Would you think it’s possible to learn all about life in one afternoon? Not even an afternoon, just two hours or so.
My three-hour labyrinth class taught me all that I need to know.
The first thing we did as the class started was to go to another room and walk a labyrinth the teacher had laid in yarn. The instructions were to keep quiet, take our shoes off, and write our reactions as soon as we completed the walk to the middle of the labyrinth and back.
The first picture below is the shape of the rope we walked. It’s a seven-ring labyrinth. The image next to it is the eleven-ring one found in many cathedrals.
  
Here’s what I wrote after I finished my walk:
– It’s best to keep your eye in the present instead of worrying about the future.
– Try not to worry about your sense of direction so much as it can shift.
– When you think you’re done, you’re not.
I swear these are the exact sentences I wrote as soon as I sat back down at my desk. As I stared at my writing, I noticed how similar that experience was to life itself.
A forty-dollar two-hour class taught me more about life than anything else.
Previously? Camera Fun.
My friend Natalia is applying to Business Schools. As with collegeapplications, these schools have a variety of utterly boring and annoying essay questions.
Anyhow, Natalia wants to get in and she’s doing all the filling out the forms, taking the exams, getting therecommendations bit on her own. But I get to help out with the essays.
I can’t remember any of my college essay topics besides two. One wasabout “three major events in my life” and another was “why Swarthmore”(which I did quite badly on since, back then, I didn’t even know whereSwarthmore was).
We’ve been working on Natalia’s essays for three months now. Amidst thereally boring and common questions, I’ve recently come across one thatreally got me thinking. One of the essay topics for Chicago Business Schoolis:
“If you were a character in a book, who would it be and why? What do youadmire most about this character?” (the question also asks how you relate to this character but we’ll ignore that part)
You might have a totally different answer if you were writing an essayfor college, but the question of what character you would like to be isreally interesting, if you ask me. After hearing the topic, I spent daysthinking about what character I would have chosen and why.
Assuming they meant a “fiction” book, here are a bunch of myfavorites:
Little Prince: cause he is always curious, looks at things from adifferent perspective, is honest and kind, is fascinated with the world andis open-hearted.
Winnie the Pooh: cause he’s nice to everyone, is always in a goodmood, is curious and loving.
Atticus: Cause he fought for what he believed in, had integrityand was kind.
I love many of Anne Tyler and Jane Smiley’s characters. I wouldn’t wantto be a Stephen King or Anthony Burgess character. I’m on the fence aboutJohn Irving and Salinger’s characters. And I hope I never come close to aHemingway one.
Ok so I can’t think of good examples. I’ll add to this list as I think ofsome. In the meantime, tell me, whowould you want to be? Feel free topicka movie character if you want.
Previously? CanDo.
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projects for twenty twenty-four
projects for twenty twenty-three
projects for twenty twenty-two
projects for twenty twenty-one
projects for twenty nineteen
projects for twenty eighteen
projects from twenty seventeen
monthly projects from previous years
some of my previous projects
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