omenti

beyond 88

Yesterday Om pointed out that it was piano day - the 88th day of the year honoring the 88 keys of most pianos.  I read his post a day late, but there's still hope for another celebration with the same name. An obvious choice might involve the Bösendorfer grand where options include 92 and 97 keys in addition to the normal 88.  Music has been written for these beautiful instruments, but why stop there? 

 

Press a key on the piano and a hammer strikes one or more strings which begin to vibrate producing a sound.  The frequency of the vibration depends on the length of the string with longer strings vibrating at lower frequencies.¹  The left most key causes the longest string to oscillate 27 times per second - 27 Hertz (Hz) - while the right most key produces a 4,186 Hz frequency.  In between the keys are divided into 7 octaves, each composed of 12 keys.  Each octave doubles the frequency so the C above middle C has a frequency twice as high. The notes are evenly divided so each key has a frequency 2^1/12 times - just under six percent higher than the preceding key. 

 

Now we're ready.

 

Let's say you wanted a piano with the range of human hearing - usually given as 20 to 20,000 Hz in young children.   Going from 4,186 to 20,000 Hz, after a bit of arithmetic, requires 27 extra keys on the right.  Five keys on the left will get you to 20 Hz..   One hundred and twenty keys and some long arms would be sufficient to entertain young children to the limit of their range.

 

But what about dogs?  Canine hearing goes up to about 40,000 Hz.   All  we need to do is add an octave, or 12 keys, to cover their range.   Other mammals can hear even higher pitches.  Bats top out around 160,000 Hz so we add two more octaves giving us a 156 key instrument.  We don't have to go much higher as the atmosphere strongly attenuates higher frequencies. A bat can produce a very loud noise, but even their sensitive ears are only good for a 20 meter range.²

 

We've left out elephants which go down to about 12 Hz - that works out to 9 keys on the left. We've grown the beastmaster piano to 165 keys.   I won't cover whales because pianos don't work underwater. 

 

The game can go on.  There are any number of natural sounds of lower frequency (infrasound), but we'll leave it at that..  

 

Well - almost.  There are very faint sounds in the universe - ripples that move compress and expand space-time itself.  They come across a wide range of frequencies, but exquisitely sensitive instrumentation is required for some of the loudest - like colliding black holes where the energy that goes into the resulting gravity wave can be the equivalent of several solar masses.   It turns out the frequency of the first one detected was a chirp that went from about 35 Hz up to about 250 Hz (close to middle C).  You can play the signal as audio.

So much information there, but it may not be pleasing so let's end with one of the most demanding pieces for the human voice - in this case a coloratura soprano.  The Queen of the Night in Mozart’s  Die Zauberflöte. 

I'll leave you to find some good piano music today.  Perhaps Om's list is a place to start. 

_________

¹ It also depends on the mass of the string, its diameter and tension.  Additionally a rich set of other frequencies are produced giving the louder central frequency richness and character.  There's a good deal of art in the design and construction of a fine piano and none of the sound the same. 

² It's a feature.  Longer range would confuse them with signals from other bats, plus they tend to work a few meters from their prey.

 

the cost of knowledge is a great deal of ignorance

a mini-post

First a caveat - I have almost no background in the social sciences.

This week a few people have written about information overload. It’s certainly been with us since the beginning of the 16th century in the Western world and one can make arguments that extend further back. The rate of new knowledge, as opposed to raw information, has increased in many fields, doubling or more every decade and causing many fields to fission into new subfields. It’s a major cause of the imposter syndrome I feel when I’m trying to hack through a paper in low temperature physics for example … sixty years ago there wasn’t a problem thinking about both.

We deal with the information increase by specializing and creating what are often rich traditions. I’ve been able to carry on rich conversations with people where I have no Mandarin and the other person had almost no English by jotting abstractions and drawings of our shared tradition on a blackboard (slate blackboards are another tradition in my field) .

But these traditions blind us to the greater knowledge around us. .. It reminds me of the early experiment where you train a dog to respond to a bell. When you measure the brainwave of the dog you get a clear signal when the bell is rung. Now put a piece of juicy meat before the dog and ring the bell. The bell signal is nowhere to be found - it’s been overridden by the sight and/or the smell of the meat.

It’s funny - we don’t make progress without tradition, but it can also blind us to the greater world.. My belief is it’s important to communicate across the boundaries of the many traditions. I think this is an area where the arts are very powerful. We’re resorting to mechanisms we don’t have a real grasp on.. machine learning comes to mind.. to deal with some of this. There are many views on the subject, but I’m guessing it isn’t as useful as many suggest.

Finally there's an issue in traditions where knowledge doesn’t increase rapidly. How to be kind, how to be a good person, love, peace. Areas where people a long time ago had figured things out within the context of their tradition and arguably we haven’t made progress..

anyway .. just random thoughts on a rainy Spring evening. There are so many issues here that are interesting to think about.

Enjoy the Spring and listen to some music and enjoy some art. And some of you are creatives so create rather than sit back!

______

A note on ignorance .. that's a complex subject in it's own right, but the title seems to fit.

 

building blocks

Watching Apple's Mac Studio announcement yesterday took my mind to something Carl Sagan said in the Cosmos series.

The Mac Studio's underlying technology goes far beyond the many tens of thousands of person-hours Apple has invested.  The semiconductor industry that stands on the shoulders of Bell Laboratories back to the fundamental work of James Clerk Maxwell and before.  Apple and others are able to come up with advances that strike us as dramatic as they make an impact on our lives.  The impact of some innovations like the electric light, the telephone, the automobile, powered flight, radio, the atomic bomb and the Internet have changed how we see ourselves.   But take a look and they're all built on long chains of invention and innovation that are often forgotten.

 

This comes to mind with the horrors going on in Ukraine.  Russia has always had brilliant minds.  They've made stunning advances in physics and math, but they haven't been as successful as the West in building on that.  A good deal of their technology is derivative.  In the past 25 years this may be by design. Most of the export value comes from extraction - oil and other natural resources. These industries seem to fall under the direct control of Putin's friends.  More technical industries are still under oligarchs, but these aren't super high profit.  As long as the core players can control them, the real focus of the economy is what can be run by shear force and power rather than technology and sound business practices.  (note - this is speculation as I'm certainly not a Russian expert..  so take it with a grain of salt).  

 

High tech industry is required for the military and some consumer use.  Although that is supposed to be home-brew there is a lot of importing and rebranding. I've seen that in electronics used in physics experiments and am told is standard operating procedure.

 

So imagine you can't important and rebrand the CNC tools necessary to make jet engines.  Can you make the tools yourself. What if you can't even make precision bearings?  What if China doesn't allow electronics into the country (they probably will, but now they can be the Mafia dons)?  Sanctions can make a medium and longterm impact.  

 

You don't need to make your Apple pies from scratch - we have our universe - but few companies or countries have the capability to build objects of the modern world without technologies that exist outside.  All of these long threads few of us think about until they aren't available.  Think about all of those high value products waiting for fifty cent ICs that were designed twenty years ago...

__________

PS - I'd love a Mac Studio, but it's way beyond my budget. 

 

 

after a fall

a quick minipost

 

Or after THE fall..  

 

The Olympics can brings years of effort into very sharp focus for some of the best athletes in the world.  A decade or more of hard work and sacrifice can fall one way or another in under a second.  By any rational measure they're all amazing to get as far as they have.   And of course the athletes don't buy that - at least not initially.

 

A few people have recommended a new book on regret.  I haven't read it, but getting the recommendations while the Olympics are underway seems natural.  I don't consider the phrase no regrets to be useful.  Regret can be a powerful motivator, teacher and catalyst for self-reflection.

 

Every successful group and organization I've been around holds postmortems for projects independent of outcome.  In large particle physics experiments it's common to hold internal and external postmortems.  These are particularly important where the culture and institutional memory are long term goals.  External postmortems are held for other experts - often competitors - and are important for ferreting out and fixing issues that hadn't been considered. (Feynman frequently said ~ The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool...)  Of course there are regrets and people can feel a bit stupid, but you learn and grow.

 

At a personal level regret can be a highly motivating teacher.   With enough reflection you become much better at making decisions and you get better at what you're doing.    And sometimes life's big decisions come into clearer focus.  Are you really doing what you like?  Are you doing what you should be doing? Should you change your goals or invent completely new ones?   A life with a singular focus can lead you down a path that you realize all too late was the wrong one.  The self reflection of regret seems like a mechanism to make midcourse corrections, learning and growing as you travel.

 

I've had wonderful failures and mostly useful regrets.  To some I may seem like a failure, to others a success, but to myself I'm lucky enough to still be learning - plus -  all of my fingers and eyelashes are still intact.

 

meshes and trees

A few weeks ago an unexpected email arrived from Germany.  A physics postdoc and had come across an ancient transition radiation detector in storage at CERN a few months before.  It seemed like it could be useful in an experiment her group was thinking about. She had a few questions and it turned out I was the best person to talk to.

 

Many people think science is done with sparkling new state-of-the-art kit.  A few pieces perhaps, but very old equipment is updated, repaired and repurposed where it might be useful.  An experiment I was part of in the early 80s required a very large magnet.  The best bet was one that had been a cyclotron at Berkeley fifty years earlier.  It worked well,  but we had to tap into institutional knowledge that had migrated out of physics entirely.  That knowledge combined with technology that hadn't been invented at the time gave us something fantastic.  

 

I have no idea how my old detector made its way from Brookhaven National Laboratories to CERN.  The documentation and lab books were packed with it, but they made assumptions that the people who built it would be involved.   That meant me.  I asked for photos of some of the lab book pages and then it came back.  I listened to her ideas, offered some suggestions and wished we had her experience back then..  Of course that experience came years later.

 

These interactions spanning several decades may not be common, but twenty year interactions of hardware, software and people.  It's all a mesh.  Old apparatus islands that have been repurposed and grafted onto new apparatus.  It's an organic process that's difficult to map out and impossible to predict.   Diagrams it would look like flocks of meshes that are grafted together with a lot of institutional knowledge.  No one has a complete picture and local expertise is critical.  A team sport spanning decades.  It isn't easy, but it works.

 

Last week I came across something by Frank Oppenheimer in the 30s:

 

 

 

It's one of the better commentaries I've seen on how science progresses.  The same is probably true for many other fields.  I suspect it's true for any infrastructure involved in messy and complex endeavors where creativity and insight come into play.  

 

I've been fascinated watching the techno-solutionist approach to cities - the so-called smart city.  These are often based on a "start with internet and build up" model.  They try to measure everything and automate control.  Sensors embedded everywhere and tree-like computational structures making decisions to smooth out - well - everything.  A fundamental problem is we don't know what is being measured and what the biases - social and technical - are.   A simple truth I've learned from my exposure to sports science is you have to know exactly what's being measured and exactly where it is useful. (duh!)   Often current measurements and/or models just don't work.  Something complex like a city is that on steroids with the tree-like information structures introducing a certain rigidity.

 

There are a few types of people who thrive in the messy environment of a city.  Impedance matchers - those who can connect and explain across disciplines, and synthesizers come to mind.  (many others too - artists for example)  They respond to intellectual and system friction and help spark creativity. They're ground zero essentials for  creativity and invention.  I have doubts that the techno-solutionist cities can be terribly creative in the long run.

a song by Malvina Reynolds comes to mind

 

diverted imagineering

Sometimes when it was really dark - those clear moonless night where the Milky Way stood out - Brian and I would load the binoculars and telescope into my parent's station wagon and either go East on Highwood Road or North on the Bootlegger Trail past Benton Lake to get away from the town lights.  It could be impressively dark.  The kind of dark where the ground disappeared.  We covered a low powered flashlight with red plastic.  Dim red light didn't damage your night vision as much as white light did.   But you could do a lot better.

 

When you're in a very dark place try using your rod-based vision.   Give your eyes at least ten minutes to begin to adapt - twenty minutes will be even better.  You won't see any colors, but your eyes will be somewhere between one thousand and ten thousands times more sensitive to light.  You can navigate with just the light from the Milky Way. 

 

A friend read something about the art of defamiliarizing yourself to gain a new perspective.  Artists might concentrate on the empty space between objects.  A few years ago Frans Blok played with geography by inverting elevations on a map of the Earth.  Everest became the deepest trench in an ocean and the Marianas Trench became the highest peak.  He tweaked place names and came up with something that makes you think. 

 

People noted for artistic creativity often do it.  Just change something to see what you're working on from a different perspective. Haruki Murakami wrote rough drafts in English and then translated back into his native Japanese. Margaret Atwood likes to change an opening sentence or paragraph to hunt for new perspectives.  She uses the example of a change to Little Red Riding Hood where the first sentence becomes: "It was dark inside the wolf." Some writers pin segments of what they're working on to a wall and ponder how the flow changes if you move them around.  Some film people use storyboarding in the same way.   Artists play with negative space - the space between the physical subjects in their paintings and sculptures.   A cute trick some musicians use is to invert music. There are even pianos where the keys are arranged backwards for this kind of play.  

 

Awhile back I taught an intro physics course to non-STEM majors. Hoping to make it a bit more interesting I found examples in sports.  I think all of us learned something.  At one point we were playing with the idea of what a sport would be like on a different world.  Different atmosphere and different gravity  and more unusual possibilities like cartoon physics.  We found many of our assumptions broke. We came to a more fundamental question - what makes a sport interesting on Earth.   Then how could you modify existing sports or invent new ones.  Why current rules of sports are what they are?  How deeply are they based in physics?  It even led to a guest lecture by a neurologist who seemed delighted by the play. 

 

Trying to explain a central concept to someone with your background is both difficult and useful.  Wired had a fascinating series of videos on the theme.   My thesis advisor required his students to explain their work in a period to high school students.  One of the most difficult things I've tried and it completely changed my thinking about teaching. 

 

 

If you're stuck on a particular problem sometimes it's useful to try something else - perhaps something very different.   Problem solving by singing in the shower, running, or doing something else physical is real for some people.  

 

I usually find it's best to change one thing and think about what happens as a result.   find it incredibly useful to talk with folks who do very different things - musicians, writers, filmmakers, artists, business people, athletes and so on.  Sometimes you get involved in a project that leads to a bit of insight that may seem completely unrelated.  Last year I found some thinking on the aerodynamics of spinning volleyballs led to thinking about something curious about neutron stars.   Through that interaction I learned a bit about the "chess" of a sport with just two players on a side and that led to some questions for a neurologist.   

 

Finally it's a fundamental part of humor..  So why not end with a bad joke?

 

A priest, a rabbit and a minister walk into a bar. The priest and minister both order a beer, but the rabbit looks confused.  The bartender asks the rabbit "what'll ya have? "The rabbit says "I dunno. I'm only here because of autocorrect."

 

 

hints on how our brains adapt to deal with new concepts

Humans have seen an amazing progression of ideas from basic survival skills to getting a handle on how the universe began and might end and a great richness in between.  We do this with a brain that hasn't changed much in the past fifty thousand years.  How do we do it?

 

Here's a quick summary of some work at Carnegie Mellon University that used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging as a probe to see how physicists organized conceptual properties.  fMRI is a rather blunt tool, but it was able to show how the brain organized the measurable and immeasurable.

 

Another striking finding was the large degree of commonality across physicists in how their brains represented the concepts. Even though the physicists were trained in different universities, languages and cultures, there was a similarity in brain representations. This commonality in conceptual representations arises because the brain system that automatically comes into play for processing a given type of information is the one that is inherently best suited to that processing. As an analogy, consider that the parts of one's body that come into play to perform a given task are the best suited ones: to catch a tennis ball, a closing hand automatically comes into play, rather than a pair or knees or a mouth or an armpit. Similarly, when physicists are processing information about oscillation, the brain system that comes into play is the one that would normally process rhythmic events, such as dance movements or ripples in a pond. And that is the source of the commonality across people. It is the same brain regions in everyone that are recruited to process a given concept.

 

There are a much broader range of deep concepts in physics that may well have separate organizations, but the technique here is very coarse.  They undoubtedly exist in many other occupations and one has to wonder how the mind of someone with a wide range of interests can dance around and play with different structures.  

 

Creative organizations need have internal access to a range of thinking modes and backgrounds. Like many others I have imposter syndrome when I'm listening to someone with deep experience in a different area.  Their mind has a great fluidity that you don't have became you lack the background and neural organization.  Breaking through this requires communicating at the appropriate level.  It's difficult if you don't know the other people.  One usually thinks of conventional academic subjects, but it's probably more general.  I find it amazing that some soccer or beach volleyball players create a mental map of the position, velocity, and acceleration of the other players including those they can't see and can bounce this off other information and communicate it to their teammate(s).  But great players run into the same problem as academic experts.  Finding the right level is difficult.  Great players rarely make great coaches.

 

Some organizations have worked out how to do this, but others tend towards narrow depth. If they appear to cover a broad range from the outside, inside they often are an array of poorly networked silos of local expertise.   Fortunately there seems to be a growing resistance to siloing.   And that brings me to a special kind of person.

 

Every now and again you come across a human impedance matches.  An impedance match is a bit of circuitry that allows as much of the signal as possible to go from sender to receiver (an over-simplification, but ...)  These people can sit between people with very different backgrounds or thought processes, often more than two, and make sure the signal gets through.    It astonishes me to see these people in action.  

 

breadth and depth

His parents were Danish, hers Swedish.  By some measures it was a mixed marriage with any number of small cultural differences. He noted and took delight in these small differences and ambiguities.  Rather than hunting, fishing or bowling he'd hike in the Summer and take long walks the rest of the year.   He liked to walk by himself and I suspect thinking about the stories he'd tell to friends and family about once a week.  He said storytelling was in his family and he had a great voice for it.      We'd sit in his yard and listen.   Some were short, some took a half hour.  They were imaginative with emotional moments coming in unsuspecting places.  They weren't the polished work of a writer, but left you wondering how he made those connections.  Only years later did I learn what an amazingly varied background he had and continually sought out.

 

My sister is a visual storyteller.  It took her half a lifetime to come to a place where she realized a single frame made of many images could be a short story that left you with questions and an open invitation to wonder.  She's extremely creative. The stories come to her quickly, but require a week or two to realize.  I suspect my Dad was a big influence.  He believed the best answers were incomplete and led to deeper questions.  He believed breadth was required to see simple answers weren't simple.  Corinne went for breadth, unfortunately I started down a path that was deeper than broad. 

 

A trigger for this post was a recent newsletter from David Epstein (The Sports Gene, Range).  He begins by talking about Emma Raducanu at the US Open:

Earlier this month, 18-year-old British tennis player Emma Raducanu won her first Grand Slam title. It was a shock; she entered the tournament with 400-to-1 odds. One of my favorite sportswriters, the Guardian’s Sean Ingle, asked Raducanu’s former coach about the factors that helped her talent blossom. Here’s what the coach said:

“From my perspective one of the best things with Emma is that she was exposed to a lot of sports from a young age, and didn’t go too specific into tennis straight away. I see that on court. When she’s learning a new skill, or trying something a little bit different, she has the ability and coordination to pick things up very quickly, even if it’s quite a big technical change.”

Raducanu added this:

“I was initially in ballet, then my dad hijacked me from ballet and threw me into every sport you could imagine. I was doing horse riding, swimming, tap dancing, basketball, skiing, golf and, from the age of five to eight, I was go-karting…From the age of nine I started motocross in a forest somewhere for a year. This was all alongside tennis.”

 

Although there are a few athletic geniuses like Tiger Woods who focus early, most elite athletes follow a very different path building a broad set of varied skills before specializing.   Epstein goes into depth in both of his books.  Outside of athletics, the generalists he focuses on in Range have richly diverse backgrounds. Something very different that the experience many have in trade school and college programs.  These people have built the tools they need to think creatively.  They're often better than narrow experts when confronted with a novel challenge.

 

 I'm sometimes asked to speak on the importance of STEM education at a local school and am doing it again.  I tell them STEM ok, but overemphasized in K12.  I think a broader liberal arts education leads to flexibility and creativity later on in life.  Unfortunately that isn't reflected in many (most?) hiring practices.  The lack of intellectual flexibility and diversity has lead to serous problems in some companies (tech in particular).   One can always add breadth later, but that can be inefficient once you're out of school.

 

I don't mean to disrespect STEM subjects.  Assuming the curriculum allows, they can be made relevant and exciting to those who won't use them in their work.   They add to breadth and can be a starting point for depth.   There are wonderful math and science books and teaching approaches that unlock wonder without getting bogged down in minutia.  Enough information and wonder that perhaps students will become citizens who can make informed choices.

 

Over the decades I've slowly broadened muself by talking to people and getting involved with their ideas and projects.  Many of you have your own diverse lists.  My short and incomplete list includes human powered airplanes, done strange things with sound, learned a little about animated film making, been around story tellers, learned a bit of anthropology and sociology, done art history research, learned about fashion and how clothes are made, learned a bit about diabetes, been involved in sandbending, the mental side of elite sport, and even know a bit about the fluid dynamics of balls used in sports.  Many of my guides and friends see this blog and I need to say thank you!   It amazes me how some of this triggers a thought in something I'm working on later.  You find yourself becoming more creative with age.  Who would have thought that the math for thinking about boundary layer separation on an almost non-spinning beach volleyball would help thinking about neutron star atmospheres.  Or the linkage between animation and fabric design, or...  the list goes on and on...   

 

Depth is great, but you need breadth to be creative.

 

 

objects and friction

Randall Munroe's xkcd is a necessary visit for anyone doing science, math, or engineering.   Artistically simple, he often sums things up with an almost poetic simplicity. Some have suggested topic ideas - he's taken two of mine and created beautifully distilled views of the underlying concepts that make me envious of his talent.  And he does it about three times a week.   Every now and again he creates something that resonates across a community.    It happened again last week:

 

 

Anyone who reads a lot of scientific papers recognizes this. Dozens of variations emerged overnight.  Some were very specialized - at least three relevant to astrophysics alone and I only know that because I know the community.    Here's one Abeba Birhane posted.¹

 

 

Serious truth!  A good deal of the community is this clueless.

It made me think of friction and objects.

 

One of the most remarkable features of physics is its simplicity.  While it may be non-intuitive and sometimes requires a bit of tricky math, you can remove complexity and discover underlying bedrock.  Once you understand the simple basics you can restore the complicating bits a piece at a time and describe a vast set of physical processes.  The fact that you can deconstruct and reconstruct so effortlessly is unique among the sciences.  It's why a physicist will tell you physics is the simplest science.  

 

Beyond physics complexity and emergent properties become important.  It turns out that asking "what is life?" is one of the most difficult questions. Working backwards from biology to biochemistry to chemistry to physics breaks down along the way.

But back to simplicity 

Students learning about motion and collisions start with a statement like "assume a frictionless surface."  Concepts become clear and it's easy to describe interactions where everything is understood.  Two blocks colliding elastically for example.  Later on you can restore friction.  Mechanical engineers, working in the real world,  are forced to deal with it.  In some of their systems - say a chain and gear bicycle transmission - it's possible to have efficiencies that exceed 99%.  Frictionless is the ideal here.  On the other hand you don't want frictionless tires or brakes - you'd never start and, if somehow put in motion, you couldn't stop.  The bicycle and road system is complicated enough that friction is good in places.  Fortunately good engineers know how to deal with such things.

 

The concept of "frictionless" has extended to interactions between computational objects and people.  In fact people are often treated as objects that contain a long series of properties.  Constructions like these lack the meaningful emergence that social creatures have. Serendipity and insight are often the result of social "frictions" in our interactions with other people.   We can have simple low friction interactions.  Sometimes they're great as we're not looking for much, but they're generally shallow.  A worry is large scale machine learning can create a faux sense that interactions with machines are deeper than they really are.  And many of these interactions are with other parties who make decisions about and for us. 

 

A few who build large scale social platforms have deep backgrounds in the social sciences and the humanities and think deeply about underlying social issues, but much of it is done without much clue by coders who build things quickly and then iterate to make them better - often more frictionless.  

 

Separately I had two wonderful reports from people at a very creative company.  Fully vaccinated people are back at the office with some precaution and maskless outside.  One reported she's had more insight and exciting ideas in the last week than in the last six months - largely through random talks with coworkers where they could "read" each other.  I hope all of you find the light at the end of the tunnel soon.

__________

¹ She's a cognitive scientist from Ethiopia who specializes in critical race theory - a rather important intersection these days.

 

 

 

the education question

Last week I sent a note to regular readers:

 

Perhaps it’s a sense that things are possible post-pandemic, but I’ve been asked for comments on the future of education three times since the beginning of the year. While I have some unscientific and undoubtedly biased thoughts I’m happy to share it occurs to me this group is exceptionally diverse.

So the request: Could you write a bit about what you’d like to see in education going forward? The subject is huge and readers represent at least seven countries so just pick a few and stay away from clear needs in some countries - like affordable and equitable education. Those are incredibly important, but perhaps some thoughts on curriculum, teaching, etc.. I’ll collect and post them with my comments in a week - say a cutoff on the 24^th of April. Let me know if you want your name attached or not. And don’t worry about it if you don’t have time.

 

Here are the responses in order of arrival:

 

I could write too much on this but one thing I think should be focused on is an increase and improvement of vocational education including changing the name and giving it an equal or near equal standing with so called academic education. With the rapid changes in technology there are numerous supporting jobs required and they must be trained for. I would also like to change the word Engineering to Applied science and technology which might attract more women and others who have a fear or not so great feeling about "Engineering" .......................you asked for it there are many other things like required mentoring in High school, more use of the case method in all education fields...... good question

Ed Hajim

__________

Thanks for the request, Steve!

I think fixing the existing bureaucracy of schooling is a fool's errand, so I'm more interested in creating a scaffolding that helps anyone learn, at any time, with others not gated by their common age, etc. We've created many kinds of artificial scarcity where abundance exists.

With that in mind, if you have the time, I'd route you to my TEDx talk, then the Vegas talk I did right after, which dovetails into the first one, then my Brain on the Hidden Curriculum of Schooling and Great Design Questions Unschooling Raises.

Happy to talk about any of the above at any moment :)

Jerry Michalski

_________

 

As a grandparent who has primary care of two elementary school aged children, I have observed, obsessed and have a lot to comment on public education in my city, Seattle.

Our system is at once both profoundly broken and resilient.

Broken? A system that refused to use a complexity lens to plan and be able to respond to changing contexts. (And appears to have NOT been planning all along, but I don't know if that is true. They appear to operate with a fixed mindset. A mechanical mindset.When the governor set a deadline to return to school, the resulting design reflected a reaction versus a design ready for complex contexts. (The lowest common denominator?)

Resilient? The teachers and learning specialists who spend every ounce of their beings supporting their students (this is not ALL teachers, but we have been blessed with ones who have been AMAZING and have saved our collective sanity. Thank you Nadia, Michelle, Kendra, Stephanie, and many more...)

Broken is a system where children of color don't want to come back into the classroom for all the racism they endured before and during the pandemic. How is it we are shocked to hear this?

Resilient? The advocates for children with special needs, for communities of color, LBGTQ, and for families sapped by Covid-related financial and emotional losses. The people who have wrapped families as best they could with food, services, support and compassion.

The resilient people are resilient. Well supported families adapted in the pandemic with home based learning, bought the additional services their children needed/wanted, and when and where they had to, made sacrifices around their own work and parenting roles. Barely skipping a beat they continued their quest to get their kids "into a good college." Yup, the system they want is one that provides the path to a good college. They make the system work for their families or they go to private school. It is a sort of bootstrap mindset for white upper-middle and upper class families. "You can make it work if you do the work!" And they donate to the PTA so they are also addressing all the ills of the system. Yeah, right. But have we leveraged white privilege to redeem the school district? I don't think so. And lump me in there as often I crumble at the depth of need and the brokenness of the system.

Broken is a system so weirdly funded that when pressed to bring back students into the classroom, the caveat is "and sorry, transportation only for those federally mandated." (Note: this example is one of cascading impact. Bus drivers laid off, weird funding approaches and what might be perceived different motivations to remove choice options from the system by denying transportation.) A system that responds to loud, privileged parents who want their kids out of the house now. How is that an option for working families and single parents, particularly those with children in multiple schools? (Broken, in that the district has poor understanding and management of their own budget and yet resist audits and insights, preferring to spend money on PR to make things look good.)

Resilient? Parents who try and set up, moderate and endure Facebook support groups (that are often hijacked) that try and serve as a critical connection points (neighborhood car pools, walking busses?) even if the data shared is often wrong. (What happened to data???)

Broken is a state leadership that says schools MUST OPEN for the mental health of students, and yet the state nor the district provides funding for additional physical or mental health services (or has to cut them due to budget shortfalls), offers no support to families struggling with the mental health needs of their children beyond a link to a help line (not the school district's), and diminishes students who must stay or choose to stay remote by hyping those who are returning to the classrooms.

Our systems are designed based on outdated, broken financing models, labor/management relationships that have deteriorated over time into spaces of zero trust and constant battles, and the instantiation of our profound, national racism.

There is no better time to reinvent, not just tinker. To do that, however, we have to re-prioritize socially and financially the role of public education for all. We can't have schools funded on real-estate taxes which continue to thread red lines through our communities. And those of us with means CANNOT WALK AWAY.

Nancy White

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I think the focus on making students a product for companies is wrong.  The skills someone might need in 10 or 15 years may be very different.  I'd like to see school focus learning how to learn rather than memorizing facts that may not be facts.  At least some of it needs to be fun and play is overlooked.  Play's where you find your passion.  For people not going to college I like apprentice systems like the German and Danish systems.   

In Alberta we had streaming. Kids were assigned to groups by what they thought was ability.    They must have thought it would be easier to put me in the slowest group because I'm deaf.   We were the kids who were constantly reminded we'd never amount to anything.   On top of that  kids and even some of the staff bullied me because I look unusual.  My parents didn't know enough to advocate for me.  Some children fall through the floor.  I'd like to see that fixed.  

Oh - I want people like Steve to teach math and science:-)

Jheri

 

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I've written quite a bit on what I think is important assuming the issues Nancy points out can be addressed, so I'll spare you.  Get in touch if you'd ever like to talk about it. But one thing..

 

The first time I was in my grad school mentor's office I noticed something on the top left of his blackboard

Knowledge is acquired and never bestowed

It was always there.