I've been carving a path, route, throughway, for tourists one could say, through some of the more challenging terrain in our syllabus. What to make of "non-literal science" and isn't that an oxymoron? Was alchemy ever at all a science? How about psychology? The psychologists seem the most like stage magic illusionists, in that they misdirect you in the lab setting.
My focus on irrigation, the management of channels, of water flow from top to bottom, took me along the fly-through in Critical Path, from Polynesia up through Southeast Asia and into the Himalayas, a flight with mnemonic value in that now you have seen some great river systems and thought about how humans feed themselves, not forgetting the fish in those rivers. They also power themselves, harnessing the river's momentum to force light to move, through circuits.
My narrative patter focused on "what was scary" in Critical Path without being scary.
There's the fact it's about money, but minus the crypto-currencies as it was published in the 1980s (St. Martin's Press). Yet much about money is cryptic in that its symbolic manifestations trace to the bull trading cultures of Phoenicia, a sea-based empire we don't learn that much about in school, which is taught mainly by landlubbers.
Then it's about "cold war stuff" as I put it, in the context of continuing to introduce JFK in several permutations. By this time we've identified Man X and played a game with Joe Rogan videos, regarding the Donald Sutherland character in Oliver Stone's movie JFK. I then point to a PBS documentary and mention the Cuban missile crisis. Mostly I talk about the inward and outward facing observer satellites and the data they've been giving us.
Finally, the irrigation discussion becomes more focused on electricity, but as we've seen, the two were unified from the beginning as water wheels became hydropower.
I'm leaving it to my more serious students to actually read Critical Path, now that I've warned them of its mythopoetic backdrop, an opera we could "make work" I suggest, but without taking it on.
Throughout, I'm remaining friendly to Oregonians who may have sampled the kool-aid and decided not to go with my "culty stuff" meaning the Concentric Hierarchy of Polyhedrons (Kepler-like) in Synergetics.
That's spreading in alien terrain perhaps, but I need to walk my talk when I invite teachers to customize. Maybe it's just the workflow, of web hosted videos, embedded in notebooks, on version control systems, on school servers, that they wish to copy.
