Debate Culture

What high school is being like for me is I'm remapping my devices and learning to use Bluetooth more effectively. I've got the iPad clipped to the Elliptic and just need to add the USB C to have the latter power the former. I can watch my vids and listen to my tunes while working out, like when I had a gym membership (I joined Gold's when it moved into what is now a Trader Joe's property, and which later become a 24 Hour Fitness across the street -- that one is still in operation I'm pretty sure, and will soon enjoy greater population density given all the infill going on).

Of course deeper rewiring is going on. I don't see these blogs as a way of getting everything into words. I have no magic bullet nor panacea for curing the shortcomings of words. That words ultimately fall short may be taken as a given to appreciate versus some issue in need of solution. Who said words provided complete testing coverage or however we wanna say it?

The recent posts to Synergeo with PDFs attached have focused on our Silicon Forest curriculum, old hat for that listserv (publicly archived). We're going with "Casino Math" in part because of "Indian Gaming" and the role of tribal resources vs-a-vs regional development, which some Euros might call "de development" as the agenda may be a return to wetlands. Call it "anti pave over" (what Euros like to do). To "pave over" has a double meaning in English. To "pave over" is to "cover up" as in "deliberately overlook" or "purposely ignore" (willful blindness).

The new Winter Term has started at School of Tomorrow. We celebrated the end of Fall and the beginning of Winter at the Pauling House on the 19th (the nearest Friday on or before). Terry Bristol, Nirel... some joined us by Zoom if only fleetingly. We raised our glasses to Jon Bunce, who passed away days before. Nirel has been coordinating Jon's care and invited his caregiver team into our midst. As Bob explained to me later, at least of of that team was a musician, in a band called Voodoo Dollz. We pulled up one of their albums on Spotify.

The word many use in describing Jon is "elegant", as he had a very cultured background, as well as outlook. He was a musician, yet polymathic. He typified Wanderers well, and anchor-managed our coffee fund, showing early to make us coffee. I like to get our meetings out of the way then go to My Father's Place, an eatery on Grand. I used to hang out with the guy a lot when he lived near Westmoreland. Then he moved, and Wanderers stopped meeting weekly, and I didn't see him for like a decade. Then he showed up on my radar again, moving to a facility in the vicinity. The prognosis was positive, however he seemed ready to checkout, eased into a next chapter by angels (I'm remembering my use of "elven chyx" years ago).

Debate Culture is being worked out in the Rumble + YouTube environment from my angle. The casters are evolving best practices, while butting heads. The stakes seem high, with money on the table. Risks are involved. Casino Math. 

My own exposure to Debate Culture was through Cleveland High School, one of Portland's public schools. My daughter helped coach Gonzo form a new team, the Cleveland Cannibals, and as a parent, I got to attend meetups and be a judge, although not of events my daughter was in. 

Driver Education

:: don’t drink and drive ::

Readers here are likely familiar with my “high school every fifteen years” schtick. That’s not a fixed number, and in fifteen years what “high school” means can change a lot. In another sense I’m saying: you’ll have to return to mastering the basics periodically no matter what. But wouldn’t it be swell (nice) to have institutional support?

Let’s look at that vista quite literally. What do we lean in high school, a lot of us (not me, but I’m generalizing): how to drive. My daughter got support through her high school, which contracted out to professional driving teachers. I went to a parents-of-young-drivers presentation and learned how the basics of driving were nowadays taught differently. As a boomer, no one ever told me to keep the headlamps lit (they were gaslit in those days — JK) even in the daytime. Plus we spread the side view mirrors wider in the new paradigm. Trainees think about the car inside an invisible box and so on…

Now imagine investing all the billions we’ve put into driverless cars, robot-piloted, into driver re-education programs instead. These could be fun experiences. Maybe the focus is parallel parking. You’ve been driving for years but hate to attempt that maneuver. Or maybe, for you, it’s the stick shift you never mastered. I remember my earlier confusions with a stick shift (I got good at it, though not to a race car driver level obviously). Imagine a parallel universe in which adults went off to practice car-driving as routinely as they go off to practice golf swings or shooting bullets at live animals. I know, crazy right?

You could go to high school, as a fifty plus year old, to learn sailing a small sailing boat. I got to learn that in my teens at a Club Med. I learned a lot on that trip. Black Sea, Romania.

Clearly I’m blurring the meaning of “high school” quite intentionally. People picture desks in rows and columns with a teacher up front, like a preacher or something. My School of Tomorrow doesn’t operate like that usually. I’ve given talks in colleges and high schools, but where I talk most is on YouTube, which is par for the course. Today’s teachers use social media. Unless they’re stuck in a rut because they haven’t been back to basics in a while. Those are the folks poised to leap frog those actively publishing today.

Now that people live longer, what’s somewhat more evident are the intergenerational alliances that form when people two or more generations apart are getting updated on the latest. For the oldsters, it’s in part review, but it may seem rather alien how they teach it today. For the youngsters, it’s a first exposure, but they’re free to examine how the stuff used to be imparted. A first responsibility of pedagogues is to awaken a sense of what it takes to self educate and / or to educate others; pedagogy and / or andragogy become topics in their own right. 

Cyber Footprint

on X

Nuremberg (movie review)

The ball got rolling, for me to see this one, at Mercado Group, my name for our bevy of professional librarians, now retired, who (a) devour media (b) have opinions about what’s worthwhile and (c) are Russell Crowe fans. And Nuremberg was just opening in theaters they told me, Russell Crowe a star therein.

I’d been casting about for a next film, ready to break the streak of rented noirs, and putting off Wicked 2 in case I could coordinate with another movie buff. So the fact it was pouring rain was no deterrent. The HotSpot Trip Planner (same as TriMet’s) advised an FX2 would get me to Fox Tower with time to spare that very afternoon (earlier today).

Having gotten there early (to the theater lobby) and with no one else around, I started doing voice to text into my phone, as I’m wont to do. This time my words were bound for Lithuania, which my longer term readers may recognize as part of my far-flung network. That’s apropos as the Baltic states are where a lot of this particular war happened, and is happening still depending on how you look at it. Lots of German armor has been heading towards Russia again.

Yes, I’m finally getting to the movie, which I thought sturdy, robust, well-made. It had all the elements. We’ve already had decades of WW2 movies haven’t we? Part of the challenge is cutting through that blanket of make-believe atop reality. Documentary footage helped.

Believe it or not, I’ve become a tad forgetful and even though I well-know Gladiator and should easily recognize the Beautiful Mind guy, I actually wondered for far too long, which one was Russ. Obviously he’s the fat German. Most people know that going in.

How could I be that confused? Maybe I’ve been indulging in too much Oregon cannabis? At least I’m not into salvia, also legal, and thanks to Paul, I own a specimen which, being a tropical plant, may not make it through the winter even indoors. That one gets lots of negative trip reports.

Anyway, back to the movie, we were 98% to the end I’m pretty sure. Our psychiatrist was back on the train, after the verdicts were in. We had taken in some gallows action, when all of a sudden a movie theater employee broke into the 1940s to bring us back to the 2020s: we needed to leave the theater now, as Fox Tower was on fire. The five or six of us left in an orderly fashion (this was a matinee on a Monday and most people are at work).

I came outside to an eerily calm scene, with fire trucks and firefighters everywhere, in full battle gear, but no one was running or shouting or seemed very flustered. Had the fire been put out already? 

I scanned the building but didn’t see anything. This was no towering inferno spectacle. I decided my dog probably needed out, so I didn’t stick around long. I was on the FX2 heading home pretty quickly, snapping a few pictures as I exited the scene.

I haven’t read any reviews yet. I expect a lot of them will be positive. I thought the performances were all stellar. 

The topic is very serious: man’s inhumanity. As a species, we fall short of what we think humanity should be. Do we have any institutions that might address these shortcomings? A lot of hope gets put into being law abiding, but as this movie points out, there’s not been much law in this area of altercation between nations, let alone enforcement thereof. We witness a similar situation some hundred years later (counting WW1 and 2 as a single war with an interregnum).

Incyder Talk