What the H - E - Double-Hockey-Sticks Do I Know?

 The post that inspired this blog, when a friend asked me to put some of my "better" FB posts together on a blog where she could find them more easily. Originally posted to Facebook on Thursday, January 7, 2021: I recall Malcolm Gladwell hypothesizing about how differences in climate and which crop is being cultivated could give rise to different cultural attitudes about the relationship between effort and outcomes. As examples he talked about how when you are primarily growing rice in a relatively temperate climate, more effort pretty reliably results in a higher yield, while if growing wheat in a region with extreme and unpredictable weather, your agricultural success depends in large part on circumstances beyond your control. He went on to compare this to different prevailing attitudes about the importance of effort versus fate in outcomes in, for example, many East Asian cultures on the one hand and Russian culture on the other. I bring this up now because I've seen...

 Originally posted to Facebook Friday, June 8, 2021 This morning our faculty had a meeting and some students were invited to share about what has gone well and what needs improvement after the last semester of distance learning. There was so much they shared that was so helpful. Here's one highlight that really stood out to me: One student commented that the overall situation with COVID "hasn't gotten any better." I realized that often I will be frustrated with students, thinking "Come on, it's been so many months of distance learning and you still haven't got it together!?!?" This comment helped me to recognize that, just as much for the students as it has been for me, everything that was hard at the beginning is still hard, and only harder because it's been going on for so long. The extra effort it takes to engage forced all of us to dip into any reserves we had, and those reserves are long since depleted, and we are all working on a deficit e...

 Originally posted to Facebook January 8th, 2021. I think that political opposition is a vital and necessary part of a healthy democracy. Even when the party one favors is in power, a robust opposition is an important component of curbing excesses and giving voters a chance to express a loss of faith or desire for different priorities. And so I will voice my disagreement with policies and principles with which I disagree, and at my best give rational explanations as to why I believe those policies and principles to be either immoral, anti-productive, or impractical, but I will do my best to refrain from calling someone holding different political views immoral or un-American. Having said all of that, here are some values, practices, and principles that I think everyone of every political stripe should be reasonably held to, and I believe that there are people of every political stripe who are doing well and also many who are doing very poorly, and we all need to especially hold t...