Don't Plan It, Janet

So Henry was in town and stayed the night chez M. (my usual weekend hostess and raison d'etre). I was about to open up my new MacBook to jack in to our new WiFi cloud and show him some of my recent online outpourings as I said, "You'll notice these stickers" (mostly black-and-whites that showed up randomly at the P.O. in my zining days) "are facing me as I get ready to open this up; the apple icon here is actually upside down and is obviously there for other people to look at. But whose computer is it anyway? If they give you ruled paper, write the other way."

Ray Bradbury made this aphorism famous when he used as an epigraph to Farenheit 451; you can look up its actual author on Google like I did and immediately forget it like I did if it suits your fancy. Sure is a great saying, though; there's no telling how often I've quoted it over the years (I read F451 in the 70's).

Right in here lately, I've decided to put it into some filler-between-calculations portion of a lecture, along these lines.

"I can't tell you the best way to study this stuff; nobody can. A lot of people, typically after a lot of trial-and-error of their own, when they finally find something that works, they think they've found the one best way and then push like crazy to get everybody to do things that one way. Even teachers do this. And, for better or worse, they can even do it very effectively in the sense that their students learn a lot... which certainly ought to be at least one very important criterion for success...

"But this is not the gospel I preach. I'm the last guy to try to tell anybody how to live—most people seem to consider my way of life pretty unappealing and mostly I can't blame 'em—but I oughta know something by now about reading and doing math problems. And if you go in thinking you already know about what you're supposed to be trying to find out, you might very well be setting yourself up to miss the best parts.

"If somebody were to say to me right in here, Vlorbik, sometimes it looks like you don't know how to teach this stuff, I'd agree with 'em and tell 'em it sure is fun finding out. But if they said it looked like I had no idea how to do it, why we'd just have to part ways on that issue since there never seems to be time to get in more than a small fraction of the ideas that come up... when we're actually interested in the problems...

"So try something! There's this awful tendency to feel as if you should have some better reason to set up a calculation than "to see what happens"... almost as if you needed permission to write in your own notebook! Or like you're going to find out some math you're not supposed to know yet. When fiddling around is one of the greatest study skills of all!

"A lot of people, when they say, learn from your mistakes, they mean, don't do it again. But I say, a lot more than most people think, mistakes are where you're gonna get a lot of your best ideas... it's like when I'm playing guitar..."

And the reason I decided it was high time to put somesuch remarks into my lectures was that I'd already decided it was high time I actually tried to live it. Last Spring I sobered up for a quarter at least in part because of needing to prep two unfamiliar new classes (math ed and calc iii); this was so exhilarating, I decided to make a real effort never to teach 102-3-4 again. Then I cashed in my retirement account and took the summer off. Played a bunch of guitar and wrote my first real song since the 80s. Stuff like that. Then sobered up again for this quarter and, along with blogging even more than I ever used to zine, got the new computer (and a Mac at that).

Hell, I even do some math problems from time to time. If I'm selling learning, I sure as heck oughta be learning something myself, and a lot of the time I feel like I did in my twenties (and, okay, thirties) as a college student and love it.

No guru, no method, no teacher. Funny, I just quoted Van (the Man) in the other new blog yesterday...