Broken Halos

By Bobby Neal Winters

Life is a classroom. If you keep your eyes open, you will learn.  Sometimes the process takes repeated applications. You go around in a circle and see the same thing over and over and each time you pick up something different.

For example, I’ve been listening to Don Mclean’s song American Pie literally for decades.  I think I probably heard it first when it was first out on the radio.  At first it was just the chorus.  It has a wonderful chorus.  You can sing along with it and have fun without understanding it, without knowing the slightest what the song is about.

Then you learn about Buddy Holly and the plane crash in which he, The Big Bopper (J.P. Richardson, jr.), and Richie Valens (Richard Valenzuela) died on February 3, 1959. You learn about the Rolling Stone’s songs “Jumping Jack Flash” and “Sympathy for the Devil.” You learn about the Beatles’ politics. You learn about Bob Dylan (the Jester)  and Janice Joplin (the girl who sang the blues).  

And I could go on, but you get the idea.  It’s a song about the history of rock music.

But there’s more. 

You come back to it, and there are multiple interpretations. That’s the magic of poetry: You look at it from one angle and it’s one thing; you turn it slightly to another angle, and it’s something different.  But if it’s true, it holds together as a whole.

I was listening to it yesterday, and heard the last line again, that I’d heard for thousands of times, but it was like I’d heard it for the first time:

And the three men I admire most/

The Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost/

They caught the last train for the coast/

The day the music died

The plain reading of the Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost refers to the Christian God, but within the context of the song, these are interpreted as Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper, and Ritchie Valens.  Them catching the “last train for the coast” is their death.

However, if you refer to the part of the song just before this you have

I went down to the sacred store/

Where I'd heard the music years before/

But the man there said the music wouldn't play/

And in the streets the children screamed/

The lovers cried, and the poets dreamed/

But not a word was spoken/

The church bells all were broken

If you go back in the history of music, there was a time when gospel was a big market.  People who sang country also sang gospel; people who sang folk, also sang gospel. People who sang country would also sing rockabilly; people who sang folk would also do the same.

But at some point, gospel music got pushed out of the mainstream market.

While “the Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost” was code for those killed in the plane crash that day in February, it can also be read plainly as a reference to what the philosophers and theologians refer to as the “Death of God.”

The Death of God is a phrase I’ve struggled with over the years.  It makes me mad.  

It was meant to.  It was meant to get attention.

Once you get past the anger, you can figure out that the “Death of God” is not about God, it’s about a change in society.  Nothing has happened to God, but society has pushed him away.

My two keys to understanding the change that has taken place have been from a miniseries taken from a book. The title of both was “The Pillars of the Earth.”  The second key was Ellis Peters

Cadfael books (also a miniseries), but the book “A Morbid Taste for Bones.”

These works give you an idea of a society in which the only way of knowing anything comes through the church and through holy scripture.

The thing to understand is that however pious you are, however much you believe in God, you don’t believe as much as they did.

While there has been a gradual change from that medieval state of mind due to the Enlightenment and the Protestant Reformation, it accelerated in the 20th Century and was going forward with the pedal all the way to the floor in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s.

Positive references to God and Jesus gradually disappear from popular culture.

You don’t have to take my word for it.  Get on Spotify, Amazon Music or whatever, and listen to the popular music of those decades.

But...

But they never entirely died out.  It was always there in Country Music.  Sometimes it was below the surface, but it was there.

I heard Chris Stapleton sing about “Broken Halos”; I heard Jellyroll sing about being a “Son of a Sinner.”

God is there. Humans are broken, but God is there.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

 You Gotta Have Rules

By Bobby Neal Winters

We like rules.  Regardless of what we may say otherwise, we like rules.  Some people like to follow them; some people like to beat other people over the head with them.  

Some people like to break them; they go to the boundary and they put their toe to it.

But that’s just it: Rules provide boundaries. They provide a lattice for growth.  They give us something to argue about, and you can’t overstate the importance of that. Sometimes the arguing over the rule, the discussion of the purpose of the rule is more important than the rule itself.

Rules in whatever form for a reason, and knowing that reason can be a guiding light.

I’ve been working in the Office of the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Pittsburg State University for the last 18 years. There will be students starting at Pittsburg State this fall who were just a gleam in their papa’s eye when I began that job. As I’ve thrown out my files--carefully shredding all the sensitive stuff--I’ve thought about the nature of the job I’ve been transiting out of.

One of my duties has been handling substitutions for general education.  It is something I never thought about much before taking the position.  It occurs to me that very few of you are aware of this aspect of education.  Please allow me to enlighten you.

Consider the following case study. Johnny has been following his dream of going to rodeo clown school down at Hay University in Bugtussle, Oklahoma. He fell in love with a girl who was pre-med at Pittsburg State which she chose because of our great record of preparing students for medical school.  Not wanting to be separated from his love, he put aside his dream and decided to follow her to Pittsburg State.

While he’d been at Hay U, he had taken a course in Advanced Fertilizer Management, where it was a part of their general education package.  He took it in good faith for that purpose, and in spite of its odd title, it is quite a rigorous course.  It is taught in the Life Sciences Department and connects with many environmental issues in a very robust way and is quite demanding.  When he transfers in: Does this course count for general education credit, and if so, in what category?

Of course, the specifics are all made up and are purposefully ridiculous--other than the great pre-med program--but I hope you get the idea. We have rules in place. Well-written, precise rules. But as hard as you work, as smart as you may be, situations will arise that cannot be foreseen. 

Now, as you might imagine, from time to time patterns emerge even from such random occurrences as this, and as the process of individually approving/denying substitutions is cumbersome, rules are made to aid in smoothing out that part of the process.  This is done with the full knowledge of everyone involved that you can’t think of everything, and someone will have to look at individual cases and approve or deny substitutions. We like to call it job security.

But you gotta have rules, right?

This last spring I led a Bible Study over the Book of Genesis at my church. I noticed a pattern that occurs not only in Genesis, but throughout the rest of the Bible and, indeed, from there into history. It starts in Eden when God gives the one rule about not eating from the Tree of Knowledge. It continues after the Flood when God gives some more rules out. 

The rules are about more than what you can eat and what you can do. There is a point when Jacob comes to a parting of the ways with his father-in-law Laban.  They make a big pile of rocks and make the rule that one will stay on one side of the pile and the other will stay on the other side, but Laban’s daughters--Jacob’s wives--can pass back and forth. It’s a rule about a peaceful parting of the ways.

These examples are the ones in Genesis. In Exodus, we see rule-making go big time when Moses passes along God’s rules while they are wandering in Sinai.

In the New Testament, there are new rules given out at the Council at Jerusalem in the Book of Acts.  There was discussion and a decision. This process continued through the history of the Church through a number of important church councils. By studying the process, we know not only what we believe, but why.

Rules such as these are often broken; they are sometimes set-aside; but they provide a framework on which the organization can organically grow. They are like a trellis for a rose bush.

They give it a shape.

One last thing about rules: They provide targets.

If God hadn’t told Adam and Eve not to eat the Fruit, they might never have eaten it.  If you don’t see that the speed limit is 80, you might drive 70 to be on the safe side instead of kicking it up to 85 because you want to go just a little faster.

But you gotta have rules.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

From Woodworking to Teaching: Transferring Skills and Embracing Mistakes

 From Woodworking to Teaching: Transferring Skills and Embracing Mistakes

By Bobby Neal Winters

As I’ve mentioned in this space before, I will be transitioning from administration to teaching starting in early June.  God put me on this Earth to be a teacher; a teacher is what I am meant to be.  I still have something to do in the classroom.

There are many different styles of teaching.  I like to teach students basic, solid truths on which they can plant their mental feet, as it were, and from there find other truths.  If they know the basics, and if they truly want to learn, they will eventually not need a teacher anymore.  

I won’t always be there with them.

(As I wrote that last sentence, I remember my father saying the exact same thing to me. It was as if he were right in front of me. He was right.)

As part of teaching, I keep learning myself, but not only the material I am going to teach in the classroom.  Those of you who have been following this space at all during the last couple of years know that I am learning the honorable practice of woodworking. This activity helps me in numerous ways.  Hammering on a mortice is therapeutic; hammering on tenured faculty is a felony. (It’s a joke. Never crossed my mind. Really.)

One of the principles I’ve picked up in woodworking that transfers nicely to the academic classroom is this: You are going to make mistakes, so set up your system to take this into account.

Before I go off into detail, let me mention the woodworker on YouTube from whom I’ve learned the most: Paul Sellers.  He’s a good model for a teacher.  He’s endlessly patient, realistic, and skilled.  He not only talks the talk; he walks the walk.

I like to hand cut dovetails, and I follow Paul Seller’s method.  He uses a chisel as opposed to a coping saw to cut out the bulk of the material.  The coping saw is--perhaps--faster, but it is also easier to make an unrecoverable mistake from.  With the chisel which is--perhaps--slower, one can order one’s work in such a way as to make your mistakes recoverable.

How does one recover from a woodworking mistake?  What would make a mistake unrecoverable?  Well, here’s the thing, if there is too much wood left, you can always take it off.  If you cut the wood too short, there is no putting it back.  If you cut it too short, you can patch it somehow, maybe.  But the wood is gone.

With a coping saw, it is very easy to cross from the part of the wood you are trying to get rid of into the part of the wood you want to keep.  When you use a chisel, you can make what’s called a knife wall to keep you from accidentally cutting into the wrong part of the wood. This cannot be done with a coping saw.

The basic technique of making a knife wall transfers into other areas of woodworking other than just cutting dovetails.  The idea of leaving the wood just a little bit long and “sneaking up on the cut” transfers as well.  I often find myself saying (outloud even) as I cut, “Cut what you are going to keep a little fat.”

As you gain in skill, the amount of room you leave for error can shrink, but I don’t think it will ever disappear. 

Not only does this transfer from one part of woodworking to another, it transfers to just about any other area.  We are imperfect creatures; we make mistakes.  Whenever possible, we need to think about what happens in the endgame when we make mistakes, when we are wrong.

As a teacher, the students learn from everything I do.  If I am late to class, they will learn to be late. If my class is disorganized they will learn from that.

In organizing my class, I can do so with the idea that I might make mistakes and in my design, make it possible to recover from those mistakes.  I can also take into account that the students will make mistakes and in my course design make it possible for them to recover. (The students who learn the most from you are the ones who make the most mistakes. Your A students are doing their learning on their own.)

My transition from administration begins soon.  As you think of me, think of me standing in front of a classroom with chalk dust on my fingers and sawdust in my hair.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

Metric Grief

By Bobby Neal Winters

If you talk to men of a certain age, you will run into a lot of strong opinions concerning the metric system.  To keep you from dying from suspense let me tell you now: They don’t like it.

Words get used. Certain words that at my house we call “magic words.”  They may be called that because they make women and children disappear.

For my part, I’ve tried to retain a neutral stance.  This is because I’ve taken quite a few science classes in my time and the metric system is there.  The metric system was designed by scientists for scientists.  The basic unit for length was originally defined in terms of the distance from the North Pole to the equator. (I guess they were thinking about Santa Claus taking a tropical vacation.) 

With scientific precision, they didn’t define units for weight. Instead they defined measures of mass, which is related to weight but does not depend on the strength of the gravitational field.

And everything is based on 10 to make the mathematical calculations easier. Everybody wants to make math easier, right?

These are all good things.

For years I’ve listened. For years I’ve wondered why all the emotion.  

One reason is that people just don’t like change.  And I agree here: Change is Bad.

There is another reason to intensify the first: The change has been slow.  There is wisdom that goes all the way back to Machiavelli at least.  He said that if you are doing something that the people like, do it slowly, but if they don’t like it do it fast.  Kind of like when Michael Corleone took care of family business. I’ve heard mom’s put it this way: You’ve got to pull off the band-aid.

But we’ve done the change-over slowly, and now we have two competing systems at work in the workshop: Metric and American. (And I use American instead of Imperial because while they are similar, they are different.)  When I go to deal with a nut, if it is metric, I will only have my American tool, and if it is American, I will only have my metric tool.  (And don’t tell me to have both open, because they are like USB plugs. Even if you are right the first time, you are wrong.)

This part of it causes the most noticeable grief.  It is what evokes the most magic words.

There is another, deeper problem that we slipped right past. It is taken as a given that basing everything on 10 makes the math easier.  While it does for scientists and engineers, it does not in the woodshop.

Here I will use my standing as a mathematician cum woodworker to state that base 10 is not the best number system to use in woodworking.  To begin with, we only use 10 as a base anyway because we have 10 fingers.  It’s only divisible by 2 and 5.  This means we can tell if a number in base 10 is divisible by 2 or 5 by just looking at the ones digit. By way of contrast, 12 is divisible by 2, 3, 4, and 6, which would make that task twice as easy.  

Not that I am advocating for change.  Change is bad.  Just think about the magic words that would be used during that changeover.  No, we will stick to base 10 in writing our numbers.

However, in woodworking, we often take half of something or a third of something.  This makes using a foot-ruler handy because you can take a half or a third of a foot quite easily.  More importantly, while metric rulers are calibrated in tenths, American rulers are calibrated in halves, quarters, eighths, and sixteens.  

There is nothing about the inch that demands that rulers be calibrated this way, but it’s the way it's done.  It’s the way we think about it.

One could take a metric ruler and mark it in centimeters, half-centimeters, quarter centimeters, and so forth.  (And we do mark five millimeters which is half a centimeter, but that is as fine as is gone in that direction.)  That isn’t done because the point of the metric system is to be in tens.

There is not as much metric grief in the woodshop as, say, the auto shop, because after a certain point measuring isn’t done with rulers. Instead of relying on rulers and numbers, we transfer measurements directly.

Eventually, all this will be behind us. After many magic words are uttered, metric will win.  This is inevitable.  But until then we will proceed and inch, a half-inch, or maybe even a sixteenth of an inch at a time.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.