In the Cool of the Morning II: The Year of the Cat

By Bobby Neal Winters

I was out again on the driveway this morning between 7 and 8.  Cup of coffee by my side and listening to my iPhone.  Al Stewart’s The Year of the Cat was this morning’s highlight. It was an interesting contrast to Take the Money and Run by the Steve Miller Band.   

I enjoy both songs, don’t get me wrong, but there is a difference in quality.  Take the Money and Run is fun and bouncy.  It doesn’t pause to make a decent rhyme; it doesn’t take the time to do much of anything.  It’s fun, but the best I can say about it is that it accomplishes a lot considering how little there is too it: “Ooh-ooh, take the money and run.”  That’s about it and it’s all on the surface.

I guess we all choose the level at which we will be snobs.  I’ve chosen mine quite low in music.  An ant will make distinctions that an elephant doesn’t while the elephant can see much more of the world on its own scale.

For my part, I like the songs that have a level beyond the surface that requires a key to see.  My favorite example of this is Hotel California.  

It is about cocaine.

That is the key.  There are multiple other readings and that is what makes it good, but once you know it is about cocaine to many doors are open to deny the meaning.

The Year of the Cat is about sex.  This isn’t a great secret, of course, but I am proud that I figured it out by myself.  The fact that millions of other figured it out long before me does not diminish my joy in making this discovery by one atom.  That knowledge provides a key that opens the doors necessary to understanding the song.

Before we go any further, I tell those of you who don’t know it that I am a prude.

But.

But there is something about the artful hiding of the sexual/subversive imagery that I enjoy.  Someone has encoded a message that is transparent to the experienced who’ve picked up the key, but which is hidden from the innocent.  There is something good in shielding the innocent for at least a while longer.  It is good to delay until the appropriate time the taking of those steps that can’t be untaken.

Along these lines, there is a qualitative difference between the work of Bruce Springsteen and Billy Joel--to pick only two--that lines up along this same continuum.  Springsteen is an artist; Joel is a hack.  There, I said it.

After the music, I called my brother and as he and I were talking, one of the family cats--Tyson--came in sight.  He’d caught--and killed by all appearances--a bird that he was carrying in his mouth.  He came up onto the porch and met Stars, who is another one of our cats and his arch-enemy.  Not wanting to risk losing his prize, I suppose, he hopped back down off the porch and went out onto the driveway.

There, on the driveway, he set to begin the final process of eating his prize.  This required opening his mouth, however.  It was at this point we learned that the bird was not dead; he was simply playing dead. Tyson’s mouth opened and the bird, not waiting one second longer, flew on out of sight.

Playing dead is an old trick, but it still works.  It is a small thing, but it made the difference between life and death for the bird.

Tyson, for his part, overcame his disappointment, hopped up beside me, and looked into my coffee cup for some consolation prize.  Finding none, he went off in search of other adventures.

The bird is gone.  For all I know, he has died from his wounds in the short time that has passed. But I believe he’s feeling better.  I believe he’s learned something about the ways of cats and of good, old-fashioned tricks and the worms will taste better than they ever have.

And enjoy sitting out on the driveway like never before.

In the Cool of the Morning

By Bobby Neal Winters

I sat out on the drive way this morning in my undershirt.  I had a cup of coffee in my hand and I was listening to Crosby, Stills, and Nash do The Southern Cross on my iPhone.  I was in the shade and it was cool, but I looked at the sun play in the new leaves on the top of the oak Jean and I had planted. I followed it down and my eyes caught the peach tree she and I had planted to shade the hostas; it has grown enough that it now is now doing its job.  Behind the hostas were the milkweed plants.  Jean has hung strings from the gutters and is training the milkweeds to climb them.  This is for the monarch butterflies that will come through later in the year.

One week ago I was sitting at KU Medical center having washer-like objects called fiducials put on my head.  This was proceeding an MRI that would create a 3-dimensional map of my head.  The 3D map was so that they would be able to perform surgery to remove a tumor that had grown over the last few decades on my pituitary gland.

I was calm because this was my second run at it.  The week before they had attempted the surgery but had stopped because my blood pressure had jumped to 220/100, a new record for someone whose BP usually runs 125/80. My multidisciplinary team put their heads together, scratched their collective temple, and decided to reboot one week later. 

One suspect in the mix is a product known over the counter as Afrin.  The ENT (ear, nose, and throat) guys use it in surgery to control nasal bleeding.  The ENT guys were a part of my multidisciplinary team because pituitary surgery usually proceeds through the nose these days.  They put a tube up your nose, entering the sphenoid sinus and then crack into the sella turca (a bone shaped like a Turkish saddle—whatever the hell they are) on which the pituitary gland sits.

Afrin is shockingly dangerous stuff for something that available over the counter.  The guys, using their collective wisdom, switched to an older product that is not available over the counter but is very much familiar to us in story and song: cocaine.

Seriously. 

They used cocaine instead of Afrin, but they didn’t tell me this before surgery.  I needed to be calm when I went under, and I was. Calmer than I had been the week before when we did our trial run.

The week before, I went under as they were rolling me off to prep me.  They were making happy talk to me after they had put an “oxygen” mask over my face.  I awoke after having noted zero passage of time and hearing the words “We didn’t do your procedure.”

In spite of not having had my procedure done, they had inserted a catheter and they had shaved my belly.  If going in through the nose to get to a gland that hangs from the brain is confusing, then so is shaving a belly to the nth-degree.

They use a piece of abdominal fat to aid the healing process.  They had prepped my tummy in order to remove it.  Those of you who have seen me in person will remark to themselves that I have it to spare; everyone makes that joke.  When I started to make it to my surgeon, she pre-empted me, having heard it too many times.

In any case, a lot had been done to me that I had not noticed.  Time had passed in a darkness deeper than sleep.

It occurred to me that the happy talk I’d heard as I went under could’ve been the last words I’d heard on this earth.  The nothingness was absolutely total.

It was calming.

That one week later--on the day of the real surgery—I was calm. I knew that my BP could spike dangerously, but I also knew they were ready for it this time.  But even if not, I knew that if It happened, then I would never know.

My thoughts were all with my family.  My family is strong because my wife Jean is strong. She would, herself, be supported by our girls who she has raised to be strong and by her mother, the one who raised her.

But I lived.

My surgeon, a woman who is famously meticulous among the hospital staff, spent the afternoon plucking a tumor the size of a black-eyed pea out from the middle of my head. She would take a bit, the BP would rise; she’d let the BP go down and then take a little more.  It took hours to get the little son-of-a-bitch out.

When I awoke this time, they asked me how I felt and I knew the procedure had been done.  I told them I felt like I’d been punched in the nose and cut in the gut.  The two-inch incision where they’d taken the fat was on fire.  My nose throbbed.  They started putting the Vicodin (hydrocodone + acetomenaphine) to me and that made everything better.

We are now at surgery plus one week.  I’ve spent a good deal of time napping in a Vicodin-induced haze, but over the last couple of days I’ve been weaning myself off of it.  I will have plenty of time to sleep when I’m dead; that I know.

In the meantime, mornings like the one we had today are simply too rare. God is too good to us for us to ignore his grace.

As the Arrow Flies

By Bobby Neal Winters

There are things you do “for the children” that you are really doing for yourself.  The kids are an excuse.  They are small, but, somehow, that makes them easier to hide behind.

I’ve bought bows for Lydia and myself.

These are youth bows.  They are a step above a toy, but they are not yet a weapon.  I am waiting to see how we progress before I invest any more.  So far I’ve got less than a hundred dollars in it total: the bows were $20 a piece; a couple of extra arrows about $10; shooting gloves $12 a piece; arm protectors a total of $30.  

I also got a bail of hay to use as a target, but I am not counting that as an expense since we can use that for dog bedding next winter.

It is a fun activity and would have been a good activity to take up as a child, but I didn’t.  I wasn’t allowed to.  And I need to be fair here.  I don’t remember ever asking for a bow and arrow set.  I don’t remember it ever coming up.  I don’t remember being denied it or feeling deprived for not having a bow and arrow set.

What I have is a feeling of absolute certainty that it wouldn’t’ve been allowed because Dad would not have allowed it because he feared for the safety of his sons.  And he had reason.

Dad had grown up in what would be considered poverty today.  He went barefoot until the snow flew.  I’ve seen pictures of him in overalls that had the straps extended with cord.  He’d worked in the oil field and had seen accidents.  He’d gone to war and had seen bodies--friend and foe--laying dead and mangled.  He lost a five-year-old nephew to an accident.

His mind was filled with scenarios of disaster of every sort.

My childhood was filled with having pictures of great activities built up, but then shot down because these scenarios of disaster crowded them out of existence.

And I understand.  I’ve never been angry with Dad about this.  But it has had an effect.  As I grow older and gain more understanding of life and of myself--not separate activities by any means--I see the effect this has had on me.  It has caused a lack of self-confidence.  When a boy’s father shows this much trepidation, the boy begins to wonder whether his father is doubting him.  

You take fewer chances and you fail less, but failing, oddly enough, is important to the building of self-confidence.  You must fail before you learn that failure is not deadly, not your enemy.  Batman’s dad said it: You fall so that you may get back up!

So Lydia and I are learning to shoot a bow at the same time.  I am being born-again as it were.  You put lay the arrow on the bow and fit the string into the arrow’s knock. You pull back the string while aiming at the target, and you let the arrow fly.

And you miss the target.

So you shoot again.

And you miss again.

With each arrow flying, you tend to get closer.  

The string on the bow hurts your fingers, so you get a glove to wear.  The string slaps against your forearm, so you get an arm protector.

And you continue shooting.

Soon you hit the hay bail every time and your daughter does too.  There is time to think while you practice.  Will she remember this?  If she does will it be fondly?

The arrow flies again and strikes the target more closely than before.

You wonder if your father would approve.  You get the feeling he’s watching.

Your daughter shoots.  Her arrow is closer to the center of the bail than yours and you smile.  And you think maybe he’s smiling too.

Hush, Listen

By Bobby Neal Winters

In the beginning was the Word.

Nature has a language.

It’s a subtle language uttered in whispers; it is a coarse language uttered in screams.  It comes in not only through the ear, but also through the eye, the nose, the tongue, and the skin.  It is in a baby’s cry, a lover’s body, or a gust of wind.

We are surrounded.

Consider body language.  We use it all the time, but often we don’t take it in on a conscious level.  We walk away we impressions of things left unsaid.

In my job, I talk to a lot of students.  In groups, of course, but also on a one-to-one basis.  I interview students in order to help them to discern whether the major I advise is the correct route for them.  I’ve a lot of young people.  I sometimes think that I’ve learned how to tell someone is lying to me.  When I first took on the advisement job, I would go home at the end of some days exhausted and I didn’t know why because all I’d done all day was listen.

I eventually figured out that I wasn’t just listening with my ears; I was paying attention to a lot of body language.  The extent of this became clear to me when I was sent a student from another department who I was told had “no affect.”  I’ve never studied psychology, so I didn’t know what that meant.  When the student arrived, I learned.

I would say something and look in her face.  There was no response. I made a joke.  There was no response.  At the end of the interview, I was exhausted.  Everything I had tossed out, verbal and nonverbal, had been sucked into the black-hole of no affect.

It’s not just people who have body language.  I think that I could get most people to agree that our pets have body language.  When I take walks, I often come upon dogs who are not on leashes.  This is illegal, but it happens.  Most of the time, I can tell if the dog is going to be friendly.  I can speak a little dog body language.  I can speak enough cat to know when they want out.

At night the dogs speak to the trains who whistle going by and the fire trucks as they scream through the night.  They’re hungry for the conversation of the wild.

I am enough of a country boy to know that this works with cattle, horses, and some wild animals as well.  And why shouldn’t it.  We are a part of nature.  We were created or we evolved (try to explain the difference between those two) as a part of nature’s system.  It works.

As a part of nature, we are equipped to speak nature’s language, though we have insulated ourselves from it so much that we are no longer fluent in our mother tongue.

But it’s still there.  Women produce pheromones.  They’ve been shown to cause the monthly cycles of women in a group to synchronize.  Women’s bodies have secret conversations with each others for reasons long forgotten.

Consider the effect that the curves and nooks and dents and bumps on the bodies of the opposite sex have upon the physiology of our own bodies.  The heart quickens; our breathing changes; our thoughts perturbed from our day jobs.  Nature speaks and it has a task for us.

Some of us who grew up before the days of modern weather forecasting still know nature’s signs for rain and storm.  Nature speaks in a million languages and we’ve forgotten most of them.

An eye to the sky has been replaced by the numbers on a computer screen.  We can read the satellite picture, but it’s getting harder to feel the rain in our noses before it comes.

Charles Wesley penned, “O for a thousand tongues to sing.”  I would plead for us to have our ears back so we can hear what we are being told and for the quietness to hear it.

Naked Chimpanzees

By Bobby Neal Winters

We are naked chimpanzees that use cell phones.  Of course we are messed up.

The author of the second chapter of Genesis expressed the same sentiment, but many who read it from there will either dismiss it or misunderstand it.

Man is not happy.  We are dysfunctional.  We seek relief for our unhappiness in destructive ways: Methamphetamine; alcohol; drugs; promiscuous sex.  Are we having fun yet?  Are we happy?

We have alienated ourselves from our place in Nature.  And everything we try to do to make it better only makes it worse. And there is no going back.  

The Ancient Mind who scratched out Genesis said there was an angel with with a flaming sword there to keep us from going back. And I wonder.  I’ve seen the documentaries; I’ve read the books.  Stories about the primitive peoples in the jungle.  They don’t give them a survey with questions to answer on a one to five Likert scale to see how happy they are, but they don’t look comfortable.  They don’t have beds; they don’t have TVs; they don’t have toilets.  The angel can put away his flaming sword.

Religion spans the gap.  Religion is the holder of our collective memory.  Religion reminds us of where we started and where we’ve been.  Religion gives a look at where we’ve been so we can better tell where we are going.  It reminds us of exactly how far we’ve come from communion with God, from harmony with Nature.

Any good religion will at its roots be pagan.  And when I say pagan I am not talking about a bunch of crystal rubbers or potion makers.  I mean that religion must touch us where we meet with Nature: at the dinner-table; in the bed room.  

Something must die in order that we eat and we should thank God for its life.

The purpose of sex is to create new life, and we should be ever respectful of that.

The Christian Bible in the Book of Revelation predicts that when we reach our New Jerusalem we will again enjoy the direct presence of God.  No temple; no priests.  Does this vision mean we will again come to some sort of harmony?  I won’t say one way or the other because I simply don’t know.  I will say that I fear those who would try to bring it to being here and now out of their own vision.

Is it a vision of some afterlife?  We know very little about the afterlife.  The one certain thing being that there will be a point after which I am no longer alive.

I always upset myself when I try to rule the world.  I must roll back my concerns: love my neighbor as myself; love my God with all my heart.

Loving God entails loving the Truth and seeking it out.  Loving my neighbor also requires effort.  I do them both badly.

But then I am a naked chimpanzee with a cell phone.

Canadian Hockey and American Education

By Bobby Neal Winters

Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers: The Story of Success contains a marvelous case study on amateur hockey in Canada. The folks in Canada hold the game of hockey at a level of esteem that I find mystifying.  Apparently they put a stick in a kid’s hand by the time he’s big enough to hold it.  They really care.

A study was done in which it was found that virtually all of the players on the elite championship team were born in the few months of the year and players born at the end of the year are virtually missing.  The reason for this is that amateur hockey leagues in Canada have an age cut off date on January 1.  The kids who are born in January are a year more mature than those born in the same year but in December.  They get on the first team; they get more coaching; ultimately they get to play more.

This extra play, extra attention, better coaching pays off incrementally and over time it manifests in players from that latter half of the year simply disappearing.

Gladwell, who is Canadian and possibly hockey-crazy himself as a result, argues that if the system was organised differently--say with a second league of players born in the second half of the year--that Canada could half twice as many championship level hockey players.

This case study serves as a guiding example for the thrust of the book: American education could be approached differently to achieve better results.

In education, the dividing line isn’t January 1st; it’s social class.  The middle class have advantages that makes them more educable that the working class.  Children from middle class families are more entitled than those from working class families; they are much better at working within institutional systems.They come into their class by virtue of the good choices their forebears have made.  

Here I want to share some thoughts.  I come from a working class family.  I competed along the way with some of those middle class kids.  Hind sight being twenty-twenty, I can see where they had some know-how about some things that I didn’t.  I also see where I had a lot of help along the way from other people.  Now I find myself in a position where I’ve got some middle class kids of my own and I want them to have every advantage possible, but I also have a desire to give a hand in the way a hand was given me.

It is at this point when I am in danger of getting warm and fuzzy that I’d like to go back to Gladwell’s Canadian Hockey example.  In particular, I want to talk about the idea that you could make twice as many good hockey players if you had a league for the second half of the year.  You run into resource issues right off the bat because either you are going to need twice as many coaches or the coaches you do have are going to have to work twice as hard.  Good coaches are just as scarce as good players.

But this is Canada, so maybe they love chasing a damn a checker around on the ice enough to take out of their hides long enough to double their numbers and bring out a new generation of hockey players twice as numerous as all previous generations.

So what?

Even if you care for the game, this isn’t a guarantee of winning any more Olympic medals.  Quite frankly they may already have more than enough talent to dominate the sport.  There are only so many players that can be at the top.  Doubling that number doesn’t mean that they win more.  It means that more good players will be locked off the championship team.

In the mean time, unless there is care taken to insure high quality coaching, there is no guarantee that two leagues will produce better players.  Indeed, if the level of play is diluted the quality might go down.

Okay, let’s talk about education again.  I do think that it’s important.  It was my ticket to the middle class and I like it here.  The beds are soft; the cars are nice; and I don’t have as big a chance of losing fingers like my Grampa Sam did.

All of that having been said, we have to use our educational resources wisely.

There is a broad range of opinion on how to do this much of it quite heated.  There are people from both ends of the political spectrum who care very deeply.  Malcolm Gladwell tends toward the left, but I discovered that he and Thomas Sowell, who leans a bit toward the right, to be in a surprising amount of agreement.

Sowell addresses the topic of education in his book Black Rednecks and White Liberals.  Without going into too deep of analysis, let me summarized by saying that they agree on the need for professionalism on the part of the teachers and hard work on the part of the students.  After that, agreement might be harder to come by.

I’ve don’t have enough insight into the heart of Man to know how to make students work harder in today’s culture, so let’s look at the other end.Good teachers are in just a short supply as good hockey coaches.   We need to take care of the ones we have and work to make new ones.  

It’s something to work on.

Attacking the Soldering Demon

Attacking the Soldering Demon

By Bobby Neal Winters

I may have mentioned in an earlier post that I have demons which have kept me from pursuing the world of electronics: the Demon of Lack-of-Self-Confidence; the Demon of Fear-of-Loss-Money.

Chief among my demons up until now has been the Soldering Demon.  I ran into this demon while trying to put together a kit for an RF-modulator for an ELF computer.  I had never soldered before, but I figured I would try.  The directions which came with the kit were as encouraging as they were racist and sexist: “These parts are usually assembled by teenage Mexican girls.”

I kid you not.

It turns out that the teenage Mexican girls out did me.  Instead of an RF-modulator I created a one-and-a-half by two-inch rectangle of lead or tin or what-the-hell-ever.  Money was tight in those days growing up, so this failure carried a huge load of guilt.

Time rolled forward and a tried to fight the demon by getting electronic kits for my older daughters.  The oldest one was game.  She could handle hot glue like a pro, and I figured it was just a small step from there to soldering.

Wrong.

We tried a telephone kit.  I figured that since she wanted a phone in her room that this would be an incentive.  We got started, but we couldn’t follow through.

The problem is that there is actually something to be learned.  There is a certain amount of patience, a certain amount of hand-eye coordination, and a certain amount of skill that only practice can bring.

Roll time forward again.

As a part of my continuing Zombie Apocalypse Crystal Radio quest, I came upon directions for a Three-Penny Radio. This takes the crystal radio one or two steps further by introducing amplification. The problem is that it required a bit of soldering, but this was turned into a virtue by making the soldering simple.

We did this late yesterday afternoon.  We’d put together a solar cell kit earlier and this had gone well.  I thought we could start on the Three-Penny Radio by just doing part of it, but Lydia wanted to push on.  This was a mistake because I hadn’t had a chance to look over the directions.  [The directions on the site are complete, but they’ve not been idiot-proofed as we shall see.]

We soldered it all together, stuck the earpiece in our ears, and nada. Nothing. Simon and Garfunkle’s Sound of Silence done for real.  It was then that Lydia exercised an amount of discretion that I didn’t have until just a few years ago.

“Let’s fix this later, Dad.”

So we put it away.

Went to bed last night, church this morning, ate lunch, and took a nap.

When I woke up, Lydia was gone.

I went to the table and compared what we’d done to the picture in the instructions.  The two were different.  

I then did what you do when you solder something incorrectly.  I un-soldered it and re-soldered it.  I put the battery in it, put the earpiece in my ear, and heard the beautiful sound of static.  With a little tuning, this was replaced by music.

I rock.

I am now waiting for Lydia to get back to receive her assessment.

The Invisible World

By Bobby Winters

While ignorance is not something we should be thankful for as a good in itself, I am glad there are so many things that have been saved for me to learn in adulthood so that I may better appreciate them.  Crystal radio now comes into that list.

I am even more fortunate in that I have a child learning with me so that I may have my pleasure amplified by feeling along with her.

I found plans for a crystal radio at this site. You may look up the details there.  My understanding of the construction of the device itself was increased when I realize it could be visualized in the following way.  The main part is a circle. (I suppose this could be what they refer to as a circuit, but I don’t want to use that technical term in a way that is nonstandard.)  The circle consists of the coil, the diode, and the earpiece.

I chose to use a crystal radio earpiece instead of modifying an old telephone hand set.  I might come to regret this in the case of a zombie apocalypse, but it’s a risk I am willing to take for the sake of simplicity.  Messing with the tiny wires in the phone cord was too much for my old eyes and my aging hands.  I might work it in at the next step.

I made my coil out of wire I had left-over from the radio fence I’d installed to keep Charlie in.  I had been uncertain about it.  So uncertain was I, that I made a second one out of magnet wire.  When I tried it out this afternoon, it wouldn’t work, so I had Lydia bring out the first one, and it worked!

The diode is the the final part of the circle.  It cost about a dollar to buy and about $5 to have shipped. Oi!

But you put these three pieces in a circle for the main part of the radio.

The you hook the coil to an antenna and another part of the circle to the ground wire.

Then you listen.

The sound was almost ghostly.  You might wonder whether it was there or not, but it is.

Then you realize you’ve made something that captures that invisible world around us, and your heart soars with joy.  You don’t have to be an engineer; you don’t have to be a scientist.  It’s just a little wire, an earpiece, and your diode...a rock on a wire.

I would like to remove the “store-bought” elements from this, in particular the diode and the earpiece.  I suppose thinking in terms of the zombie apocalypse is my standard.  Things that are re-purposed are okay.  Things that you could get by tearing up something else are okay.

Crystal Radios and the Zombie Apocalypse

By Bobby Winters

For those who’ve been following this space for a while, this is another adventure in the tradition of the Potato Cannon and the One-Piece-at-a-Time Computer. A notion came into my mind that I wanted to make a crystal radio.  Their is one important difference.  I remember the moment I decided to make the potato cannon: I saw rednecks on TV creating explosions and generally having fun, and I wanted to reclaim my heritage.  I remember the moment I decided to build a computer: I had extrapolated from how to make a potato cannon to how to make an IED and decided I didn’t want to wind up on some FBI watch list.

But I have no memory of the moment I decided to make a crystal radio.

I suppose, like all things, pieces of the desire to do this have been floating around in me waiting for a key ingredient, but that key ingredient came in so slowly that I didn’t recognize it as happening.  One day I simply knew I wanted to do it.

Why make a radio?

Radios are cool.  They are Einstein’s spooky action at a distance embodied.  Some guy--maybe far around the world--talks into a microphone it goes out into the air and you can hear it thousands of miles away.

You say, yes, that is cool.  Why do you want to build one?  You can buy them cheaply.  Heck, you own several already.  

Okay, there is something about being able to do it yourself.  It’s the difference between winning the affections of a real, live woman in all her complexity and buying them. One requires some virtue on your part, and the other only requires that you have cash.

Then there is the Zombie Apocalypse thing.

There are certain skills we should cultivate in the event of a Zombie Apocalypse.  

Please be aware that I am only speaking of the Zombie Apocalypse metaphorically.  In less colorful terms, we creatures of modernity are so far removed from nature and are so reliant on the tools of high civilization for our very survival that we begin to feel rather exposed.

If there were a Zombie Apocalypse how would we be informed of the coming Zombie Hoards.  There would be no news from cable-tv; those folks are almost zombies already.  There would be no power from the electric grid.  There would only be lone, isolated Ham radio operators transmitting reports using batteries charged by wind power.  Those who know how to make crystal radios will be able to hear their transmissions and be ready when the zombies arrive, waiting for them with their potato cannons.  (After the potatoes run out, zombie body parts will be used.)

I’ve been doing research on the Internet and have found a wealth of information.  At this point I am one 1N34A diode away from having the parts I need to make the radio set.  I went to Radio Shack and all I could find was a 1N40A diode.  Although, I have to say that on YouTube I found the plans for a so-called Foxhole radio that uses a razor blade and the stub of a number two pencil in place of the diode.  I’ve got to think that if you can get a razor blade and a number two pencil to work then going from 1N34A to 1N40A isn’t going to make a whole hell of a lot of difference.

In the mean time, I have enlisted the help of Lydia.

Back when daughters one and two were younger, I’d bought an AM radio kit, but couldn’t get them interested.  The kit had lain untouched for years.  Saturday afternoon, Lydia and I put it together. We can get exactly one station: KKOW.  We listened to a little of a basketball game.  She was hooked.

As she took her long, thin fingers and maneuvered the resistors, capacitors, and transistors into place, I saw something else begin to happen, something exciting.

Next Saturday the crystal radio.  Then I replace the diode with a razor blade and a number two pencil.  Then we figure out something about tuners and amplification.

We will be ready for the zombies when they come.

The Tin Can Telephone Part II

By Bobby Neal Winters
            This is a continuation from The Tin Can Telephone on my other blog.

It is tempting to say that teaching is all about communication.  There might be some validity to that, but the plain statement itself would be easy to misinterpret. Teaching is not about getting information from the head of the teacher to the head of the student.  Something like that will no doubt happen along the way, but it is a part of a much more subtle process.  It is a process whose subtlety I appreciate more with each passing year.

One can model the teacher in front of the classroom with the tin can telephone as I did earlier.  The teacher speaks, puts slides up, hands out activities, i.e. is a transmitter.  The students listen (or not!); they take notes (or not!).  That is, they are receivers.

I wrote earlier of the transmitter and the receiver each having code books.  This is true in the classroom as well.  The thing is this: everyone has a different code book.  As students, part of the education process is learning the teacher’s code book.  As a teacher, part of the education process is to facilitate this happening.

The difference in code books has been recognized more widely than just me. Each year a particular liberal arts university sends out a list of catch phrases and historical events that have over the life time of typical professor.  Many of these are drawn from popular culture and would be used by academics who are trying to bridge the gap with their students.  Along with the phrases and events is the assurance that the students were not yet alive when these phrases and events were current.

While others no doubt interpret this differently than I do, this list serves as a reminder to me of the futility of trying to be the “cool teacher.”

When I was a first year graduate student, teaching for the first time, I, along with the rest of the teaching assistants, met in a group for an hour each week with one of the math professors to talk about teaching.  As part of this, the professor said something I will never forget: “If you are a great teacher, your students might learn 90 percent of what you know.  When they teach, they will teacher their students 90 percent of what they know, and so forth.  We know the direction this sequence goes.  Before long, the student isn’t learning anything.”

I don’t recall the point he was making with it.  I remember much less than 90 percent of what he said.  But I have mediated on it over the years and have had some thoughts.  

The first is that my students have to be learning from people besides me.  And they do.  I only get them for a very short time.  They learn from people before me; they learn from people after me; and they are learning from other people at the same time.

The second is that students can draw inferences from partial information.  Knowledge does not consist of isolated data items; it has structure.  A contemplative mind grows knowledge.

The third is that we pass more than information.  If we do our job we pass a spirit that I would call a love of learning.  We can also sharpen a general love of learning into a love of our subject.

This third part is--to me--most important.  It is also the most difficult thing to do.  I am not sure that I’ve ever passed the love of learning to anyone, but I may have nurtured it in some or helped to focus a student’s love of learning on a particular topic.

It is in this part where the mysterious way that humans deal with other humans come into play.  The Duke of Wellington supposedly said that the Battle of Waterloo was one on the playing fields of Eton.  Our early lives do shape us far out of measure to the amount of time we spent living them.  For most of us, it wasn’t Eton which shaped us but our families.  We deal with other people in the modes we learned in dealing with our families.

When I as a teacher stand in front of my students, only in very rare cases do they know me as a person.  They will not know how to deal with  me as me.  They will deal with me as they would someone they already know that I remind them of.

When I was a graduate student, they dealt with me as a peer.  As I aged, they related to me like a cousin or a young uncle.  These days as I approach 50, having children in college myself, they relate to me like a father or--because of the gray in my hair--a grandfather.  I am not expected to be cool.  Indeed, it’s creepy when I try; not that I try.

This is the image, the persona I come to them with.  I don’t fight it.  Instead, I build on it.   They will take my being just a tiny bit grumpy in their stride.  Indeed, they expect it.  As I am aware of how they perceive me, I can use it to shape our interactions and to make aspects of myself--such as my love for the subject--be attractive enough for them to want to take it up themselves.  You can learn a lot from a teacher you hate, but a love of learning is not part of that.

To conclude, I will return to the tin can telephone model for one more round.  The last stage of the learning process is the student teaching himself, i.e. studying.  We who teach at the university often have the expectation that the student will already have this mastered by the time we see him.  I use “expectation” in that sentence not in the sense we really expect it, but in the sense we believe it is a standard the student should meet.

The reality is that many of them frequently don’t meet that standard.  They haven’t mastered the art of studying. Many professors would deny its their job to teach them.  I would say that it is often part of the job, and whether and how to do it is part of the art of teaching.

What You Are Prepared to See

By Bobby Neal Winters

When I first started writing about ten years back, I had a exercise I did.  I found stories in the Bible and wrote them up in modern style.  The one rule I had was that I would be absolutely faithful to what was written in that I would not subtract anything.  I kept the plot-line; I kept the dialog;  I would add flesh to the bone that was there, but I wouldn’t change the bones.

It was a remarkable educational experience.

The first thing I learned was that there is a lot that is open to interpretation.  An example of this would be in the story of Deborah and Barack. We know simply that Deborah was married, she was a prophetess, and she was a judge of Israel.  She lived under a tree known as the Palm of Deborah.

That’s it.

I chose to make her an old woman.  This, I thought, who work better with her character.  As she was living in a male dominated environment, I thought that making her a wise elder would work better.  As this was an age without modern dentistry, I chose to make her toothless.  As a part of this, I gave her the habit of sucking the pulp from pomegranate pieces and spitting out the seeds in a rather disgusting manner.

Because of this, I learned something else: when you mess with other people’s mental images, you get push-back.  I showed this to some of my friends who’d imagined Deborah as a princess between the ages of 30 and 40, with a mouth full of teach and a diadem on her head.  Apparently there is an old painting that depicts Deborah as such.

The artist had been doing his own interpretation.  There is nothing wrong with that.  He had his own reasons just like I had mine.  My point is that my reader had seen that interpretation first and had taken it up as her own and had imposed it over the story.

I eventually carried this exercise out with several Bible stories.  At the end, I decided I would try to put them together as a collection, but they were just shy of what I considered to be book-length, so I decided to fatten them up a little bit.  What I did was to write a short story about a preacher who had been transferred to a church that had once had beautiful stain glass windows. The windows had been painted over by individuals--members of the church, pastors, etc--who found particular stories to be objectionable for one reason or the other.

In the story, the preacher cleaned the paint from the various windows, revealing the story beneath.  Each one of these cleanings served as an occasion to insert a story. ( I admit the conceit of thinking of myself as someone who was similarly revealing a previously concealed story to the reader.)

This not only served as a framework for placing these stories together and working in a bit of didactic explanation as well, but it serves as a metaphor for how controlling information controls understanding.

There is the old story about the three blind men who feel different parts of an elephant and come to different conclusions as to what sort of an animal it is according to whether they feel its leg, ear, or trunk.

One might assume for the sake of the story that these men had been blind from birth and had never seen and elephant and that they had never fully experienced an elephant before even in a tactile way.  If they had, then they might have been able to have an insight from even a partial input.

I gained a greater insight into this during my trip to South America.  Those of you who grew up during the same era as I will, perhaps, remember Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. Wild Kingdom was hosted by a fellow named Marlin Perkins.  It featured trips to the African Savanna and the jungles of South America.  I also received a steady diet of other nature programs featuring floats down the Amazon.  Then, of course, there is the by now classic movie Romancing the Stone with the drug dealers and treasure hunters.

Given this sort of input, it’s a wonder I had the courage to go.  My courage was bolstered by those who had been there before me and told me that I could do it.  Indeed, I not only did it, but I took my family with me, and we wouldn’t trade for it.

The thing is that South America is not a fishing village on the Amazon or an alligator farm owned by a crazy drug-lord.  We are prepared to see it that way by what gets through on our TV and movies. The truth is rather more complex.  In Asuncion, Paraguay you can stand in a neighborhood and see a horse-drawn cart collecting trash and a pickup truck with boys in the back texting on cell phones.  There are three centuries going on at once.

Quite frankly, there were times when I thought that, if I knew more Spanish, I could easily go native because I had more in common with the folks there than I did with the folks either in the Northeastern US or on the West Coast.

When only minor excursions out, I’ve lived my life in Kansas and Oklahoma. This is still the frontier. We have a strong, agrarian strain.  On one strip out of Asuncion while I was there, I saw a huge billboard with a couple of cattle on it.  It read “Mas Pasto, Mas Carne.”  This translates as “More Grass, More Meat.”  Having grown up on the farm report, I knew I was among my own kind.

It would be easy for me to go all paranoid here and say there is a conspiracy to make us think of South America and the rest of the world as being backward.  This conclusion awaits a more careful argument.  It is much easier to believe that most Americans live in cities and have a certain filter they put on the rest of the world.  They view South America as backward and so concentrate on what fits that image, filtering out evidence to the contrary.  

The hard truth is that these same people view most of the United States outside of the city limits of certain selected cities as being backward too.

When we go to the movies and watch television, we know that we are viewing fiction, but even fiction is set within a certain realistic context, so it is easy to be led astray.  I have two examples where my personal experience has been illuminating.

In the movie Fletch, starring Chevy Chase, the main character takes a trip to Provo, Utah.  Provo, in that movie, is portrayed as a very small town.  Indeed, it is purported little more than a pig farm.  I took sabbatical there in the academic year 1995-96 and one of the reasons I chose it was my impression that it was a small town.  While I knew it was more than a pig farm, the expectation I had for it was quasi-rural.  Imagine my surprise when I arrived and discovered that Provo, a town of 90 thousand, is located in the Utah County metro area with a population of a quarter million people.  In fact, as most of the population in Utah is concentrated in a corridor around Interstate 15 that is about ten miles wide and a hundred miles long, you could say that it is part of a city of a million.  

An error in the other direction comes from one of my favorite episodes of the X-Files.  It was set in Connerville, Oklahoma and featured Lightening Boy. This was very interesting to me because I grew up twelve miles north of Connerville.  I’ve friends buried in Connerville.  Connerville consists of a couple of churches, a few houses, a cemetery, and the Blue River Bar.  That’s it.

In the X-Files, it had a hospital with rather impressive scientific resources.  There were things pictured as being in Connerville that are not available for a hundred miles in any direction.

And, of course, in each case the picture painted was done that way because of the needs of the story.  There is no harm intended.

But unless you’ve been to Provo or unless you’ve been to Connerville, you don’t know.