Measurement choices

So I'm collecting facets of reality in preparation for the first lesson in my Communication Theory class. Virtually every theory we study is either social scientific or interpretive in nature, so we begin by nailing down what that difference means. It's a cool little idea to play with, and also a fairly important pillar of God's creation, but I'm more and more sure that it's best learned through multiple examples. I'm posting this to preserve the ones I've spotted, and to invite others to contribute more.

I always introduce the concept with a simple thought experiment: suppose I bring a tape measure to class, and the day's activity is to determine the tallest student in the room. How might we accomplish that? We talk about precise definitions of "tall," how to minimize errors in measurement, etc., but at the end of that, we understand that we'd take the tape measure, measure each person in class, and the record of inches and feet would settle the matter. The most important part: once our data were collected and properly understood, it would no longer be rational to disagree. You might speak up and say "Well, Brody (or David or Jordan or whoever) might be the tallest to all of you, but not to me! I have my own opinion about who the tallest student in this class is!" But your classmates could demonstrate that you were simply mistaken. Part two of the thought experiment: what if, instead, the day's activity is to determine the most likable student in the class? Not only could we not do that with a tape measure, but no instrument exists that would settle that question. We might each supply an answer and discuss our answers, but it would be entirely acceptable to disagree with the majority: "Bob might be the most likable to you, but I personally find Fred more likable." Nothing wrong with that.

Many times, students' first reaction is to ask, "So it's just opinion?" Then I explain that opinions are things to which reason is entirely irrelevant -- my example generally is the relative tastiness of chocolate versus vanilla -- whereas interpretive theories deal with questions that aren't exhausted by collection and analysis of data, but are proven intersubjectively. People are free to like or dislike any author, according to their taste, but enough people have found Shakespeare's work exceptionally powerful that obviously something exemplary is at work in his writing, even if there's no literary tape measure that can give it an exact weight.

Those are my starter examples. Here are others that I've been collecting:

• An archive versus a memory. Maintaining an archive is an attempt to record objectively demonstrable remnants of past events. On the other hand, memory is a trace of our own subjective experience of those events. And if we compare our memories with other people's, we're likely to find that certain of our stored impressions are widely shared, while others are unique to individuals. But even those, and perhaps especially those, are worth examining: often it's the unique perspective that influences people to think in new and creative ways.
• A health inspector versus a restaurant critic. A health inspector will conduct a thorough examination of a restaurant, checklist and swabs in hand, and will issue a report consisting of data collected through techniques that are standardized and replicable. A restaurant critic will report her subjective judgment of the restaurant's success or failure at delivering an enjoyable eating experience. Parallel concepts are nutrition and flavor.
• Nature versus nurture. Our genes determine certain of our traits, but other traits are our own response to our experience, which is some part happenings in the outside world and some part our own interpretation of those happenings.
• God's sovereignty and faith.

That last one brings me back to where we usually wind up the discussion: the big picture of this duality is that there is a reality out there, a reality outside our skulls that is independent of our observation. Even if we were all struck dead at the same moment, the tallest among us would remain the tallest. But there is also a reality inside our skulls, inside our thoughts, and that reality is not identical for any two people: if every human on earth was struck dead at the same moment, the question of who was the most likable would vanish, because there would no longer remain any sentient people to like, dislike, or behave in a way that was worthy of liking or disliking. And a very simple, straightforward definition of God can be derived from this: God is the one for whom the outer and inner reality are unbroken, continuous.

If you've got any other good illustrations of the gap between that which is demonstrated objectively, and that which is argued with intersubjective accounts of experience, I'd love to pile up a few more. It's a powerful idea, and the more illustrations I've got to bolster it, the better we do.

Mañana cosa

During my first two years at NCU, everything I did seemed to endear me more and more to the students, which was a bit worrisome, because I honestly don't want to be popular with my students. Fortunately, that now seems to be turning the corner.

I don't want my students to like me too much right now. Rather, I'd much prefer that they like me ten or twenty years down the road. I want the more adult, mature, fully launched, professional versions of themselves to look back and say "Doyle made my life hell, but under his teaching I grew a lot more than I would've, if left up to my own motivation." This in some ways is a lingering effect of my years at SFA back in Texas. There, I taught a lot of lovable students, and I got a lot of enjoyment out of my daily interaction with them. Nevertheless, it was one of the least competitive four year institutions in one of the nation's largest states, and I told the students, very bluntly, at the very first meeting of each class, that I believed one out of three of them did not belong in college and were wasting their time. My classes almost always started with twenty-four or -five students, but a typical class would collapse down to fourteen to sixteen students as the non-serious ones dropped, and some fell to six or eight. One summer class made it all the way down to four students, whom I then tried to teach with just as much energy and enthusiasm as I would've for twenty-five.

NCU is very different. Many of the students here were raised right, which is to say that they set high expectations for themselves and thrive on being challenged, and that makes them a joy to teach. Others don't have that advantage, but do keep the focus where it belongs, so when a class speeds up and becomes difficult, they put the pressure squarely on themselves and do all they can to keep up. Students like that are the reason I teach: I do my best to come alongside them and give them support, and I've got a much bigger opening to make a genuine difference in their emergence into the world, which is more rewarding than a paycheck ten times the size of mine.

But then there are those, admittedly fewer than at SFA, but still a good number of students, who tell themselves lies and choose to believe them. They peg the degree of effort and risk that they're willing to tolerate very low, and then start looking for loopholes and opportunities to offload blame. I feel a great deal of compassion for them, because I know in how many cases they're using strategies they learned from their parents, and for which they've been rewarded with success for most of their lives. Still, no matter how much compassion I might feel, if I want to do my job the right way then I have to become the stone wall in their path and put a stop to their winning streak.

In fact, it's not terribly different from my years working with the two-year-olds in the nursery. Almost all were strong willed, but, on top of that, a few also suffered from extremely poor parenting. Even with the worst of them, if I said no, meant no, and made it stick, they soon learned that they couldn't get around me. Then, once we understood each other, their behavior would improve, and many of them grew to genuinely like me. College students have a lot more resources, a lot more tools, for the purpose of trying to escape my grasp, such as reinterpreting my decisions as lacking legitimacy. That means I'm generally not in their lives long enough to see the fruits of my efforts. Still, it's the first move of saying no and making it stick that is so vitally important. And for some of them, I'm not the first. But even for them, every exposure to that lesson supplies a fresh chance to decide to turn things around. And even if I wish I could be spared the immediate effects of butting heads with them, the knowledge of why it matters makes it worthwhile.

Some of what went on in the term just ended genuinely amounts to the palpable manifestation of my own shortcomings: I did, in fact, have a grumpy semester. I was struggling under some particular kinds of pressure and life stress that were bigger than what I can easily contain, and I took some of it out on my students. I do regret that; I've beat myself up for it pretty soundly. But much of the discontent I saw on my teaching evaluations was easily recognizable as students attempting to blame me for what they did to themselves. The down side of that is, if they're caught in that pattern, they're pushing back the day that they'll break through and understand what needs to change if they want to be successful or happy. But I don't worry about it too much, because that process never gets set in motion until someone finally digs in her or his heels and tells them "No," and I know I did that. If a few more people do it on this campus, then they have a good shot at changing their ways before they make it to their first job. If not, I'm quite confident a boss won't hesitate before teaching them some painful lessons.

Much of teaching is not about immediate results, not about instant gratification, but rather about setting in motion ripples across a body of water. The size of the body is invisible, and I can't even see how quickly the ripples are moving; all I know is that I did throw the stone. I know that someday, a quick aside I threw out in class may suddenly fall into place for one student with the force of a wrecking ball. I know that because I know what effect my own professors had on me. And I also know that imposing high expectations is a choice I've never regretted in all my years of teaching. I knew from the start that any approach, any choice at all, would please some students and make others unhappy. What I caught on to, just a few years into my teaching phase, was that my choice was making the hard-working students very happy, because at last someone was lowering the boom on their lazy, manipulative classmates, and that I was disappointing students who wanted to pour their energy into anything other than doing what they were capable of. That profile still gives me peace and satisfaction, even if occasionally I have to weather my share, or even more than my share, of complaints. Ultimately, these students are growing up, not down, and if I get out in front of them and expect more than they're currently willing to give, then I feel as though I'm on the right side of history. And a few years down the road, I expect to be a lot more popular with them than I am today.

Magisterial children

When I was fourteen years old, I didn't like being around young children. Naturally, my mother chose that year to announce that I'd outgrown an allowance, and she'd lined up a job for me in the church nursery, sitting with two-year-olds, on Wednesday and Sunday nights. I dragged my feet the entire way. This was about a year after I'd stopped going to church, so I suspect she had multiple purposes for this move, but whatever her reasons, she downright insisted that I give it a try for at least one evening. One evening was all it took: I stayed in that job for the next four years, and would've stayed longer if I hadn't left for college. I still really don't enjoy being around badly behaved children, but after all these years of teaching, I've managed to grow a little helping of patience. I'm not a patient person by nature; it's the product of a lot of hard work and struggle, and as with most of my toughest life lessons, I've adopted a quick bit of verbal shorthand to put me back in a good mental spot when needed: "They're just kids being kids."

Kids are kids, sometimes. It's difficult, frustrating, to be a kid, and it's important to keep certain kinds of misbehavior in perspective. I'm not talking about cruelty, or the kind of violence that goes beyond simple roughhousing, but rather a certain flavor of orneriness, a certain failure to be wise. Those are just part of the ugliness of growing up. They're certainly things to reach past, to look forward to the end of, but a sharp, severe reaction to them is very likely to be an overreaction.

Those are all old thoughts. The connection I've made tentatively a few times this year, and more firmly over the past few days, is something new.

I struggle daily with anger, and in particular I get angry about politics. I have very nasty feelings, and sometimes say very nasty things, in response to twists in government wheeling and dealing. And yet, I know full well that any elected official, at any point on the political spectrum, is trapped between the needs and demands of different people who pull in endless different directions at once. I know that political language is designed to strike balances that necessarily are unstable and unsatisfying. I know that political decisionmaking is ramshackle, that compromises stray vast distances from the original need that gave rise to a proposed change, and that any reform which purports to sweep aside the swirling chaos is really just an exercise in gross oversimplification. Simple problems tend to get taken care of by the parties on the scene, without the need for government involvement. With very few exceptions, politicians who "talk straight" are the biggest liars of all, and no matter how entertaining or soothing their words might be, it's necessary to spot the mismatch between their plain speech and the ornate problems they discuss.

So what I'm trying to do, more and more, is tell myself "This is just politicians being politicians," and then to draw that thought into some measure of tolerance and respect for those whose words and decisions ordinarily would infuriate me. They're doing work I would never want to do. They're doing it under circumstances that they don't control, in a political environment they inherited. And just as I found myself more patient with children when I worked directly with them, got to know them, got to leave my mark on their behavior, I also suspect that if I involve myself more in public deliberations, the more salient the complexity of reconciling everyone's needs may be.

One of the earliest lessons I learned about working with youngsters, first toddlers and then teenagers, was "Don't take what they say at face value. Double-check for yourself." Not a bad idea with politicians either. And in all three cases, it's not an excuse for hatred or undue anger; it's just a by-product of what they're working through.

Merry Christmas

Granularity of knowledge requires both investment of effort and immersion in uncertainty. And like any good Baptist, I'm really into immersion.

One of the things that comes up in this or that commmunication class is the phenomenon of "political correctness." Whenever I hear that phrase, I clench my teeth. And that's not because, as is fashionable, I hate hate hate political correctness, or love to bray in my best Texas twang, "Ah'm nawt politically kerrect, haw haw haw!" Actually, I do my best to be politically correct, and I think the original idea that was parodied, caricatured, distorted, malformed, and lied about into something almost universally despised, was a good one. It's something I was taught as a child: good manners. Call people what they want to be called.

Years ago, I asked a friend of mine, "So I get that I'm not supposed to call you Indian. But I gather 'Native American' is not quite right. So what do I call you? Indigenous Turtle Islander?" She said "How about Cherokee?" Problem solved. Larger lesson: call people what they ask to be called. That's just respectful. Is it hard to keep track? Well, I can keep track of their names, can't I? Is one additional identity marker really that much more work? I had asked my friend to provide me with a label that fit her, but was also universal. Why did I think that a reasonable request?

Around that time, I dated an African-American woman for most of a summer. I found out right away that she preferred "African-American" to "black," which was fine with me. But the first time she called me white, I said "No, don't call me that. Call me European-American." What followed was a calm, and even fun, discussion of reciprocity and respect. My position was that she was free to call me white if I was free to call her black, and I would be glad to call her African-American if she'd call me European-American in return. She said our positions weren't mirror images of one another. Over time, we both converged toward a middle ground that chiefly consisted of treating the entire matter as an ongoing conversation. And not a touchy or sensitive one: a very interesting, rewarding one, packed with good, meaty, thought-provoking mutual lessons.

What I believe often holds people back from such conversations, and I'm no exception, is uncertainty. It was a very pleasant, and honestly very unexpected, surprise that we were able to explore the issue without stepping on one another's toes. But typically, when I meet new people and there's an identity issue, I freeze for just a moment because I'm afraid to mis-step, to present myself as a clumsy or insensitive person. It's genuinely not that I fear offending them; life isn't wrapped in cotton-wadding, and those who wear big people pants can handle offensive messages and offensive encounters without a trip to ICU. But I do work hard at telling others about myself through both my words and my actions, and I don't want that gestalt message to include the kind of sloppy, arrogant ignorance that I associate with the outright bigots I've known. It's easy to put such uncertainty in the same category with other fears that aren't tied to genuine danger: public speaking is the first one that comes to my mind, because it's my line of work. But categorizing it that way doesn't lay the issue to rest. Yes, we probably should confront the fear and muddle through it. Easier said than done.

I got to thinking about these things this morning as I listened to an interview on the radio at the end of which the announcer said "Merry Christmas," and the interviewee answered "Happy Holidays." That got me to thinking about the stink surrounding which greeting to use. It does strike me that the best solution is just to ask people which, if any, holiday they're celebrating, and wish them one of those: Merry Christmas, or Joyous Kwanzaa, or חג מולד שמח ושנה טובה. That does require extra effort, but I doubt the effort is what holds people back. I think the bigger barrier to finding out may be fear of uncertainty, which I'm convinced underlies the trap of alienation from which this culture doesn't seem to have any luck escaping.

(On a random note, I actually didn't start naming this month's blog posts with "M C" so that they'd fit "Merry Christmas." I named the first post of the month "mountain climbing" because of its subject matter, and what resulted was just serendipitous.)

Movable claims

I get tickled when I spot patterns of reasoning that transfer neatly between political opponents. The example I've carried around for years is, "Banning it will just drive it underground." What's the first objection to any gun control law? "If guns are illegal, only criminals will have guns." How about restrictions on abortion? "All prohibiting abortion will do is drive women to back-alley quacks or coat hangers." What strikes me about this is, the reasoning seems compelling to them on their pet issue, but it stops making sense as their feelings change. Why distrust a ban in one case, but think it's a constructive move in the other? Why is it that people who make the defiance/driving underground argument on the one issue don't thereby cultivate at least some recognition of its force in the other?

So this morning, I noticed another one: "Teach the controversy." That's the line taken these days by a certain stripe of politically active Christian on the question of what ought to be taught in high school biology classes. They realize they've lost the fight on outright creation science, so instead they argue that teaching evolution as though it's an undisturbed consensus is misleading, and instead educators ought to teach the controversy. Don't just stick to the scientifically-developed precepts of evolution through natural selection; instead, introduce objections to those findings alongside them, and leave students to sort out what they believe. But I remember reading James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me, and I followed the textbook wars in Texas, which was and is one of the primary national battlegrounds for culture clashes in K-12 curriculum, and on that subject, as with gun control vs. abortion, the arguments are neatly flipped: the right wingers want to teach a stable, pseudo-consensus view of history, and their opponents want to "teach the controversy" by including such disturbances as marginalized voices, unflattering accounts of the nation's founders, and stories about American war crimes. Here again, people will argue "Teach the controversy" on one issue, and "We've got the truth, so why contaminate it with nonsense?" on the other, and flip back and forth between those moves without any apparent internalization of their premises.

People are funny. And politics is not about good reasons. Political argument is very much kabuki theater. The forces that settle political disputes have very little to do with anything said for public consumption: the public arguments are engineered to lay on a veneer of deliberation, but the deliberation actually makes no difference. It reminds me of Milli Vanilli, who danced around and appeared to sing, but really had nothing to do with the production of their music. It also reminds me, as I wrote a while back and worked into my rhetoric class, of placebos, in the sense that many patients somehow manage to overcome their symptoms and right themselves in response to the appearance of medical intervention that actually isn't in any way bioactive.

And it seems to be the way of the world. Now I see through a glass darkly, but then face to face.

Meaningful contradictions

Whenever someone says "Don't you impose your God on me; your religion might be true for you, but not for me," I wonder how sound that person's math skills are. Does two plus two equal four only for me? Is that true for me, but not everyone else? Or how about their grasp of elementary science: is gravity true only for me? If you're sufficiently exercised at all the suffering caused by gravity (people falling down, buildings collapsing, avalanches), can you simply reject it? Step off a skyscraper and fly around like a bird?

But then, just a couple of weeks back, I wrote a blog entry about my take on evolution, and I said that God, by choice, leaves His existence in the realm of that which could be otherwise, which the Greeks categorized as phronesis, as distinct from episteme, true knowledge. God leaves enough looseness and slippage in the world, enough plausible alternative explanations, that people come to Him only by choice, and never because they're trapped into it. But if that's the case, then I bump up against a contradiction: above, I'm asserting that His existence, sovereignty, role in creating and sustaining the universe all are features of reality, universally and uniformly applicable everywhere and to everyone, meaning they're in the realm that which could not be otherwise, the true knowledge that Chaïm Perelman says is the product of demonstration, not argumentation.

Not long after I spotted this knot, its solution also struck me, much to my delight. I've never been terribly convinced by attempts to disprove God's existence through reductio ad absurdum. Using language, a finite system, to try to map the features of God, a transcendent being, is a sketchy undertaking in the first place. And where we find that things we believe to be true about God result in contradictions, it's foolishness to spring to the conclusion that we've just eliminated the possibility of His existence. What's far more likely is that the reconciliation of His attributes requires knowledge that our brains can't contain.

A week or so ago, I stumbled across a YouTube clip of Carl Sagan discussing the fourth dimension and showing a 3D shadow of a hypercube. The best we can do in understanding dimensions beyond the three of our senses is cobble together mathematical equations about them; we can't visualize them, and there seems widespread acceptance that this is just a shortcoming of our brain architecture. If that's easily accepted, then why do we struggle so mightily to understand that a far more complex problem might not yield all its nuances to our ability to capture meaning in words? God is all powerful, all knowing, all good, and evil exists in the world; the fourth statement in that series contradicts the first three. But it doesn't, because it simply describes a problem whose answer we don't know. To claim that no answer can exist, just because no human with a human brain has produced the answer, is hogwash. Another example: God is sovereign and orders all things, yet human beings have free will. Those two conditions can't both exist as propositions, but that simply means the logic that reconciles them is more than we can grasp.

A lot of times, I imagine a three-year-old toddler trying to tell her toddler friend what her mommy does all day at work. Does the toddler understand it all? Does she have the vocabulary and sophistication to explain it? Do those failings mean that her mother's job simply doesn't exist? Of course not.

So the reality of God's existence belongs both in the realm of that which could, and could not, be otherwise. And all I've found is that those categories of knowledge, however useful they've been since ancient times, are still of human construction and thus, necessarily, incomplete and imperfect.

Mediocre commitment

In the first place, in case there's any doubt, I am grateful for the existence of competitive debate. I owe much of what I do successfully as an educator to the years I spent pouring most of my energy and attention into winning debates. Here are just a few of the ways my debate heritage has imprinted my teaching:

• It taught me to be quick on my feet. Very little has built my credibility with students like my response latency.
• It taught me to be assertive, and, when necessary, nonverbally dominant. I have very few classroom disruptions, and the handful that happen rarely drag out for more than a few seconds.
• It made it very real to me that college students can excel, can work hard, can understand unbelievably complex concepts if they're given the right motivation. That certainty is the best inoculation against low expectations.
  

The list is nowhere near exhaustive. The one bonus I noticed most recently was the way debate prepared me to grade essays. I spent most of my debate career giving the first negative constructive (if you never debated, don't worry about the lingo), which means I was exposed over and over again to the experience of needing to pick apart someone's arguments on first hearing, under enormous time pressure. Every speaker in the debate has to do that, but the first negative is the first speech where actual line-by-line clash occurs, so there's a certain first impression to the picking apart, a certain feeling of getting first crack at the other team. In some debates, my immediate reaction was "Oh gosh, is that all they've got? That's pathetic. A good hard sneeze will make them fall apart." In others, their positions were solid enough that I had to rack my brain, but I managed to come up with winnable arguments in opposition. And in some debates, what they said was of such high quality and made so much sense that I had to shake my head and think, "Too good. I'll make noise, but it doesn't look good for us." So last week, when I was grading essays, I noticed that my brain was back in first negative mode, and where I could sneeze hard and make the essay fall apart, that was a C or below; where I could think of some things to pick apart, but on the whole what they said was sound, that was somewhere in B range; and when, as happened encouragingly often, I thought "Too good; nothing much to quibble with," then those were A essays. And the fact that I was using that gear in my brain both sped up the work and gave me an extra layer of enjoyment, based on my association with those past experiences.

So, as I started out by saying, debate has done a lot to equip me for what I do today. And, since I'm the communication faculty at NCU, and the director of forensics to boot, it would seem that I'm in a position to give that learning experience to the students here. Unfortunately, there are a few complications.

To begin with, virtually no one here has a background in debate from high school. Some college debate teams put a lot of time and resources into novice development, teaching college students how to debate from ground zero on up, but other college debate teams mostly recruit successful high school debaters and teach them from moderate experience up to the top of the activity. All the programs I worked with during my full-time coach years fell into the latter category. Honestly, my debate coaching instincts don't run in the direction of teaching novices. I can certainly do it -- I taught novice labs at summer workshops for a number of years -- but it's much harder work, and doesn't come at all naturally.

To continue, learning how to debate is very time-intensive, and I've rarely seen college students as overcommitted and overstretched, time-wise, as I have at NCU. Students here do a lot of stuff. Scholarship athletes hold key posts in student government. RAs also do small group Bible studies. And I've got at least two team members who have both of those sizable commitments on their time, not to mention classwork, before they ever set foot in my office to practice anything forensics-related. If we had a critical mass of students who could find two two-hour blocks of time each week in their schedules, then I could devote one to bringing them up to speed on vocabulary, concepts and strategy, and we could use the other each week for a practice debate. But I may as well wish for the moon.

Not only that, but the very best format of debate isn't practiced at all in this part of the country. I debated NDT/CEDA, which is research intensive and involves the most actual speaking time of any of the formats: nine minute constructives, six minute rebuttals, two for each debater in each debate. But tournaments in that format simply don't happen much in the Pacific Northwest, and not at all in Oregon. Instead, people here do parliamentary style debate, which is different in a number of ways. In parli debate, research is certainly a good idea as preparation, but it's against the rules to cite the research directly in the actual rounds. This means it's often a winning move simply to make things up. (I didn't originally write "things.") Plus, the speeches are both fewer and shorter, which makes the debates more shallow. The benefit for time invested is a lot less; not zero, but a lot less.

Last complication: I got out of full-time coaching back in the last century because I was burned out on it. I started debating in the fall of 1982, and seventeen years later, I had simply worn out the game. In my last year of coaching, all the debates were sounding alike. I was no longer getting excited about any debate, even debates that I could tell were extremely good. In the years since, the burnout hasn't worn off; I'm glad I debated, and I'm glad I still have the skills and confidence that debate built into me, but I'm not especially interested in being actively involved in debate. It's devilishly hard work for me to get the slighest bit motivated to think, or otherwise work, on debate.

Put all of that together, and I'm left in a terrible dilemma. The students' commitments mean they don't have time to reach a certain minimum level of competence before going to compete, and they compete in a severely limited format, and I'm not as much help as I could be both because my coaching gifts aren't geared to novices and I don't really want to be thinking about debate. We put in token effort and make token appearances, but there are days when I think if we're going to do it in this half-hearted, halfway fashion, we may as well invest that time and effort in something else. But every time I have that thought, I remember what an enormous difference the opportunity to debate made in my life, and I feel an almost painful wish to give that to my students.

To be honest, dealing again and again with this dilemma is about the only part of my job that I genuinely don't like.

Mountain climbing

So this week's news has been all taken up with the three climbers who went missing on Mount Hood. One has been found, dead. The other two are still missing, but the weather has turned severe enough that the search has been halted indefinitely, and I'm hearing that there's less than a one percent chance that they're still alive. This story keeps grabbing my attention in part because it's touched off a debate about whether all climbers should carry beacons. It's also dredged up a loose end from the talk I gave to the incoming frosh last August, a loose end I wound up not including.

Nearly all college students bellyache about the core. They don't understand why they have to take classes from departments outside their major. Some think that they do understand, and the reasons they come up with don't cast us in a very good light: it's busy work, it brings in tuition money for the school. I'm frequently surprised at how many of my very good, very mature students are the loudest to complain about having to take core classes.

I planned to set aside some time in my talk with the frosh to take up this very subject, and this is how I was going to introduce it: when I lived in Arizona, I used to hear on the news about pinheads taking off to hike the Grand Canyon in the middle of August and taking nothing with them. No backpack, no cell phone, no water, nothing. And, naturally, a lot of them ran into trouble that they didn't see coming, and had to be rescued. Now it certainly should be possible to go on a hike without bringing along a cell phone: the cell phone does nothing to help me put one foot in front of the other. But a wise person will bring along a cell phone in case something unexpected does happen.

This Mount Hood story has a lot of folks demanding that reckless hikers and climbers who need rescuing be billed for the rescue, or even that certain zones be declared no-rescue zones; if you enter them, and something goes wrong, well, been nice knowing you. Most of us have a very easy time identifying sloppy and inadequate preparation in other people's behavior, and seeing it as a very clear-cut and egregious wrong, the kind we would never commit.

But that same principle of necessary preparation for the unknown is in play when it comes to core classes. Nearly everyone changes career fields many times over the course of a lifespan. I, for example, am already in my second occupation, and it wouldn't surprise me at all if there were more changes in store down the road. We take core classes, loading up with extra knowledge of such things as history, social and natural sciences, and basic skills in writing and math, for the same reason that competent mountain climbers take along a camping stove. They likely don't enjoy shouldering the extra weight, but it is reasonably foreseeable that under certain circumstances, it will help them survive.

Unfortunately, necessary preparation is burdensome, and thus requires discipline, and people at this developmental stage have just emerged from under the externally imposed discipline of their parents, and are too giddy with relief from that emergence to be in a frame of mind to impose self-discipline from inside. But they're very ready, attitudinally, to look with disdain on hikers and climbers who set out on a journey unprepared. I just wish I could find a way to make that connection real for them, and make it deep and powerful enough that it would drive them toward cultivating a good attitude about boning up in core classes.