Learning And Teaching

Feynman Learning Technique:
1)  Take a piece of paper and write the concept’s name at the top.
2)  Explain the concept using simple language (show examples to demonstrate you know how the concept works)
3)  Identify problem areas in your explanation or examples and then go back to the sources to review the material / concept
4)  Pinpoint any complicated terms and challenge yourself to simplify them.
Several days ago, I posted a quote and made a comment about excellence in teaching.  (Why We Have So Few Personal Favorites )  Basically, my proposition was that it is extremely difficult to evaluate the competence and productivity of a teacher because of the number of variables and an inability to control them to a point sufficient to determine what are the tools we could provide the “most effective” teachers to make them better (or any teachers for that matter).
I never gave much thought about teaching until I joined the Army and they insisted I learn, participate in and practice “Performance Oriented Training” (POTs training) when I attended the NCO Academy in Frankfurt, Germany.  Essentially, POTs stipulates that until the student can perform the task, the training has not been effective.  There were three elements:  1)  the instructor demonstrates the task to be performed / explaining the objective of the task, the reason for the task, and each step necessary to complete the task;  2)  the instructor then walks / talks the student through each step as they (the student) follows along with each step;  and, 3)  the instructor asks the student to perform the task independently.  If the student fails in performance (step 3), the instructor must return to element 2.  Re-cycle through elements 2 and 3 until 3 can be accomplished independently.  At that point, the student can perform the task and the training has been effective.  (Of course long term retention of the knowledge / skill is a different matter.)
This training methodology served me very well during my working life / career as I was frequently called upon to instruct on topics in the military, and then as a civilian:  from credit card fraud prevention, to correspondent banking, to numerous Information Technology topics (basic trouble-shooting, using spreadsheets, using word processing applications, server and network administration, setting up databases, conducting data analysis and creating web pages to display the analysis / data).
Rather late in my career, I “discovered” (i.e. read about) Dr Richard P. Feynman (PhD) and his personal learning methodology.  Post-employment (i.e. in retirement), I’ve now watched bits and pieces of Professor Feynman’s lectures (on YouTube) and I believe his methodology is a civilian / academic equivalent of personal POTs training.  That is:  how we should expect to teach ourselves and verify our own knowledge / competency in a subject.  I shudder to think of the number of lectures / classes / training sessions I’ve attended where the instructor either did not have this level of personal expertise or expect the student to demonstrate understanding at the end of the session.  Which, (again) is why we remember our few “great” teachers over our lifetimes.
Disclaimer:  The list of four steps above are available in several books and on the web and the exact wording is neither mine nor exclusive to any specific source so I have not bothered to cite any “original” source.  I apologize in advance if anyone reading this feels I have used their exact language describing Dr. Feynman’s technique.
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I Never Could Keep A Secret

The secret of success is making your vocation your vacation.
—    Mark Twain
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No Crumbs

Aside from a moral obligation to treat workers well and pay them a living wage, there’s nothing to prevent more companies from jettisoning full-time employees and shifting to lower-paid gig workers.
They’d just be following what has been happening for decades in other fields.  Just as manufacturing shifted overseas for cheaper labor and as gig economy apps drove down wages for taxi and delivery drivers, the pandemic has hastened the gig-ification of white-collar jobs.  The gig economy might have been a crowded space before COVID-19, but the booming economy masked its workers’ struggles because many of them could find other jobs to supplement their income.  Now, that extra work has dried up, and their desperation is more evident than ever.  When gig work is the only pie that’s available to millions of people, sharing it means that some don’t even get crumbs.
—    Alana Semuels
In her article:  “As the gig economy grows, its workers’ paychecks shrink“
In:  Time Magazine, dtd:  1-8 June 2020
This article also appears online with a different title:  “‘It’s a Race to the Bottom.’ The Coronavirus is Cutting Into Gig Worker Incomes as the Newly Jobless Flood Apps“
The specific link is:  https://time.com/5836868/gig-economy-coronavirus/
You may have to go through a paywall to view the online article.
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When I Grow Up I Want To…

Cleaning Windows
The “original” LP version…
And a “live” version…
Comment(s):
When my son was young (pre-teen) and we were living in Liverpool, his mum and I used to ask him what he wanted to grow up to be.  He always replied:  “I want to clean windows.”  We always assumed he’d grow out of this “job” answer, but he kept saying it for several years.
One day I asked him why he wanted to clean windows.  He replied:  “Because when you’re up on the ladder, you don’t have a boss constantly looking over your shoulder and watching you work and you get your money in hand after each house.”  I asked him why that was important.  He replied:  “Because the tax man will never know how much you earned, so you can diddle him dead easy.“
I used to chuckle about that conversation every time I heard this song.  Nowadays, I think:  “Someday my son could turn out to be a Republican candidate for the Presidency.“
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Works For Me

If I didn’t make it in baseball, I won’t have made it workin’.  I didn’t like to work.
—    Yogi Berra
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I Hope So

One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.
—    Sigmund Freud
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I Don’t Think We’ll Be Serving Them Cake

…
Capitalism, however, has been here before.  One of its great historic strengths has been its ability to reform and change shape as social needs and democratic demands shift.  In the late 19th century, parties of the right in Europe brought in a wave of progressive reforms to suit the times, from expanded union rights to the social insurance that began the creation of the modern welfare state.  In these cases, there was a pragmatic and also a moral imperative at work to improve the lives of ordinary citizens.
Yet today, politicians and thinkers have largely stopped making the case for capitalism as a moral good.  What we have instead are abstract ideas about the supremacy of markets.  At the same time, the surges in inequality seen in country after country are corroding the moral principles that underpin capitalism.  The ethical basis for capitalism must be that it offers better life chances for a majority of citizens.  If it is failing to do that, what is the justification for its dominance as an economic system?  Little wonder that a Gallup poll found only 45% of U.S. young adults view capitalism positively, a 12-point decline in just two years.
…
Artificial intelligence has the potential to alter our lives to an even greater extent.  AI is best understood not as an upgrade of our existing structures but as a general-purpose technology (GPT), like electricity or the steam engine.  GPTs are transformative in their social and economic impacts, reaching into every aspect of life.  “Some people believe that it’s going to be on the scale of the Industrial Revolution,” says Demis Hassabis, the AI expert who co-founded the pioneering machine-learning company DeepMind.  “Other people believe it’s going to be the class of its own above that.”
The crucial factor for managing these changes is time.  In 1900, the proportion of the U.S. population who worked in agriculture was 38% and the proportion who worked in factories was 25%.  Today only 1.5% of the population works in agriculture and 7.9% in factories.  So there’s been a catastrophe of unemployment?  Absolutely not: the losses were more than made up for by growth in other sectors of the economy, which went from providing 24 million jobs in 1900 to some 150 million today.  Most of the new varieties of work simply didn’t exist at the dawn of the last century.  Given time, we know from experience that a society can manage this kind of transition.  The question is, do we have that time?
…Think about what the working life will be of a person who can expect to live for a full century.  What can we say about the likely span of her economic and political life?  The only absolute certainty is that it will involve change.  It will not be static.  It will not involve doing the same thing in the same place over and over again.  Unless we are all prepared for change, we are not prepared for the coming world of work.
At the individual level, the prescription for what we should do to prepare for this new landscape is relatively straightforward.  For a life of multiple careers and skills, people need an education that prepares them for a lifelong process of training and retraining.  They will need, more than anything else, to learn how to learn.  Flexibility and resilience will be crucial.  It won’t be easy, but at least we can see it clearly.  At the level of society it is harder.  Let’s be honest:  this is a vision of insecurity, projected across a working life.  It is a clear principle of economic and political history — one we’re relearning today — that humans hate insecurity.
What we need is to rethink the relationship between the individual, the corporate sector and the state.  In recent decades, we have seen a “great risk shift” — to borrow the term of the Yale social scientist Jacob Hacker.  Individuals in temporary, insecure, giglike employment are taking on risks that used to belong to the corporate sector.  Not coincidentally, the share of GDP going to the corporate sector as profits has risen and the share accruing to labor as pay has gone down.
That trend, and that risk transfer, are not sustainable over time.  We need a social safety net focused on career support rather than just simple unemployment benefits.  Companies and individuals and the state must work together to build an enhanced and more flexible version of the welfare state that overlaps with lifelong training and education.
…
The architects of this new industrial revolution, by the way, agree with this proposition.  Yann LeCun, the chief AI scientist at Facebook and one of the pioneers of deep learning, said recently that every economist he has spoken to agrees that governments must take measures to compensate for rising inequality brought about by technology.  “All of them believe this has to do with fiscal policy in the form of taxing, and wealth and income distribution.”
We also need a functioning marketplace.  The collapse of U.S. government action in the area of antitrust and competition law has led to a damaging concentration across most industries — from cable TV to airlines, online advertising and farming.  While a new generation of robber barons controls huge sections of the U.S. economy, corporate profits surge, wages stagnate, and fewer ordinary workers have reason to believe in the capitalist system.
…
The final component of what we do next concerns not what we do but what they do — “they” meaning the elites who have profited most from the trends of recent decades.  Quite simply, those elites have to pay their taxes.  They have to stop using offshore havens and accounting tricks to hide their wealth from the societies in which they live and from which they make their profits. Instead of founding think tanks and gorging on discussions about improving distant lives, they have to attend to the lives around them in the places they actually live.
A new emphasis on the role of the nation-state;  a new partnership between the state and the private sector and the individual;  new action on lifelong learning and training;  higher and fairer taxes; less security for big corporations:  these things shouldn’t be unthinkable.  It is strange and sad that the least likely thing on my wish list is the idea that elites will change their behavior.
But elites may have to change if they don’t want change to be imposed on them.  This coming wave of technological transformation has the potential to be the most serious challenge modern capitalism has faced.  For people who don’t have the chance to change and adapt and re-skill, a pitiless world ruled by algorithms and machine learning, in which they have no utility, no relevant skills and no security, could look completely unlivable.  Facing that prospect, the populations of the developed world may do things that make the current populist moment look polite, low-key and lawful.
—    John Lanchester
From his article:  “Economy:  Leveling The Playing Field“
Appearing in:  Time Magazine (dtd:  Feb 4/11, 2019)
The article also appears online as:  “The Next Industrial Revolution Is Coming.  Here’s How We Can Ensure Equality“
The link to the entire online version is:  http://time.com/collection/davos-2019/5502589/next-industrial-revolution/
[Please note: This article is extensively quoted without permission from the author or from Time Magazine.  I personally subscribe to the physical version of Time Magazine and have done so for almost 50 years now.  I make no claim to ownership of the article or its ideas.  I do NOT normally post so extensively from an article, but this was (to me) a powerful article about the future of civilization, so I have made an exception.  The ellipses indicate where I have edited out portions of the article.  I hope neither the author nor Time Magazine will object to my editing or use of the article.  Obviously, I encourage all of my readers to go to read the original.    —    KMAB]
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Insha’Allaha Bukra

Work is the greatest thing in the world, so we should always save some of it for tomorrow.
—    Don Herold
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I’m Actively Irresponsible

To do real good physics work, you do need absolute solid lengths of time  …  it needs a lot of concentration  …  if you have a job administrating anything, you don’t have the time.  So I have invented another myth for myself:  that I’m irresponsible.  I’m actively irresponsible.  I tell everyone I don’t do anything.  If anyone asks me to be on a committee  …  ‘no’ I tell them:  I’m irresponsible.
—    Richard Feynman
Quoted by:  Cal Newport
In his on-line article:  “Is Email Making Professors Stupid“
Appearing on the site:  The Chronicle of Higher Education, located at:  www.chronicle.com
[LOL!!!  It worked for me, too!    —    KMAB]
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Does Terrible But Not Important Count?

One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.
—   Bertrand Russell
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Too Significant

Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.
―    Mahatma Gandhi
No work is insignificant.  All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.
―    Martin Luther King Jr.
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Brown’s Rules

1.  Show up!
2.  Cultivate authenticity
3.  Set boundaries
4.  Actively practice gratitude
5.  Embrace vulnerability
6.  Let go of perfectionism
7.  Explore your emotions
8.  Build shame resilience
9.  Risk failure
10.  Don’t have any regrets
-= BONUS =-
* Let yourself be seen
—    Dr. Brené Brown
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But What Are You DOING About November?

Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work.
—    Peter Drucker
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Not Necessarily In This Order

I like to work, read, learn, and understand life.
―    Langston Hughes
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Coffee Crunch

A few nights back, I was chatting with my older daughter about funny things which happen at work.  She chuckled and said like teaching the boss to make his own coffee.  I asked what she was referring to.  She said a co-worker approached her one day and commented she was sooooo lucky to have a boss who didn’t expect her to get up and make his coffee for him.  The co-worker inquired how she managed it.
My daughter explained she didn’t actually.  She began working for her boss as an office intern while in high school.  Her only experience with adults drinking coffee up till then was her parents (my wife and I) drinking instant coffee.  When she was asked to make some coffee, she added a couple of spoonfuls of ground coffee to the pot, poured in some boiling hot water, and gave it a stir.  Voila!
She didn’t realize ground coffee went in a separate place and required a filter…
No one actually complained, but no one asked her to make a pot of coffee for quite awhile after that.
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