Living-Learning and Teaching

This is a deeper dig into the list that I had created for my article titled: Do Something Every Day. https://polymathtobe.blogspot.com/2020/11/living-do-something-everyday.html

Ever since I was young, my parents and my culture had instilled a sense of respect for learning. Even though the dominant pedagogical philosophy in Taiwan was of the cram and memorize in school, I learned more by asking Why? What if? And How? questions. In fact, when my family moved to Honduras, one of the new family friends there would shake his head at how often Why? came out of my mouth.

It was a natural habit that follows me today, although the persistent question asking has been tempered by circumspection and patience.

The joy of learning and the pride in knowing is a part of my genetics, it is my raison d’etre. I realized this fact about myself late in life, much after I had set my life on a path which was expected of me: to chase after the brass ring.  Our society does not hold the idea of knowledge for the sake of knowledge in high regard. My pursuit of broad knowledge is considered by society as living as a jack of all trades but master of none, which is considered a pejorative in our society because  of society’s need for its workers to specialize and concentrate on narrow bailiwicks and serve as replaceable cogs in the production machine supersedes society’s desire to have people who knew knowledge for the sake of knowledge.   

I have instead started telling people that I am a polymath in training because I felt I needed to disguise my joy in pursuing my catholic span of interests. Saying that you are training to become a polymath is slightly more respectable than being a jack of all trades; at the least the term polymath will send people off to Google before they can denigrate the idea. As I became fascinated with the idea of the polymath, I have come to appreciate the implications of being a polymath. There is even a book espousing the many merits of a polymath (Ahmed 2019), or in David Epstein’s book on generalist.  (Epstein 2019)

It may have started out as a snarky retort, but this has become my purpose in life and my destiny: to know something about everything and everything about something.

In the ever-pragmatic reality in which we exist, the societal norm is to treat knowledge as salable commodities. This attitude narrowly define knowledge as either being  immediately applicable or as the basis for creating new knowledge from the foundation of the old knowledge. All to advance human progress. This was especially true in my chosen profession of engineering. We were judged as either as applied, real-world engineers; or as theoretical and impractical researchers.

Teaching is an obvious third option, but it is held as a very non-glamourous, non-celebrated third option. Society views teaching as necessary but non-value-added proposition for passing on the knowledge to the future workforce. Even though many researchers inhabit the hallowed hall of academia, their worth is determined narrowly by their originality and ability to break new grounds in their niche subjects.  The teaching part of their profession has rarely been celebrated as a standalone achievement, only as a companion, a complementary function that is secondary to the innovation and creative endeavors of the researcher. There have been good, if not great teachers amongst the great innovators, but the brilliance of their pedagogical prowess are seen merely as a bonus rather than as a primary endeavor.

As I worked my way through the usual career of an engineer with a doctorate, I found myself drawn to the teaching function as I got older. My gift, I realized, was not in applying the knowledge, or creating new knowledge; instead, my gift was in my ability to communicate knowledge to others. As I look back at my career as an engineer, I was never happier than when I was doing research, to learn, and then to teach.  I did get a thrill while applying my knowledge, at witnessing a design evolve into a product, or investigating the unexplored territories of engineering, creating something new and heretofore unknown; it is just that the thrill of connecting with another human while sparking their minds gave me bigger and more thrilling thrills.

I decided to make the learning something new every day and teaching someone something every day the central tenets in my daily list of habits. Habits that I hope to internalize. Habits that will  be my wu-wei behavior: doing without knowing, action without thought, impulse rather than intent. Make learning and teaching a deeply integrated part of my being. So it is that I train myself to do it everyday.

Works Cited

Ahmed, Waqas. The Polymath: Unlocking the Power of Human Versatility. New York City: John Wiley, 2019.

Epstein, David. Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. New York: Riverhead Books, 2019.

 

 

Observations: COVID Positive? Who me?

Today is the last day of my ten-day quarantine. One of my players had tested positive for COVID-19 two weeks ago, which meant that the team had to quarantine for 10 days. I decided to take advantage of the new testing kiosk at my local pharmacy and take my first COVID test.  Of course, I thought of it as a new experience that comes with this new COVID era. I never thought I would test positive. Positive test it was. I was completely incredulous. I didn’t have a fever, my oxygen levels, courtesy of my online investment in a Pulse Oximeter showed that my oxygen level averaged well above 95%. My sense of taste and smell were still intact. No sore throat, just a cough that recurs every winter for as long as I have been an adult. I questioned the woman who called me, and she assured me that false negatives were more prevalent than false positives and that I should plan on staying home for ten days.

Luck would have it that a series of winter storms rolled through the area, so I wasn’t going to go out anyways. I had food in the fridge, and I was able to discover the wonders of online grocery shopping and anonymous deliveries. I was lecturing to my class through Zoom sessions and everything that I did was easily taken of online.

Except.

I was missing my twice weekly volleyball practices with my team; their quarantine ended a full week before mine did. I missed coaching my knuckleheads something fierce, something that I expected but I did not expect how much I missed them. So, lesson one: I am still passionate about coaching volleyball.

Many people have described their own quarantine experience as pure misery. Being deprived of human companionship was devastating to my friends who had the misfortune of experiencing the same situation as I was about to experience. I knew it would not affect me as badly as it affected them, as I was an introvert by nature and I had accrued an immense To Be Read book pile, so I was not short on entertainment. I didn’t even come close to reading all that I had wanted to read. Lesson two: no matter how much time you may think you have to read; you still don’t have enough.

I did miss the conversations that I had with my coffee klatch group. To be fair, they had also decided to cancel a few of the meetings for the sake of the aforementioned winter storms. I made up for my missed conversations by sending them emails and links to articles that I would have brought up as potential conversation topics during our twice weekly ninety minutes of whirlwind sessions of conversational daring do and intellectual high wire act. Lesson three: you will always  yearn for intelligent conversations with your friends.

I was extremely fortunate in that I was asymptomatic through out my quarantine. There were some coughs and sniffles but the big news with my COVID experience was that it was no drama. The only salient effect is that my circadian rhythm is way off, I couldn’t get a continuous night of sleep. But then again, I was having a hard time sleeping through the night before I tested positive for COVID.

Unlike some people I know who survived the virus, I refuse to examine the chronology of my illness in complete hindsight and pontificate about the wisdom of my approach towards dealing with the virus; I know different, I know I dodged a bullet. Through some miracle of genetics or just sheer dumb luck, I avoided the worst of the punishment that could have been. I am grateful for my unaffected health, I am appreciative of winning this flirtation with disaster, and I am in awe of the powers of ambiguities, uncertainties, and randomness of our world which somehow came down on my side of the equation. Lesson four: dodging the possible by skating along the edges of the probable is very sobering.

There were moments of sheer terror as I experienced a number of  temporary symptoms that threw me into instant panic. Coughs, moments where I thought my forehead felt warm, or moments where I started to sneeze repeatedly. Every time I thought it was time to pay the piper the symptoms went away. I lived in a constant state of vigilance for the first five or six days of the quarantine, always having to pin my ears back at the first sign of abnormal bodily functions. But it never came. Lesson five: living every second of the ten days of quarantine as if you were under the sword of Damocles is a crappy way to live life.

I developed a ritual of texting my early morning vitals to a number of friends. I lived for those return texts of affirmation and happiness from these great friends, it is amazing just how I came to look forward to these tenuous connections to the world outside my house and the affirmations from those that care for me. Lesson six: affirmations from friends are better than ice cream when you are COVID positive.

As the end of the quarantine period came up, I began to feel a bit of guilt, about my asymptomatic status. I am not asking to getting beat up by the virus, I am not asking to suffer through the numerous pains and punishment that many others have suffered. I certainly don’t relish the thought of going into the hospital and hovering between life and death. But still, I keep wondering: why me? Why was I so lucky? One of my close friends lost her sense of smell and taste, she started suffered migraine headaches, and chronic fatigue. Yet here I am, someone who is ill-prepared physically to battle the virus, and I got away with minimal symptoms. You start to wonder about genetics and the serendipity associated with epistemological  uncertainties. I really don’t want to figure out the ins and outs of calculating the probabilities of my being where I am, but I still wonder. Lesson seven: no matter how good you have it; you will always feel guilty to not having had it worse.

Once the state of Ohio receives your positive result, they send your information to social workers and they contact you and basically tell you how to count the days of quarantine and what to do, what to avoid, what is OK, and what is forbidden. My case worker called, and we started chatting. I asked her a million questions and she patiently answered all of them, reassured me if I became nervous or borderline hysterical, and calmly gave me resources to contact. She walked me through the if-then scenarios thoroughly; indeed, she told me to keep the number on my caller ID handy so that I could call her back if anything came up. I called her back a few times and wonder of wonders, she played volleyball collegiately and she coached club volleyball. Who would have thought? Lesson eight: there are volleyball people everywhere you look, and by and large, they are the good people out there.

As my quarantine is coming to a close, my friend asked me what I was going to do when I leave the house for the first time in ten days. I honestly don’t know. First of all, I probably need to shovel the driveway as I had not bothered to do so through a few days of snowfall, so I might be stuck for a few more involuntary days. I may take a little drive around town, enjoy running errands, enjoying grocery shopping for the first time in ten days, even if I have become dangerously enamored with having my groceries delivered. I may even call one of my many favorite restaurants and order take out. I am not going to start eating out in person, not yet anyways. I am hoping to look upon the outside world with new eyes and experience every experience with a new perspective. Most of all, I will be thankful.