Knowledge 4

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19. I continue to marvel at what a great high school education I had. I've already indicated how wonderful my math and science teachers were. My English/literature professors were of the same quality. My college literature class was a breeze because I had already read half of the books in high school.

I will look up the name of my tenth grade English teacher, but I was remembering yesterday that we had a collection of short stories in a book called Point of View. In keeping with my personality, I was fascinated at the classification of fiction on the basis of point of view. First person subjective narration, third person omniscient objective narration.

A couple stories really struck me. One was called something like, "Going to Run All Night." The character, a former runner who finds himself as part of a company in a really bad spot, is asked to run forty miles in the middle of the night to inform another battalion that his company is surrounded and their communications are out. The short story is about him running, running, running to get help before dawn.

I loved the idea of being called upon to save everyone. This was a scenario I have always loved and, indeed, that I have to watch. When you grow up feeling like an unnoticed nobody, the idea of being called upon to step in and sacrifice yourself to be a hero has a certain appeal. The danger is that you come to like emergencies. You are less motivated to fix things for the long term or to build infrastructure because you find meaning in needing to be the hero.

The story also tapped into my increased love of running and my identification of myself as a runner. I would go on to run a couple marathons. I remember the first time I ran ten miles. It was about a mile from my house to the end of the elementary school to 26th street back down to sixth ave to my house. One summer I think in late high school I ran the loop 10 times. I saw it as quite a feat at the time.

20. There was another short story about a man who kidnapped people and hunted them for sport on an island. [1] If I find the book as I unpack I'll get the title. This would inspire one of my early novel ideas. In the novel, people are put into an internet world and hunted. My novel title was Domain of Consciousness. The kidnapped people realize that they can do all sorts of superpowered things if they only believe enough. Meanwhile, those who cannot imagine enough beyond what seems to be die in that world.

The hero wins by tapping into the subconscious of the hunter and arousing the God of his childhood, who destroys him. I never decided whether the novel would end with them stuck in that world, their bodies hooked up to machines, or whether someone would eventually find them in the real world and let them out. By the way, I had this idea a few years before The Matrix.

21. In the eleventh grade I had Mr. Hatley for what amounted to an American Literature course. He was spectacular, although I was annoyed with him on a test when he took off a point every time I misspelled the word versus. My Christian upbringing led me to spell it verses. Suffice it to say, I have never misspelled that word again... ever. It does highlight that I think phonetically. I often type homophones and have to correct myself.

That class had what had become my people, my closest circle of high school friends. Facebook came out right at the juncture when memory might have threatened to lose high school. I enjoy being Facebook friends with many of those from those years. We are all now in our early fifties. I think it was my junior year that Mary Jo Hamil found out my parents were out of town and came over with a boom box playing Adam Ant's, Goodie Two-Shoes.

In Mr. Hatley's class we read Emerson, Thoreau, Whitfield, Melville, Cooper. He was a gentle, soft-spoken man. I remember him as a quietly devout Presbyterian. At least he had the demeanor of a Presbyterian. :-) As I remember other things I read in high school I'll add them here.

21. Senior year was the epilog. As valedictorian I received a number of awards. I mentioned the RPI award for science. I won the Voice of Democracy contest with an essay. I was surprised to be nominated for the Mr. FLHS contest, although I didn't come close to winning. I was an officer in the Key Club and we went to a Key Club convention in south Florida that year. I would get a scholarship from them that helped in college and even beyond.

I was president of the National Honor Society and was officer in several clubs. There was "Night of Joy" at Disney World, where high school students spend the whole night there having fun. Casey Walker and I, who had perhaps become my best friend, went on an academic trip to Washington DC. I remember meeting him the summer after graduation and him saying, "Just think of how much smarter than us the people will be that we are about to meet at college." I wasn't real keen on the comment. :-) Of course life has nicely pointed out my place in the scheme of things to me.

I have a certain selective stupidity. In some ways I seem very smart. In other ways very stupid. In my youth, my frequent stupidity did not allow for much pride. I didn't really realize how much easier many things are for me than others. But of course they see the reverse on other things.

One obvious thing that didn't really dawn on my in my early days is the fact that being smart isn't just about being able to understand something eventually. Real geniuses understand things with which I struggle immediately. I might be able to understand about anything if I work hard enough at it. Geniuses understand so many things immediately without any effort or explanation.

22. Cathy Edwards and I had some strange thing going with the names of Russian leaders. She called me Yuri; I called her Andropov. Then she called me Konstantin and I called her Chernenko. We lost touch with each other soon after Mikhail... Gorbachev.

Perhaps it was Modern European History that inspired that exchange. We had a teacher just out of college. She was a nice lady but at times we felt like we knew more than she did. As I would later be my first year teaching, she was quite manipulable. I think I got a 4 on that AP exam, surprisingly. Central probably shouldn't have, but between my 4 on the American History AP exam and my grade on this one, they gave me something like 12 credit hours of history. I didn't have to take any history in college.

23. My twelfth grade English teacher was Mrs. VanRoo. It was hard to follow Mr. Hatley, but she did a good job. If his course was oriented toward early American literature, hers was more like a course in British literature. I seem to remember reading Shakespeare and Jane Austen. I was not culturally aware enough at the time to realize fully how little differences between the United States and England made some of these works hard for me to understand. And what exactly is a marsh?

I wrote my first fiction in her class, a short story titled, "The Light of the Withered Rose." I'll slip it into this series if I find the time. I was quite proud of it. It made me want to write a novel some day. I've started well over fifty. The first one I finished wasn't until about two years ago. I also wrote some poetry I was proud of that year. My grandfather Shepherd wrote poetry.

24. One of the highlights of my senior year was Mr. Stock's Humanities class. He said at the beginning of the year that he regularly had students come back and tell him how much his class helped them when they traveled Europe. I had the same experience. At the time, I never imagined that I would live and travel in Europe the way I did.

His course was a mixture of history, world literature, art, and philosophy. We read The Republic and Machiavelli's The Prince. we saw pictures of the Mona Lisa and flying buttresses. I would later live three years in Durham under the shadow of a cathedral that started construction with Romanesque style but ended in the Gothic period. What a spectacular high school education I had! I have ridden those fumes to today.

25. For science, I had Chem 3AP and Physics my senior year. The physics teacher was Ms. McGuire, a former nun as I recall. I enjoyed her very much. I would get a 4 on the physics AP exam and 4 hours of college credit from it. The fact that I had gone through most of the Navy Basic Electricity and Electronics course with Mr. Brandt certainly helped. And we had Mr. Pickett for Calculus at the same time as well. So even though Ms. McGuire did not assume calculus, we were looking at some of the same material from two different perspectives.

I don't know exactly how my interest in quantum physics started. I ended high school thinking I was going to become a chest surgeon of some sort. But it wasn't real. I wasn't practical enough to succeed at something like that. It was an idea. I did get a full tuition scholarship to the University of Miami into their 5 year honors med school program. The Isaac Bashevis Singer Scholarship.

Before the doctor idea, though, I had thought of becoming a nuclear physicist, which must have been either late middle or early high school. To this day I love physics and have on my bucket list finally understanding quantum physics. I am not far from understanding Schrödinger's equation. One of my unfinished novels is about a quantum physicist who is in a bad car accident and forgets almost all of his past knowledge. One of his goals in the novel is to understand this equation again. He fails.

I think it was my friend Paul Herman who introduced me to a book called Gödel, Escher, Bach my senior year. I still haven't finished it. I bought a number of books in those years, some of which I finished much later. Thirty Years That Shook Physics, Einstein's Relativity. Sometimes I absorbed the key ideas of these sorts of works without fully finishing them.

Gödel's incompleteness theorem would later be of interest to me from the standpoint of hermeneutics. It basically states that no set can completely describe itself. There has to be at least one key outside a set to identify a structure to the set. I'm probably massacring the concept. Gödel pretty much undermined the life work of Bertrand Russell in trying to reduce all mathematics to a set of self-contained axioms, as I understand it.

But it relates, I believe, to the notion of sola scriptura. As a set of books from varying time periods and authors, the Bible cannot cohere as a set without bringing to bear on it some organizing principle or principles from the outside. In other words, something outside the Bible has to make it a canon. All of this of course fits with history, as the early church collected the Bible as a canon and, as it were, provided organizing principles for its coherency by way of orthodoxy.

In short, sola scriptura, taken in its most restrictive sense, is incoherent. The Wesleyan quadrilateral and the notion of prima scriptura is thus a far superior hermeneutical model.

26. I did not want people outside my group to know I was a nerd. In a discussion with David Riggs at IWU in recent years, I mentioned that I realized back in middle school that most people just weren't interested in the same things I was. I would later resonate with Juvenal's sense that what most people want is, "bread and circuses." We read Tale of Two Cities in Mr. Hatley's class. I understood what happens when the majority turns on the so called intelligensia.

This pessimistic sense of real human interest in truth has only been confirmed through life. Haidt's The Righteous Mind fit very well with my sense that, although we humans play intellect games, we are by and large not really interested in truth. Ideas and intellect are games we play to make ourselves feel justified to be who we are by invoking something greater than ourselves. Religion largely has functioned this way in human culture on the highest scale. We use God to justify what our tribe thinks and wants to do.

I hope it's obvious that I don't think true religion or intellect is like that. It is just the way of most humanity. Indeed, there are many people far smarter than I am in many ways who, nevertheless, only use their intellect to reinforce what they already want to think. My advantage is that I am a true truth seeker, not someone using the "truth" as a tool of their tribe.

If you are not willing to change your position based upon the evidence--or at least aren't willing to admit to yourself that you are taking a leap of faith in the face of current evidence, then you really aren't interested in the truth. You're just a tribalist, maybe a very smart one.

So, as a former VPAA at IWU once said, "Students don't come to IWU to learn the liberal arts. They come hoping for a career that will give them a job. We have to trick them into the benefit of the liberal arts." For most colleges and most students, I fear this is the case. You won't attract most students by advertising yourselves as a liberal arts school.

A good education has a bit of subversion in it. The person enlightened from the journey is glad they took it. But they might not have chosen the path of knowledge if they had known what it would mean from the front end. All education involves some unlearning of our unreflective starting point.

I was quite happy one time when a fellow track athlete asked me if I had passed all my classes. He had no idea I was a nerd.

[1] Diana (Fernandez) Baker remembered that the short story was "The Most Dangerous Game." Another story that resonated strongly personally for me was "Flowers for Algernon." For some reason I resonated with this poor soul who, for a time, went from very low intelligence to very high intelligence and then back again to little.