What Could Be Wrong With Me 1: Asynchronous Andragogy

 I was really tempted to title this post "Who put the peda in my gogy" but obviously that might imply that Mr Beauregard had me touch his weenus or something. Which didn't happen. As far as I'm aware, I'm not carrying that kind of trauma.

Disclaimer

A disclaimer in this series one might expect to include my complete lack of qualifications, and that's very true. What I wish I could prioritise over that, is a mutual acknowledgement that while I've invoked the "wrong" word and pointed it toward myself, I have enough healthy narcissism to be at significant risk of writing posts that are backdoor self-agrandisement/humble brags. You know, I mean check my grammar and punctuation and shit, to be confident this is just an example but the cliched "name a weakness" "I'm a perfectionist."

So I will disclaim here and now, I'm not necessarily searching for a cure nor am I suggesting that you should be more like me at any point. Like when an organised person meets a disorganized person and one presumes the other would want to be 'fixed' while the other presumes the one could benefit from learning to 'chill out.'

Or in a I'm sure British Colonial thought experiment, one civilization encounters another and is shocked to learn of a culture who eat their dead, and even more shocked to learn that civilization is shocked to learn that they bury their dead.

These series, whenever I get around to writing them, are attempting to be descriptive, explorative, not judgemental. That said, I'm me and will express myself uncharitably most often simply to amuse myself.

To the Man With A Smartphone Every Problem Looks Like An App

This will serve as my introduction, and I'll almost immediately get on the snark express. 

Humanity is undergoing a medical expertise crises. It is bad enough in the domain of biology, regarding vaccines and diets and shit. I personally know people that couldn't reconcile that when they told their career advisor they wanted to invest the next 3 years of their life becoming an accountant, and then worked as one for 35 years until in 2020 they found themselves in lockdown, that 38 years ago they had inadvertently closed the door on being an epidemiologist, and decided to have a crack at 'doing their own research.'

Psychology is, to my lay understanding, if not more complicated than biology, waaaaaaaay squishier. And, in the past 10 years in particular, but pretty much going back 25-30 years for me when ADHD was just ADD and Southpark were making episodes where Chef proposed the school adopt an exciting alternative to Ridilin called the "shut up and do your work" technique.

By my own availability heuristic, here's what lay-people seem to know:

• ADHD
• Autism Spectrum
• Narcissism
• Gender Dysphoria

Along with this, laypeople have a tendency to trivialise conditions that are actual conditions, referring to their own:

• OCD
• Anxiety
• Depression
• Expertise
• Competence
• Intelligence

Carelessly saying things like "That's my OCD always patting my pockets to see if I remembered my keys." and "I'm a good driver."

Hopefully a bunch of you have already threaded your own needle by this point and can skip ahead to the next bold heading, but for those who need a bit more, here's some documented phenomena I am aware of:

1. Confirmation bias
2. The Dunning-Kruger effect
3. Trends (fashion)
4. Medical Student's disease

These just give me pause before I feel any safety in numbers, nor any confidence I can have in a story I tell myself to make sense of the world, myself or someone else.

On top of this, somewhere I am actually qualified to speak on, is the domain of economics and also marketing. There can be advantages, and therefore incentives to having certain conditions. For example, if by virtue of a diagnosis an inefficient education system might grant you an additional hour to sit an exam that could determine whether you get into a top 100 University in the World, or a regular arse college we might see a phenomena where say, private schools wind up having over 50% of their enrolled students eligible for special consideration. And the trouble is, that in Australia and many (perhaps all) countries, secondary school has become mostly dedicated to discriminating between people to allocate scarce tertiary places. A market mechanism - meritocracy, that nominally rewards by Daniel Markowitz' analyses 1. Innate talent, 2. Effort and 3. Education & Training (Investment) and I assert, that the investment component can extend now to getting a doctor's note that says you get an extra hour to complete your exam.

Certainly there is a case to be made about making experts available to identify appropriate supports for learners for whom society might lose the benefit of their potential through something arbitrary - for an example that is likely both obvious and now quite redundant, there's no reason a blind kid called Matt Murdoch couldn't be a brilliant legal mind, and providing him textbooks translated into braille is worth both private and public investment.

But then there's all the people who simply want an edge for their own self-interest. They may even be displacing someone of greater potential who simply cannot access the same advantage. 

Outside of education, their are high profile cases of fraudsters who have faked serious health conditions for personal gain. Setting up fake charities and imbezzling funds.

This level of malevolence however, is itself on a spectrum. I find it highly likely that people will embark upon fraudulent self-diagnoses for matters as petty as attention or esteem. This fraud might be completely off the malice spectrum, and simply the product of incompetence. I have met and been a teenager that wondered if they might be bipolar, because they had periods where they felt down, and other periods where they felt up. In my own case I noticed I tended to listen to music in waves defined by energy levels. For a week I might listen to real shoegaze type stuff, and felt pretty flat myself, then I'd get in the mood for some Funk-metal, and feel pretty up.

Suffice to say, this is not bipolar.

I don't feel competent to even self-diagnose seasonal affective disorder.

Yet, my lack of confidence I would assess as abnormal. For a literal 5 fucking years I felt a stranger in a strange land working a job where to a man my colleagues were diagnosed with 'anxiety' I foolishly had presumed that the people all around me had undergone some form of clinical therapy where a psychologist had diagnosed them. It took one person letting slip that they had never seen a therapist for the penny to drop, that everyone around me was self-diagnosed likely from tumbler or reddit. 

As it transpired 'anxiety' is not even a diagnosis. Don't get me wrong, generalised anxiety disorder is a diagnosis, and I believe there might be an anxious personality disorder too, which could charitably be shorthanded to 'anxiety' but mostly it was people telling themselves a story that was self-debilitating but came with the benefit of relieving them of the responsibility of dealing with uncertainty.

So to wrap this up, I'll put it to you, a little case study: You have a friend whose behaviour you don't quite understand. They seem to take odd tangents in conversation, that feels unnatural, and disorienting for you. Now, it could be ADHD, or it could be Autism Spectrum Disorder, or it could be both. But how many other things could it be, based on the described symptoms?

Respect expertise. Having said that, now I'm going to wildly speculate, I know I'm doing it. Do you?

Pedagogy

Pinko Marxists know what pedagogy means because they recognize it from Paulo Freire. Allegedly 'Pedagogy of the Oppressed' is the third most cited book in social sciences. It really makes me think how small the world of Academia is, particularly at the published-in-a-journal level.

Pedagogy is basically "the way of teaching children" now, I don't know the history of pedagogy, what preceded the industrial revolution, what came about in the industrial revolution, nor how it changed over time. I also generally don't respect the epistemology of critical theory as a sound one. I will give what most lay people and some scholars refer to as "postmodernism" its due, but I look at Freire's wikipedia page where he asserts a "traditional pedagogy" exists as some kind of known quantity, and it might be fair enough to generalise that schools where a teacher teaches kids at desks a set curriculum is a tradition. But I don't know if that gives proper due to how much education has evolved while preserving some common elements for a very long time.

He was writing in the late 50s and 60s when he coined "the banking model of education" for his asserted traditional pedagogy. This involves kind of treating kids heads as empty vaults where knowledge is simply deposited. So kid comes in, can't do maths, tell them how to do maths, kid goes out 'educated.'

So decades after pedagogy of the oppressed was published, I started my education. I simply don't have enough detail to compare my experience to whatever Freire is getting at. All that is clear to me, is that education is certainly not efficient. Students are routinely put into classes with only minute differences in their physical perspective of the class, otherwise exposed to the exact same stimulus and results are not-quite-all-over-the-place. Usually results are normally distributed, perhaps with a few outliers.

By 12 years, the majority of students tend to acquire literacy and numeracy, but beyond that, I can't say any two students have much in common. I never witnessed for example, a 'dumb' student become 'smart' through a process of education. Certainly individual teachers could attain results from students that other teachers seemingly couldn't. This seemed to be typically a product of two compatible personalities. I would guess the more important one was the personality of the teacher and particularly the enthusiasm they possessed for the subject they were teaching.

A Book At Bedtime

I was pretty much illiterate until age 10. The first proper book I read was an abridged version of Jane Eyre in a special remedial class I was sent to during grade 3. 

Mostly my parents tell me, but I do have some decayed memories that could be fabricated, that I had this trick to fake my ability to read - my parents were quite diligent in reading me bedtime stories, and quite early on I adopted the transparent trick of following about a syllable behind them in reading. 

So they would be reading a picture book like Spot or Grug, and they'd say "One day..." and I would just repeat "One day..." as close as I could to them, but was unable to ever overtake the reader. I cannot recall if I could read certain limited words like "the" and "and" I knew I could write my own name but being left handed wrote it as "Mot" naturally mirror scripting my instructors writing technique, and I feel like I must have attempted to write more.

I am also the unreliable narrator of my history here. For example, I might have been 9 or 8 when I learned to read, and was simply behind. I can't remember being given any actual remedial instruction, all I remember is being taken to a room and left in the presence of some books that I may have started reading simply to alleviate boredom. My issues may have been simply attributed to a lack of confidence to read aloud with the class.

Anyway, I learned to read, then I became a reader, reading for myself The Hobbit, some of the Narnia entries and eventually, good books like the Roald Dahl ones, Erik the Viking and Ursula K. Leguin's Earthsea Trilogy before it became a cycle, and then back to bad but diverting books like the Fighting Fantasy books.

What I vividly recall hating, was fucking cut and paste. As an adult I sincerely hope cut and paste activity books are fucking gone now. When I was a child, we were subjected to pots of clag, and had to cut out five apples with fucking safety scissors, apply clag and glue them to a picture of a tree, in what must have been a means of ostensibly teaching numeracy, but was tedious by design to allow primary teachers a 15-60 minute break.

I never got strong at maths, but I don't feel I was ever close to innumerate either. So what does a vague memory of illiteracy and a vivid memory of tedium have in common?

What's the fucking point?

A few weeks ago I was having a chat to the neighbour's gardener. He was telling me he used to be a nurse, and despite being a nurse for 20 years he had to sit an exam annually to prove to regulators he knew how to wash his hands. 

I can steelman the case of the regulators and the consumers/citizens they act on the behalf of - infections and contamination are serious, and warrant serious reassurance. What I can't do is imagine a reason some ISO9000 intern couldn't tick a box after a 30 second practical demonstration. Now, I don't believe the hyperbole that he had to sit an exam to prove one simple vocational skill. I'm sure there were questions about administering medications and changing wound dressings and all of that. 

What I can relate it to, is that there's no conceivable need to cut out little rudimentary pictures of apples and glue them next to other pictures of apples, using clag pots and safety scissors to demonstrate to a teacher that 2 + 3 makes 5, and that 3 + 4 makes 7. This could have been demonstrated using my fingers, and I feel that as a tiny little kid, I knew my time and energy was being wasted on tedium.

It was not that I didn't need to take off my shoes and socks to count to twenty, and I shared at least one class with Chris who would go on to be dux of my secondary school and was always good at maths, much better than me. 

My problem was that I didn't see the fucking point. I could imagine having more time to make frogs out of clay, or draw cars with guns on them in art class, which I enjoyed.

Here I'd like to denote, that I, like you, don't experience my unconscious. Certainly in my primary school years I would not have had the emotional competence to name my emotions as and when they arose. I would not have had the vocab to describe a difference between boredom and frustration, I would not, until my thirties learn to distinguish between anger and anxiety. So at this point, I really am speculating as to what was going on.

I was somehow looking at these cut-and-paste activity books, processing the emotional data that I did not enjoy them, anticipating some kind of trade off between the learning outcome and the tedium required to obtain it and foregoing the learning outcome in order to forego the tedium.

As to why I couldn't read, I have no vivid affective memory as to why I 'cheated' reading aloud by just mimicking my parents with a kind of parlour trick (the shitty kind). So I'm just rear projecting, a pattern I preserve to this day - it is likely I couldn't see the point of learning to read and nobody bothered explaining it to me.

My parents recently recounted an impression I made upon them as a child, that certainly sounds like me but I cannot myself recall - they were talking about how bribes/extortion didn't work on me, having informed me that if I didn't finish my dinner (likely steamed squash [what australians call squash]) I couldn't have any icecream. Apparently I said "looks like I'm not having ice cream then." Like some wiseguy being questioned by the filth.

What I can remember though, are the 5 years I studied Japanese. First in primary school, where I memorised some songs in Japanese like heads, shoulders, knees and toes - atama, kata, hisa, ashii. Some numbers and a couple of colours. I couldn't learn to read Japanese hiragana though either. 

I would not learn hiragana until year 8, where Jordan sensei introduced me to mnemonics to learn both hiragana and katakana relatively quickly. Like reading, I caught up pretty quickly though the Chinese characters kanji I never took to. I can probably still write about 30 kanji characters of the 3000 or so that are required to read the Asahi Shinbun and attend University in Japan. 

Speaking to, did not take, and this is the big clue to pointlessness being my major obstacle in acquiring languages. For some reason, my brain refused to learn beyond a box-checking level that made me a C student in Japanese, any actual Japanese that I could use to talk to Brenton, Keegan, Laura, Hayden, Belinda, Sarah or Sean. 

What I retrospectively construct as the 'some reason' being an unconscious awareness, that without Japanese, my friends and I could talk about Primus' obvious influence on both 3-11 and Incubus, but in Japanese we could have inane conversations about walking two blocks and turning left, before walking one block and turning right in order to get to an imaginary post office.

Nippon ni Haite Kudasaimase

(My Japanese is rusty) But Chie our host mum has picked up Brenton and I from the Nagoya train station after a week or two of travelling around Japan with our teacher and seeing some sights. Brenton is having a go, trying out his Japanese talking to Chie, who can speak good English, though it takes her cognitive effort and she perhaps feels simultaneously guilty and anxious to do so. 

I can only understand a word here and there that Brenton is saying, yet I have a profound impression of this car trip. It is like it is the most fascinating lesson in Japanese I have ever had, and while Chie includes me, by explaining that we will go to some shops before getting to her house etc. in English, nobody is teaching me. I imagine myself watching through narrow eyes, as Brenton finally, but indirectly, explains to me the point of learning Japanese.

Now you see, to give you temporal whiplash, I can remember the point of learning Japanese being explained to me by O'Neal sensei in Grade 4 or 5 when I learned heads, shoulders, knees and toes. The point was that the Victorian Department of Education now required children in primary school to study/be instructed in one language other than English. 

Arbitrarily, I was being taught Japanese in primary school, because my primary school was able to hire a Japanese teacher. Being a major trade partner of the 80s before the Japanese bubble burst and they went on to some 30+ years of economic stagnation while China grew rapidly playing catch-up, Japanese was taught in a lot of primary and secondary schools. I then largely continued to study Japanese via inertia, every secondary school I went to also had it, and by the time LOTE subjects became electives, I likely preferred it to doing accounting or chemistry, because at least it gave me some access to discussing Japanese history.

But I never had any intrinsic motivation to get good at Japanese. O'Neal sensei told me I was learning it because the government required it of the institution I was required to attend. I learned only so much of it as necessary to avoid detention, and then quite reluctantly.

Those early days in Nagoya, Brenton and I would hang out in my room, which had a gaming console, and I would only go down to the living room if Brenton was there, otherwise hiding. Once we got to school, I discovered myself surrounded by girls who treated Brenton and I as near-deities. 

At the time, what I thought, was the secret to my finally picking up Japanese, was immersion. I had breakthroughs in early key moments when I was left on my own and had to speak Japanese. I was for example, put in a home room for morning and afternoon classes with my host-brother who did not share the all-girls class we spent most of our school days in. Kimura-sensei the deputy vice-principle and highest ranking employee who was not a direct descendent of the school's founder, instructed me to introduce myself to the homeroom. Self-introduction was something I had to learn by rote, so I started saying my name, my age, my hometown in Japanese. Ted Kimura interrupted me and implored me in English to use a 'big voice' so I put on a theatrical Brian Blessed style voice that won the class over immediately - and I remember thinking that even though my Japanese was limited, I could still get my personality across easily.

In two months, while I wouldn't ever become the best Japanese student in my cohort, I caught most of the way up. Went from a C or D student to a B+.

Again, I thought it was just immersion, a theory that wouldn't get tested until I began living in Mexico much, much later. But I think I was wrong. Immersion seriously helps, don't get me wrong. That's just access to opportunity. Now though, I think the key was that car ride with Brenton and Chie. 

Brenton responded to Pedagogy. I didn't and never have.

Spanish is a Level 5 language

Spanish is a fucking nightmare. I was in Mexico because they give an 180 visa to anyone, no questions asked. It is also, super fucking cheap. I had also, somewhat given up on life, and so was in Mexico because why not be in Mexico? I was in Guadalajara, because people that could answer that last question were not in Mexico but in my art studio, and I'd polled them about where to go live in Mexico and had gotten 2 votes Guadalajara to 1 for Queretaro. 

I had gone to live in Guadalajara for 5 months, to have an artist's sabbatical. I was also interested in putting into practice, stoicism by living as meanly as possible. I'd even learned about capital "C" Cynicism, and that was really interesting. So I'm not fucking with you when I say, as I headed out of Mexico City to Guadalajara via a stop in Queretaro my ambition was to find the most rudimentary legal shelter as possible, and I'm serious I had big plans for drinking out of a dog bowl and washing out of a bucket, possibly with the same dog bowl.

I'd asked my friend in Guadalajara if he could help me find some rental options, and his connection came back with some "Melbourne Experience" luxury shit. I found the cheapest monthly rental listing on Air BnB and went there instead, found it quite luxurious but ultimately was too comfortable and lazy change it up after the first month, so just booked it again. A process that would repeat for the 13 months I wound up staying there.

My hosts Lu and Pes spoke little English, as did an exchange student from Spain who spoke even less. Carlos was decent but shy, more eager to teach me Spanish, which though I did try, was content not to learn and figured I'd pick up what I'd pick up.

I joined a conversation club, where I was happy to be a native English speaker for locals to practice their English with, than push myself to advance my Spanish. My friend and club host Sajid tried to outsource my motivation to learn Spanish and kind of force it upon me, but even when there were just three of us there and could all speak fluent English, it was just a hang where I spoke English.

I also joined a group on Meetup for drawing, organised by Karen a name that doesn't have the same boomer connotations as English. That club was not an English conversation club, though there were members, like Karen who had become pretty much fluent in English from watching TV shows. 

That probably should have been a clue that I didn't know what I was talking about, but at any rate at one of those drawing groups I dropped the hearsay that English was the hardest language to learn, and I had some experience of trying to teach English to a refugee student so it seemed about right.

Karen then informed me that Spanish was considered (by whom?) harder than English, as it was a level 5 (what?) language. I had no idea languages were ranked by levels or any of that. I assumed English would be hard because it has the largest vocabulary by far, and most of that is loan words from other languages, including being a mash-up of Germanic and Latin. Look up etymology of English words and chances are you will get Greek via Latin, or Greek via Latin via 'Old French.'

There also probably hadn't been a single thing I'd taught my student Zamin, that wasn't immediately contradicted by the next sentence we read together, and I'd have to then explain why it was an exception to the rule I'd just outlined, so often, that I wound up just explaining it was because English is a nightmare.

But Spanish is a nightmare. I could not navigate GDL's bus routes, only use the train lines, which meant I walked an hour in each direction to Casa Musa where the drawing group mostly met. On those walks, in the early months of my stay, I would inventory my Spanish vocabulary, thinking I was making good progress. I knew I went from being able to recall 30 words and their uses, to 100 from month 1 in GDL to month 3. 

I had no grasp of Spanish grammar, but my standard of communication is being understood - or a "shared understanding of meaning" I would speak Spanish in ways that I can't translate English easily, because as far as I'm concerned, the central feature (not benefit) of Spanish, is that they have 36 different conjugations of verbs in order to save time on pronouns. So where "()" indicate an ommitted prounoun I spoke Spanish thusly:

"I (I) have a ticket, you (I) have a ticket?" right, and it's pretty easy for Spanish speakers to figure out I am using redundant pronouns instead of congregating and they interpret my shitty Spanish as "I have a ticket, do you have a ticket?" and communication is achieved anyway.

The main drawback of me not being motivated to speak Spanish, even though I could see the point just as with Japanese, was that it filtered my dating pool really, to women who could speak English fluently. Maybe not, but I never got close to a date with a non-English speaking Mexican woman. Largely because Ale came along and she was fluent to the point of having a perfect mid-western US accent, in English she sounds like someone who would be called 'Nancy'.

The real disaster, was when Ale tried to teach me Spanish. I cannot testify to the lasting damage it did to Ale with respect to our relationship, but I evaluated our one lesson as an utter-disaster, and I learned something about Ale that helped me understand her and myself better, so I don't resent it.

Ale put together a lesson on Spanish phonics, she informed me she had found phonics really useful for her learning English, which she speaks far better than I ever will Spanish, Japanese or Italian. I cannot stress enough that Ale's diction is perfect bar the wide variety of dictions available in English, with 'perfect' allowing for accents, probably reserved for the King (then Queen) of England, she didn't sound like the Queen, she sounded like someone from the midwest called Nancy. But like my friends that overheard voice messages she sent me in Australia, expressed their shock at how much her English defied their stereotyped Mexican accents.

The hitch was, I did not, and do not, give a fuck about my diction in Spanish, English, Japanese or any language ever. I only care about being understood, and having my personality come across.

The likely reason for this, is something I will have to come back to in a latter part of this series, it is in other words, another thing wrong with me. 

In the presentation Ale lovingly prepared for me, we reached the slide for 'LL' which most Australians now will recognise is in 'Pollo' for Chicken as in Chicken Tacos. Now to my ear, most Spanish speakers pronounce 'llo' as 'yo' as in 'yo dudes, how's the surf? Tubular!' Ale's lesson presented 'llo' as 'jo' albeit 'j' with an accent, which I'd write out on my keyboard as 'jyo' using romaji conventions from Japanese. Kind of halfway between 'jo' and 'yo'. You can go type into google translate now 'chicken' and then hit the audio button and see how google pronounces 'pollo' maybe it's subject to some neuroscienceshit, like the Yanny/Laurel audio perception thing. (Curiously, I now hear Laurel, but I swear I used to hear Yanny apparently I have crossed an age threshold.) 

The thing is, Ale clearly said "jo" and also clearly said "Poyo" for chicken. I would come to describe us, as orthodox and heterodox. Ale believed in an ideal of orthodoxy, you seek out an esteemed teacher and try and replicate their teachings with the highest possible fidelity like a disciple. 

I was heterodox, I took things in, pulled them apart and examined and questioned them. Ale and I worked in many ways as a couple, at least for me, but not as a student-teacher couple. We had similar albeit less disastrous experiences when she taught me Kundalindi Yoga. 

I suspect this may be culturally bound somewhat - for example, in Australia teachers are called Mr. or Mrs./Miss. [Surname] at primary level, and mostly at the secondry level, though it was not unusual for some teachers to be called by a knickname - we had Knighter and Etho for example at my highschool. Overconfident, obnoxious and entitled students can also freely get away with being on a first name basis with teachers too. Curiously by University, the norm is to be on a first name basis with lecturers and tutors, as we are all adults by then.

In Mexico teachers are typically called "Maestro/a" even when they have no qualifications whatsoever, it seems the barrier to obtaining the title "Master" in Mexico is calling something your doing a class. Curiously, I am currently studying to be a trainer, and I'll talk about this more later, but one of my cohort is from Peru, and she also taught in an authoritative orthodox way, and seemed also put out by the mere act of me asking questions or questioning the content of her lesson, even solely to express confusion. It was not an interpersonal disaster, but afterwards I asked if in Peru they also called teachers "Maestro" and she told me, they call teachers "Professadore" so an even more esteemed title.

All I have is my spider sense, but this is why I suspect much of it is culturally bound. Hispania it seems tends toward a more authoritarian pedagogy, and it's possible it is culture shock to have a student question the teaching. My sample is too small to be in any way conclusive or even a generalisation, just a notion.

Once a year however, my Spanish would take quantum leaps. Like approve 100%+ in a really concentrated window, until it eventually clicked for me. This is not to say I am fluent, or speak like a native or have a good ear for Spanish. But I can converse in Spanish, I am better at Spanish now than I am at speaking Japanese. Spanish is my second language, and though it was a nightmare to obtain, I feel more affection for it. 

I would pick it up quite rapidly, at these camps, they lasted just a week, but Ale got tied up in activities such that I was socially isolated with a group that largely couldn't speak English. I was suddenly motivated to speak Spanish so as to not feel...well, again this is another post in the series converging in. The word is not alienated, as I am not a joiner, I infact most often felt alienated by the camp groups attempts to include me, rather than allow me to be an outsider. But it's hard to describe, I was motivated to get Spanish to click so as to be a gentleman. To help out and also explain when I needed to withdraw for my sanities sake, without causing counterproductive anxiety in my hosts.

The motivation, the point of learning Spanish for me came when I realised I needed it to be humane, so I needed to be able to explain abstract, not just concrete ideas. That's what it took to get me to conversational Spanish.

Andragogy

All this speculation I've presented, is first and foremost speculation. It is a notion, not a theory, but like a theory, this new notion being a narrative achieves greater explanatory power and pushes out the old not-quite-right immersion theory of language acquisition. 

Andragogy being similar to pedagogy simply replaces the "peda" root being for 'child' as in the word you're all thinking, with "andra" the root for "man" or "adult" I'm not sure, and it doesn't matter because it refers to how adults learn as distinct from how children learn. 

I was taught some of this in my training program to become an English tutor for a refugee, but nothing clicked at the time, beyond adults learn differently to kids. Mostly what I absorbed was slower, which is why this speculation didn't start happening until recently.

Andragogy was first forwarded as a theory by Malcolm Knowles, and from his work were derived 6 principles of adult education. The first is the one that sticks out to me now like a turgid penis I must grab and rub vigorously if I want it to explode with the good stuff:

Need to know: Adults need to know the reason for learning something.

As has been explained by my current course instructors, kids respond well to teachers, I guess the theory or hypothesis or notion is that they are still in a development stage of like "eat the red berries" so adults can just tell them things and they believe them, this I mean in the sense that you could take kids being taught something we find useful like literacy and numeracy, and take them outside and teach them some Stalin gulag shit like how to dig ditches for the purpose of filling them in again, and kids largely just assume there's some point to the exercise.

This I think was what set me and Brenton apart in Japanese. Brenton always outperformed me academically and later, financially as is to be expected, and this is a debilitating effect of how I am, but its kind of tantalising to entertain the possibility that as early as pre-primary, I needed an approach more akin to andragogy than pedagogy. 

Besides the 1st characteristic about 'purpose' or 'the point' the remaining characteristics I think would also have produced in me an A+ student:

1. Foundation: Experience (including error) provides the basis for learning activities.
2. Self-concept: Adults need to be responsible for their decisions on education; involvement in the planning and evaluation of their instruction.
3. Readiness: Adults are most interested in learning subjects having immediate relevance to their work and/or personal lives.
4. Orientation: Adult learning is problem-centered rather than content-oriented.
5. Motivation: Adults respond better to internal versus external motivators.

Certainly, what I have referred to as 'heterodox' may be better explained by "Experience (including error)" as in, I don't care if my Mexican or Japanese sounds weird, to me that is just distinct, so long as I can achieve communication. I would rather communicate in a distinct but effective way, than a conformist and effective way.

I have also always chafed under my lack of agency in Education. I had to fight to not do Further Maths and do Studio Art in year 11 and while nobody could stop me from doing my chosen electives, I was heavily discouraged by pretty much all bar my art teacher from doing so. I had to sit in a meeting with two staff members and justify my choices, I was also told bullshit twice about being unprepared/unqualified to do specialist maths because I didn't do the subject that involved such cognitive geometric challenges as reading a table, and drawing box-plot graphs. Further maths was a subject where I knew the greatest challenge facing me would be sitting through it, I knew the school had a financial incentive to push its students into doing this cakewalk subject because it would artificially inflate our ATAR scores which would then be used to encourage prospective parents to enrol their kids in the junior school.

The readiness also goes somewhat to my experiences in Japan and Mexico - I learned fast when the relevance finally arrived. My Japanese instruction began 10 years before I would set foot in Japan, and I learned more Japanese in two weeks than I had in the preceding 10 years.

A Brief Gander at The Road Not Taken

When my mum told me of a friend's adult diagnosis of ADHD, I wondered at its significance. It was not "Adult-onset-ADHD" as far as I am aware, and quite simply, I don't know enough about ADHD to really make any sense of it. As far as a story goes, it explains one tantrum in me I know was induced by him pushing me to the brink by completely derailing all my attempts to arrange a dinner party.

But to the point of significance, it made me wonder why my friend would care, why he was shouting from the rooftops, as it were, that he had ADHD and had gone for so long with it undiagnosed. I was thinking "so like, does he rue that he could have been a doctor?" 

I just couldn't see it. 

Now I've mentioned, had I been enrolled at the age of 8 in a vocational training course, like the former School of Mines Ballarat hospitality course, maybe I would have topped the class. But to what end?

The debilitating aspect of me having the characteristics of an adult learner, even as a small child, which is just a speculative notion, is the antipathy generated between myself and my teachers. 

I needed to learn literacy and numeracy, Japanese was useful, then there were subjects I found intrinsic motivation to engage with - like Philosophy and Economics. I also wound up doing well in school, well enough to have all the opportunities I wanted. 

There's another post to come regarding why I had no motivation to be a doctor or a lawyer, and with the results I got, those career paths weren't really closed to me, probably medicine because I didn't do prerequisites like Chemistry or sit the UMAT, but I had no motivation to even go for it, and the closest I've come was contemplating a Covid scenario that turned out to be counterhistorical, where so many doctors and nurses died off that I may have simply been conscripted into the healthcare system in some dystopian pandemic nightmare. I would have done my civic duty then, I'm very civic minded.

But I had, and mostly still have an attitude as a student that boarders on appalling. I'm sure I have teachers that wouldn't put on my report card, but would almost certainly have described me as 'obnoxious' 'nonchalant' and 'contemptuous'

They also faced the wedge created by my parents wanting for me things I did not and do not want for myself, like good grades. I have many teachers from all my times in life that appear to harbour great affection for me as a student, even nostalgia, but I know the hardest times for them would have been when they had to insist I do something I couldn't see the point in doing. 

That's what I mean by antipathy. Had I the awareness, we could have communicated, but again, this probably would have facilitated solutions. There also likely would have been a misdiagnosis. 

A common impression I give is one to my fellow students in a class, who presume I must be an A+ student because I'm so engaged. I dominate air-time, teachers routinely remark 'great question' and people often assume this is because I'm highly motivated to come top of the class. At University in particular this created some awkwardness when people willingly joined me in group assignments, to discover the first thing I suggested was that I wasn't going to even look at the assignment until the week it was due, then we should reconvene, punch out some bullshit until we met the word limit and slap it all together and hopefully we'd get a pass.

Eventually I found my equilibrium and my people in Andy, Jerry and Xi, 3 Chinese nationals from Wuhan where we divided the workload in a manner that suited me perfectly: I explained the actual assignment to them and what was required. They went off and did it and then emailed it to me, where I would go over it and correct anything, rewrite anything that didn't make sense etc. format it all and then print it out and hand it in. We got Bs and B+s which I was happy with how much less work I had to do and they were happy with the better grades than they got when they were isolated from local students.

We became great friends and finished our degrees more or less together. 

Someone, I don't recall who, pointed out that Education is older than capitalism. Our educational institutions are not really businesses, they've perhaps evolved into them, but this evolution may have dragged them too far from their reason for being.

I recently finished Tom Nichols "The Death of Expertise" and in it he attributes one factor contributing to the anti-intellectualism of contemporary times to the evolution of students into clients.

With some chagrin, I must confess I was ahead of this evolutionary curve. I have long had the bad attitude of a student who views the teaching and administration staff as people who work for me. I felt entitled to their knowledge and indignant that I was asked to demonstrate I had absorbed it.

I quite literally resented being assessed by University. I understood in a vague sense that the Uni required me to demonstrate that I knew what they had taught me so an academic transcript could reassure employers that their education met some quality threshold. 

It was probably not helped by my first discipline of marketing being largely practiced to dismal standards in Australia, with an ICU sustained manufacturing sector making up many of the most prestigious employers, now all extinct like Ford Australia, GM Holden, Toyota Australia etc. populating their marketing departments with sales people in a holding pattern for an executive position.

The idea that my future employers could even discern whether I knew my marketing shit or not seemed implausible to me. I'd never spoken to the designated marketing person at a career night with them actually holding any marketing qualifications anyway. I could also observe that most of my cohort enrolled in marketing had confused it with advertising or something, assuming it to be the most creative of the major business disciplines, many of them were ill-suited to marketing as best practice being highly data driven and analytical, rather than touchy-feely intuition.

My lecturers seemed to proudly boast that 30% of marketing graduates could not define 'brand equity' (this boast, oft repeated, a literal humble brag, was rarely followed by a quick recap of the definition of brand equity). For the record, a brand is the intangible but distinct identity of your business, it can include logos, colour schemes, audio signatures or may even just be your name, your voice, your dress sense when talking about an individual. Equity refers to stored value, like your outright owned share of real property purchased via an ammortised loan, but applied to brand it means the stored value in all the defining intangibles. I find it most salient to define brand equity as "the difference in value of your product with and without branding." and give the example of what you could charge for Coca-cola, if you remove the label, the distinct packaging, the jingle, the vending machine, the refrigerator etc.

Anyway, this attitude I know was present at least as early as highschool, I know I had the conscious thought that with my Bursary (a 1/3 scholarship) which I had achieved on my own merit, I was making an equal financial contribution as my parents (in my mind, never mind contingency, I didn't think on that, consciously at least) and as such was an equal stakeholder in my education and should be treated as such. Unlike other students (albeit I was friends with kids on full scholarships) I was both inventory and client. At a private school though, the general rule is that the parents are the clients, it is they, not the students who determine customer satisfaction.

Hence I could be an unpleasant little shit. But there may have been a theoretical solution - just explain the point of what we were learning like I was an adult. And if the point was that we were just checking boxes for compliance purposes, at least shrug apologetically when you handed me the checklist.

Asynchronicity

"In my early 30s I was cornered by a familial obligation to attend my cousins sweet 16 party. I was frankly surprised and flattered to be specifically named by the birthday girl as I felt I didn't know her that well, growing up largely estranged from my cousins by geographic distance. I had naively assumed that I was invited to a strictly family affair, setting my expectations of the evening a little high.

"It was only when I arrived I discovered I was there more for form than function. Though perplexingly my cousin seemed genuinely excited to have me there, they were distinctly oblivious as to what a fish out of water I was. I stayed as long as I could in the main party space, a function room attached to a local bowls club, and found myself nursing my drink, by that stage years into teatotalling, and observing the kids these days like a social anthropologist.

"The 16-somethings struck me as somewhat of an awkward pastiche of adults, too excited about drinking, too overconfident in their tastes, too reactive in their consumption. These were kids reaching for adulthood, and the discomfort with their own age, impatience with their own development showed.

"I'm not proud but I was relieved to simply slink away to the kitchenette where I found other adults hiding, my evening was salvaged by calm sober conversation about a wide range of subjects and experiences. We held out in our bolt-hole as long as we could, but the others in my age range made apologies and excuses and departed.

"I alas was dependent on another's ride and accomodation, so I rejoined the main festivities as best I could, though I felt totally alienated by the immaturity, and quietly consoled myself with 'this too shall pass' which eventually it did."

Okay that was all fiction, hastily thrown together. Here's how shit really went down and hopefully you can see what I'm doing here. Just a note, recently my friend B said part of our shared history, though perfectly legal and not involving Jeffrey Epstein at all, was now a professional liability, so in an excess of caution I'm going to use initials for the players in this particular anecdote.

B and I were 15 and we'd been invited to our friend's K and S's party in the big smoke. This was a pretty big deal, though I'd by then had two girlfriends, they had gone ineptly, both lasting a matter of days because I was psyching myself out over being 15 and still 'frigid' as we said back in the day.

B was also most definitely a theatre kid, occupying that paradox of being far more sexually active than the modal kid our age, yet marginalised because theatre wasn't cool, sports were cool. But we together, had been invited to travel up from our backwater palookaville and go to the party of girls in the year above us, and stay overnight.

It seemed the stuff a boner-comedy/coming of age movie was about. I can't speak for B, but my expectations were ratched up sky high. This would surely give me the kind of insight that would give me incredible credibility to hold over my peers. 

We got to the party and I was told my outfit was pretty okay. B was wearing a hat a lot those days. I didn't drink and wouldn't start drinking, before stopping again, for a few more years. I didn't see the point. The party got underway and I was struck pretty much instantly by the disillusionment of my expectations. It was clear that by Palookaville standards this party was pretty tame. 

The big smoke kids were neither more erudite nor sophisticated than my friends back home. Besides one quirky girl I briefly made eye contact with while she danced across a room lost in that particular jam, the party goers were universally more basic than the scum I was used to associating with. 

The nature of the party itself was music and booze, I sat somewhere for a while and witnessed what for me was a tragically superficial courtship between a girl that I recall having a first name in common with a state and a guy who was kind of just there that involved her picking up his bolle or oakley sunglasses and trying them on, before making out with him. I felt they were fairly evenly matched 5s, and though I wouldn't have had the vocabulary at the time, found myself reminiscing about how much higher the batting average was in my own year level at school. 

There were two obvious explanations as to why I was not having a good time, the first being that I was stone cold sober. It's really easy to throw a party if you assume what your guests want to do was get really drunk. The other thing, was that I had simply expected too much, like thinking joining the freemasons will get you into some esoteric cult, instead of a sad buffet where a bunch of old dudes eat corned beef and mash potatoes. 

I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out I only gave the party 30 minutes or so of actual attention. I slunk off probably in search of a bathroom, and wound up sitting in the front room chatting to K's mum and dad. I can't remember the details of the conversation, just that it was engaging and stimulating for me. It likely would have involved small talk, then discussing whatever they were watching on tv before going down all the pathways of associated ideas on offer.

I probably hung out with K's parents for an hour. The party wasn't an all night rager, being for 16 year olds, so it must have wound up by like 1am or so. I got billeted into a guest room bunk bed next to my ex girlfriend's friend P. I think she applied makeup to my face, and I recall having an argument about Clapton vs Hendrix with these two 17 or 18 year old guys, that S had told me off for ridiculing their appearance, one being an ex boyfriend of hers, and while I wouldn't learn the word until seeing the Seinfeld episode where George dumps his accountant girlfriend for being pretentious, those two guys were quite possibly, the first pretentious people I ever met. 

I recall them arguing that Clapton had turned lame, and I rebutted that had Hendrix lived he also would have turned lame. They partially conceded that had Hendrix lived, he would have done disco. I think they remarked on the makeup P had applied to my face, that I was "in" with P. I gave their suggestion some thought, and was conscious of P's proximity, but also that B had expressed an interest in her in the past, my guilt over breaking up with her friend, my ex, and that I hadn't really thought of P that way.

The next day B and I took the train back to palookaville, were he told me he couldn't believe that I didn't hook up with P. I asked him why I would hook up with P, and he ejaculated "because then you wouldn't be frigid anymore." I was left with this odd feeling that B was more concerned with my frigidity than I was. B had previously helped coach me through asking out Sarah, and shortly after this eye-opening party we went out again, this time I asked her out all by myself, feeling our first relationship had failed due to the insertion of a middle man who wasn't my wingman and frankly didn't understand what he was doing there. It wasn't B, who was my wingman.

Years later I was hanging out with my friend Paolo, an Italian Graphic designer. He was telling me he was throwing a party at his new sharehouse he was pretty excited about. Either I said I would love to come, or he headed me off, but the result was him explaining to me that he only wanted people under 30 at this party.

I asked him how old he thought I was. As it turned out, I was in my early twenties, and Paolo was over 30. At which point, the party was sounding more like a creepy event with Harem-aspiration undertones, but it was the first, and maybe even last time someone drastically overshot my age.

I'm pretty sure despite him learning my age, he still didn't want to invite me because he knew me primarily as an economist. At that point a I was a self-taught hobby-economist. I would go get a degree later to ride out the GFC. 

This exchange made an impression though, because the general rule is that people assume I am younger than I actually am, sometimes much younger. Younger than people who are younger than me. Likely a biproduct of not drinking, not smoking, and not partying hard.

Paolo gave me a key though, and that party in Melbourne is my most vivid memory of avoiding kids proximate to my own age and seeking out the company of adults. For some reason, my development was asynchronous, in some sense, Paolo was actually the best at guessing my age, I was in some ways 30 years old when I was 15.

Now there's a process of elimination to be gone through here - I was not emotionally mature, that's for sure. This leaves me with 'cognitively mature' and I'm just not sure what that means.

As mentioned, my grades were not that spectacular.

Knowledge vs Intelligence

You probably do know the difference between knowledge and intelligence, but in my experience most people have no real reason to contemplate it. They can use both terms correctly in a sentence so I don't want to come out guns blazing and accuse most, nor any people of thinking them synonyms.

Having said that, in the context of education the two concepts often get confused, mostly in who gets labelled "the smart kids."

This post has been a bit highschool and primary school heavy, which is to be expected when invoking pedagogy and andragogy, but perhaps the easiest-to-hand example of the difference between knowledge and intelligence are nerds and fandoms. 

Somebody who knows everything there is to know about Mobile Suit Gundam, who blows their wages collecting "Gun-pla" collector kits and gets fired from their job after it is discovered they spent work time making over 260 entries to Wikipedia all related to Gundam has a wealth of knowledge and is objectively not intelligent.

However, then there's the tricky problem of not knowing what intelligence is. As a student I was more like ChatGPT than I'd care to admit, I excelled in the subjects where I could just spew out cogent-sounding sentences on a page that made seemingly intelligent points about a book I was required to read or a story I'd been told about the economy, history, geography or some shit. 

It was even better if the assessment involved me getting up and talking because that was even less effort, but I was so averse to spending any of my own time on schoolwork, I would also often roll the dice on not being called up in the first class of doing presentation based assignments, and be unprepaired. If I got called and wasn't ready, I'd fess up and take the 10% per day grade reduction.

Maths though, I was a dumbass. I had to go to effort, or otherwise take my lumps. Some units were straightforward enough, but I can recall sitting in classes observing that the kids who were good at maths could simply see things I couldn't, like the difference of two squares. They would recognise the actual problems to be solved quickly.

I did better in physics, probably because physics somewhat lends itself to andragogy style presentations. It's obvious what the point of quadratic equations are when you need to calculate if a speeding bus can maintain a high enough speed to jump a gap in an underconstruction overpass without losing so much speed that it triggers a speed sensative explosive device on the bus that couldn't slow down.

Or the point of knowing when a rock thrown from a cliff-top will hit the ground. It's easy to extrapolate this out into a career in aerospace engineering and stuff.

The point is "the smart kids" broadly speaking, is a misnomer. Schools discovering smarts is largely a biproduct of what they are testing for POSIWID style. As alluded to, "merit" consists of some combination of three factors - Innate talent (which includes intelligence), Effort (which includes conscientiousness) and Education and Training (which is basically investment).

Private schools are often criticized for "spoon feeding" which is kind of unfair, because by Daniel Markovitz breakdown, that's kind of what education and training is, you primarily invest in an instructor to show kids how to do things correctly. Markowitz though, also points out the massive disparities in investment in his home country of the US, where it is estimated the richest private schools spend on average $75,000 USD per year, per pupil educating their children, whereas in public schools the annual investment is $12,000. Almost $900,000 is spent on the wealthiest kids education compared to $144,000 on a public school student.

Anyway, my school was private, and wouldn't have cost anywhere near an almost million dollars, but certainly there would have been a significant disparity. Grades reflected effort, either through the conscientiousness of the student themselves and/or the effort of the tutors and instructors via investment. 

I'd now like to try and describe my subjective experience of what people throughout my life, have tended to label as 'intelligent' about my character.

For me it is an intuitive sense, I largely pick up unconsciously through both verbal and non-verbal cues of a kind of distance between me and others. Think of like a gameshow, but instead of a buzzer it involves dashing across a circle to pick up an air-horn and sound it. If this sounds like it doesn't have much to do with anything, you'd be right, it very often does it. It's something like being able to perceive the relative speed with which someone's processing power will get to some point. 

You likely experience analogous calculations with street crossing, being able to sense without conscious calculation whether you and a vehicle are on a collision course and adjusting your speed accordingly. Provided you aren't on a phone.

Beyond that sense, it is just a question of investment - and for me, this is a matter of whether the shit is worth knowing or not, relative to my peers, I don't give a fuck about Gundam so why build up a Gundam schema in my mind? 

In this, I had a pervasive sense my teachers, my instructors where somehow not as 'smart' as me, much more so than many of my peers. They simply knew shit by virtue of invested time and training. They also presumably had an interest advantage, like say I was just forced to do history, I have an interest in history, but I was forced to do history like Australian overland exploration expeditions.

So if you let me and my teacher loose in a library with the vague instruction to 'read up on history' I likely would have gravitated towards European, Asian, African and Pre-Columbian Americas feudal history, an area where the unique culture of the Indigenous people's of Australia is light, and the colonization of Australia, though violent, was also very light.

Then you told us after weeks of self directed history reading, that we would be tested on Australian overland exploration expeditions, my teacher would be like "Yesss! my favorite." and I'd be like "What the fuck is this? This isn't going to tell you anything meaningful about our relative capacity at constructing founded and coherent historical narratives."

Suffice to say, this kind of apprehension is both awkward and painful. The boon however, was that lacking the conceptual schema to think in terms of conscientiousness vs intelligence, my late teens thru early 20s were my boom years for serial monogomy. 

Before I come to that though.

Afterschool Special

I was educated almost entirely prior to the publication of Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers" which I read somewhere lead to a shift largely in parental demands of educational institutions to focus on specialising so their children could grow up to be Bill Gates - immune from prosecution for sex with underage girls, that is wanting the best for your own child.

The paradigm before Gladwell infected the world with the "10,000 hour" rule, the paradigm was actually generalist, likely trickling down via prole-drift from the Ivy league corruption of admissions policy to exclude Jews and Asians by insisting on 'character' of course developed through activities like lacrosse and rowing, jazz saxophone all things Jews and Asians are known for.

Pick up a school yearbook from the 1990s and you were likely to notice the school captain featuring heavily in the spreads dedicated to rowing, athletics, cricket and football, but also seeing them photographed on stage in that year's production of "Are you there God, It's me Margaret." and in the report about that years success at the state finals of debate, before spotting them again on the school winter exchange program to assist the Fred Hollows cateract surgery charity in Namibia. Track them down and you discover they got into Law or Medicine, having achieved academic honours.

That was the 90s ideal, and I'm sure long term outcomes vary, there was a guest on Oprah once who described this ideal as "intellectual obesity" foisted on kids.

My school Chaplain dedicated a service or maybe it was just a random pep-talk, to discussing the reading up he'd done on the top performers who aced their final years of secondary. He wanted to assure us that the intuition they would rush home from school drink a glass of milk and then hit the books from 4.30pm until midnight every night for 9 months until their final exams was not true. Emphasizing consistent realistic discipline instead and the use of mnemonic tricks to prepare for exams.

What did I do after school? Well mostly I figured out ways to get out of doing any schoolwork. I had to convince first my parents, then my teachers in that chronological order. It was a calibration issue to reclaim as much of my own time as possible for my own purposes. 

I found I could be quite successful in doing whatever the fuck I wanted between 3.30pm and 9.30pm if when I went to bed I spent ten to fifteen minutes coming up with some excuse to tell the teacher. 

I would often calculate how late I could hand in an assignment and still attain a passing grade to put everything off until as late as possible. I would later ascertain that I could go beyond the point at which I needed to get an A+ or perfect score in order to get a C once penalised for lateness because actually grading effectively changed to pass/fail and one could always pass, so I could be a week late and hand in some bullshit worth a C and get a C.

Anything that was just homework, didn't really entail the consequences to require me ever doing it at all, though you can imagine by now why I sucked at Japanese right up until being transported to a Japanese family home. 

It was also very salient to me, very early on that my school was an institution that made its bread by gaming another institution which was for general applicabilities sake - the national university admissions institution. As above, so below, my approach to school was to game out their game. My reward was an abundance of my most precious resource - time. 

Instead of learning what was presented to me, I'd try and learn the meta game, an example I'm sure I've mentioned before, was that my teachers were incentivised to not entrust our education to any self-directed learning. They taught to the assessment, to the practice exams, everything else was window dressing. If they gave me a photo copied handout, it was safe to throw it out immediately after the class. 

My school campus back then produced a common sight of someone lugging a 3kg laptop in a case slung over one shoulder, and a pencil case, notebook and textbook, a school diary, along with a binder that kept handouts. Technology will have cut back much of this luggage, but by my final year I lugged pretty much nothing. I ditched the school issued diary for a phone address book I could fit in my pocket, the little black book studs in 80s and 90s movies and sitcoms set in Manhattan kept girl's numbers in. I just took notes chronologically, because student life is not that fucking complicated.

Knowing my teachers were incentivised not to trust us and instead spoonfeed us, I figured out I only had to pay attention in class. This meant keeping my books closed and listening. I stopped using my laptop altogether by my final year.

The teachers just tell you what you are going to be asked in an exam and how to do it. That's their focus. The trick to being a high school student is to not get in your own head and see things from the institutional perspective.

Throughout my adulthood, I've generally described my education experience as "a joke" or alternatively "a fucking joke." Mark Twain's maxim "Don't let school get in the way of your education" resonated with me deeply. 

I found education to be profoundly industrial and shallow. Of almost no substance, Paul Simon reflected on an even earlier time of less industrialised education and wrote the opening lyrics of Kodachrome, a song to this day I have not got around to listening to myself:

When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school / It's a wonder I can think at all

Not what I was expecting. But I wasn't surprised when inspiration of mine, Brazilian champion of workplace democracy Ricardo Semler, spoke about resitting his exams and doing so poorly he wouldn't have been able to enter the courses for the qualifications he held, it aligned perfectly with the sheer arbitrariness of secondary content that screams out from the pages of our then hardcopy issued VTAC guides where courses ranging from Arts to Commerce had prerequisites of a passing grade in English. 

I can't divulge all the tricks private schools pull to privilege their students over public schools who generally educate in good-faith meritocracy. The largest one was just a photocopy budget. In my STEM subjects we were handed phonebook size slabs of practice exams, including like 4 years of past official exam papers, and then dozens of private company produced practice exams.

But even prior to that, my school was not the worst offender, but students were strongly encouraged to do bullshit subjects to game out the scaling system. My school didn't even try to hide what it was doing when it shoved all its best maths students into the remedial math subject to exploit the loophole that the scaling didn't sufficiently penalise top-scoring students. Other schools taught Latin and Hebrew and shit, you know, the most useful and practical languages. Now they are useful and practical if you go onto Law or academia, but many private schools produce graduates that go onto Engineering and Actuarial studies at top universities that have studied Latin and Hebrew.

School would not have been a joke if I had wanted one of the top prizes, if I'd wanted to do Law or Medicine at Melbourne University, I would have had to work really hard and also risked failure. I was able to calibrate what I was likely to get, with what I wanted to do (a business degree) and recognise I could spare myself about 80% of the effort some of my peers were going to.

That's something really wrong with me.

Approximately Right

Let's play mastermind. You can play along, I can't really play, because I'm making up the rules. Here's the deal, I'm going to reveal a sequence of numbers 1 at a time. If you can guess the rule that defines the sequence, then you get 10 points, minus the number of numbers in the sequence that have been revealed. If you guess wrong, then you are disqualified. 

Ready? Go.

1 - - - - - - - - 

Here's where I would buzz in. If the first number revealed is one, a prime number then there's relatively few places it can go. If this is the first sequence presented that begins with the number 1, then it is probably less likely to be one of the trickier or more obscure rules, like the fibonacci sequence, or an osscilating wave of 1s and 0s, it is most probably going to be the 1 times table, or normal counting of integers. That's what I'm guessing.

1 2 - - - - - - -

We've eliminated a descending sequence, and also any binary code. Btw I already have 10 points or am disqualified, because my brain has done the work it typically does and lost interest. The odds being the 1s time table are looking better now, but there's still room for some trick, like an offset fibonacci sequence ommitting the 0 and the 1 starting at t = 2 or whatever. It could also be an offset 2x table starting at 2^0 bullshit tricks like that.

1 2 3 - - - - - -

So now it's either the 1 times table or an offset fibo sequence but most other bullshit has been eliminated. It could be some kind of sine wave rule but those options would increasingly come across as grift and punish students for thinking probabalistically.

1 2 3 5 - - - - -

So there we have it, it's a fib sequence starting at x or t = 2, this is where if you don't grab 6 sweet points you are a dumbass or have some serious risk aversion emotional issues you might want to look at.

1 2 3 5 8 - - - -

That's more or less enough information to approach 100% confidence you know the rule. I scored 0 points, and this is because something that is wrong with me is that I don't care about points, so much as the glory of guessing a sequence from a single data point.

This is how my mind works, it extrapolates out a good enough fit from minimal data and acts without certainty based on evaluating consequences.

I used school to exercise this capacity, largely because it was the most entertaining option.

Context Context and More Context

My first corporate job exposed me to meme culture. Social media either didn't exist at that point or hadn't been widely adopted, so it came in the form of chain emails filled with crap. Racist screeds that were completely uninformed about how everything was made overseas, to crappy jokes like "Have a grape time" and a picture of a grape.

One I was sent was a side by side comparison of a couples diary entry. The pink page involved a woman describing her concern over her partners depression and refusal to open up about his feelings, wondering what could be going wrong with him and taking an inventory of where they were at in their relationship, before expressing her surprise and relief when her seemingly futile attempts to reach him resulted in a breaking of an emotional dam and culminating in a passionate bout of lovemaking. 

His diary read "Can't believe my football team lost. Had sex tho."

It's pretty bad, an argument can be made that it denegrates both sexes, but clearly the woman is the victim here. She would be criticized for 'overthinking' her partner's depressed affect, the silly bitch is egocentrically placing herself at the center of his emotional life where he actually isn't invested in their relationship at all. She is simply someone he uses to masturbate.

In this example, someone scrambles incompetantly for context to explain another's behaviour, it comes to mind because I was reading this:

Greg willingly took a seat at the typewriter and laboriously typed out his story and explanation. An hour and a half later, he handed the pages to his mother... 

"It all began in third grade..." started the first paragraph. Greg went on to describe in careful detail how he and Joe had met and embarked upon a rocky friendship. 

At certain times, Joe seemed to want to be friends. At other times, Joe refused to allow Greg to participate in ongoing playground activities. Greg admitted to sometimes leveling "insults" at Joe in retaliation for these playground rejections. 

Greg listed incidences from 3rd and 4th grades as well as the 5th grade incident which precipitated the immediate problem. For each incident, he detailed each child's behaviors with painful accuracy in an effort to render an objective view of what had happened. 

Greg's outburst was, according to him, not only a response to the day's happenings, but a reaction to the entire pattern of incidents composing their relationship over the past two years. 

The argument of the day was simply "the straw that broke the camel's back."

The next day, Joe, too, wrote out his version of the fight. 

He wrote simply, "Greg hit me and then I hit him back and he kept hitting me."

The day I read this, I'd sent a carefully worded email to a friend admonishing them for a faux pa I felt obliged to address. This case study was the first I considered, that a large explanation for what I was responding to, was that my friend likely committed the faux pa because they experienced the same incident as decontextualised, much like Joe. "We were talking about this and so I said this."

I can't really reproduce my email here, suffice to say I took into account our entire interpersonal history, what's going on in their personal life, what they were unaware of me knowing or suspecting, their profession and training, their personality, their history etc.

I often get accused of overthinking things, but late last year I caught up with an old friend and colleague who did a shout out asking for bike parts. We were reminiscing about a former employer, where I had cut and run and they had stayed, which they attributed to having a major health incident.

My decision to cut and run though, had been contextualising and extrapolating, willing to be approximately right that the company was going down the toilet and weighing up the costs and benefits of staying. My friend, near as I can guess, decontextualised the situation down to the role he was hired to perform, and focused on performing it.

This strikes me as fairly normative, and generally its okay, its fine. But like it produces results like tech workers getting laid off in droves. 

Those jobs are highly competitive, when Amazon, Dell, Google, Meta, Microsoft or whatever make 2,500 people redundant, they are making a bunch of people redundant that maybe were willing to go through a 6 month job interview process to get that job because the salary was lifechanging.

They probably also needed to really know their shit, they aren't dumb people, just myopic. They took as their whole context probably the total capitalisation of the employer, the salary on offer and the job role. They neglected to contextualise it in firms that were able to borrow cash at 0 or sometimes even negative rates for decades, and VC firms that could borrow at 1% and deduct any bad bets from their taxable income.

The whole of silicon valley though was riding roughly a 12 year slump of dud products from NFTs to AR and VR and the Metaverse. Ed Zitron tells me cloud computing was the last real successful innovation. Right up close, it might seem incredibly important to beat Google's integration of Gemini into Google office by getting Agentic AI via Copilot into Microsoft 365. In the meantime your highest value decision makers purchasing business licenses for your subscription based software type with two fingers and need to ask their nephew how to put the 'flex' emoji into a text message to a fellow boomer.

Pedagogy, to bring this post back on track, is based on a presumptive decontextualisation, people deposit their kids in schools, and largely (even nowdays where parents make demands of teachers, and teachers quit) trust the process. You send your kids to school because that's what people do. No context needed, people who home school home school because they believe God made everything and Science is the devil or some shit.

Kids follow teacher instructions because they trust there's some reason their parents insist they be there. Like dreamers, kids tend to accept the reality they are presented with. Tragically when their reality is traumatic.

Just as I seemed to maybe need an andragogic approach to my own education, I know plenty of adults that still basically approach the world via pedagogy, that's how they read their news...fuck me "AI" has been eye opening to the amount of adult pedagogy going on. 

But I don't just need andagogy in the context of a classroom, the whole world is my classroom. Last year I was having fun with asking people the question "what is the economy for?" It stumps grown adults. A significant number of them go "huh."

This is the unexamined life Plato asserted was not worth living.

I have been having an Existential Crisis since I was 23 years old

But only last year did I finally reframe it as: "It's not that I don't know what to do with my life, that would be easy. There are any number of practical suggestions to engage me in something to do. It's that I don't know what everyone else is doing with their life."

Over the summer holiday period, I went to an Xmas party with friends who have young kids. The party was attended by a bunch of young children, and I felt bad about not having children of my own. I had to process the grief of lost relationships and opportunities and contemplate my own mortality and where to next, which isn't that pleasant.

By late summer I went to another party of friends whose children are almost all grown up now. This had the opposite effect. I saw people my own age who were prematurely boomers, and after a brief age of innocence, their children were now joining us in the boat we are all in. 

When Albert Camus wrote "we must imagine Sysiphus happy" it is a brilliant answer to the absurdity of life. But this must be qualified by pointing out that Sisyphus' worked in a sustainable economy. Sarah Paine encourages me to use the Strategic-Operational-Tactical framework, we live in an operational world with no strategy.

My own answer to "What is the economy for?" is descriptive rather than idealistic, I think the economy serves the purpose of keeping people occupied. It facilitates habit, to facilitate our large stable populations. Smoothing out our existence so bar the passing of the seasons, one week looks much like the next.

It was a colonial imposition that the Chinese had a curse "may you live in interesting times" but the world does seem to hate all the interest having a clown in charge of the most powerful military that has said fuck you to all the checks and balances, creates.

From my limited understanding of Paolo Friere's 'Pedagogy of the Oppressed' he assert that the main function of education is to replicate the system of oppression into the future. 

I'll maintain that my existential crisis didn't hit me until I was in my early-to-mid-20s, and I'll even forgive myself for thinking that I had answered it for another good 15 years by choosing to be an artist. But I was aware of the absurdity of it all from early in my education. I could see the pointless, habitual repitition.

I don't want to be too bleak, I don't think Friere was accurate if he asserted some strong form of the replication argument. I am certainly not a nihilist. 

I probably see society more like a single occupant SUV, even in the EV era. Most of the engine's work is moving the vehicle which is like a tonne. The occupant is going to weigh about 70-100kgs. Basically a rounding error. 

Society struck me as similarly inefficient, most of the world's population are engaged in creating the future world population. A few of them will contribute to progress, and we must admit, a few will contribute to regress via conceiving and popularising stupid ideas and taking stupid actions. 

I squandered a lot of opportunities to engage both in creating a future population (so far) and contributing substantially to the story of humanity (so far) because I wasn't aligned with how people are engaged in their early, protean development. 

I lived a kind of anxiety dream, though I wasn't anxious, where I dreamed as an adult I was back in school, and subject to the petty myopic politics of the in-crowd. I suspect I just fucking lived that though, with no waking up, and plenty of warning time that exams were coming. I had agency over my own unpreparedness, I often preferred to be unprepared that take on the costs of being prepared.

I'm exhausted now, so I'm going to tie this post off. I remind you it is but a candidate for what could be wrong with me, and a highly speculative work of fiction at that merely 'based on a true story' I can't recall all the details of.

Now if you want to be hilarious, post in the comments how you suspect I might be autistic.