Coyote & Road Runner: a tale of two cities at Dartmouth;
truth comes to roost in the millennium
This is a true story. The fact that I can write it now is a testament to my further higher eduction at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. To all of those who shaped my experiences there, I owe you a huge debt of gratitude. Both who taught by example & shone for me their own unmitigated brilliance & perseverence at remaining on the campus & faculty, & also to those who functioned as a collective "coyote", a shadowy predatorial force that haunted & hunted me for years from the time I was forcibly exiled from my home at 29 Rope Ferry Road.
Your lessons were tougher.
But if you are an organic farmer, or farmer's daughter, you observe that, when planting & nurturing seeds & life, the strong plants develop strong roots, stalks & branches by being subjected to the winds of adversity. The winds that will, if you are a weaker plant or seedling, knock you over & do you in.
Both the nurturing encouraging forces of nature; the sunlight, the fertile soil, adequate rain in season, & the sudden snap chills of autumn, a gust of wind across a field or a campus serves to strengthen you if you do not fall into the pit of despair over what would be considered on the face of it, not your usual or traditional academic course load.
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I just completed a series of articles which appear on the syndicated online journal the American Chronicle. You may access these articles by clicking through to them on the right hand side of this blog. They are entitled:
The Second Shot Heard Around the World
Were I to consider this an online continuing educational forum, I would suggest that the reader begin with these as foundational group for a core of this curriculum.
For those who are NOT acquainted with American history, the title infers there was a First Shot heard around the world which is correct. The first shot heard around the world was the shot fired that began the American Revolution & initiated the bloody struggle that ensued to birth our United States & what we fondly regard as our own American Constitution.
Believe it or not, there are many United States citizens today who would be unable to tell you that.
Someone just write to Jay Leno & ask him to do a person on the street survey, a roving interview with his Tonight Show camera crew as he is apt to do, & you will see what I mean.
We have a far smaller percentage of our own citizenry who know anything about our basic history than other educated groups all over the world do. Sadly, it's a fact.
As an example, take a look at the voter turnouts in Iraq. Well over 50 %, in a country filled with martial law & soldiers from all sides including our 0wn intense presence there, filling their streets, monitoring the election booths to make sure no suicide bombers hit them, while brave citizens march to create their first ever Constitution. They APPRECIATE the struggle that began with that first shot heard around the world & are willing to brave possible death or maiming to get to the polls & take matters finally, at long last into their own hands.
We in contrast, having grown complacent & mesmerized by our increasingly consumer-driven society, showed up at well under 50% of the registered voters. It is unclear, truly as to whether any majority voted our current administration in in the first place. With scandals involving chits in Florida & recounts in the Midwest, who knows?
Was it real democracy or a facsimile, a FAX???
People with a conscience may be having trouble sleeping these days thinking about these things.
We DO know that the media is the predominant force in the majority of households however. This should be abundantly clear.
It seems there IS a growing healthy level of skepticism about it all though. Because the PAIN of what is happening is growing, & PAIN, if nothing else will spur anyone into action. Into some form of reflection, questioning, because we do not LIKE it. It does not feel good.
We LIKE pleasure. Now that feels good.
The Creator apparently, or the universal intelligence which knit our human bodies together, has built right in to each & every human body the capacity to know both.
This, I have come to learn is in order for our souls, the part of us we identify with a name, a mind, a character, distinct from the packaging on the outside, the color of our skin or the sex, the gender, to be able to evolve greater & greater levels of DISCERNMENT.
dis·cern·ment ( P ) Pronunciation Key (d-sûrnmnt, -zûrn-)n.
The act or process of exhibiting keen insight and good judgment.
Keenness of insight and judgment.
It is an indispensable faculty these days. To develop it can mean the difference between life & death. Literally.
There are most definitely different styles of teaching; different modes, & many, many institutions to access in the quest for knowledge now, the world over. More & more gateways have opened to online education, this INEDA blog being one of them.
This blog is dedicated to teaching, to heightening the faculty of discernement. To help the reader to develop it for him or herself.
Back to Dartmouth. Back to learning & teaching.
One of the many seminars & classes I attended there, a KEY offering I was fortunate to attend, was a talk given by a UCLA professor of psychology on the subject of long term learning; long term memory.
He had done research on this subject as he was keen on training disaster response personnel, first responders in the L.A. area for catastrophic events. He trained nuclear power plant employees, whom we all would like to know are properly trained in the event of a potential problem in those plants; the police, firefighters, & those who wanted to improve their tennis game, along with those who wanted to retain a working knowldege of a second language, Spanish in this instance.
His findings were these: that in the usual undergraduate campus setting, with the traditional academic loads, what students have been doing for a few hundred years, cramming for exams the night before, staying up all night, drinking coffee & Jolt (this past century, the Jolt), eating chocolate & granola bars & showing up for the exam the next day worked to get higher marks.
HOWEVER, if you were to go back & reexamine these same students for knowledge retention even one month later, overwhelmingly, most of them would not be able to recall the majority of the specific knowledge they had been tested for!
One of the nuggets of wisdom that makes you go hmmmm, or at least it did me. I sat up in my chair.
These types of preparation obviously work for a specific event. Like say, prepping for a news conference with our chief of staff, an "open interview" type of scenario. If you have a preparation team going on ahead of our chief commander & choreographing a session, a question & answer session with him, & a director coaching you, intensively prior to the cameras rolling, well, you will get a high degree of performance, especially when those who are being interviewed are being interviewed by their boss. There is also an INCENTIVE to please him, isn't there? A paycheck.
In the case of an undergraduate class there is likewise an incentive; passing the course & moving on to the next one, in academic pursuit of the dream which is to complete a degree.
What you want when you have been out there awhile however, in the day to day working world, is an education that is more serviceable for the long haul. One that will serve you when under stress. One that might save your life & those of others, say your family & loved ones. Now that is a good bit of learning to do.
And this professor showed us, with all the academic authenticity a rigorous scholar needs to hear, that in training disaster relief workers, it is a better principle to NOT cram everything into a marathon session. Such as an 8 hour day long seminar. Because, while they will have that for a short time, they will have only a small percentage of it when it may truly be needed.
What is needed instead, is for the brain to develop new pathways over time which ARE developed by less frequent feedback loops. Also that the brain needs riddles to solve, gaps in information to put together.
Here are some of the examples he gave.
With the tennis pro it was dicovered that it is better to give a student some feedback concerning the swing 1 in 15 strokes. To give the student more tries in between the feedback to self-adjust.
With the Spanish student it is best to give a lesson twice a month, rather than 4 times a week.
He backed this research up with graphs & other evidence that showed, the brain actually kicks in a makes these long term channels for knowledge better with this change in frequency. He also showed us examples of questions he used in information processing which were those typical word puzzles where you gave a student a sentence with a blank in it, & the student had to fill in the blank. The learner had to actively think about what word belonged in the context of the sentence that fit. Those "match the word" parts of an exam, where you are given a series of sentences with a matching number of words at the bottom in random order. The student selects the appropriate one & pops it in.
It STIMULATES brain pathways. it creates new ones, which will be there, when needed. In the area of the brain where LONGTERM memory is stored.
The Romans said it simply; experientia docet. I said that a few times in the Second Shot series, quoting the one little snippet I do remember in a class we were required to take in 4th grade in my elementary school. Now at 50, I look back to see that, somehow that one snippet of a "dead language" made one of those long term memory channels in my particular brain.
In pausing to reflect about this, I would hazard a guess that, applying my own learning about that particular goal, as a Red Cross instructor myself, I was motivated to retain the knowledge.
Saving lives is important to me.
What I also recall now, so many years later, this qualifying it as long term learning then, is the actual setting where I learned that phrase. It was in a small area of hallway where a small group of us students were sitting around a shared table.
Me & some guys. I was a real tomboy then, & I prefered their company, so there we were, with this Latin book we were all supposed to be studying, about a dead language.
What bugged me about it, was that it was being billed as such. Why bother? I thought. Learning about something that is dead?
But we were flipping the pages, conjugating verbs, & just sort of got to giggling & cutting up about the whole stupid project. One of us wiseacres, probably Peter Selfridge who was always doing outrageous things in class, had pulled his chair up to the ceiling & removed a tile from it, revealing that there was a black cavity hidden above that ceiling.
Another classmate intoned, "niger cavum" or something like that which meant black cave in Latin. Which evolved into a silly dialogue about piglatin until we were all laughing & trying not to get detention.
Finally we all agreed it was a great discovery & we could probably stash candy in there.
"Experientia docet" someone noted. There, it was not a dead language after all! We did realize at that tender age, experientia docet! Experience teaches. I never forgot it.
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Good mystery stories are like that. The page turners. The New York Times best sellers. Here is a recent example; The Rule of Four.
Check it out. Written as a collaboration between two guy Princeton students. Obviously successful now, as they have published a New York Times best seller.
And it is a page turner too, if you love to study the ancient civilizations & histories we have as a legacy. And if you like Ivy League campuses. Like I do.
I picked it up & read it for similarities I could find with my own experiences at Harvard & Dartmouth & found some startling parallels. With both fine schools.
I will not tell you what they all were though, because I am truly hoping you will develop some long term pathways in your own brain & memory. I am going to tease you instead.
In broad strokes it is about a group of four students who became friends while there.
About one in particular's major focus & quest.
As the reader discovers, this is a fascinating quest, & you find this out because as it is being told, you are seeing the campuse & culture of Princeton right at the turn of the millennium. The main characters are targeting a graduation in the late 90s. So from my perspective it was interesting since I was a student in the Dartmouth Master of Arts in Liberal Studies graduate program during that era.
They obviously learned something there. They gained many experiences.
This book details their own coyote/road runner chases, through an underground system of ducts & passages most are unaware of. Of a shadow side of campus life that is rarely ever surfaced in the catalogues or the regular press or media which is carefully crafted for the public image.
But for those who are at Dartmouth now, studying, who want to know the "untold stories" that do not make it into the Valley News or the Dartmouth online I will point the way.
Go to the Supreme Court in Concord. Find out what Writ of Certiorari means. And ask to read the court documents that contain my name vs. James Freedman & James Breeden.
Then follow those documents to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Those are the main characters.
You figure out who is the road runner & who are the shadows that make up coyote.
You do the heavy lifting. It is all contained in public records but you have to look.
And if you do not understand who coyote is, take a class or two in Native American Studies, or ask Michael Hanitchak. He knows many legends about coyote & other Native American wisdom stories. You could consider him a wise tribal elder.
Happy hunting grounds!
Peace, Medicine Who Flies Far
AKA Monica King
