Wednesday, September 16, 2015

hypothetical speculating is not a healthy thing



6:55pm

Seven students are taking the toefl pre-test test right now.  They have thirty minutes to plan and write a 300 word essay on a recent event and how it has affected them.  My lower back hurts so I am sitting down and writing along with them.  The most recent story that has affected me, personally, is what everyone has seen and heard and commented on.  What is my opinion in the blizzard of seven billion opinions, I’d rather save the time and work it takes to answer this question and consider my plan for the break which is coming up in less than a week, yahoo!!!

Saffiq and I took a six am walk, chilly it was, and headed to a grassy open field past another field where young men and boys play football, and we walked and jogged.  I think the jogging might have aggravated my back.  After a lunch of kidney beans cooked in tomatoes and onions with bread we walked to a travel agent and I bought the second leg of my trip.  I am very thankful for the help I receive here but I told Saffiq I feel bad asking, I like to do things on my own and if I hadn’t destroyed my credit cards six years ago I could do all of this planning on line.  I am, I told him, just like everyone else here and I was just like everyone else in Oman.  Besides, anytime I don’t have to include card numbers online the better.  

I have forty words to go, what should I say about my trip and about not doing the task, I am so bad.  Anyways, more work for me.  Writing, grading, writing, grading, back to the room, go to bed, wake up, yawn.  Did I mention I met my new class today?  There are covered up women and children!!!

When I return to work after the break I will begin looking at where to go for the next break.  Michigan is in the scrum, a beach somewhere appeared on my radar recently, and the still Leuven option.  Which will be looked at again in two weeks.  Meanwhile,


we’re all a little nuts.


before the science age humans didn’t speculate.  Humans also saw things quite concretely.  A bird and a fish walk into a bar and….before science people didn’t go outside their own knowledge of nature, or in the speaker’s words this concrete world where there is no speculation.

You can’t do science without classifying, you can’t do science without…I missed it…consistent logic, and today abstraction.  Found in education.  Take the hypothetical serious, take the abstraction seriously. 

Be cognitively flexible. 

bankers.  hssss.  upgrades in everything require cognitive.  Moral debates are absurd because we take the hypothetical serious.

My grandfather hated the English so much he didn’t have any feelings left for anyone else.

We base our principles on abstractions and then try to make them logical. 

Well, it sounds like the intelligent people in the world today are most likely no where as happy as their grandparents, and they don't know it.  And people who are not especially intelligent are in the same wacky world of speculating the hypothetical and it just looks dumb. It does.

And that could explain the not too bright Americans and Donald Trump,  they have found their savior. 

I have never listened to The rise and fall of ziggy stardust in its entirety.  Bowie was really good, wasn’t he, eh, calling ELP.   


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