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Reason for the Season

We attended Jen’s Passover Seder last night. This was our third or fourth year, so the rituals are becoming familiar by now, though I’m sure we’ll never master the songs. (Foreign words I can handle, but they don’t rhyme, they don’t scan, and often they repeat without prior indication.)

One of the rituals, at least at Jen’s place, is openly questioning the tenets of Judaism. Sometimes very basic tenets, like whether the Jews were even slaves in Egypt at all before taking their 40-year desert vacation. (I’ve seen convincing evidence that native Egyptians were, at least technically, slaves, while outside tribes were hired and paid to bolster insufficient corvee labor; another guest reported that slave labor, cheap but slow, wouldn’t keep up the one-pyramid-a-generation pace for succeeding pharaohs.) Not only do we have moral quandaries like whether God was responsible for Pharaoh’s intransigence (“but the Lord hardened his heart”) and whether God is a bastard for punishing that intransigence by killing innocent first-born children nation-wide; there’s plenty of reason to doubt whether any of the culture’s foundation myth is true, beyond “we left Egypt, then seized lands from the people living in the Levant.” We’ve also had Jews at the table claiming with a straight face that atheists can be Jewish—not merely of Jewish ancestry, mind you, but active practitioners of Judaism—despite denying its first, primary, most fundamental teaching: “I am the Lord thy God Jehovah…”

So a pretty heterodox crowd. Which is good. Heterodoxy is healthy, especially when it comes to obeying a quite probably imaginary magical man.

But I gotta ask: If you’re going to treat all and every doctrinal element of a religion, even the simple and obviously literal ones—as our hostess does—as strictly optional, why bother claiming to practice that religion at all? It’s like claiming to be the kind of vegetarian who eats pork chops, y’know? If a definition excludes nothing and no one, it becomes meaningless. And if it’s meaningless, there’s no reason to celebrate it.

2011 04 19 mdlake Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

Heterodoxy

We attended Jen’s Passover Seder last night. This was our third or fourth year, so the rituals are becoming familiar by now, though I’m sure we’ll never master the songs. (Foreign words I can handle, but they don’t rhyme, they don’t scan, and often they repeat without prior indication.)

One of the rituals is openly questioning the tenets of Judaism. Sometimes very basic tenets, like whether the Jews were even slaves in Egypt at all before taking their 40-year desert vacation. (I’ve seen convincing evidence that native Egyptians were, at least technically, slaves, while outside tribes were hired and paid to bolster insufficient corvee labor; another guest reported that slave labor, cheap but slow, wouldn’t keep up the one-pyramid-a-generation pace for succeeding pharaohs.) Not only do we have moral quandaries like whether God was responsible for Pharaoh’s intransigence (“but the Lord hardened his heart”) as well as punishing that intransigence by killing innocent first-born children nation-wide; there’s plenty of reason to doubt whether any of the culture’s foundation myth is true, beyond “we left Egypt, then seized lands from the people living in the Levant.” We’ve also had Jews at the table claiming with a straight face that atheists can be Jewish—not merely of Jewish ancestry, mind you, but active practitioners of Judaism—despite denying its first, primary, most fundamental teaching: “I am the Lord thy God Jehova…”

So a pretty heterodox crowd. Which is good. Heterodoxy is healthy, especially when it comes to obeying a quite probably imaginary magical man.

But I gotta ask: If you’re going to treat all and every doctrinal element of a religion, even the simple and obviously literal ones—as our hostess does—as strictly optional, why bother claiming to practice that religion at all? It’s like claiming to be the kind of vegetarian who eats pork chops, y’know? If a definition excludes nothing and no one, it becomes meaningless. And if it’s meaningless, there’s no reason to celebrate it.

2011 04 19 mdlake Atheism & Religion Comments (0) Permalink

Sprung

Spring break, in a sense, begins today. Technically, I’m not enjoying any extra time off yet; we get Friday nights and the whole weekend off, just like every other school, and only on Monday do we begin enjoying time in which we would otherwise be working. Unofficially, however, people pad out the break with normal weekends. Also unofficially, we enjoy a real bonus to free time right now: I don’t have to spend any time this weekend preparing lesson plans, grading papers, contacting parents—all the work that happens when teachers aren’t officially working, but in reality are.

Yippee!

Eileene keeps asking what I plan to do. Do? I’m going to relax. To her mind, vacation must be elaborately staged. Taking advantage of that free time to do something fun makes sense, up to a point—we’re going to take a day trip to Boston. But filling vacation time can easily be taken too far. Travel, and travel planning, is stressful. Keeping a schedule is what I do for work. You’ve heard people complain of returning from vacation not feeling refreshed, perhaps even more stressed out than when they departed? It’s because they’ve lost the art of quiet. So has Eileene, if she ever had it in the first place.

We have a seder to attend and a road trip to Boston. I’ve got job interviews, immeasurably more stressful (for me, at least) than merely teaching a class. That’s plenty. I’m going to spend a large block of free time not doing much of anything. Monday is reserved strictly for playing video games and otherwise goofing off, until we must attend the seder. Later in the week, with the cooperation of the weather, I’m just going to sit in the sun. Maybe I’ll read a bit, but a book is strictly optional
for solar therapy. I will rehearse my material for interviews, but I will also take large blocks of time on either side of the interview not thinking about jobs, because I can. I also won’t think about extended polynomials. Maybe I’ll try to pack in not thinking about factorial arithmetic at the same time, because I can multitask like that. It’s spring break. And I intend to take it as a holiday, not a vacation.

2011 04 15 mdlake Teaching Comments (0) Permalink

Sprung

Spring break, in a sense, begins today. Technically, I’m not enjoying any extra time off yet; we get Friday nights and the whole weekend off, just like every other school, and only on Monday do we begin enjoying time in which we would otherwise be working. Unofficially, however, people pad out the break with normal weekends. Also unofficially, we enjoy a real bonus to free time right now: I don’t have to spend any time this weekend preparing lesson plans, grading papers, contacting parents—all the work that happens when teachers aren’t officially working, but in reality are.

Yippee!

Eileene keeps asking what I plan to do. Do? I’m going to relax. To her mind, vacation must be elaborately staged. Taking advantage of that free time to do something fun makes sense, up to a point—we’re going to take a day trip to Boston. But filling vacation time can easily be taken too far. Travel, and travel planning, is stressful. Keeping a schedule is what I do for work. You’ve heard people complain of returning from vacation not feeling refreshed, perhaps even more stressed out than when they departed? It’s because they’ve lost the art of quiet. So has Eileene, if she ever had it in the first place.

We have a seder to attend and a road trip to Boston. I’ve got job interviews, immeasurably more stressful (for me, at least) than merely teaching a class. That’s plenty. I’m going to spend a large block of free time not doing much of anything. Monday is reserved strictly for playing video games and otherwise goofing off, until we must attend the seder. Later in the week, with the cooperation of the weather, I’m just going to sit in the sun. Maybe I’ll read a bit, but a book is strictly optional
for solar therapy. I will rehearse my material for interviews, but I will also take large blocks of time on either side of the interview not thinking about jobs, because I can. I also won’t think about extended polynomials. Maybe I’ll try to pack in not thinking about factorial arithmetic at the same time, because I can multitask like that. It’s spring break. And I intend to take it as a holiday, not a vacation.

2011 04 15 mdlake Teaching Comments (0) Permalink

Pirate Trap

Hardly time for a proper entry today, but that’s okay: the thing most worth sharing today is a scheme to get software pirates to turn themselves in. I’m not technically savvy enough to explore the implications, but I’m human enough for the news to curl my toes with delight.

And damned if the pirates who got burned aren’t whining about how unfairly they’ve been treated. They don’t understand why they should be banned from playing other games on the same system after getting caught using that distributor to cheat. They don’t understand why they should be banned from playing the very game they stole. They don’t understand what’s wrong with stealing at all: “I can’t afford a computer game, so I’m not hurting anyone by pirating one.” They don’t understand why claiming they can’t afford a $10 game (to go with a computer capable of effective PvP play) just earns derision.

The limitless sense of entitlement is disgusting. The threats of lawsuits against Garry Newman, maker of the pirate trap, for failing to deliver a product neither contracted for nor paid for lie in that terrible realm where sad and hilarious meet.

Parallels to today’s financial institutions, convinced they are entitled to risk-free profit, and prepared to seize our assets to make good losses on a mess of their own creation, are left as an exercise to the reader.

2011 04 14 mdlake Games Comments (0) Permalink

Harvard Simplified

Heh. Someone rummaged up a copy of the 1869 Harvard entrance exam (sometimes mislabeled 1899, the date of archiving), which is making the rounds under headings like “will probably make you feel dumb.”

Nothing could be farther from the truth. (Though readers who know me might object that I went to the he-man technical school nearby. Fellow students who took electives at Harvard reported that it was for wimps.) The test comes in two sections: classics and mathematics, the gentleman’s liberal education.

I’d fail the classics test, but only because we were taught modern language and American history in high school. About Latin I know virtually nothing, and about ancient Greek I know nothing at all…but I could answer comparable questions about declining German nouns and conjugating German verbs, because German is what I took in high school. Twenty-five years ago. Where classics shade into history, my knowledge is spottier, but comprehensive enough to answer questions I, II, III, and any other two. Yes, I know now who Jugurtha was, though admittedly I didn’t when I was seventeen.

And the math? Puh-leeze! Define a prime number? Simplify a product of polynomials? Construct a circle circumscribing a given triangle? Kid’s stuff. Literally. Okay, so I happen to be a math teacher, and have to know this professionally. Note well, however: I placed out of math classes at MSU; I knew it before becoming a math teacher. This is nothing to brag about. I’ve got intermediate-track sophomores doing some of this stuff, in a school officially failing to meet state and national standards. Couldn’t say how the geometry is going, since I don’t teach it yet, but dividing polynomials was last month’s homework.

The only gap a college-bound senior should face, apart perhaps from some of the geometric constructions, which require a bit of inspiration as well as understanding, is some of the material about logarithms, because, like ancient Greek, nobody needs to remember the log base 10 of 7. That was a skill for another era, before calculators, before even sliderules, when multiplication of large numbers was approximate and done through logarithmic translation. (Trivia: calculators and computers don’t multiply; they add—using this same process. So did sliderules, for that matter.) Practice long enough, and you’d memorize values like log(.02183) by osmosis, but knowing it in 1869 was no proof of understanding, and not knowing it today is no proof of lack of understanding.

It’s not even a good test. One question consists of three names: “Leonidas, Pausanias, Lysander.” Well, what about them? Another question asks students to compare Sparta and Athens, when I suspect they were supposed to contrast the great cities.

So. “Make you feel stupid”? Hardly. I’m trying to figure out how to hand this exam, or at least the arithmetic and algebra portions of it, to my basic kids as a morale-builder. “Look: you’re smart enough to get into Harvard!”

Of course, that was a different era. An era when being able to multiply binomials was the mark of an educated man. An era when professors mastered Greek but couldn’t be bothered to master English. An era when Harvard was hurting for enrollment, and used this test to advertize how accessible it was. But no need to harp on that for students already prepared to give up because they “aren’t worthy” of college, much less the Ivy League.

2011 04 14 mdlake Teaching Comments (0) Permalink

Pirate Trap

Hardly time for a proper entry today, but that’s okay: the thing most worth sharing today is a scheme to get software pirates to turn themselves in. I’m not technically savvy enough to explore the implications, but I’m human enough for the news to curl my toes with delight.

And damned if the pirates who got burned aren’t whining about how unfairly they’ve been treated. They don’t understand why they should be banned from playing other games on the same system after getting caught using that distributor to cheat. They don’t understand why they should be banned from playing the very game they stole. They don’t understand what’s wrong with stealing at all: “I can’t afford a computer game, so I’m not hurting anyone by pirating one.” They don’t understand why claiming they can’t afford a $10 game (to go with a computer capable of effective PvP play) just earns derision.

The limitless sense of entitlement is disgusting. The threats of lawsuits against Garry Newman, maker of the pirate trap, for failing to deliver a product neither contracted for nor paid for lie in that terrible realm where sad and hilarious meet.

Parallels to today’s financial institutions, convinced they are entitled to risk-free profit, and prepared to seize our assets to make good losses on a mess of their own creation, are left as an exercise to the reader.

2011 04 14 mdlake Games
Politics Comments (0) Permalink

Smart Enough for Harvard

Heh. Someone rummaged up a copy of the 1869 Harvard entrance exam (sometimes mislabeled 1899, the date of archiving), which is making the rounds under headings like “will probably make you feel dumb.”

Nothing could be farther from the truth. (Though readers who know me might object that I went to the he-man technical school nearby. Fellow students who took electives at Harvard reported that it was for wimps.) The test comes in two sections: classics and mathematics, the gentleman’s liberal education.

I’d fail the classics test, but only because we were taught modern language and American history in high school. About Latin I know virtually nothing, and about ancient Greek I know nothing at all…but I could answer comparable questions about declining German nouns and conjugating German verbs, because German is what I took in high school. Twenty-five years ago. Where classics shade into history, my knowledge is spottier, but comprehensive enough to answer questions I, II, III, and any other two. Yes, I know now who Jugurtha was, though admittedly I didn’t when I was seventeen.

And the math? Puh-leeze! Define a prime number? Simplify a product of polynomials? Construct a circle circumscribing a given triangle? Kid’s stuff. Literally. Okay, so I happen to be a math teacher, and have to know this professionally. Note well, however: I placed out of math classes at MSU; I knew it before becoming a math teacher. This is nothing to brag about. I’ve got intermediate-track sophomores doing some of this stuff, in a school officially failing to meet state and national standards. Couldn’t say how the geometry is going, since I don’t teach it yet, but dividing polynomials was last month’s homework.

The only gap a college-bound senior should face, apart perhaps from some of the geometric constructions, which require a bit of inspiration as well as understanding, is some of the material about logarithms, because, like ancient Greek, nobody needs to remember the log base 10 of 7. That was a skill for another era, before calculators, before even sliderules, when multiplication of large numbers was approximate and done through logarithmic translation. (Trivia: calculators and computers don’t multiply; they add—using this same process. So did sliderules, for that matter.) Practice long enough, and you’d memorize values like log(.02183) by osmosis, but knowing it in 1869 was no proof of understanding, and not knowing it today is no proof of lack of understanding.

It’s not even a good test. One question consists of three names: “Leonidas, Pausanias, Lysander.” Well, what about them? Another question asks students to compare Sparta and Athens, when I suspect they were supposed to contrast the great cities.

So. “Make you feel stupid”? Hardly. I’m trying to figure out how to hand this exam, or at least the arithmetic and algebra portions of it, to my basic kids as a morale-builder. “Look: you’re smart enough to get into Harvard!”

Of course, that was a different era. An era when being able to multiply was the mark of an educated man. An era when professors mastered Greek but couldn’t be bothered to master English. An era when Harvard was hurting for enrollment, and used this test to advertize how accessible it was. But no need to harp on that for students already prepared to give up because they “aren’t worthy” of college, much less the Ivy League.

2011 04 13 mdlake Teaching Comments (0) Permalink

DIY

Decisions, decisions. I still intend to explore FATE as a system for a short campaign wedged into an hiatus from our current one. Like many people, my first exposure to FATE was through Spirit of the Century; I didn’t like all of it, but there was a lot of good, red meat for players interested in a narrativist approach and, importantly, may have enough crunch to satisfy our crunchier players. The power level for SotC was too high for my taste. It was supposed to be: two-fisted adventure has to operate at high power levels, or the PCs just end up dead.

Enter the alternative versions of FATE: the Dresden Files and Diaspora and some other, less thoroughly written-up offerings. Reading them, I was reassured that SotC, not FATE, is built for high-powered play, and you certainly can adjust to your taste, just as the designers intended.

But how to adjust when I myself merely understand the rules, and not the nuts-and-bolts design decisions behind the rules?

To give a concrete example: all FATE systems employ short health meters: take enough hit points of damage, and you’re out of the fight. (At the complete mercy of the victor—the winner gets to declare how the loser is taken out.) You can avoid this horrible fate by stacking up “consequences,” short- to medium-term disadvantages in place of damage, but since these are readily exploited by your foe for even bigger combat effects, you may merely be delaying the inevitable. You may also choose to negotiate a surrender, losing the fight but preserving yourself from your opponent’s wicked imagination. (This negotiation happens out of character, so your PC might fight on unflinchingly even though you the player agree he’ll be knocked unconscious and left mistakenly for dead.)

So much all the systems have in common. They vary sharply, however, on how long the hit point track should be, how many consequences you can take, how many consequences you can take at a time, and how far consequences mitigate raw damage, with major implications for combat, both in game (How risky? How brutal? How much difference do skill ranks make?) and out of game (How much time does a fight take to play out?). I haven’t witnessed these differences first hand, but I’ve received repeated assertions that it’s so, which confirms everything I’d expect.

So I certainly have license to set such parameters as health bars and consequence size to reflect my own desired campaign’s tropes, but I may not have the understanding to set them properly. Go too far, and my players could be the mismatched equivalent of Superman in a world geared to Aquaman… or Aquaman in a world geared to Superman. Simply taking the rules as written from any of the systems I have at hand is no help: I don’t really know how any of them play out, and even if I did, I would know only that they aren’t quite what I want for my game. Some degree of guessing is inevitable, and that’s okay; I guess well when it comes to math. Shooting blind, though, is a little worrying.

2011 04 12 mdlake Games Comments (0) Permalink

Blind Fate

Decisions, decisions. I still intend to explore FATE as a system for a short campaign wedged into an hiatus from our current one. Like many people, my first exposure to FATE was through Spirit of the Century; I didn’t like all of it, but there was a lot of good, red meat for players interested in a narrativist approach and, importantly, may have enough crunch to satisfy our crunchier players. The power level for SotC was too high for my taste. It was supposed to be: two-fisted adventure has to operate at high power levels, or the PCs just end up dead.

Enter the alternative versions of FATE: the Dresden Files and Diaspora and some other, less thoroughly written-up offerings. Reading them, I was reassured that SotC, not FATE, is built for high-powered play, and you certainly can adjust to your taste, just as the designers intended.

But how to adjust when I myself merely understand the rules, and not the nuts-and-bolts design decisions behind the rules?

To give a concrete example: all FATE systems employ short health meters: take enough hit points of damage, and you’re out of the fight. (At the complete mercy of the victor—the winner gets to declare how the loser is taken out.) You can avoid this horrible fate by stacking up “consequences,” short- to medium-term disadvantages in place of damage, but since these are readily exploited by your foe for even bigger combat effects, you may merely be delaying the inevitable. You may also choose to negotiate a surrender, losing the fight but preserving yourself from your opponent’s wicked imagination. (This negotiation happens out of character, so your PC might fight on unflinchingly even though you the player agree he’ll be knocked unconscious and left mistakenly for dead.)

So much all the systems have in common. They vary sharply, however, on how long the hit point track should be, how many consequences you can take, how many consequences you can take at a time, and how far consequences mitigate raw damage, with major implications for combat, both in game (How risky? How brutal? How much difference do skill ranks make?) and out of game (How much time does a fight take to play out?). I haven’t witnessed these differences first hand, but I’ve received repeated assertions that it’s so, which confirms everything I’d expect.

So I certainly have license to set such parameters as health bars and consequence size to reflect my own desired campaign’s tropes, but I may not have the understanding to set them properly. Go too far, and my players could be the mismatched equivalent of Superman in a world geared to Aquaman… or Aquaman in a world geared to Superman. Simply taking the rules as written from any of the systems I have at hand is no help: I don’t really know how any of them play out, and even if I did, I would know only that they aren’t quite what I want for my game. Some degree of guessing is inevitable, and that’s okay; I guess well when it comes to math. Shooting blind, though, is a little worrying.

2011 04 12 mdlake Games Comments (0) Permalink