What did you learn today?

I was standing at the cash register ready to pay for my meal.  The high school student behind the register took my hundred dollar bill.  The student hesitated.  I couldn't imagine why.  The register already had the amount of the money for the meal, the amount of money received, and the amount of the change due.  He called over another high school student to help me, then left for the back.  The new student informed me, "He sucks at counting money.  Sorry about that."  Then, she counted out the bill according to the amount on the register.

Something is really wrong.  I understand that the above example of the high school student is possibly not representative of students in all 50 states, but the sheer numbers of students who describe their math experiences, together with scores from a variety of sources including standardized tests from the states, national standardized tests, the number of students in math related fields in college, the number of 70s or Cs given in classrooms, and the difficulty level of math in grades 1-8 tell me that there is a massive problem.

Curriculum is rarely questioned when discussion of reform occurs.  The subject is usually about teacher accountability, teacher turnover, better methods of presentation, getting learning standards in teachable form, or parental involvement.  Even if curriculum is mentioned, the subject is how to better protect the core subjects of math, language arts, science, and history against the ever increasing number of non-core curricular subjects.

But that should not be true in the schools of the 21st century.  If technology is king in this century, then the center of the curriculum should revolve around the technology in use of it and in understanding its principles.  Teachers should be so well versed in using technology in their presentation that there should be few students who could outperform them in the field.  All other subjects should revolve around the bigger ideas of their use.  For example, instead of a Language Arts class, language should revolve around a larger idea, communication.  That's because there are several types of communication that businesses use.  Business doesn't use the essay form of writing for anything.  Research and reporting, but not the essay.  Politicians and other speakers might use the essay form, but speech writing should be the more appropriate title.  A whole program that includes social media communication (blogs, picture presentation, Facebook advertising, video presentationetc.), business presentation, report and request writing, and other language applications should exist.  The days of the narrow, very narrow English classes of today should die a quick death.

The curriculum needs an overhaul in the worst way.  Whatever form it takes should be a radical departure from what has existed, and it should drive what needs to be mastered to thrive in a globally competitive economy.  It should not be driven by the artificiality of classroom training like today's school.  It should include formal training, and experience, and simulation.  A curriculum should be designed with technology at its heart in each of the three aspects named above.   Anything less will prepare students for second best.  Two countries of a billion people each are working very hard at becoming world class competition for the U.S, - India and China.  They will succeed in displacing the U.S. if we continue education on its current track.  It doesn't have to be that way.  There is still time to change.

Jimmy, here. Janie, here...

It's time to rethink every aspect of education.  That would include the mandatory attendance laws.  In America it is considered a right rather than a privilege to get an education.  That worked for about 50 years.  Now the generation being raised doesn't know that the right also carries with it a responsibility.  They only see the privilege it is capable of producing.

I find it indicative of this generation's parents that they are blaming the standardized tests for their children's poor performance in school.  But they are falling for the distraction, not the root cause for poor performance.  When a standardized test is scored, it compares in one way or another a student's performance to all the other students.  Stanines are used, a Bell Curve is used, or some similar statistical measure is used so that people can tell more accurately where a student stands than does a teachers' manipulated grading system in measuring student knowledge alone.  In Texas, at the moment, parents are up in arms because the "best" students are not scoring well on tests.  It's always possible that a wrong key was used in grading.  It's just unlikely.

It's more likely that student performance in the classroom is so poor that teachers have had to use means other than knowledge in order to boost performance, or even more likely, that a student is not in a competitive environment with a teacher, so a student's average  is high because of the number of revisions allowed for papers, make-up work, and participation grades.  So, this generation of parents want to shift blame than have their children become responsible for their own behavior.

But testing and grading are results of a wider problem.  Attendance is indelibly intertwined with grades.  Parents don't always see the number of absences, the amount of make-up work allowed without instruction, when 20 or more groups on a campus are pulling students from classes for one reason or another.  School sponsored absences account for a lot of absences for athletes on trips for out-of-town contests, for theater and band competitions, for club conferences, for shortened days and stunted weeks for holidays and testing, for UIL competitions, for field days, for number of days allowed for "sick" absences, for sitting in the waiting room of a vice-principal or counselor, for schoolwide fairs and science projects... the list really is almost endless.

Reconfiguring the school's instructional system would naturally affect all of the above activities, so attendance would have to be addressed.  The bottom line is that attendance laws make education ineffective.  Attendance laws have the effect of turning educational institutions into daycare learning centers where "well-roundedness" of a social and instructional mix of activities lead to not enough time for learning.  It leads to a very different definition of mastery than is used in most other circumstances.  In fact, if mastery were defined well and adhered to in the newly reconfigured school, attendance would take care of itself.  It would also draw a line between those who are responsible and those who are not.  And when responsibility is tied to money and basic needs, an individual's creativity in a gifted area rises to the top.  Everyone responds to incentive.

There should be a definite end to the attendance laws since they have not produced the quantum leap forward in education that the WWII parents had envisioned or that the Great Society of Lyndon Johnson's policies predicted.  They have produced a generation of those who want the right to an education with the privileged economy it is designed to produce without the responsible learning that it takes to support and improve the economy.  Reconfigure the schools, then watch the performance of the students change.  Attendance does affect output.  The natural consequence for lack of attendance tied to productivity and total time in a program would force students to switch program schools for not meeting deadlines or the mastery required when proceeding to the next level of training, experience, and simulation.  Also, if proven productive principles are adhered to, then most of the reasons for poor attendance disappear.

If incentives and productivity are linked to progress, attendance will not figure in to nearly all students' progress.  For the very small percentage that it does figure in, it would be easy to fund an all-experience school or type of business where lackadaisical students can either store up experience credits for a time in their lives when they have more incentive to complete a program or make a little money for their time spent in a service or retail business.

Formulating another model

If game playing is what the people of the country are satisfied with, then the current status of evaluating student learning will continue.  But, from what I see from those in their late 20s and early 30s, the status quo will be changed.  That's a breath of fresh air.  To what?

Perhaps, "mastery" of a discipline to be learned will be the focus.  It will be hard, after all, to fake what you don't know about writing an app or running software that becomes a usual skill for business.  If mastery is achievable, then the breakdown of the graduated k-12 system should happen.  Various schools will begin to take their places that offer fields where basic knowledge, experience, and simulation can be gained.  A person "graduates" when all of the foundational knowledge has been gained, all of the necessary experience gained, and all of the simulations achieved.  A communications school, for example, would offer all of the various ways that business uses presenting, selling, social media communication, and marketing communication.  Technology might offer programming skills in all of the basic formats for use on the internet, all of the hardware, experience in both solving problems that arise in business applications and fixing "glitches" for personal use.  They would explore a majority of the types of apps that are available for making life easier.  These are only two of the types of schools to emerge.

And how would student evaluation happen?  Grades would not be given, simply a mark for completion of a training regimen, the number of experiences needed, and the completion of simulations required. If an experience or simulation breaks down or goes awry before completion, the student simply goes through the experience or simulation again, or goes back to the formal training that prepares for the activity that had gone awry.

And what would people in society expect from a graduate of one of these schools?  If from a technology school, that they would not have had a survey course in World History or in British Literature, but that they could fix the technological problems faced by businesses.  If from a communications school, that they would know how to make presentations to sell to the public on the internet, how to communicate within a corporation or with a buisiness' customers, and how to communicate in person with employers whether in a corporation or an entrepreneurial endeavor, but that they might not be so knowledgeable about cellular respiration or the digestive system of a worm.

Other exciting arrangements and possibilities exist for schools.  The above is merely one configuration.  Schools would be more productive and efficient rather than taking 13 years of one's life to teach that average behavior and achievement is all right, that chemistry and introduction to analytic geometry are for everyone, and that credits are awarded based on some subjective, unpredictable, and manipulated grading system that has little to do with "mastery" of anything.

A picture of disarray

If student evaluation were a love affair between the public perception and actual learning it would be captured in this song by Dwight Yoakum

What would you think of a graduate who regularly scored a 40% for every subject all year for 10 years?  Right.  Me, too.

What would you think of a student who regularly scored Fs or 50s in one school and then switched to a different school, for example a public school, then a charter school, and scored 70s and 80s or Cs and Bs?  Right.  Me, too.

What would you think of a student whose record showed an absentee rate of higher than 20% of a semester and a score of 80?  Right, me too.

What would you think of a student whose record showed an A in one class where the teacher scored 60% of students with an A and a B where the teacher scored only 15% of students with a A?  Right, me too.

This should lead to the question of what the value of a score is of any kind.  In the case of the first example, schools hide this 40% grade by limiting teachers to only giving 10% (usually) of grades of 69% or less, and then further limiting a teacher to giving no grades below 50.  That limits the grading field to 1/2 of the 0-100 range.  So, a 70 is really 35 (70% of 50 points in the range).  A failing grade of 60 or below is really a 30% or below.  The school just uses the numbers of the upper end of the range they cut in half.  50-100 is really 50 points.  Even though a student grade of 70 is given, it is not a percentage, or it would be half as much as a percentage.  So, the school only uses 50 points, but continues to use scores on papers and report cards of the upper numbering of the range 50-100, not the 1-50 that it really is.

In the case of the second example, a charter school is designed for students who are "not the norm" of students in the public schools.  It is still funded by the public taxes, thus is a "public" school, but it is for students who don't do well for one reason or another in the public schools.  So, the teachers count participation much more heavily than tests by memory.  An assignment turned in at a charter school might be turned back to the student as many times as it takes for the student to revise it until a passing grade is "earned."  There are other tricks as well to the more simplified system, such as assigning much smaller (but representative) portions of a text for reading or a smaller number of problems to solve.  Sometimes, only the first half of textbooks are used so that foundational knowledge is the only information given, not the next layer of complexity.

In the third example, problem students many times can do a "community service" project like picking up trash around campus or delivering equipment from field house to playing field for coaches in order to replace failing grades in an academic subject for days missed in school on which tests, quizzes, or homework were taken.  This last example happens all the time, but mostly at the end of semesters so "grades" can be raised.

One teacher has more participation grades than another, or one teacher places more value on a test grade while another teacher treats tests, homework, and classwork all the same.  One teacher teaches by projects, another by reading and writing essays.  One teacher relies on group grades, another on individual grades.  So, what does the average represent?  The answer differs by teacher, department, school, even by elective versus non-elective courses.

One can gather that evaluation is by no means even, fair, justified, objective, or leveled by grade.  The system is in great, great need of change because no one knows really what a passing and failing grade means.  When standards are set, schools and teachers know how to manipulate the systems and hide the reality of the amount of learning that is taking place.  Suffice it to say, that the term "mastery" is not happening as a whole in most educational institutions.  Student evaluation is in total disarray.  The ripple effects of disarray usually last a generation.  I shudder to think...

Needing new medicine

Evaluating students by giving an average or a letter grade has been a rather recent development in the long history of education.  The reason for that is that in ancient times, education was by mentor to student, one on one.  In the Middle Ages, the privileged of society were able to pay for their teachers, so education was more widespread, but still the master/apprentice idea was the model.  One learned how to do something, trying again and again until he or she got it right.  Finally, England brought in the teacher/students model with a ratio of about 1:10.  At that time scoring knowledge became fashionable since teachers wanted to distinguish between students who did well for them and those who didn't.

By the time America was established, schooling was well underway and scoring knowledge using the teacher/students of a ratio of about 1:15 was practiced in populated places.  America has practiced this model since its inception.  After World War II, schools became much more populated since about half of the women stayed in the work force and school was a logical place for children in cities to go.  So, the ratio increased by about 60%.  Then mandatory attendance laws raised the teacher/student ratio to its current levels.  Because of this increase in student population, a more uniform grading system had to be implemented.

The system settled on two grading systems, A-F and 0-100.  Many schools had a D in the first system, which meant only one step above F since E was stricken from the scale.  The number system settled on 60 as the lowest passing grade at first, but a decade later, 70 became a more standard passing grade.  The numbering system is a little more popular these days than the lettering system, but they correspond nicely.

The scoring system itself is a plague on our society, but the games teacher play with the system are a travesty.  While evaluation is a necessary part of learning, other systems would better serve any reform that emerges for the next century's schools.  Our businesses deserve better to maintain the competitive edge in the global economy.  Our children need desperately to know that an average is not their best.  They need to know that 60%  or 70% of a knowledge base is not "passing" in society.  One gets paid to do a job well, not 60% well.  Or that payment for a job is for one's A game, not their C game, not even their B+ game.

The video below is a message for the generation coming into adulthood to change their world.  It's upbeat and altruistic.  A new form of education and an evaluation system that promotes reality and grit will allow this generation to fulfill their goals.

Take it to the next level

Initial experience, at least the kind that schools could offer, is limited in its scope and practice because people at some point want the experienced person's touch for things of great interest.  That is why simulation is vital to an education.  Through simulations students learn how to navigate the tough situations.  A student can crash and burn without doing real harm.

True-to-life situations can be simulated for most problems that arise in the world in most fields of endeavor.  Sometimes role-playing is a really good simulation.  I learned the Peter Principle by playing a role-playing game when I was in college.  It taught me something I about a deficient area in my life that I had to work on considerably.  The computer game Civilization was a great experience in trying to see if the world could have developed any differently than it actually did.  It was fantastic fun, and I learned a lot about history and people's ability to manage complexities in life.  Video games containing levels of difficulty are great simulations to have on hand.  They teach students about skills, levels of skills, and can be applied to many different areas of life.  Playing stock markets with groups, against groups, or in competition with only oneself has always been one of the best simulations to play and to analyze as follow-up after an extended period of time.

But simulations can also be for training as well as virtual experience.  The Microsoft 10 Hologram beta testing is something that will soon be available for public consumption.  Every school should invest heavily in this experience.  It would change people's attitudes rapidly and beneficially toward educators and education.  It would produce a "product" of students that come with a based knowledge ready for the workforce.  It would be the best way to fight minimum wage earning.

Replacing direct instruction

One of the best examples of giving students experience that I have seen in the last 6 years was in an elementary school.  Every Friday they operated stores in a town.  One grade level was responsible for setting up the stores, another providing sales in the stores, and still another for cleaning up after the event.  Grade levels rotated from one responsibility to another each Friday.  Each store was responsible for counting and reporting the amount of money (tokens) they collected, the mayor of the town was responsible for reporting how close to the goal they were, and if reached was responsible for implementing the distribution of the goal.  After a goal was reached a new mayor was selected for the next goal.

It worked well, the children looked forward to it, and they learned a plethora of lessons that "seat time" could never teach.  That's just one example.  I have seen others that weren't so regular, but that were still good.  I have seen greenhouses for raising a variety of plants.  I have seen miniature aquariums for raising fish to sell and to eat (and to learn about aquatic life).  I have seen regular trips to the planetarium with a different objective for each trip (one for almost each week of the school year).  I have seen art galleries maintained weekly that feature the artists and the stories behind either them or their particular piece in the exhibit.  I have seen others that would classify more as projects, which would work for beginning experience, but not the kind of experience that more consistent repetitions yield.

There are a million ways to give experience to the training students receive in the early grades.  When experience makes training relevant to present and future needs, students engage in and learn valuable, immediately useful lessons.  Making experience the norm would require a change in the way space is used in a building.  It would also require a different kind of lesson planning on the part of teachers.  And, it would require a different type of evaluation of student performance.  It would change the focus of schools away from the classroom model, and a reallocation of money for the needs of the new focus.

Parents of the classroom model are the greatest resistors to a the idea of experience as a teacher.  It's not something that can be measured with an average on a report card.  They think there is no accountability for teachers who don't spend their time endlessly reinforcing basic knowledge.  Redirecting parents' expectations would have to precede and continue any reform moving to an experience model of teaching.  Change has happened before and it wouldn't stop with this leap forward.  But, it would have to happen with plenty of solid answers to many questions.  Providing all the proof in the pudding would need to happen for a couple of years in advance of the change and continue at least the first three afterward
.

Efficiency is the new game

One of the most accepted principles in educating children in grades 1-3 is to be sure that reading is taught to all of them.  The second most accepted principle is to teach children the fundamentals of mathematical operations.  Beyond those two principles, people add good citizenship, fundamentals of life science, and writing stories.

Grades 1-3 are the formative years for children in that they form their opinions about school that rarely change past the third grade.  Surveys that are published don't usually deal with children's affective attitudes about education, but rather their performance because parents think that children's attitudes follow their performance.  If that logic is used, then performance tests at those grade levels should tell us the opinions children have of school.  And, given the data of performance of the two academic subjects of reading and math, children would have poor opinions of what happens at school.  Two indicators tell me this is true.  Observations in the classroom portraying students' actual engagement with the work going on and a record of the number of interruptions to activities, exercises, and short tests requiring behavioral comment or redirection show that disinterest in reading and math are rampant - to the levels of 60 and 70% for each indicator.

It's time to redirect all right.   But, not for the students, nor the teachers, but for the environment in which efficient, productive learning happens.  The classroom model would have students learn from their seats with books and instruction.  The occasional engagement with a board activity or a silent personal activity, sometimes a group activity with manipulative work of objects or a paired activity for a speedy learner to help a less speedy learner isn't efficient for productive learning, isn't efficient for lasting learning, nor is it efficient for natural cognitive learning.

If a person needs to present formative training for the generation that could, and will at some point, learn completely by computer, subscribe to the ABCDisney.com website and app.  It can teach students without a teacher or with a little adult guidance and monitoring.  So if a machine can do the training part, what is left?  That's a question for the old school educator and for those educated by the classroom model.  But, there are major steps left, not the least of which is presenting oneself through social media presentation, programming syntax, website setup and presence, and many other preparations for modern instruments and tools.  Giving students experience is so necessary for taking on the modern world and making it a better place.

A better way

Education should provide several benefits for people.  It should train the very young.  It should give a limited amount of experience to children during late childhood and early teen years.  It should contain true-to-life simulations for the jobs people prepare for.  It should culminate in an entry level skill set for the jobs and careers that people choose to be a part of as they enter adulthood.  And, it should impart a skill in knowing how to entertain and act on new ideas if people decide to switch jobs or careers.

Training young people has never been a problem.  That kind of education is at the heart of the classroom model adopted by the U.S.  Early childhood education has developed many good ideas and processes over the many years it has been in use.  A number of methods exist, also, such as Montessori/Discovery learning, laboratory learning, project-based learning, curriculum-based learning, and mentor-based learning.  All of them have significant merits and have contributed to a modern understanding of education.

Learning, or training young people's minds in areas of knowledge, is an important facet of education, but as one can see from the provisions listed above as benefits for a population, learning is not the end point of education.  Simulation, experience, and a "starter kit" of skills is on the list as well.  These three latter facets of education are not so evident in a student's current educational regimen.  They should be.  They're part of the definition of education that adults in the work world want for their children in order to take society to the next level of productivity and quality life.

Schools are not set up to provide the last three facets on any kind of ongoing and consistent basis.  Since people's desires are contrary to education's current state of affairs, then leaders who represent people's desires need to start to come to the forefront of the public's attention.  Activism is necessary.  That's usually the first step.  Reform is slightly behind.  It's time to hear the voices from innovative leaders across the educational spectrum and from the heartland of America's workforce.  It's time!

Change more to our liking

It's astonishing what people define as "good education."  Some are really loose with their definition, saying that education is just what people learn in life about life.  Some are really narrow in their definition, referring only to what young people learn between ages 4 and 18 in a classroom.  Others see education as what it takes to get a job for making money, and still others want education to be either well-rounded to encompass many disciplines to ready them for a profession or trade-oriented to become good at a few specialties within a particular discipline.

It appears important to define education before anyone can proceed to other steps.  It is clearly in a society's best interest to educate, but to what end?  A definition allows them to determine how to achieve the definition and eventually how to measure the learning that takes place as a result of the education.

As the state of education stands now, far and away the consensus is to educate via the "classroom model" which is deemed the most efficient system for the economic source funding it.  Even classes via internet use the virtual classroom model although instruction is not by a group in one place but by an individual in one place.  However, there are so many reform movements afoot in the U.S. that any onlooker would conclude the system to deliver the definition is broken or the definition of education needs to change.

Many people don't like one aspect or another about the current state of education.  There are those who would reform curriculum, for instance, or those who would change the idea of grading and mastery.  Two of the biggest areas of discontent are the funding sources and funding allocations used for the public school system.  Deriving a definition for education would allow a discussion for the funding source to change or the funding allocation (formula) to change.

An example of changing the funding source would be to replace the corporate tax due to a school district placed into a state mandated funding source for public schools and charter schools.  Instead, schools who teach to a specific set of skills would be funded directly by an account set up outside of the state/city government.  For instance, a software developing company would send a "tax" to an organization for disbursement to a general technological account, which in turn would send a percentage of funds to a technology school which has as a part of its course of training different types of software coding and development.  Other technological companies would do the same.  The tax would be sent for specific, but targeted and excellent training for technology only.  An oil company would send its "tax" to a general geo-science organization for percentage disbursement to a geological/geophysics/geoengineering school which has as a part of its training the exploration and operation of oil.  Other oil related companies would do the same.

Funding is always the major issue in education.  Defining what education is and should do, would help resolve the problems of this major issue.  Other issues would follow.  But a definition would guide people through the other issues as it would through the issue of funding.  It might even result in a change to the "classroom model in the U.S.  I would think, in fact, most Americans would support finding a definition for welcome change to this model and its current state of affairs.

Check out the register

For at least 80 years people have used the word register.  It is the word used to indicate that some words are commonly used and others are not.  People don't use words for a variety of reasons.  Sometimes people have rather restricted vocabulary banks.  That is usually a function of educational level, but not always.  Sometimes people have limited experience in a lot of different fields while others expose themselves to many different disciplines.   The more limited the experience, the more restricted the vocabulary.  Some people have decided that reading is tedious.  That results in having vocabulary disappear even if they have exposed themselves to words because of the principle, "Use it or lose it."  Reading regularly is a cause for an increased vocabulary, while limited reading yields a smaller number of words learned.  Sometimes people find themselves in a cycle of only associating with a certain group of people.  The words of the group are the words of use while other words are actually eschewed.  This happens with religious groups who have a closed approach on group admittance.  Of course, educational level is one of the greatest indicators of restricted vocabulary.

Since vocabulary choices are a function of various factors, one might think it would be impossible to use it in detecting deception.  Quite the contrary.  Lies have to look like the truth.  Thus, it is easy to assume that the vocabulary choices would be the same as for words of truth.  But, a principle higher in the hierarchy of choosing words is the principle of looking smart.  The idea is that if one appears smart/intelligent, then the listener more easily will view it as the truth.  That has the affect of changing register from usual one used by the person.

One of the most common word changes involving register is the opinion many people have of using verbal extensions, what some call phrasal verbs.  Verbal extensions are the use of adverbs mainly to extend or slightly modify the meaning of the verb being used, for example hand out for deliver or give, or figure out for discover or calculate.  The word out is an extension to the verb hand and figure and extends or slightly modifies the meaning of hand and figure.  Many see the verbal extension construction as ordinary or less formal.  To sound smart, people will revert to one word synonyms.  Examples abound: return for come back, accept for buy into, leave for check out, produce for put out.  The list is long.

When a person uses fewer verbal extensions than his or her usual habit, the person views the topic or environment one in which he or she needs to appear smarter.  So, the person makes a register change.  That is precisely the place where prevarication appears.  So, one has to figure out if the person has true knowledge of the topic or a good comfort level in the environment.  If not, perhaps a little deception is occurring.

What is meant?

Word choices are pretty important when speaking.  Early on in the second half of the 20th century, linguistics became a full-fledged discipline of study apart from psychology although before that time the two were indelibly linked.  One of the first matters of interest to explore was to find a universal grammar.  That ended up being a street that has branched many times as it has been explored.  But, the second matter of interest was a part of Noam Chomsky's work (the father of modern linguistics wrote a dissertation that spawned transformational grammar) that went unresearched and left for others to investigate, the area of semantics.  Now, of course, a number of good theories exist as to the nature and generation of meaning assigned to words.

Eventually, forensic linguistics would intersect with the study of semantics and produce tailored theories and methods for delineating between truth and deception.  Some of the first methods developed worked with word choices.  People usually think of vocabulary when mentioning word choices, and sometimes that is the case.  But, many times it has to do with the placement of adverbs in particular positions in a sentence or the type of conjugation of a verb.  The linguist working with detectives on the Susan Smith case a number of years ago, for instance, noticed that she spoke immediately following the drowning of her children in past tense.  Most people would have spoken in present tense since they would not have been used to the idea of their children being dead yet.

Because all words have assigned meanings to them by society, the choices people make can definitely be important.  In casual conversation, people don't really think too much about the words being spoken because they are speaking for the reason of merely communicating information.  But, when people think they are being evaluated, judged, or taken more seriously for some reason than casual conversation allows for, then they become much more aware of the words they are using and start making more particular choices.

The tricky part sometimes about evaluation of word choices is that society allows words to have double and triple meanings.  Deciphering meaning sometimes can be very context dependent.  An example from the famous DeLorean car case in New York illustrates this concept perfectly.  The person who broke the case  was told that if he did so, the defendant would kill him.  Sometimes, the word kill means to take a life, but it can also be used to metaphorically express anger without any action taking place.  Attorneys worked hard to show the context was a case of the latter, not the former meaning.  The defendant for this and other reasons was found innocent.

People say things all the time that they don't mean to follow through on.  So, eventually, everything boils down to words being figures of speech or literal in nature.  Once that hurdle is discovered, then the business of truth or deception can be taken up.

Word capture

People usually feel comfortable when talking to others they know.  Most personality types feel comfortable making conversation with people they don't know.  But when people feel out of their comfort zones, they try not to talk unless forced to.  When people get on elevators, they tend to clam up, not feeling the compunction to make even small talk with other occupants.

If someone has been accused and has to give a deposition for an attorney, if someone has to make a statement to a detective, or if someone has to talk in front of cameras unexpectedly, then the speech changes.  It is not a natural situation.  They are forced to talk.  That uneasiness is captured in words believe it or not.

The beauty of such captured words is that people cannot tell that their speech changes, it's so subtle.  It happens below the conscious level.  Unlike polygraph tests that measure nervousness and temperature rises, speech changes are so unapparent it can't be controlled even if the person knows what the changes are.  A person would have to know what changes about speech and practice it for a long time to fool the speech change test.

When a person begins speaking, and continues for any length of time, a comfort mechanism forces the language into a certain range of words being used.  The range is not a set range of words, but unique to each person's vocabulary base.  A quantity-based value for this range, called the type/token ratio, can be established.  The more and the longer one talks, the more the baseline of the ratio becomes certain.  A second statistical test performed on the range on various segments of his speech reveal the areas where misleading speech has been made.  Choices of vocabulary might be important to other types of analysis, but word choice semantics in the type/token ratio analysis are not important.

Such an analysis makes the 5th amendment an important principle if someone knows that a forensic linguist is in on a case.   Incrimination is the name of the game.

Following junctures

The word crafty comes from an Old English word meaning skilled.  By the time the Old English period slipped into the Middle English period shortly before the time of Chaucer in the 1300s, the word crafty began to be used as skilled in being deceptive. 

Part of the meaning for crafty is that someone designs the construction of the deception.  That idea lies at the heart of finding deception in speech.  People have to design their lies, so they have to decide at what point in a person's story it begins to vary from what actually happened.

The idea of design enables those who analyze discourse structure to know where to look in people's stories for their deceptions.  Stories have juncture points.  These are points where either the action ends or changes or points where a change in cast is introduced.  From one juncture to the next, one can judge the plausibility of the story happening the way it is told.  Some deception designers decide to change multiple junctures.  But, no matter how many junctures are changed, the story has to end in the same way as it was reported to the police or investigative team. 

That makes each juncture have a plausibility rating as the proceeds from one juncture to another.  A contributing factor to the rating is how well the action of the juncture supports or points to the reported ending.  These pointers are the markers that show an emerging design to the unknown parts of an occurrence.  A second contributing factor to the rating is the amount of detail offered in the juncture.  A person doesn't necessarily have to have too little or too much in this rating.  The person just has to have an equal amount of detail to the level the juncture starts.

The lower the rating of pointing or equality, the higher the probability that the section of the story is the point at which it varies from actuality.  Those who like to deceive are usually very good, but are they skilled, crafty enough, in controlling what lies under the surface of normal discourse?  The amount of practice that one would have to put in to recognize what to do to evade pointing and equality is something deceivers are not willing to give.

Science vs. hunches

Some people don't believe that forensic linguists can tell from words uttered when a person is being deceptive.  They point to the failures of other forensic methods from other disciplines such as eye movement, gestures and facial expressions, and sensors to measure temperature differences or tensal variation in the body.  Experts at telling non-truths can learn to beat any of the above investigative methods.

So what is different about the methods that measure the language used in lying?  People speak all the time to communicate their ideas.  In the first place, most people don't believe words can be turned into numbers or statistical data.  In the second place, language utterances reveal tendencies both in types of words used and in quantitative analysis.  It is virtually impossible to see either of the tendencies since the brain has been trained over a great number of years to produce those tendencies.  Even if someone could spot tendencies in words used and retrained their brains not to use them, nearly all people don't know the calculations to use statistically monitored words for tendencies.

One attorney I know called the linguistic method "voodoo," but he could not find fault with the method because he could not spot the tendencies in speech nor did he understand the statistical method used to find the patterns for analysis.  So, the voodoo became simply a reflection of his ineptness to manipulate language on more than a mere style or substance level as he was used to employing.

Different graphs can been constructed to measure several indicators of deceptive speech people use. Unfortunately, people are conditioned not to truly trust these investigative tools of science since the methods in the first paragraph have been found flawed or possible to beat.  That's too bad.  Many more people could have had their webs of deception exposed by forensic linguistic investigation than by hunches and stylistic/substantive guessing of words' surface values.

Word spinning

I have seen attorneys try to lead a witness without leading the witness according to examination rules. Unexpectant people play along unwittingly, and those who ultimately play along know that something is really wrong with line of questioning going on.

Usually, the attorney asks a few warmup questions to get the witness loose.  Then (s)he begins with "Would you agree that... ?"  No witness should answer yes or no to such a statement.  A witness should always say, "I would say..." and proceed to give her or his own version of what the attorney is referring to.  Sometimes a lawyer will try, "Would you characterize the situation as...?"  Again, the witness should give the answer, "I would characterize the situation as... " and proceed to recount his or her own characterization.

The most damaging kind of leading comes when an attorney phrases a question and asks for a simple yes or no answer.  There are two lines of response to follow if that happens.  The attorney wants to highlight the answer of course and not the context.  The first response should be to say something like, "Yes, I could answer yes or no, but the context is indelibly connected to the answer. "  Then begin with providing the context.  The attorney will probably interrupt the context to demand a yes or no answer.  The second response should be to say, "Because (the event) happened (a certain way), then yes (or no)."  If the attorney moves to strike the comment because it doesn't answer the question, or if the attorney reduces your second answer to a yes or no, then the second line of response is the only one left open - pleading the 5th amendment.

Reducing testimony to yes or no is really not the best way for an attorney to pin down a witness.  Establishing context is important, so an attorney needs to help the witness establish the context.  The jury hearing the testimony is just as likely to think less of the attorney pushing a witness to a fifth amendment answer as it is to think less of the witness.

One other advantage of allowing a witness to speak of characterizations or facts is that the words can be charted according to known linguistic methods of detecting deception.  Exploiting those areas then becomes much more factual and much less dependent on how an opposing attorney wants to cast a case.

What we know

One habit that detectives and attorneys have that leaves them blind to the truth is to ignore a very obvious principle.  Everyone knows that people speak more about matters they know than matters they don't know.  Duh, right?

But detectives and attorneys fail to ask for comments on all relevant topics.  As a result. matters a person knows versus matters a person doesn't know goes unknown.  That unknown information could prove to be damaging.  If a suspect or witness doesn't know much about something, then the topic is harmless. It would be the topics most known that need exploring and probing.  That will be where deception is taking place.

More generally, people new to a relationship should adopt the same philosophy.  A partner is less likely to exploit what he or she doesn't know, more likely to exploit what he or she knows a great deal about.  Being aware of the areas of someone else's knowledge base makes one aware not to open up without trusting the person or situation.  That limits the amount of damage a malicious soul (or uncaring) can inflict.

In legal matters, areas of knowledge are like enemies.  And as Michael Corleone has said, "Keep your friends close and your enemies closer," (Godfather, Part II, 1974).  Areas of great knowledge unprobed are very dangerous.  A lot of truths, half-truths, hedges, and deception can take place in such vast unexplored areas.  It should always be the case for attorneys in depositions, voir dire, case presentation, and witness examination to explore all the areas of strength an individual has.  Therein lies the truth (and his or her deception) about a matter.

Glib talk

Glib talk can be innocent.  It happens all around and all the time.  People just say what comes to mind and it is mere chatting, many times to extend a friendly conversation.

But, I know some people that talk glibly as a matter of style and as a matter of business.  In this case, the glib talking is to lead people to believe something that could never be delivered on.  Many people are trusting and they are disappointed when the action promised is not delivered.

When glibness is a matter of style, I know to stay as far away from that person as I can.  They tend to be charismatic in personality, which complements their glib style.  So, recognizing this style is easy.  Most of the time their business is too good to be true.  That's a second flag in recognizing the glib talker.  This person doesn't see his or her talk as deceptive since he or she does it so often.

But, glib business style is deceptive.  And hurtful.  Very disappointing.  It wastes people's time.  Fortunately, these people also shrivel quickly when confronted.  Those who don't, need to beware.  Glib talk is the easiest kind of talk to analyze and illustrate how truth never resides in its words.

Hide and go seek

People hedge when they don't really want to give the heart of a story or set of events.  There are many reasons for hedging.  Sometimes, people are just private people and don't like others to know their business, such as their salary, their weight, their religious preferences or beliefs, their middle name, where they were born, and a host of other details about them.  They're just private.  They're not really hiding things.

Most of the time people are hiding things, though.  People hide when they have made a faux pas, when they have embarrassed themselves in some way, when they have seen or heard something they weren't supposed to see or hear, or when the timing of a happening is not to their advantage.  People hide things from everyone except certain people close to them sometimes.  But, people definitely hide things they have done that are wrong, either morally for them or illegally.

Psychologists, detectives, agents in espionage, and attorneys are groups of professionals that have studied how to crack the code on people who hide things.  They have developed techniques to try to bring out the event that is hidden.  Torture is the oldest technique, but a person doesn't ever really know if what is given up in torture is really the hidden event.  People give up hidden things merely to escape pain.

Three very popular techniques that have been around for decades and are still used are polygraph testing, reading gestures and eye movement, and highlighting hedges.  The first two are accurate to a small degree when used on people who haven't been subjected to them.  However, they are easily defeated by practiced people who hide events.  Hedges, on the other hand, take much more rehearsal for people to free themselves from because speech habits are hard to break.

The best known hedging word is the word well.  What follows that word is a thought carefully worded.  The utterance uh with a pause of .5 seconds or more is also a widely used feature of hiding something.  Other characteristic speech habits signaling a hedge are use of fillers like you know, I mean, you know what I mean, that was something, right, I'm telling you, so... (when drawn out or lengthened past normal timing of the following words).    Most of the time people use hedges to word something to follow that will divert attention or tell an innocuous portion of the event they are hiding. Hedges come in other forms as well.

It doesn't necessarily take an alert listener to hear or recognize a hedge.  But, it does take an astute person to know how to explore and probe the ideas, stories, or event hidden by the hedge.  The fun is just beginning for the forensic linguist or other intuitive professional or person who loves sliding back the curtain a little at a time after a hedge is used.  What is hidden is soon to be revealed.

Watching injustice

Last week I found myself in a courtroom for jury duty.  After they randomized my number for the jury pool I was to be in, I knew I was too far away from the number of jurors they needed even after the strikes and most likely after the people still trying to get excused.  So, I decided to mainly observe the lawyers during the voir dire.

The lawyer for the prosecution was a man of middle age.  His client was suing for damages for negligence.  The questions the attorney asked were the standard questions and aimed at the jurors who had had the experience asked for in the question.  That particular method is a gross waste of time, and doesn't really get anything to surface that he needed to hear.  People don't volunteer information if they think they want to be home in 2 hours and raising their hands prolongs their stay just that much longer.  The defense lawyer's method was efficient with time, but didn't garner the information she needed.  She used whole group questions, only receiving answers from a few prospective jurors who wanted to volunteer only enough information to salve their consciences.  Most of the time, she had to call jurors by name to get any answer at all.

The two lawyers' mannerisms were really predictable.  That doesn't garner a high degree of cooperation nor respect for the system everyone in the room was supposed to be upholding as a great way to judge others.  The defense lawyer unnecessarily broke the rules a couple of times, mustering an objection from the defense.  She showed a lot of inexperience in trying to break her way of thinking in redirecting questions to fit the rules.

The prospective jurors were also pretty typical in their responses.  Three of the pool decided they wanted to talk a lot.  There are different reasons for this, but mainly these prospects wanted to impress the defense attorney in particular how well qualified they were to judge this type of case.  6 others were factual in their responses.  That usually signals cooperation but the terseness of the facts really showed the opposite.  Then there were the 4 utterly silent ones.  Two of them paid attention to the proceedings, but two didn't.  Two of these people were picked as jurors on the case, which is a real mistake on the attorney's part.  It should be an attorney's rule never to have a person on his jury panel that he didn't make contact with during voir dire except in Federal court where the rules for voir dire are a little different than state rules.

Of course, I was dismissed after the voir dire.  I didn't follow up on the proceedings.  But, I could see how it was going to go.  50% of the jurors picked had actively identified with the plaintiff's attorney.  One more had reacted against the defense attorney.  One of the prospects that had not answered a question was one who had not been attentive during voir dire.  The other silent one had paid attention, but had seemed less involved with the defense attorney.  I would imagine it was a verdict for the plaintiff.

I am always brought back to some sobering news after reporting to jury selection duty.  People observe how we react even if we don't know they are watching.  That's not new news for me.  But it is always sobering news to me.  I need that reminder to keep me from becoming stagnant and complacent.

Today is for time lapse

I won't get to write a blog on this day for another four years.  This is that special day of a leap year that makes the year a leap year.  It's the key ingredient for extending the year by 24 hours.

It's a bit funny sometimes how ideas linger much past their time.  I hear people, for instance, still saying "roll up the window," when modern cars press a button to raise and lower it.  But the "roll" action lingers.  Admittedly, it's used a little more by older people than younger people like "icebox" for refrigerator is.  The two older terms will soon die out, probably in another 20 years or so.

The keepers of the stock market were rather stubborn as well.  It was the 21st century, April 9, 2001 to be exact, before Wall Street changed from using fractions to using decimals.  That could have happened easily a decade prior to the change, maybe even two.  But, it's the result of conditioning people receive.

So, when it comes to Leap Year, it's time for an update.  We've just been conditioned to think in terms of a leap year.  We have the capacity to think a little differently about a true year, and we certainly have the technology to calculate it accurately.  Everything would work out without a leap year if our days were extended by .9856262833675 of a minute each day.  How hard would that be?  Simple.

And who would notice the extension.  Clocks wouldn't have to change anything.  There are already 1440 minutes in a day.  It would take nothing to have 1440.9883321894303 minutes in a day.  Only the timing mechanisms would have to adjust by 59.299 seconds every day to make the change.  Then, there would be no need for leap years at all.  I'm really all for this change.

We could change the calendar too while we're changing things about time.  Who needs to have short and long months?  We have the technology to precisely and accurately change to having our days completely equal.  Every month would be the same length every year, year in and year out.  That would much better mirror what is happening with the Earth's revolution around the sun.  We could even adjust for the Earth's slight movement closer to the sun and account for a new revolution time in nanoseconds as well.  I guess that is a discussion for another day.

Today's blog is in honor of Leap Day for Leap Year.  I hope people become reconditioned soon and that timing of years changes post haste.  But, until then... Happy Leap Day 2016.

Brought to light

Nuances are the little things that change or add to the usual meaning of something.  Nuance can be applied to almost any situation.  A person can refer to nuance of color, taste, texture, art, photography, lighting, culture, and word meanings.  It's a flexible word in its application.

It's also a rather modern word, historically speaking.  It was nearly 1800 before the word broke onto the scene.  The French had used the word nue for a long time because it had derived from Latin.  The French had dropped a b from the word.  The Romans had used the word nube, but the French used a glottal stop for the letter b, so b dropped from its spelling.

The Romans were very superstitious about things that happened in the sky.  Clouds were a part of the sky and the presence or absence of clouds usually meant something.  The color of the clouds also changed the meanings of things.  The French made the same application and added an r to the word to make it a verb (nuer).  The French could cloud or shade things like situations or pictures when they painted them.  The term felt natural to use for a British man, then, to adopt the root of the word nu, take off the er verb ending of the French word and put a noun ending in its place, ance.

One of the greatest tools in detecting deception is to analyze something according to the nuances of a person's regular speech. Nuances of definition are important, so synonyms for adjectives, adverbs, and nouns become important in spotting lies.  Nuances in verbs also change the type of action that was used, so their meaning in particular is important.  And nuances can apply to sentence length and topic change as well.

Those who weave their dangerous webs in words love to shade the meanings of the things they say.  It's easy to spot, however, when the listener is paying attention to the meanings of words.  And if a person is able to read the words of what has been said and can compare to other words being used, then the web of dangerous words can be spotted and brought to light for what it really conveys.  Nuances play the role of cameras in catching all that people deny.

Life's procedures

Yesterday I was listening to a medical doctor as she was speaking to my daughter.  She was trying to recommend a follow-up treatment, but she seemed a little uncertain.  She mentioned that there were a couple of different protocols for the follow-up as a reason for her uncertainty.  She had to review for a moment or two the two different treatments, then she recommended one.

Many fields follow protocols.  Medicine is one of the most protocol-driven fields there is, but that is due to the high stakes of life-altering substances and techniques for conditions and due to resulting lawsuits.  The military is a protocol-driven field as well.  That's because order and danger from weaponry are paramount to life and death.  Psychology is a field full of protocols because of the various detrimental results that could happen from influencing or conditioning the way people think.  The field of education doesn't call their procedures protocols, but the procedures to follow come as a result of standardized curriculum and testing over that curriculum.  So, yes, they are protocols.

It would be nice if life adhered to protocols, but it doesn't.  There is no set system of procedures through life that yield "best results."  Religion would have people believe that there is a procedure for best results in life, but many times I hear double-speak because it also advises of the struggles of life even if following the procedures in place.  Countries like to legislate procedures for best results, but people are so different from each other that the morality arising from such legislation yields mixed results at best.

All of the fields mentioned above are in interim stages of development right now.  There really should be just expert training in known procedures and let the experts piece together other combinations for advancement than to have protocols established.  Protocol only produces status quo and mediocrity.  It has been nice for the interim as we have advanced.  But we're past that stage of development.  And it isn't a reflection of how life works anyway.

We really go through life with our best guess at how it should be lived.  If we follow the crowd's best guesses at life, we usually don't bother to distinguish ourselves from them in any way.  If we march to the tune of our own drummer or take less traveled paths, then we find ourselves going it alone in a lot of cases without support or trust.  It's more than a little difficult to navigate through life with any assurance that everything works out nicely at the end.

In fact, life is ragged, curved, back and forth, repetitive, harsh, and dilemma-presented.  Sometimes we find others who make their best guess in the same fashion that we do.  That's a beautiful thing when that happens.  And it's so beautiful because it happens so infrequently.  I recognize those infrequent beauties much better now.  But, there are so many that fight our best guesses, and they're hard to rid from our lives or from their influence on our life experiences.

By the end, I don't think I will say so much that I have figured life out.  There's really nothing to figure out since life happens rather randomly.  And I really don't want to say that I followed all the standard procedures.  I hope to say to those whose best guess was very close to mine, "I really enjoyed our walk together!"

All day rain affair

It's been an all day rain affair, a soaker.  It's a soft rain, pepper and salt style.  As always, it brings its refreshing aroma.

There's nothing to spoil it.  I have been sitting in front of a window watching it, and doing a few other things like writing this blog, as it peppers the cars passing by or parked outside this nicely tucked-away Starbucks in a new and beautiful section of town.

I don't frequent this area, but it's nice whenever I have to come to it.  New shops, new buildings, new cars and car dealerships.  The people here are early career to mid-career people, ambitious to have the best of the American Dream, hopeful that they will accomplish their goals and desires.  The two wealthiest areas are many miles to the north of this place, but in 20 years these people might achieve that status.

Rain brings with it hope.  I have felt that since the rain started last night and have thought about it the last two hours looking through the front window of Starbucks.  I like to deal in hope.  Like the rain, it leaves a refreshing aroma.  And, I like dealing with people who bring hope to my life.  They provide  a materialism to the soul like new shops and buildings do for people achieving their dreams.  They make life so worth the living.

Captivated

"Space - the final frontier."

Thus starts the introduction to one of television's most lasting and famous programs, Star Trek.

Of course, it's not the final frontier.  Space as we now know it consists of so much more than just a trip to the closest star or star cluster.  In fact, the Milky Way itself is thought to contain a couple of hundred thousand stars.  We hadn't really been able to look much farther than that when Star Trek first came out.

Now we know so much more.  Space is still fascinating.  There's just a whole lot more to it than just a fascinating frontier.  It conjures images to mind that we can only sketch out as an artist's representation at present.  It's fascinating, beautiful, inviting, full of splendor, and sacred ("set apart" from Earth views).

If I really think about it, I realize I have something like space in my own mind.  It's the place I can go to over and over and still enjoy and explore.  I can think of new frontiers or I can go to those really familiar places.  My favorite is a safely guarded memory that I conjure to mind.  It, too, is fascinating, inviting, and sacred.  It's familiar but it contains unexplored territory because I can think of what happened after that memory or what could have happened as a result of it.  I have it captured in the chambers of my heart and mind so that I can explore its uncharted areas at will.  Whenever I recall it, it is beautiful and full of splendor.  That particular stored image flashed before me today, unexpectedly.  I was captivated again by it, just like space.

The final frontier seems far away, as do memories for that matter.  But, I get excited thinking of exploring the ice oceans of certain moons, the volcanoes of others, the remnants of life from dried up oceans, and the energy producing craters of others.  I get equally excited seeing the familiar red dirt and strewn rocks of Mars and the ice patches of Pluto.  And, it's just as sensational to explore again the representation from that sacred chamber of my heart.  I just love what that exploration brings.

That's cool, Gramps

One of the most interesting research studies I have been a part of was the study of intergenerational conversations.  Before that involvement, I hadn't really thought too much about how conversations happen exactly between younger and older generations.  But, the study  revealed a definite process.

Astoundingly, to me (but I admit to being a little naive on the subject), conversational skills are not learned much from parent to child.  The parent-child conversational model is one of question and answer or rhetorical questioning mostly.  Sometimes instructional conversation takes place, but not a lot of skill building for regular conversations happens.  Children see their parents model the skill by observation of their parents in conversation with their friends, but not so much from parent to child.

Thus, teenagers learn their conversational skills from their peer group.  That model of learning how to speak conversationally sets up real problems related to dating and marriage, but it is the model currently followed in the U.S. today.  But, it also sets up the need for a learning process in the laboratory of real life speaking occasions.  Teenagers, generally, expose themselves to other teenagers by choice and to people older than they are by force or by necessity.  They learn from their own, but have to learn how to talk to people outside their age group by experience.

Often, teenagers have to find by trial and error how much of their conversational patterns and vocabulary are acceptable in a more adult world.  This makes them tentative when talking to older people.  The more they talk to older people, the more they find out about vocabulary acceptance, attitudes toward certain expressions, turn-taking, and amount and types of information to give and receive.  They find that many times the experience of intergenerational conversation is a little bit taxing on their ability to communicate.  So, they have to learn to converse little by little.

My favorite conversation illustrating the truth of the process was a conversation between a grandmother and granddaughter.  The granddaughter mainly listened, at first, then the grandmother had to involve her granddaughter with leading questions.  Finally, the granddaughter began commenting on her own.  It was the consummate tutorial on intergenerational conversation.

I suppose this happens in general in life in a lot of different areas, but to actually see the evidence for what happens under the surface of conscious awareness, was a great exercise in awareness for me.  It should make me much more of a tolerant person.  I'm not sure that is the case, but it should be.

Spot on

My cousin put a picture up on Facebook not long ago depicting the river and surrounding land where our dads grew up.  It was a beautiful shot of a wide river at the point where it bends across a two-mile spread of land.   The bend is appropriately named for the most common animal in the area in the days when the bend in the lake was only a bend in a river.  Many of my cousins still live in that area today.
The picture conjured up a feeling of serenity in me.  It took me to some of the memories my father had told me about when he and his brother used to roam the hills barefooted, killing possum and squirrel to eat, camping on the bluffs overlooking the lake, and spending the night cooking their supper and resting for the next day's adventures.

On one of those bluffs rests a nice get-away place for weekends or a spot to rest for a week during a vacation.  At one point in my life I used it as a refuge from a place I lived during hostile times.  It just represents good times with relatives, good memories of being an ascetic for a while, and an ongoing place to rest my head for shelter from a storm or for kicking around having a good time.

It's just a "spot" on the Earth, but it's an important spot for me.  Heritage and very pleasant memories are bound up in that spot.  Hopefully, everyone has a "spot" somewhere, even if it's not land or houses that he or she owns.  People just need a spot to go to physically and mentally to make it through the insanity of life when it rears its ugly head.  And people need a spot to constantly create the next memory for the times when life goes from good to bad.

I'm headed there at the crack of Spring this year, and again as it Spring closes out.  It's my refuge.  "Spot on," I tell myself when I go.  It's spot on for a lot of reasons.

Others' decisions

The story made local news first, then regional, then state.  I read it first on USA Today, a national news agency.  What could be such a big story?

The article was about a school district that was going to have a four-day student week for instruction.  The article was a lengthy one by news standards.  It didn't really deal with the impact of that decision or the academic reasons specifically for causing the decision.  There were two reasons given for the change and nothing about the future impact.  One reason was that too many students needed individualized instruction from tutoring services because of failing test scores.  The second reason was that the four-day week could attract more people to live in the town.

That drove me to want to find more out about the town.  What town would have so many students using tutoring services that it would alter the school calendar?  What town needed to move to a four-day school week for attraction of denizens?  So, I looked up Olfen, Texas.

The 175 people or so that live there don't even comprise an incorporated town.  The number of students in the district is 28.  The median income is $11,000 less than the national median income.  The average house costs $92,000, about $30,00 less than the national average.  

Everything about the community is less than.  Who really would be wooed by such a place to live there even if they had a one-day school week?  I don't know what kind of number for required tutoring services out of 29 students was "too many," thus triggering a change in schedule, but even if tutoring was 100%, what is hard about accommodating that number of people?

I thought there might be something of interest in a news title about a four-day instructional week, but no, there's not.  I'm not sure why the story became a story of national interest.  I'm really not interested in reading about a less than town having any influence at all on how to handle education, so far for them, in a less than manner.

And, yet there's something that resonates here.  We do let people with a lot of values, money, talent, ambition, or connections less than us, dictate how we should think or live.  We shouldn't.  Fortunately, we as humans, get better at living and limiting undue influence on us to control or even slightly alter our lives.  We get better at employing our talents, our values and money, and at focusing our ambitions and connections to further the cause that makes us productive and happy.  We don't let the Olfens, the less thans, dictate what we become.

Effects of "out there"

The more one studies and observes the solar system, from the vantage point of other planets and probes filming them, the more one is painfully aware that time, location, and space is all relative. Speeds on Earth, for example, are negligible on other celestial bodies.  Gravity is different on those planets, so travel with vehicles is also different.  When people have been on the moon, they usually walk to different places.  They did have a wheeled vehicle available, but it had limited use since fuel and traction were problems.  The same has been true for the wheeled vehicles on Mars.  Atmospheric conditions and chemical make-up also alter the way movement happens on a planet.

So, as we humans go about our daily activities all bound up with schedules and apps that tell us time estimates on freeways to get places, events that are coming up, sleep times, heart rates, calories burned, and amount of water consumed on our wrists, we should know that our routines and outlooks are relative to our position in an orbit around the sun.

  

If we lived on Mars, Europa, or Titan, or if we lived outside of this solar system, what would our perspectives be?  I have to believe they would be much different.  They would be relative to our location in the time and space of that planet.  The films Interstellar and the Martian have helped us see a different perspective since they had characters that lived outside of the Earth's location in time and space.  They helped us see the relativity, the fragility, and the minor importance of existence here on Earth.

I consider that from time to time.  Whenever I do, my mind usually releases the stresses that have built up.  I treat people better.  I feel less ambitious and more apt to act out of a sense of what the long-term benefits are rather than the shorter ones.  And I cherish my memories more because it could have been extremely different if I had been born in another time and in another place "out there."

From a jack to a king

The year was 2014.  He had been fired at the end of 2013.  He was used to working 80 hours a week.  Now he was on the couch on Sundays watching NFL afternoon football games.  He had made good money, so he wasn't too worried about running out.  But, still it was a difficult mind game to play.

People knew of him and his abilities.  He didn't have a low profile.  But, in 2014, 25 times he was passed over for a job.  His resume was not a slouchy one.  It included two stints as a head coach and a number of assistant coaching and coordinator jobs.  Still, 2014 was a very silent year for him.  

I don't know what kind of resolution he made for January 1, 2015, but it could have been to enjoy retirement.  Then the end of January happened.  The Denver broncos' coach called.  It was his boss from 2013.  They had been fired together in that year.  But, now in 2015, his boss wanted to rewrite their story together.

And rewrite the story they did!  Denver won gracefully with aplomb and command last night in the nation's largest sporting event.  The game was not a fantastical performance by a spectacular aerial bombardment.  Quite the opposite.  The points scored for Denver were the work of the defense.  You could have guessed that though.  This defense was the number one defense in the NFL this year and has often been compared to a few of the other history-making defenses.  Denver won because of a coach who recognized players' abilities and meshed eleven talents to form an ironclad defense.  The result was holding the NFL's highest scoring offense this season to 10 points.

There were some other media-catching stories in the game and after.  Everyone saw those stories.  But, this story of Wade Phillips wasn't touted.  It was mentioned during the game, but in a small 8 seconds of time.  It deserved much more than that.  Wade Phillips, you inspire us!  You embodied the attitude of never giving up, and even more so, the attitude of being the best with what we've got.  Here's my grandest "THANK YOU!" for leaving us this picture of yourself.

Headshake

What happens in language is generally what happens in people's attitudes toward life.  Here's a great example using English.  A noun is a person, place, object, or idea.  We learn that definition in elementary school.  A noun functions in two places, first as subjects of to a verb and second as an object of various constructions such as, object in a verb phrase, object in a prepositional phrase, and object in a verbal phrase.  It also answers the question "Who?" or "What?" in all of its functions.  Easy enough, right?

It's easy to cite an example for each sentence above.

Subject - The volcano erupted.   (What erupted?)
Object of verb - The tourist saw the monuments.   (Tourists saw what?)
Object of preposition - All of us talked for an hour.   (for an what?)
Object of a verbal - The principal called a meeting to give us our assignments.   (to give what?)

Still easy enough.  It's simple application and recognition.  Then a grammarian steps in.  "What about the following?" they say.  "The secretary is right.  What is right?"

I reply, "Easy. The secretary is 'what?'  Right.  Right is a noun."

"Oh, no," the grammarian says.  "The verb is isn't a normal verb.  It's a verb that shows existence or state, not action.  It's different.  So all the rules change for what follows it."

"What?" I say.  "The secretary is 'what,' doesn't make sense to you?"

"Not in this case," the grammarian answers.  "Because is shows a state, then the word right tells that the secretary exists in a condition of being right.  So, right is an adjective.  Right also answers the question 'What kind of,' which is an adjective question.  What kind of secretary? A right secretary."

"Wow," I say.  "I suppose you are going to tell me that in the sentence, 'The toast tastes good,' that the word good also tells a state for the toast, so it also is an adjective?"

"Exactly.  Now you have it!" the grammarian exclaims.

"But the toast tastes what?  Good!" I retort.  By way of concession, and to confuse the issue, I add, "Maybe the toast tastes 'how,' but certainly the toast doesn't taste 'what kind of.'"

The grammarian never misses a beat.  "No, the verbs for the senses like feel, taste, look, smell, and so on, function as verbs of being like is.  So adjectives follow them.  Good in this case is an adjective.  It asks, 'What kind of toast?'"

Seriously?!!!  I don't know what planet grammarians get their training on, but it's not on the planet I live on.  This is exactly the kind of conversation you would have with them if you ever engaged them in matters of grammar.  And it's the kind of rationalization that people use when they solve problems for themselves in real life.  People say, "The rules are this.  And it may look like I'm breaking the rules but really I'm doing it for the right reason, so the rules don't apply."

Rules by the government or corporations are just as bad.  If a company checks your credit score, it will receive one, but tomorrow when you check your credit score for yourself, the score is lower because the company checked it the day before.  What?  Or the IRS has a standard deduction for each person - unless you're married.  Then, the deduction is different.  What?  People make money for their time all the same, whether time in McDonalds or time in Goldman Sachs.  But, the tax tables say the McDonalds employee is taxed at one rate and the Goldman Sachs employee is taxed at a different rate.  What?  I work hard to increase my value for a rate of service and the government says its value also increases commensurately with mine?  What?????

I'm telling you - Watch out for life's little magic tricks.  They're everywhere from the language you speak to the money you owe to the score that buys you a car.  Are you just shaking your head like me?