Looking for the criterion

I think in many situations, people prefer generalities.

  

"Mom makes good pizza". 

 "What's good about it?"

"I don't know, it's just good." 

"X was a great baseball player."

"Nah, he drank too much."

"What's that got to do with playing ball?"

Getting into data

I taught courses to both graduate and undergraduate education students about grading, testing, statistics and educational research methods.  I tried to use explicit grading based on clear standards of performance.  At the same time, personal computers were becoming available widely at prices that many people could afford.  

I had a duty of promoting the use of our campus computer that was rented for the express purpose of supporting faculty research with data analysis.  It was a time where I sometimes got asked by a professor "What is a computer?" People hadn't used one but they had heard of such a machine.  The situation was somewhat like the current one with AI (artificial intelligence).

My first experience with a computer involved developing a computer program in the computer language Fortran.  The computer was too large and expensive even to rent to have many.  We created a series of Fortran commands, each one punched in a separate card.  We handed our deck of cards to a clerk at a window and came back the next day to see the printed output.  It was tedious detailed work and often disappointing to see how our program had failed to do what we wanted.

It was a big deal in our household when we bought our first computer, an Apple IIe.  I wanted it at that time because I read that Apple had just started selling commercially made software for the machine.  The software consisted of a word processor, a spreadsheet and a simplified database.

It was so exciting when the printer printed out a sentence that I had just typed that I took the output to my wife's workplace to show her immediately!

That sort of work increased my sensitivity to what basis was being used to sort students, results, scores, etc.  It can be disorienting when one faces the many different ways that data can be derived, calculated and viewed.

Death Corps membership

Maybe as a person gets older, it is beneficial to join what I could call the "Death Corps".  I am using that term to refer to older people who school themselves in acceptance of death.  It may be impossible for a living human to fully accept death but it seems to me that the more one can accept the possibility of death, the less the event of one's death holds one hostage.  When I suddenly experience a heart attack, fear may storm through my being but working on acceptance may lessen the paralysis of mind and emotion that dying smacks me with.  I like to point out that I have not actually died.  We understand that full death is final and that it may not be possible to sample death.  It seems to be a condition that is all or nothing but it seems to be that books and opinions and medical exams can give me the idea that I am approaching the state of being dead.  Working on accepting that fact, on the realization that many people before me have died and that it seems inevitable that I will too.

As I age and friends about my age die, become limited in their body's abilities, I may become convinced that being dead would be preferable to being in pain or being very limited in my abilities.

Ebooks and two good reads

I have heard objections and reasons why some people don't like ebooks, (electronic books).  Some like the heft of a book.  Some like the scent of a book. When I first bought Amazon ebooks, I worried that some books I wanted to read might not be available through Kindle books.  Now, I have 3600 of their books.  They tend to be cheaper than paper books and they are much faster to acquire.  It does take an electrically charged device to read them but if a person has a cellphone, tablet, Kindle reader or computer, charging is quite familiar.  

There are various services and possibilities with Kindle books but the main differences are in weight and in speed of obtaining ebooks.  Since they are nearly weightless and take up just about no space, having a large number of them is not like having shelves and shelves of paper books. When I take a Kindle reader in my bag, I am taking quick access to thousands of books.

When I learn of a book I am interested in, I usually have a copy after a few clicks.  I can start reading immediately.

A friend recommended the book "One Thousand White Women" by Jim Fergus.  After I read a bit to Lynn, she agreed to listen to the whole book read aloud by me.  

"Why do men have nipples?" by Leyner and Goldberg consists of many often-asked questions about our bodies and their care.

CNN Photos of the week 10/5/2025

https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/02/world/gallery/photos-this-week-september-25-october-02?

Skirts

When I was in the third grade, I asked a girl to go to the Saturday afternoon movies with me.  I think I got a ride to her house from my parents or maybe rode a bike.  I don't remember the movie.  Many of the Saturday cowboy movies were quite similar.  A hero, Gene Autry or Hopalong Cassidy or Tim Holt, had to straighten out some bad guys.

When I was in the fifth grade, I purposely dropped something on the floor so I had an excuse to get under a group round table.  From there, I could look up the girls' dresses.  All I could see was white underpants.  Not very thrilling.

I knew I enjoyed trying to understand people and their feelings, fears, impulses, personal convictions and habits.  I discovered the local teachers' college was quite inexpensive so I went there.  Most of the other guys in my all-male high school looked for a high salary.  I had no salary at the time and put off thinking about money.  The teachers' college was about 80% girls, very different from an all-male school.  I dated a gorgeous girl who was intrigued by the books I carried and read.  In my junior year, I started dating the woman I have been married to for 65 years..

Some graduate courses later, after four years of teaching the fifth grade, I became a faculty member of the School of Education, University of Wisconsin Stevens Point.

Home!

We are back.  We tried to find a trip that appealed to us both and after several misfires, decided to drive around Lake Superior.  After a while it got too repetitious and we came back.  We still love and admire each other, and are proud of our 65 year marriage. The trip used Lynn's car and she drove until yesterday.  I suffered multiple zones of road repair and one-laned roads but have recovered from my single experience driving while she rested and put her attention elsewhere.  Don't expect us to try again.