Number 1 in what?

You may already know that I taught a course on testing and grading.  The rather silly stuff I wrote yesterday was motivated by trying to think of ways that I was No. 1.  Of course, we could list the weakest, lowest first and move to the highest, best last.  But if I am the best speller in the class, I typically have to state the size of the class to establish how good I am, writing "I am the best speller in the entire third grade of 114 students!"  It is easier and faster to rank them best first, so that Number 1 is the best and number 2 is second-best.  With a spreadsheet or some other software, it is easy to sort various columns quickly and accurately. OpenAI says that 2 billion people use the free Google Sheets and 1.2 billion use Microsoft Excel for handling and analyzing numbers.

Because each human is unique and our situations are always changing, I think it can be fun to toy with the criteria for ranking.  It may be easy for students to think that the teacher knows the "correct" answer to test questions but as we get more knowledge, sometimes we find that what was taken to be the "right" answer isn't correct.  More often, I think as we proceed through our lives, we find that skills and abilities that were not called upon in school turn out to be valuable.

Am I number 1?

1. Who has the best credentials for identifying as me?  Me!

2. Who has been me the longest?  Me!

3. Who is the first person they think of when they think of me?  Me!

4. Who would I rather be: Ralph Waldo Emerson or me?  Me!

5. Who knows more about computers?  Betty Grable or me?  Me!

Clocks and watches tonight

At 2 AM, Central Standard Time will change to Central Daylight Savings Time.  So, if you live in the US, official time may Spring-forward.  The official web site "time.gov" says the time change occurs at 2 AM tonight but it will probably work out to change clocks and watches just before going to bed.

Look!

We took a bus trip from London to Edinburgh for a short visit.  That evening, we ate in the hotel dining room.  Lighting above the ceiling showed a rat running about here and there, in the ceiling.  As you can see, I still remember that critter from back in 1974.

The day of the week

My watch tells me the day of the week and the current time.  It can deal with something about the tides, too, but I don't need that and I don't use it.  When the month of March began, it began to tell the day of week incorrectly.  The last time, it was wrong, I went to a local jewelry shop and a woman got the watch corrected quickly.  But this time, two different women said they didn't know how to fix it.  One of them advised me to use the numbers on the back of the watch, find the right manual and follow instructions to correct the watch.  I had no faith that such a procedure would work but I was wrong.  

I had time last night and used the numbers to find the appropriate instructions, followed them and now my watch says it is Thursday!

March forth!

Some humorist I read said that "March 4" is the only date that is a sentence.  I haven't checked all the dates but I think the idea is to consider the date to be "March forth!" instead of "March fourth".  The search software Duckduckgo says "there are approximately 40 calendars in use around the world".  Of course, they have histories, some being in their present form way back and some recently formed or modified.

Matilda

The book "On Repeat" by Margules introduced me to the fact that many people naturally listen to the same music repeatedly but go out of their way to avoid reading a book they have read.  The book by C. S. Lewis "An Experiment in Criticism" emphasizes that serious readers often return to a book.  I have had little experience with film studies but someone told me that a film course they took required watching a movie three times over: once for a general introduction, once with an eye to the acting and directing emphases and once for concentration on camera angles and lighting.

Last night we watched the movie "Matilda" and I was surprised to find that previous viewing came back to me at moments expectedly.  The movie is about a young child, maybe first grade age, with an unusual mind.  It is the story told in the children's book by Roald Dahl.  This little girl is the daughter of Danny DeVito and Rhea Pearlman, a father and mother who are unable to see they have an unusually intelligent child.

The whole experience of watching the smug, certain parents and the child's experience attending the school headed by actually dangerous Principal Trunchbull who despises children is a delight.

Consequences

My friend is a historian, especially the history of science.  He and I were interested in the book "The Limits to Growth" in 1972.  It was about coming problems on earth and among its humans.  From that, we moved to the idea of having a college course at UWSP on aspects of the future and on the question of how well people had predicted their futures.

From preparing, teaching and reading for that course, I concluded that basically humans have been poor at predicting the future. As I thought about why, I came to the idea that things we do have consequences that we can foretell.  Factors such as your actions and my actions have consequences that combine in ways that we could not have foretold.

When my daughter gave me a year's worth of Storyworth's questions, the power of unforeseen consequences came up.  I remembered several decisions and actions in my life that I could see how consequences that affected me that I could not have seen beforehand.  When I was in the 8th grade, I was asked to choose a foreign language to study for 2 years.  The choices I was given were French, German, Latin and Spanish.  I thought that decision might be my only chance to study an old and influential language so I picked Latin.  

I had no idea of the string of events that decision led to.  I found I had to go to a particular all boys high school, way across the city, for the 2nd year of Latin.  No other public high school offered a 2nd year.  That high school was male only at the time, which led, temporarily, to meeting few datable girls.  My homeroom teacher and my guidance counselor both explicitly advised me to go to college.  I told my mother about their advice and she suggested I check out going to the nearby teachers' college.  I did, I could afford the fees and I went there.  Something like 75% of the students were women, one of whom has been my wife for 65 years.  The fees were very low because of state support but I have to agree to teaching for at least two years.  I taught for four years and enjoyed it.  My school system required me to work for a master's degree and shortly after beginning, my grad advisor told me about a PhD scholarship that seemed made for me.  I applied, was accepted and studied fulltime.  When I graduated, I applied to a school of education and taught there as a faculty member for 37 years.  

If you are like me, and you probably aren't since I am weird, I say "Choose Latin."

By 13th century

This paragraph caught my eye.  It is from the book A Place for Everything by Judith Flanders

By the 13th century, knowing how to search through a book for a particular piece of information, rather than reading it from start to finish, had become commonplace for clergy and scholars. How to search for a book, however, was something that had yet to be addressed. Until this date, it had been a question that had barely needed a solution.

"A place for everything" p. 133 by Judith Flanders

"A Place for Everything" is subtitled "a history of alphabetical order".  You might think that such a history would be boring.  But I am married to a professor of school librarianship and I am a former library page, a lowly employee that replaces books that have been left out back where they belong.  It was from this book that I learned that

Your best hope for finding a particular book at one time was to ask the librarian where to find it.

It took years to move from arranging books by the first letter of their last name to also using the 2nd letter, so that "Kaplan" came before "Kirby".

Professor Arthur Herman

Yes, it can be a shock when an important person in your life dies.  It can happen unexpectedly, of course, but as we age, there is more and more concern about death. Prof. Arthur Herman of the UWSP philosophy department died recently. He was in his mid-90's so his death was not unexpected.

Some years ago, Prof. Herman gave a talk about the basics of Buddhism.  He specialized in Eastern thought and was able to read the language Sanskrit.  His talk gave me an introduction to religious ideas that are not based on the idea of an all-powerful supreme being.  He wrote several books including "The Ways of Philosophy".