The presentations recorded by our learning in retirement group take awhile to be uploaded into the Canvas library. That interval is long enough that we tend to forget about a talk that we missed.
I have learned from the talks given and from a Wisconsin Public Broadcast original program called "Wisconsin Life" that a community, especially one that includes a college campus, has stories, histories, skilled craftsmen and women that are always of interest. They just have to be uncovered and written up in good form to be entertaining, informative and pride-inducing.
I got a call a while back that the organization's calendar was too empty. Could I contribute a talk? I taught testing and grading, statistical analysis of experiments, educational psychology, educational philosophy and professional reading for personal development for years. Everyone that attends just about any American school as a student has experienced grades and parental reaction to grades. So, of course, I should have something of interest to say to older citizens reflecting on their histories and the experiences of their families.
I did talk today and I considered the topic of our unconscious minds. We humans are pretty good at reasoning and examining evidence for and against an idea but there are many other aspects of our thinking, our traditions and our conversations. The notes I used are posted in this blog for Wednesday, April 19 under the title of "I am giving a talk…"
I didn't mention the unconscious process of decoding spoken language into meaning nor the process of reading, both reading aloud and reading silently. Academics and lawyers are famous for preferring written documents to transient speech, which doesn't allow repeated scrutinizing as much as writing. I saw a book recently that challenged a reader to turn the page and NOT read what was there. The next page had such large words and so few that the message slipped into my brain before I could stop it.
