Can we learn new things even in old age?

I saw a post the other day from blogger Scott Young that asked a timely question: Why do people (usually) learn less as they get older?

As he usually does, he tried to answer this question through some research and logic. One reason he gave was "opportunity costs and investment horizons," which suggests that people are quite rational and actually think through how to invest their limited time and energy. Bottom line: why invest much effort into learning something that doesn't seem "worth it"? 

Maybe we just get lazier and more reluctant to add complexity to our lives as we age. It's not easy to keep the energy level up and I have to admit that there are times when I find myself wishing for life to get simpler and for things to not change so rapidly. 

Here's a minor example. Yesterday, Kathleen and I wanted to watch something on Apple Plus, and the app demanded that we log in (again) and prove that we were who we said we were (this involved a website, a code, and an Apple ID... quite a process just to watch a rather mediocre TV show). Our hope, of course, is that now that we are "accepted" on that device, we won't have to go through the whole rigamarole again for some time.

A second minor example: we both have older iPhones (the 6s varietal) and both of us have recently noticed that our battery life is clearly fading. It wouldn't be the worst thing to upgrade to a newer model with a brand new battery, but my experience with new phones is that several processes/apps/connections will get "lost" in the cloning or copying or whatever. I need my phone simply to log onto both of my university accounts, including "push" notifications, etc., to insure that I'm an employee. 

As Kathleen rightly noted, we need a phone or ipad or some other computer in order to do something as simple as watch a TV show on a service we have paid for. Just a TV isn't enough.

An organization I am part of is currently discussing how to reduce credit card costs for payments and fees, wondering if we can save a few hundred bucks a year in service fees. On suggestion was to ask people to pay a participation fee in cash or by check... but just last month that same group talked about how so many younger people rarely carry cash and may not know how to write a check. That was why the organization created its own Venmo account (and takes ticket purchases by credit card through out website). 

I don't know what the final decision will be but assume that we just need to include credit card fees as part of the cost of doing business. There was a time when this might have seemed avoidable, but the convenience and ubiquity of credit cards and other electronic payments are tough to overcome.

And there will definitely come a time when we need to upgrade those phones. Weak batteries cause all sorts of disruptions... and mostly we just want our phones available when we need them. So we will spend some time reloading and adjusting and researching how to get things on those phones back to what we previously had. And we will whine about it (a bit).

When I began teaching, I ran copies on the school mimeograph machine... a process that included noxious odors and smeared ink, but worked. No computer needed. In fact, a typewriter was required to "cut" the stencils that copies were made from. 

Now I teach online course that involve no physical copies at all. PDFs are what I share with students. They could be printed by a student but I assume most read those documents on their screens. 

I won't go into all the stuff I had to learn in order to adequately create online courses on Canvas, access student work, add comments electronically, etc. 

My basic thought is that new technology and being forced to incorporate new software has not really changed my teaching or student learning.

What has changed (a bit) is my old brain, forced to create some new connections and find some creative approaches that never would have occurred to me in 1985 (for instance).

So the answer to the original questions about learning less as we age may simply boil down to motivation and necessity. 

We can forget that sentences, and word choice, combine to make better writing

The latest Frank Bruni blog post offered a wealth of great sentences... so many that I couldn't resist sharing some, and I will be sharing parts of this collection with my Metro students this week as we begin the spring semester.

My hope is that impressing upon those students the fact that great writing begins with great sentences, and that starting an essay with a great sentence sets us up for success will lead to fewer "wasted" sentences that are mostly the writer stumbling around looking for a way to express an emotion or reaction or observation. How many times have you encountered a piece of writing with a great opening sentence that just doesn't go anywhere. Those opening sentences are the engines that drive good writing.

From Bruni (and his many readers):

Olivia Nuzzi’s spirited end-of-2022 look at the spiritless Mar-a-Loco launch of Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign in New York magazine: “On the day he announced his candidacy this past November, the air was heavy with oleander and snipped greenery and sea mist colliding with mold and wood polish and hotel soap and the metallic vapor of Diet Coke and the alcoholic ferment of generations of cougars in Chanel No. 5.” 

The above example is clearly dependent upon sensory details and includes some caustic observations that are anything but "objective," even if they help readers better visualize the scene.

Next is from an opinion piece in which The Economist contextualized the hubbub over Elon Musk, Twitter and permitted versus censored tweets with this finely turned wisdom: “Free expression is not a problem with a solution bounded by the laws of physics that can be hacked together if only enough coders pull an all-nighter. It is a dilemma requiring messy trade-offs that leave no one happy. In such a business, humility and transparency count for a lot.” 

The wisdom here mostly that complex problems require complex solutions, and that truth lies at the heart of a college education and all the varying ideas and possibilities that we encounter in a community packed with research and analysis and deep dives into sometimes obscure topics.

In The Denver Herald, Kirsten Dahl Collins recalled the unusual beginnings of a Colorado church: “In the summer of 1860, four armed desperadoes invaded the offices of the newly launched Rocky Mountain News in Denver, gunning for editor William N. Byers. Luckily for the journalist, two Presbyterians walked in.” 

Now, who wouldn't want to read on to discover what happened next? This is clearly the opening sentence for a longer piece. It caught my eye partly due to the reference to departed Rocky Mountain News, which I subscribed to until its closing, but I also was intrigued by the feeling that armed gunmen with a grudge might invade almost any place of business today. We don't have to live in the Wild West... or maybe that is the heart of America's love affair with guns.

In an article in The Atlantic titled “The End of the Silicon Valley Myth,” Brian Merchant wrote: “You can just feel it, the cumulative weight of this stagnation, in the tech that most of us encounter every day. The act of scrolling past the same dumb ad to peer at the same bad news on the same glass screen on the same social network: This is the stuck future. There is a sense that we have reached the end of the internet, and no one wants to be left holding the bag.”

I see that tech firms are shedding workers at a high rate due to the economy slowing, not to mention over-hiring during the pandemic. Is the internet near its end? Hardly, but the writer's view is that it has matured to the point where it's getting closer to, say, the Law & Order glut of shows that fill hours and hours of broadcast time each night. Or perhaps it's like cable news, which rehashes and repackages outrage over and over, to the point where it all seems like meaningless background noise. Yes, it's all outrageous... so what?

And Megan Stack plumbed the lows of our country’s perpetual sugar high: “If America’s candy culture is a symptom, then we adults must be the disease — frightened for the future, harried by daily cares, snatching up a cheap simulacrum of happiness that’s already melting once it hits the tongue.” 

Diction choices tend to honor the expectations writers have of their audiences -- here, the writer seems to expect we will all understand "simulacrum." Readers can get a basic sense of the word's definition from context and the hint of "simulation" somewhere in the root. It means a representation of something or someone. 

Sometimes writers can push the envelope, so to speak, seeking to expand the vocabular of readers. I often did that in the high school English classroom, showing students how more advanced words might work in practice (and usually trying to provide some clues as to meaning).

But sometimes student writers grab a thesaurus (or just go online for the equivalent) and choose a synonym for some word they sense is overused and choose something almost randomly. That gets criticized as using a "twenty-five cent word when a nickel word will do").

I look forward to picking just a couple of the examples above and really digging into the types of choices the writers made, and perhaps exploring options. 

Happy New Year, and a new schedule for this blog

Today is Friday the 13th, and seems strangely appropriate as the day for me to return to this blog. I have been "away" since Dec. 21.

Did anything happen since then?

Of course the answer is "so much," but what's the point of rehashing all those events and situations when the barrage of news continues at a rapid pace?

After all, each day recently appears to add another embarrassing revelation about another misplaced classified document... and a deluge of criticisms of President Biden and bizarre pronouncements from his predecessor, not to mention a torrent of half-baked media commentary.

Suffice to say: it's bad for Biden and for the country.

Perhaps this will still be the overriding national issue next week, or is the smart money on some now-invisible challenge or scandal or natural disaster or mass shooting pushing Biden's document mess off the front page?

Yeah. I would go with the smart money, too.

This is my clunky way of getting to this: This blog will become weekly rather than daily (M-F), with my goal to publish each Friday in the coming year. This may give me a bit of space to include more perspective or may just be a way to be lazier as a new semester begins next Tuesday.

Or maybe both will be true.