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.

Time to begin rethinking some writing assignments for 2023

One goal of mine for winter break is to beef up some of my units/lessons for "Composing Arguments," the First Year Writing course I have taught for over a decade for Metro State University. All courses need a refresh every once in a while, but when an instructor is consistently disappointed by student performance in a particular assignment, there is no time to waste.

A classic argument genre I like to use is the "critical review," which asks the writer to analyze and judge, with the intention of being helpful for the reader who is trying to decide how to allocate limited money, time, or attention.

One staple for all teaching is the model, or series of models, and I clearly need to be more intentional about which models I choose and how I share them with students. 

The immediate cause here is that most of the reviews I have been reading over the past few years have been underwhelming, if not downright horrible.

Here is a sample review (chosen for length and timeliness rather than artistic value) from the New York Times site on a somewhat new Netflix release called "the Noel Diary" that fits this time of year:

The actor Justin Hartley, who won fame on “This Is Us,” is no stranger to the themes in the holiday romance “The Noel Diary.” The yearning of adoptees, the tug of interracial connections and the repercussions of a family tragedy should ring a welcome bell for fans of NBC’s wonderfully weepy melodrama.

In the movie, Hartley plays Jake Turner, a best-selling author who returns to his estranged mother’s home in Connecticut after her death. He learns she had become a hoarder — though a notably hygienic one — and finds a journal by an unknown author amid the clutter.

A young woman pens her worries onto its pages in the movie’s opening scene.

Barrett Doss (“Station 19”) brings nuanced comedic timing and charm to Rachel, whose search for her birth mother — the journal writer — has led her to Jake’s childhood home, where she’s seen standing tentatively across the street.

Although Rachel is engaged, the two immediately share a spark, one stoked by their road trip to Jake’s even more estranged father in hopes of learning about Rachel’s mother.

James Remar, Bonnie Bedelia and Essence Atkins do nicely buttressing work as Jake’s rueful dad, a compassionate neighbor and Rachel’s birth mother. And the director Charles Shyer brings a journeyman’s ease to the screenplay (based on Richard Paul Evans’s novel by the same name): embracing holiday movie expectations here, gently deflecting them there.

The roadways are as snow-dappled as the town of Maple Falls, where a showing of a holiday classic further bonds the traveling pair. Their on-the-road revelations offer hints of what could turn out to be a wonderful life. While this will come as heartwarming news for sentimental viewers, it’s sure to leave one unsuspecting fiancé out in the cold.

Worth discussing: How important to a reader are references to actors the public may know previously? How important is briefly summarizing the overall theme of a movie? How important is giving readers a rough plot summary? How important is it to not simply give away the ending to a new film?

And one thing about the above review, which is rather brief (288 words is too brief for a college argument, so I would be asking for something closer to 600 or more): How important is it to provide examples that support claims made in a review? I highlighted two unsupported claims that a reader might have questions about. Students might wonder what "buttressing" means, and "a journeyman's ease" is so vague that it practically demands more examination and explanation. 

In the end, the above sample review is well-written while remaining remarkable free of "nutritional value," so to speak. Is that what we want our arguments to amount to?

Locally, we worry about the cold snap; nationally, we just worry

I subscribe to a free daily e-newsletter called WT Just Happened Today, and it always begins with a (long) one-sentence summary of the top news as chosen by this site. Here was yesterday's:

Today in one sentence: The Jan. 6 Committee formally accused Trump of inciting an insurrection, conspiracy to defraud the U.S., and obstructing Congress’ Jan. 6 joint session, and unanimously voted to refer the crimes to the Justice Department for prosecution; the House Ways and Means Committee is expected to vote Tuesday on whether to make six years of Trump’s tax records public; a federal appeals court rejected an effort by 19 Republican-led states to keep a Trump-era border policy in place; the Senate gave final approval to an $858 billion defense spending bill; the national average for gasoline dropped to $3.14 a gallon; nearly half of 18-to-29-year-olds live at home with their parents; and 65% of Americans say the country is on the wrong track and not headed in the right direction.

This sort of "headline" approach rarely provides much true insight, but does provide some sort of broad sampling of what is going on. I knew something about each of these items, but seeing them all strung together with the help of our friend the semicolon really caught my eye.

It's tough to miss the news about the Jan. 6 Committee (and the soon-to-shift committee power with the Angry White People Party soon to take over the House), and I have no idea where all this is going. It is nice, however, to have an on-going process finally reach a clear conclusion. 

Our border policies are chaotic, as is most everything happening around immigration, and it is certain that we won't be making any helpful changes in the coming year or two, thanks to that slight R majority in the House. I don't know what the clear solution is to it all, but voters really can't complain much about the government doing nothing when they opt for split chambers. That will not keep the whining and moaning from continuing, of course, much like all those "thoughts and prayers" will not stop or even diminish the slaughter of our fellow Americans with guns. Freedom!

The Defense bill came in many billions OVER what President Biden proposed, which shows that however much partisan debate there is, we can all agree that showering the military with unimaginable funding always passes. If having more guns in the country than people remains our policy, it's tough to argue against providing ever-more money for the Pentagon. And both are equally effective.

A gallon of gas had dropped almost $2 since summer, and no one gives Biden any credit. He doesn't really deserve any, in fact, but he also did not deserve all the criticism when rich oligarchs pushed the prices so high for several months. We are a country of morons.

Learning that a huge percentage of young Americans are basically delaying their full entry into adulthood is distressing. It also tells us a lot about the economy and job opportunities. And why wouldn't young people, many coddled a bit too much by anxious parents, think living in their parent's basement sounds like a bad idea?

Bottom line: nearly two-thirds of Americans think the country is headed in the wrong direction, but I would guess there is virtually no consensus as to what direction the nation should be heading. What could be more American than complaining to no effect (as with gas prices)?

We are becoming a nation with no true leaders other than the technocrats who keep things running, enforce rules, and issue checks. 

Maybe someone will show up to take on that role in the coming year. We can hope.

You can't run and you can't hide

It took almost three years, but Covid finally caught up to Kathleen and me about a week ago... and we are now on the backside of the illness (which resembled a bad cold more than anything else). The timing could have been worse, since we are confident that we will be well past the infectious stage (not to mention the sneezing/coughing stage) by the time Saturday rolls around. That is when we fly to Seattle for Christmas.

I am thankful that we both had our flu shots (super shots for seniors!) as well as five total vaccine shots, with the most recent being in September for the Omicron variant, which is likely what got us in the end. But we are not in the hospital or dead or otherwise impaired... and that could be sheer luck but more likely is due to the support our aging immune systems received from our various shots, not to mention staying home more than we would have guessed prior to the pandemic.

We have discussed how and where and when we might have been exposed... and we might have exposed one another in the end. There are no good answers since we were among several large groups in the past couple weeks, mostly involving holiday concerts and churches. We aren't sure exactly when we became "positive," since that may happen days before any symptoms show.

We finally did those at-home tests last Thursday, despite feeling that our colds were exactly like past colds, pre-pandemic, so today may mark one week of Covid, or maybe a bit more. The CDC says on its site that all should be well about five days after symptoms subside, so we feel OK about flying (masked) to Seattle on Christmas Eve.

We have delayed getting together with Lesley, Ian, and girls until after we return from Seattle "in an abundance of caution." as they say.

Bottom line: we feel fortunate that our Covid encounter didn't overwhelm, though today's story that China now predicts up a million deaths from Covid in the next few months is sobering. 

They seem to face some of the same problems the U.S. did in suffering our own million deaths over the past three years. China's extreme lockdown policies appear to have simply delayed the inevitable, and they have not convinced most of their elderly to get vaccines, etc. Their own vaccines may not be as effective, which may end up being one of those "national pride" situations that backfire. Who knows?

The U.S. deaths now are concentrated among the over-65 population (90 percent!), and it turns out that being old equals being vulnerable to this virus, no matter the race or location of the population. 

We are hopeful that we did not inadvertently spread the virus while infectious, but I suppose we can only feel a tiny bit of guilt. After all, the virus is everywhere and we are all behaving as if it's no big deal. I never really believed we were invulnerable, but going so long without catching even a minor illness might have led us to taking a few extra chances. Perhaps we were blissfully "naive."

At some point, though, we have to come to grips with the fact that we did everything we could, for as long as we could. My hope is that our systems are now even more strongly protected, since our immune systems were called upon to fight the nasty bug. We may be stronger in the coming year.

Maybe the virus is not a big deal at this point for a huge chunk of the Western World population, but tell that to the hundreds of thousands of Chinese who will be suffering and dying in 2023. 

Two similes, a metaphor, and an allusion in today's model sentences

You can find great sports writing quite easily, partly because the very nature of sports contains all the elements of story-telling: characters, setting, challenges/problems, and resolution. Sports are also just plain fun and people are so passionate about them.

This week's Frank Bruni feature on "for the love of sentences" reminded me of that, though I will share just a couple examples as we wrap up the week and the semester. The following sentence ends with a striking simile: 

The New York Times’s coverage of the World Cup has brimmed with too many standout passages to mention, but here’s a characteristically excellent one from Rory Smith, regarding Portugal’s often underwhelming play: “The country has for years boasted enough individual talent to match any team on the planet and yet, under the aegis of Fernando Santos, it has been assiduously, unapologetically, and in many ways successfully dour, as if a group of the finest artists in the world had been gathered together and asked to wallpaper a bedroom.”

There is something about our relatively slower sports -- like soccer and baseball -- that seems to inspire writers. Maybe that is due to writers having time to process what happens on the field, with plenty of time to speculate about the causes of great success or spectacular failures... not to mention the quirky, driven personalities who dominate at the highest level of sports.

This soccer writing features a provocative metaphor:

Andrew Das, also covering the World Cup for The Times, described a match in which Brazil grew frustrated and “pivoted to some of soccer’s darker arts: dives and flops, shirt pulls and shoves and appeals to the referee for justice. None of it worked. Croatia had brought a vise to a gunfight, and for more than two long hours on Friday it calmly and methodically squeezed the life and the joy out of Brazil.”

It helps if our students realize the expected cliche is "a knife to a gunfight," but it's not strictly necessary for them to get the idea. 

This comparison requires the reader to be familiar with both a 1981 movie and recent controversies with Ye and a fellow-bigot dining with the former president:

And Bret Stephens rued our country’s trajectory: “Pretty depressing how American culture has descended from ‘My Dinner With Andre’ to that dinner with Kanye.”

For most of our students, this may be asking too much, and it's a good reminder that allusions always assume a lot from our readers. Handle with care. 

And let's finish with another simile:

An unsigned article in The Economist asserted: “Trying to learn about sex from Hollywood is like watching James Bond for tips on a career as a British civil servant.” 

This one appealed to me both as a nice figure of speech but also because we have decided to revisit our James Bond collection of DVDs, combining Friday nights with the movies in chronological order and pizza night. 

There's little meaning to be found in those movies and lots of things to criticize and bemoan, but if we turn off our critical minds for a couple hours each Friday evening, what's the harm?