Speech on taking initiative. Blessed by nature, figuratively speaking.

20221107

The light just came on at 6:30.  We had only about two hours during the day.  I’m getting this out quickly.

Oksana called my attention to the fact that her figure is back to what it was before Marianna was born.  Not that I needed reminding.  I notice, and appreciate.  I in turn pointed to my belt, which has wear marks across it below each of four holes, but which is now in need of a new hole.  Gerontologists will tell you that we lose weight as we approach eighty.  Probably true, but having given up drinking and sweets (mostly) over the past year certainly helped.

I left out a particularly appropriate quote from yesterday’s bit on the credentialed.  Lord Melbourne – think he’s the Prime Minister after whom the city is named – observed sometime early in the 19th century “What all the [highly credentialed] wise men promised has not happened, and what all the damned fools said would happen has come to pass.”

I also forgot to mention economists, who have certainly been a fount of foolishness over the years.  Now that in Powell we have a Fed Chair who seems to get it, the first since Volker, the system is far too far gone to fix.  How many, in the interim, have been awarded Nobel prizes for elaborately named band-aid solutions, putting lipstick on pigs?

Last night, as Oksana, Zoriana and I played dominos by the light of a flashlight, Eddie was absorbed in a Ukrainian book on beekeeping.  During other players’ turns he educated me about giant Southeast Asian bees, pygmy bees, queens and drones and all sorts of other apiary matters.  It delights me to see him reading on his own.

That offers a convenient segue into another speech I recently prepared, to be delivered at Toastmasters but intended for Eddie, about learning to take initiative. 

The light is out more frequently.  They might be doing it simply to convince us that the situation is real and to discourage Ukrainians from returning and posing more of a logistical problem.  Whatever the case, I bought a bit more charcoal this morning.  I also redid the arithmetic on how much it would take to keep the house reasonably warm.  Not encouraging.  I’ll be buying more.

That’s the news from Lake WeBeGone, where life is as normal as might be expected.  Oksana teaching, Zoriana at kindergarten, Eddie studying, and Marianna playing in the yard as I rake leaves.

Graham

Taking Initiative

I have experience in all aspects of teaching. I have been a student, a teacher in public schools and private schools, and am now homeschooling my son. I was a graduate student in education at the University of Maryland. I read a lot on the history of education. What I have read and what I observe leads me to take a nonstandard approach with my son Eddie.

Public schools as we now know them came into being only about two centuries ago in Germany. The idea was to form citizens, taxpayers and soldiers with the proper indoctrination. Prior to that education had been a private matter. Parents taught their children what they could. They would hire tutors for them if they had enough money and the children were promising. Those with the means would enroll children in private schools, colleges and universities.

In America we had the one-room schoolhouse in the middle of the 19th century, in which a single poorly paid schoolmaster would teach children of all ages. They were simply not enough students to allow them to specialize by grade or subject. The older students helped the younger ones. People look back and say this was a golden age of education.

Life was different then. Most children grew up to follow their parents’ occupations. They would become farmers or craftsmen such as blacksmiths or carpenters. Girls naturally watched their mothers and helped around the house. They learned the business of raising a family. Education was an intergenerational thing. It went to apprenticeships whereby young people would study under a master to learn a trade.

A few people entered professions – doctors, lawyers, and academics. These usually came from fairly well-to-do families and attended college or university. People could "read for the law" whereby they studied with a lawyer, helping him as they learned the legal business and could then pass the bar examination. There were no schools of journalism – people learned to be reporters by doing it. HL Mencken and Mark Twain have written colorful descriptions of the process.

The “factory school” came into being about the turn of the 20th century. Children became regimented. They attend six or seven classes a day, rotating through the classrooms as the teachers stay put. They get a daily dose of each subject. Schools are able to staff, having one teacher teach with one area of expertise teach that one subject for an entire year. While efficient for the teachers and administration, it is not ideal for learning.

A factory system inculcates passivity. The child does assignments as they are given. Children do not do what is not assigned. Most look at school work as drudgery. They get it over as quickly as they can and get on to their other pursuits such as playing with their friends. They develop the attitude that you do what people tell you, and no more. This attitude gets kids through school. It does not prepare them for life beyond school.

Children get used to doing what is demanded. They automatically advance from one grade to the next. When they graduate, the expectation, at least these days, is to go on to college for another four years of doing what the teachers ask. And thinking the way the instructors tell them to think.  After that they emerge into the bright world and look for jobs. They may have had some work experience along the line, although that is increasingly rare these days. With adults competing for those positions, and the work ethic of today's children being viewed as less than ideal, it's hard to get jobs even in a cookie factory or a coffee shop.

When I went away to college in 1960 I had no idea why.  I was being pushed along, flotsam in a stream. Without a purpose, I didn't really have my heart in it and I did not do very well. Sensitive that I was a financial burden on my parents, I dropped out after two and a half years,.

I worked for two years surveying highways for the State of California during which time I did five months’ active duty with the Army National Guard. Two years’ work convinced me that I needed to earn a credential simply to get a better job. It gave me the motivation that I had lacked before. It was a good time to return – the University of California at Berkeley, at which I had taken courses during high school, readmitted me, and I graduated with just about straight A's, earning a Phi Beta Kappa key.  This time I knew what I was doing.

My degree is in mathematics. The logic was simple: no writing and no labs. It was a propitious time. Silicon Valley was approaching warp speed across the bay and IBM was releasing the 360 series of computers.  Both needed employees. I had two offers. I would have taken the job in Silicon Valley but my hippie mailman lost the offer letter. I accepted IBM. It was a sliding doors experience that changed my life.

As I had done in school, at IBM I did as I was told. They taught programming and I learned it. It turned out, fortuitously, that I have a gift. It was at this point in my life, 23 or 24 years old, that I did what I would ask my son Eddie to do at a much earlier age. I took control of my life. It happened by phases.

In the National Guard I rose to the rank of sergeant. Getting promoted is easy – you just do what they ask. As a sergeant I was concerned that we were not being dismissed from the weekend meetings until late – 5:30 or 6:00 – when it should have been 5:00. I wondered why that was.

I had done the right things leading up to this. Sgt. Gregory, who ran the company, needed somebody in the office who could type and understood filing. I had the skills.

Therefore when I asked Sgt. Gregory why we tended to not be dismissed until late, he listened. He said “Okay Seibert, when the day ends, your job is to go around to each of the platoon sergeants and make sure that all of the day’s work is complete. Have them line the men up in formation and report to me when it's all done. I will come out and dismiss them.” This was a great assignment and I took it on with relish. I got everybody dismissed on time.  I also learned something valuable - to take initiative.

IBM needed people to go to Vietnam to support the military and the State Department as the war built up and they needed to keep track of supplies and personnel. The San Francisco headquarters, which had territorial responsibility for the Pacific, was looking for single men. I was looking for a change of pace, and the financial inducements were powerful. Sgt. Gregory was instrumental.  He changed my Army job title from communications to cook.  Thus being inessential, he could let me go.

It was a wonderful deal, having the company pay for my rent and restaurant meals for four years. They reimbursed us in dollars, and, being an ethical company, they asked that we exchange dollars at the official exchange rate of 128 piastres to the dollar. The unofficial rate, reported in Newsweek magazine, was 200 to 350.

IBM reported our living expenses as income, which boosted everybody’s tax liability.

I had two observations. First, they were inducing us to exchange money on the black market, and second, they were making us pay more taxes than we should.

I wrote a paper suggesting that IBM exchange the money from dollars to piastres and report the income to the IRS at the unofficial rate. This would have the dual effect of keeping us honest and reducing our taxes.

This paper was immediately approved by my boss in Saigon and it was sent up the chain to the main office in Honolulu, who forwarded it to headquarters in San Francisco who forwarded it to their headquarters in Washington DC,  After a few revisions, which I was happy to make, it came back approved. Through this I had learned the value of taking initiative and I had started to write.

Prior to programming it, I wrote the design for the support for the Vietnamese language printer designed by my colleague Curt. I then wrote a training course for teaching Vietnamese to program at the United States Agency For International Development. I came to appreciate that writing is just as valuable a skill as programming and that being able to do both set me apart.

I had learned in my 20s how to take initiative. Returning to the topic at hand, education, I am homeschooling Eddie. He is studying three subjects at the moment, math, biology, and geography. I have him read the chapters in biology and geography and write summaries.

He reads them in Ukrainian, dictates his summary to Dragon Naturally Speaking software in English, then translates back what he has dictated using Google and corrects the Ukrainian. The results are good.

I constantly tell him that he does not have to ask what the next assignment will be.  We are going to go all the way through all three books using this process. He will do the problems in the math book, at which he's pretty good, and he will go through the biology and geography books chapter by chapter.

When he looks for an excuse to slack off, saying that he is done with a chapter, I tell him no.  You are never done.  There's always another chapter. This is the lesson that he has to learn. Studying is a continual process. It's not a question of doing what the teacher asks, it's a question of doing all you can, to make yourself the best you can be.

Eddie understands what's coming up in his near future. Instead of asking him to simply summarize what he has read, I will ask him to write original material – stories and speeches. Every child dreads these assignments. I'm not pushing it on him yet, but the suggestion is always in front of him that this is what's going to come.

He has to take charge of his life. In that instance, decide what he is going to talk about. At some point, in a year or two, I expect he will compose speeches like this one to give at Toastmasters, drawing on his own life's experience.

If I am able to form a child who takes the initiative, takes charge of his own education by the time he is in his mid teens I think I will have accomplished something rather rare. Whatever chaos is coming in this world, and it looks like there are all kinds arriving, Eddie will be prepared.