Tag Archives: Curiosity

Behind the Barn

Posted on by
Reply

It is something I’ve never really understood clearly enough. Why do people roll over so readily when it comes to technology? Instead of being curious, poking, prodding, and exploring, they just roll over and give up.

I get this a lot with people who can’t use websites at all, a lot like WordPress.com or WordPress.org. What gets me is that a lot of these systems are written in a way where the programmer really has a vested interest in helping you understand. They are going way more than halfway with the design of a lot of these systems, but some people simply refuse to explore. Why are we so incurious, so resistant to exploration? Is it that daunting and I just don’t see it? So what if you broke something? That’s what IT people like me want to see. We want to see a field littered with broken technology because that shows us where we need to concentrate on making things better.

I get this a lot at work. People tell me frequently “How do you know this?” and it’s rather embarrassing to tell them that I just looked at the thing and saw what the purpose of the thing was and saw how it was supposed to be used and blindly wandered around bumping into things until I figured things out!

It’s how I learned how to drive a car. It’s how I learned Windows. It’s how I learned Mac. It’s how I learn everything. I open it up, dive in head first and start making a right proper mess out of everything. Each oops and damn and well-crap reveals more about what the system does than any manual could. Plus you get a feel for all the natural ways that people may approach new things like these bits of software. It seems so natural and simple to me that I get to wondering why more people don’t try it and see if it works for them as well.

Don’t study, don’t just sit there contemplating doing something. There is no try, there is only DO. Do it. Whatever it is. Anyone can be an instant genius if you have just a sliver of faith in yourself and absolutely zero qualms with making messes out of things. I wish more people would do this sort of thing. Go exploring. Make a mess. Take something broken apart and see how it was put together.

I’ve tried to explain the whys and the hows to people in my job and I’ve seen the same response over and over. Exasperation. People don’t want to know the why or the how, they just want simple instructions, much like “Slot A” and “Tab B”. It’s almost a kind of Pavlovian thing, someone comes to them asking them for something and all they want is just the minimum to produce minimally acceptable output and then hand it back. There isn’t any pride in that and that’s something else that bothers me. So few anymore take actual pride in their work. Even if you can’t take pride, you can at least say that it works, even if your solution is a hot mess and someone else has a much more elegant solution. At least you came up with a solution on your own! I suppose a part of what I dearly wish for would be for people to sit back and say “If I got what I’m about to give this other person, would it be correct?” And if it’s not, and you hand it off anyways, and you know it, then you are the worst kind of lazy person – willfully lazy. I just can’t stand that.

I hear the same statement from folks quite a lot, “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks”. This statement bothers me so much and so deeply that my usual response (and usually I leave it unsaid) is “If the old dog can’t learn new tricks perhaps it’s time to take Old Yeller out behind the barn and do what must be done.” It is one of my deepest held beliefs that when you stop questioning, when you stop being curious, when you stop wanting to know – that’s when you die. Yes, the mechanical parts of you live on and you may have another thirty or forty years of meaningless shuffling yet to do, but really, you’re dead inside. When you stop wanting to know, when you stop being curious, you might as well go behind the barn and do what must be done. Living any other way is living like a sleepwalker, just shuffling through your life and the only thing you can really take pride in, the one last thing that you can contribute is carbon dioxide. That’s no way to live.

So I urge everyone to take things apart and put them together again. Find something that interests you and explore it. Do something. Take pride in doing it badly at first, but you will get better. There is so much to our world left undone, unimagined. I don’t think one lifetime is anywhere near enough to ever “have had enough” of learning. If you feel the icy grip of age sneaking up on you, fight it off with something new. Try something creative. Write, draw, sculpt, paint, sing. Any verb. Do it, do it awfully, but take joy in knowing that you are really DOING something instead of just waiting to be led out behind the barn.

Rosetta Stone Francais Level 1 Unit 1 First Thoughts

Posted on by
Reply

I just finished Level 1 Unit 1 in my new Rosetta Stone Francais course. The approach is something I’ve never experienced before. The interface is so simple that I found myself overthinking it several times. It’s helpful in that it tells you “Nothing here is click and drag” instead everything is clickable, talkable, or writable.

What did the first unit cover? It didn’t approach the language as I thought it would. There was no demonstration of rules, no tables for Je, Tu, Vous, Nous, Ils, and so on and so forth. There weren’t any verb conjugation drills and I found myself not translating after a little bit of time. Of course, a little knowledge is a very bad thing, and in this case I have the tattered remains of my grade school and high school french floating around in my head while I’m going through the basics again, and oddly enough, for the very first time.

It was extremely pleasant and I found myself picking up a kind of natural approach immediately. I think what bothers me the most about Rosetta Stone isn’t the actual product, it’s very polished and professional, but what gets me is that I would probably be better off starting French with this program than if I had skipped a foreign language completely in grade school and high school altogether! I can’t imagine what a Rosetta Stone course would cost a grade/high school and I’m sure it would “break the bank” as it were.

One thing that’s really quite awesome about the Rosetta Stone courses is that I can do all my work on my laptop and practice on my iPhone almost as well. The entire course structure is synchronized in the cloud at Rosetta Stone itself so as you follow along in the program on a computer the mobile app knows where you are and makes the programs available to you over wifi or 3G to keep on practicing.

During this unit the things you learn are boy and girl, singular and many, gender, and certain verbs such as swimming, drinking, eating, running, reading and writing.

One thing I can tell immediately is that this is going to be incredibly fun to use and at the end I should have basic fluency in French. That will be a wonderful feeling.

Something else that I’ve been thinking about is the need for translation. All throughout school it was a translation matrix, memorizing language rules and then establishing mental lines drawing from English to French. Imposing a germanic language onto a romance language can only work so far before you run into conflicts. That’s what’s always upset me about the standard way other languages are taught in the United States, it’s always English-wearing-another-language. I have a faith, as I don’t know outright and for sure, but I suspect that the shape of thinking in English is different than the shape of thinking in French. We think in words, we think in our language. We can imagine without language, but when we want to share what we think we have to drag what exists in our minds as honest thoughts through the bog of our language so we can communicate our thoughts. I have it on good authority that while people think in different languages there is no reason to think that the quality of those thoughts of the efficiency of communication is any different from language to language, it’s not a matter of good and bad, it’s just different.

I think that’s the thing that draws me to the Rosetta Stone courses the most. That excitement I feel when my thoughts can dip their little toes in another language-bog altogether. Instead of thinking in English and communicating in English, I could possibly (with enough hard work) start to think in French. That’s what drives me, that curiosity of what it feels like to think in another language. Not so much to do more things that have a direct application with it, although that would also be nice, but to sit back and feel the difference between expressing a thought in English and then expressing it in French.

Only time can tell if Rosetta Stone is successful in coaxing my 36 year old brain to re-accept a new language. This is where kids born today are the luckiest kids ever. A young 4 to 6 year old brain, in the channel of language acquisition can soak up all of these new thoughts and even more before they settle into a primary language and an “other” language. If only Rosetta Stone was available in 1983, I could have mastery over French, English, and German for example. Maybe I still have the ability, despite it laying dormant for so very long.