A bit of relaxation in the morning.
A little exploration in the afternoon.
A little soccer in the evening.
The Day After Easter
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Easter 2021
Regionals 2021 Day 2
The Girl’s team today had a rough time of it. During their first game, they were up one set 11-4, but they just couldn’t put it away. In the second game, they were up 24-19 and ended up losing it 26-28. That means they had four set points and couldn’t convert. That frustrated L to no end. They won the final game in straight sets, but it was by far the weakest team we’d seen in a long time. Still, a win is a win.
In the break between game one and two, I walked down the street to see where Papa’s parents used to live. I know Papa lived in a couple of houses in the area growing up, but the only house I have any connection to — any memory of — is the small now-yellow house on Izard Street.
Down the street stands an abandoned building that I seem to remember as a store that my cousins and I used to visit to buy a Three Muskateers candy bar and a Mountain Dew.
Tea Party Concluded
Students today finished working on the enigmatic twenty-fourth chapter of Mockingbird, which includes this passage that stumps all the kids every year:
Mrs. Merriweather nodded wisely. Her voice soared over the clink of coffee cups and the soft bovine sounds of the ladies munching their dainties. “Gertrude,” she said, “I tell you there are some good but misguided people in this town. Good, but misguided. Folks in this town who think they’re doing right, I mean. Now far be it from me to say who, but some of ‘em in this town thought they were doing the right thing a while back, but all they did was stir ’em up. That’s all they did. Might’ve looked like the right thing to do at the time, I’m sure I don’t know, I’m not read in that field, but sulky… dissatisfied… I tell you if my Sophy’d kept it up another day I’d have let her go. It’s never entered that [head] of hers that the only reason I keep her is because this depression’s on and she needs her dollar and a quarter every week she can get it.”
“His food doesn’t stick going down, does it?”
That last line — “His food doesn’t stick going down, does it?” — always leaves students flummoxed, and this year was no exception.
What makes this passage so tricky is the intentional pronoun/antecedent that those in the conversation are employing. Like good, genteel Southern ladies, they can’t be said to be gossiping since they’re not naming names, and no true lady would gossip. But that is of course what they’re doing, and though they’re not using anyone’s name,
The Tea Party
Few chapters are as initially bewildering as the tea party scene in chapter 24 of Mockingbird. It makes little sense because the women are all intentionally being somewhat obtuse, and while they all understand what they’re talking about, Scout is completely lost — as are most of the students.
Our first task was to break it into manageable sections. Afterward, we focused on chunk 1, which is about some previously unknown character named J. Grimes Everett and someone or something known as “those poor Mrunas.”
It’s all a mystery to them, and they work through it meticulously, discovering things here and there with me walking around offering a bit of guidance.
“Mrs. Merriweather says, ‘Not a white person’ll go near ’em but that saintly J. Grimes Everett.’ What is the antecedent of ’em in that sentence?” I ask one group.
“Mrs. Merriweather says, ‘Not a white person’ll go near ’em but that saintly J. Grimes Everett.’ What two important inferences can we make from this statement?” I ask another group.
We’ll finish up the work tomorrow.
Comforting the Boy
The Boy and I are finishing up the classic Where the Red Fern Grows. I remember my fifth-grade teacher reading that to us, and I knew how it ends: both Old Dan and Little Ann, the protagonist’s beloved hounds, die. We reached that part today, and it brought the Boy to tears.
“I’m just remembering Bida and Nana,” he said. “I miss them. I want them back.” He sobbed for a while as I comforted him, continually talking about memories he had with them.
After a while, when he was calming down, I asked the Girl to bring in a box of tissues.
“What?” she asked.
“A tissue box.”
“What?!” she asked again, incredulously.
“A tissue box!”
“Oh, I thought you said ‘a fishy box.'”
And like that, the tears turned to laugher.
Assessing the Testimony
Kids today worked on the various witnesses in the Robinson trial from To Kill a Mockingbird. I’ll be having the local criminal defense attorney who speaks with students every year meet with us via Google Meet when we come back from spring break, so we’re spending a couple of days getting ready for the session.
It always strikes me when students sketch out Heck Tate’s testimony about Mayella how their drawings look simultaneously silly and horrifying.
Spring Monday
Palm Sunday 2021
Polish Mass this year; nothing last year. No after-Mass social gathering again this year. But one thing stayed the same:
Closing Dinner
When K closes on a house, we splurge a little and have a special dinner. Tonight, it was crab cakes and crab legs.
The best thing about crab legs (other than the taste) — they’re fun to eat as well.
Friday Evening
The Boy has decided he needs to do more conditioning to improve his soccer game. Tonight, he ran a series of interval training exercises that we kind of made up as we went along. Then he decided he wanted to make up his own.
He struggles a bit this year in soccer. He’s one of the youngest on the team, and as a result, he’s less aggressive/experienced than others and a bit slower than many of them. To his credit, he’s not giving up, though he wanted to at first. The thing is, he actually likes playing soccer, and that makes all the difference.
In the evening, I took the dog for a walk and discovered our neighbor had started his weekend backyard fires. Perhaps I’ll go over for a visit tomorrow night.
Late March Thursday
Today, we ran one of the students’ favorite activities: a Socratic seminar. There are few things fourteen-year-olds love more than arguing, and a Socratic seminar (obviously altered for Covid safety) is the perfect way to wind up a week. Today’s discussion: who was the most morally upright of the minor characters in To Kill a Mockingbird.
After school, we got to hang around a bit because of a tornado shelter-in-place order.
The few kids who were still around sat in the hallway and made silly poses.
The last time we had a shelter-in-place order, the whole area got flooded.
The journey home was dark.
Spring at School
Visiting Coach
The girls went to watch their coach’s other team play — a college men’s team.
“They jump so high!” was the common comment. “And the net is higher!”
At one point, they were discussing the other team with coach M. “I liked number 10,” one girl said.
“Really?” coach asked incredulously. “He was terrible.”
“I’m talking about looks, coach,” she clarified.
“I was not part of the conversation,” the Girl clarified when I related it to K.
(I also didn’t take the pictures…)
In Which the Teacher Screws Up
Last Thursday, the kids had an e-learning day as the whole district took a day off for teachers to get vaccinated. I gave the students the following work:
So many issues with this. First of all, the time I was supposed to be online (and therefore the time students were expecting me) was 9:00-9:30. When I got online at 9:30, everyone was leaving. How did I look at the school schedule and think I was supposed to be online during math teachers’ time? Oh well — it was no big deal.
The real problem, though — did you notice that fourth point? “Read chapters 13-16 by Wednesday.” But on Wednesday to have them read by Monday. So when I began class today ready to work with chapters 13-16 of To Kill a Mockingbird, a substantial number of students hadn’t done the reading.
“You said on Classroom to have it done by Wednesday,” a sweet and honest girl said. She offered me her Chromebook with the assignment pulled up: “See?”
I stood there, looking at the clear evidence I’d screwed up, wondering what happened (I just mixed up the chapters — it should have been chapters 17-20 for Wednesday), and wondering if there was any way to salvage the day.
“Reading day.”
“Seriously?” they asked incredulously.
What else was I to do?
The End
Every now and then, I learn something so profound that it marks a significant change in my thinking. The last two days have constituted such a change. I listened to Josh Clark’s podcast The End of the World, and I can’t remember anything having a more profound effect on me. Not the realization that I doubted the existence of God; not the change I made from being very left-leaning to being right-leaning and the return to the left I seem to be experiencing now; not the knowledge that I was going to be a parent.
The podcast deals with how the world might end, and by that it means how humanity might end. The world itself might continue on but humanity might not. And the podcast begins with an odd question: given the size of the universe, the number of galaxies it contains, and the number of stars in those galaxies, the universe should be absolutely teeming with life. We’re talking about billions upon billions of galaxies each with billions of stars. Even if the odds of developing intelligent life were a 1-in-100-billion, there should be almost countless examples in the universe. So why have we found no sign of them? That’s the Fermi paradox, and it is the material for the first couple of episodes. The fact that we see no signs of intelligent life anywhere has one of two explanations:
- It exists, and we simply haven’t found it.
- It doesn’t exist currently, and we alone constitute all the intelligent life in the universe.
Option one is the less interesting of the two, but Clark convincingly illustrates that it’s unlikely. It’s the second option that is terrifying, because it breaks into two options itself:
- There never was any other intelligent life — we’re it.
- There was once intelligent life somewhere in the universe, but it no longer exists.
Thinking about option two leads us to question what could have happened to them? Presumably, they advanced at least as far as we have, and presumably, they would have advanced further if they could, spreading out into the cosmos and colonizing their solar system, their galaxy, significant portions of the universe itself. That they didn’t suggests that they never existed (back to option one) or that they met an insurmountable obstacle that resulted in the end of their existence. This is known as the Great Filter — in this case, the thing that prevented a given alien species from colonizing beyond its original planet.
What does all of this have to do with the end of the world? Simple: due to the technologies we have developed now, we are almost certainly about to pass through our own Great Filter. There are so many threats to the continued existence of humanity that it seems inevitable that one of them will catch us by the ankle, so to speak, and drag us back down to primordial sludge (or nothingness). Clark covers several of them, including artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and physics experiments, but in my mind (and in Clark’s as well, I believe), the greatest risk comes from artificial intelligence, though biotech is not far behind.
The risk from artificial intelligence is not a Terminator- or Matrix-style war between robots and humans. It’s something much more subtle. Imagine, for example, that a paperclip factory hires a programmer to create a program to maximize paperclip production. The programmer creates algorithms that have the freedom to make their own decisions about how to go about the productivity improvements. Its goal is simple: create more paperclips. Should it attain super-intelligence, it could wreck the world in its effort to make more paperclips. It takes over other computers in order to increase its computational capacity to make more paperclips. It develops machines that make machines that make machines that make machines to improve paperclip production. Eventually, it learns how to create nanotechnology that can actually manipulate things at an atomic level. It can then literally begin the process of turning everything into paperclips, manipulating atoms to transform everything into aluminum to make paperclips — everything, including us. It then launches probes into space and eventually turns the whole universe into paperclips.
It’s hyperbolic and a little silly, but it gets at the heart of the concern: once AI achieves super-intelligence, it will be to us as Einstein is to an earthworm. There are no guarantees that it will have any concern with us at all. After all, could we expect Einstein to spend his tremendous intellect and life worrying about the happiness of every earthworm? So we have to figure out a way to program these things in a way that they have morals compatible with ours.
The biotech and physics experiment risks are equally fascinating, but it was about this point in the podcast (this would have been episode five out of eight) that I began thinking of how any one of these might be our Great Filter — the thing that we run up against which destroys us — in terms that Clark never mentioned: the impact of religion on all of this. Most believers would not take this seriously at all because they already are convinced that there’s intelligent life out there, and it’s responsible for our existence and has a plan for us. That plan doesn’t include us destroying ourselves, so they would be unlikely to take this situation seriously. “Eradicate ourselves from the earth? Come on — Jesus will return before that could ever happen.” God would never let the pinnacle of his creation destroy itself entirely. This is in part why so many Christians don’t take global warming seriously (and after listening to this series, I’m of the mind that global warming, while a threat, is at least not an existential threat to all humanity).
This itself could be the Great Filter: time after time, intelligent life has arisen that evolves tremendous intelligence at the same time it holds radically superstitious ideas. At the point when the species has developed the technology capable of destroying itself, it harbors the superstitious lack of wisdom to know how to handle those technologies, and they destroy themselves.
Much of Clark’s podcast was on the foundation of Nick Bostrom’s work. He’s been thinking along these lines for a long time:
Games
The Boy had two soccer games today. His team won them both, but the second game was a real bruiser. The kids on the other team were much more aggressive than any other kids we’ve encountered. Fouls don’t occur in eight-year-old soccer, but these kids fouled. They pushed and shoved, getting very physical in almost all aspects of the game. Still, our boys managed to pull out a 3-1 win.
E didn’t play for most of the game, though. He went in for about the last three minutes of the second half. My understanding was that the coach let the bench decide: leave the kids in who were doing well or get subbed in. They decided to let the kids who were already doing so well continue doing so.
The Girl is with K outside of Atlanta for a volleyball tournament. Their team won the first two matches they played but lost the final match. They took one set, though, so that’s always some little bit of compensation.
Finally, the Boy played a little guitar tonight. He’s decided it’s time to get serious about his playing, so I printed him out a simple chord chart, and off we went.
Friday Morning
Full Circle
A year after the first day of school in quarantine, I got my first dose of the vaccine. A local hospital and the county school system partnered in an impressively well-organized effort to get all teachers who wanted the vaccine vaccinated. The school system had a single-day e-learning break and transformed two high schools into mass-vaccination sites.
But the important part of the day was after everything was done, and the Boy and I headed out for some exploring.
The Slip
One thing I love about being a teacher is that I don’t have to know everything. “I don’t know” is a perfectly acceptable answer to a student’s question, and I’m not afraid to admit as much. I follow that admission with a promise to find out, or, in some situations, I suggest to the student to do a little research herself.
When you’re a priest leading who knows how many thousands of listeners through 365 days of Bible reading, you’re going to encounter some troubling passages. You’re probably going to do your best to explain them, and sometimes, the explanation might be reasonable. But statistically speaking, you will eventually say something that is so completely outrageous that you’d probably wish you hadn’t said it.
Today Fr. Mike had just such a day reading Numbers 31. It tells the story of God’s command to the Israelites to wipe the Midianites off the face of the earth. What was the Midianite crime? Well, they’d introduced the Israelites to the false god Baal, and the Israelites became so smitten with this new god that at least two of them conducted a fertility ritual in the Holy of Holies — the holiest place on Earth, Fr. Mike explained. It’s a troubling passage, and Fr. Mike struggles to explain it from God’s point of view:
You have to go to battle against the people who have already corrupted you. … You have already been corrupted, so you have to put an end to this. That’s one of the reasons why the warfare there is, like, ‘kill everybody,’ which is really hard for us. And it’s not because God wanted everyone to die. That is not the case. In fact, that kind of warfare would not have existed — this is important for us to understand — that kind of warfare would not have existed if the people of Israel had been faithful. This is so critical for us to note, that that is not the plan of God.
The first problem I have with this is that it’s almost as if Fr. Mike has forgotten the reading from just the other day from Deuteronomy 28.63:
And just as the Lord took delight in making you prosperous and numerous, so the Lord will take delight in bringing you to ruin and destruction; you shall be plucked off the land that you are entering to possess.
Killing and bringing things to ruin seem to be what this god enjoys, and he seems to boast about how much he enjoys it. How does Fr. Mike reconcile these two passages? Simple. He doesn’t. He probably didn’t even notice it.
Second, what about the responsibility of the Israelites? If they went astray, the Midianites certainly had something to do with it, but ultimately, it’s the Israelites who went astray, not the Midianites. Fr. Mike is essentially saying that they deserve total eradication because they tempted the Israelites to idolatry. But Fr. Mike tries to deal with this:
They are so weak that they worship other gods. It’s because of the people’s weakness that Moses has to command — and I say, ‘has to command’ because it’s just, like, no other way around their weakness than the kind of total destruction of the Midianites here. We’re going to see this warfare again and again. It can be troubling for us, and that’s okay that it’s troubling for us because it’s not good, right? It’s not good. It’s not what God would ultimately want.
There’s no other way around their weakness?! This is an omnipotent, omniscient god we’re supposedly talking about here. Surely he could figure out another way to deal with this that doesn’t involve wholesale slaughter. Hell, I’m just a stupid human, and I can probably come up with at least half a dozen other ways that don’t involve genocide.
It’s as if Fr. Mike’s version of the OT god is sitting up in heaven going, “Dang, I wish they hadn’t done that. I don’t know what I’ll do about it. Well, I can’t see any alternative to killing them all.” It’s ludicrous. But Fr. Mike doesn’t see the box he put this god into. He just has to explain it.
He can’t say, “I don’t know. I just don’t get it. It seems brutal, and I can’t really understand it myself.” That’s not an option if you approach the reading with an a priori assumption that this book is the perfect word of a perfect being. That assumption forces you into saying utterly stupid things like Fr. Mike.
There’s another little treasure in the reading that Fr. Mike didn’t mention: “Now therefore, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known a man by sleeping with him. But all the young girls who have not known a man by sleeping with him, keep alive for yourselves” (Numbers 31.17). “Keep the virgins for yourself,” is what this god is saying.