Author: stangrigsby

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my thoughts Porch Ponders

Stories

“No story lives unless someone wants to listen. The stories we love best do live in us forever. So whether you come back by page or by the big screen, Hogwarts will always be there to welcome you home.” – J.K. Rowling, author

I think it is critical that we learn to really read. It is critical that we learn that as soon as possible. However, I am coming to the view that storytelling is the key to learning. Every teacher I know, including me, will say they learned more from teaching than from being a student. I believe we all have at least one story to tell; we need to learn to tell it well.

When I was teaching, one of the most difficult things for my students to do was to restate a problem in their own words. I believe if you can’t tell a story, in your own words, you don’t own the idea. And perhaps the issue is with both the author and the reader as captured in quotes by Einstein and Feynman.

“If you can’t explain it to a six year old, you don’t understand it yourself” – attributed to A. Einstein

If you can’t explain an idea to an 8 year old, you don’t understand it. Can you explain basic logic to me in 5 minutes (about 500 words) in a way that 8 year old could explain it back to you? – R. Feynman

When we tell that story, we provide a listener, a reader, the opportunity to see an idea in a different way.

A quote I have used, “A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.” ― George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons

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my thoughts

Late Night with an AI

Late night conversations with chatGPT. A few months ago, like many others, I discovered chatGPT. While it is an interesting assistant in some research projects, I find often it is an interesting conversationalist.

Some of my reading has caused me to wonder about the interaction of different folks from history. For example did John Wesley interact with Benjamin Franklin? So I asked.

My Question, “Is it possible that John Wesley and Ben Franklin interacted?” chatGPT replied:

[—————————————————————–]

There is no historical evidence to suggest that John Wesley and Benjamin Franklin had direct interactions or encounters with each other. While both Wesley and Franklin were significant figures in their respective fields during the 18th century, their areas of influence and geographical locations were different.

John Wesley, an English theologian and cleric, was primarily involved in religious matters and the development of the Methodist movement. He spent most of his life in England and had limited travels abroad.

Benjamin Franklin, on the other hand, was an American polymath, statesman, and scientist. He played a prominent role in the American Revolution and made significant contributions to various fields, including science, writing, and diplomacy. Franklin resided primarily in North America, with occasional visits to Europe.

While their paths may have crossed indirectly due to their prominence during the same era, there is no documented evidence of any personal interactions or correspondence between Wesley and Franklin.

[——————————————]

This, of course led to many other questions. I have become quite interested in this type of question regarding interactions among folks across disciplines, especially during the 17th and 18th centuries. It is difficult to find folks who also enjoy this conversation; especially at midnight.

Categories
education my thoughts

Equations Tell Stories

Mathematics is the gate and key of the sciences … . Neglect of mathematics works injury to all knowledge, since he who is ignorant of it cannot know the other sciences or the things of this world. And what is worse, men who are thus ignorant are unable to perceive their own ignorance and so do not seek a remedy. — Roger Bacon 1220-1292

How little we have progressed in 800 years. I can start with an example. Some of my first University students, “engineering students”, wanted numbers to ‘plug in’ to equations or they couldn’t understand the concept. At least that is what they said. I would submit that if you didn’t understand the abstract representation, you couldn’t really understand the concrete. It became clear that getting an answer, getting a grade for getting that answer was their goal.

So why is it that x = 3 is OK or better yet 2+2 = 4 is OK, but A + B = C is just too abstract of a construct? Or, I don’t understand A + B = C unless you give me values for A and B? While these are the most simple constructs of math, it seems to cause confusion.

This is not a lament on the poor state of math education, it is an observation that otherwise intelligent students fear and therefore don’t try to understand the value of math.

A math professor at the University of California addressed the following question, “Despite all this timeless beauty, many people dread mathematics. They say that they “hate math”. But if it is so beautiful as I claim, then why do people hate it?” Professor Edward Frenkel responded, “Imagine that you had to take an art class in which you were taught only to paint a fence or a wall but were never shown the paintings of the great masters. Would that make you an art lover?”

It isn’t enough to simply learn the tools of math, one must learn enjoy these tools and appreciate the power they provide. Math is at the heart of everything from music to space exploration. It is the language of the arts and sciences.

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education my thoughts

Creating AI

I have been ‘visiting’ with chatGPT a bit recently. If I am informed sufficiently, I can ask questions in such a way that it adds to my knowledge. If I don’t know much about a subject, sometimes my questions and its answers are not very good. However, if I stay with the conversation for a while, I often will learn something. It will often give me a place to start to learn more.

An interesting thought, to me, came to me as I thought about this. After being on the planet for quite a few years. And, after engaging with the U.S. education system for many of those years, it seems we are creating AI ‘wet-ware’. Our students seem to be trained to learn a rather large number of facts and are tested on their ability to remember them.

Of course all generalizations are false, and there are some excellent students out there; I had some in my class. And, of course, I saw far more in the first grade readers than in the University students.

The reason for the title of this piece is, it seems we are teaching students in much the same way we teach AI entities. A difference is the AI has a much larger memory and often writes better.

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Porch Ponders

Guess What?

You have a brand new week ahead of you to slay dragons, achieve goals, sweat more, gripe less and ditch the fear! Go! — found on the internet

Not everything on the internet is false and useless; discernment required.

“Promise me you’ll remember, You are Braver than you Believe, Stronger than you seem, and Smarter than you think”. — A.A. Milne

And, of course, A.A. Milne and Eeyore were way ahead of their time and the internet when Eeyore said, “The sky has finally fallen. Always knew it would.”

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my thoughts philosophy

Read Ideas

After these few months of reading with first graders, I made a comment about how well they were doing. The response was, “some are doing great, and some are just reading words.” That caused me to think about many conversations with adults. Often we talk to fill the silence, not to communicate an idea. We use words and sentences which, on closer examination, convey little but disconnected words and sentences. If there is an idea buried in them, it is often quite vague.

Of course I then proceeded to extrapolate to life in general. A vague and disconnected stream of conscientiousness about how my actions are often just that, a series of disconnected activities. I think there is a place for such an activity, but I also think it should be embedded in a “Purpose Driven Life.” As with organizations, I don’t think it is frivolous to consider the question, “why do I exist?”

Do we live a life of words, or of complete sentences?

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my thoughts philosophy

On the Nature of the Universe

Considering our understanding of the Universe, I happened across the picture of the day and narratives about it. Guided by an AI based chatbot.

The Earth looks like an immense plain, rugged by a thousand kinds of facets and reliefs, green hills, flowery valleys, mountains more or less high, meandering rivers in the plains, lakes with cool shores, vast seas, infinitely varied countryside. This land seems to us fixed for eternity, sitting on century-old foundations, crowned by a sky at times pure and at times cloudy, extended so as to form the unshakable foundation of the universe. The Sun, the Moon and the stars seem to turn around her. From all these appearances, man has easily believed himself to be the centre and the purpose of creation, a vain presumption that he held for a very long time, as there was no one to contradict him.

Camille Flammarion, Astronomie populaire (1880)

The engraving may have been based on the following story

This fact reminds us of the story Levayer relates in his Letters. It seems that an anchorite, probably a nephew of the Fathers of the Eastern deserts, boasted of having been to the farthest edge of the world, and of having been forced there to bend his shoulders, due to the meeting of heaven and Earth at that very end.

Camille Flammarion, Les mondes imaginaires et les mondes réels (1865)

To me it is more of an illustration of the quote by Sir Arthur Eddington, “Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.”

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philosophy

An AI Poem

I ask chatGPT, “Can you write a poem about pi and probability?”

Of course, I can! Here's a poem about pi and probability:

In circles round, we find Pi's sound,
An irrational number, never to be found.
With digits vast and never-ending,
Infinite, yet always pretending.

For Pi is more than just math, 
A symbol of the world's path, 
Where probabilities run amok, 
And uncertainty's the rule of luck.

Like rolling dice, the odds we take, 
A game of chance, a risk we make. 
The probability's a fickle friend, 
A measure of how much we bend.

For in the midst of all this mess, 
We see Pi's pattern nonetheless. 
A ratio constant, never-changing, 
A comfort in a world so ranging.

So let us embrace the unknown, 
And let probability be our throne. 
For in the chaos and the strife, 
Pi's constancy is the thread of life.
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education

Reading is Fundamental, still

My teaching experience and now our experience reading with elementary school students has emphasized the importance of reading. Reading is Fundamental. One important thing I have learned is there is a big difference between knowing words and sentence structure and “reading”. Many of my college students appeared to only have skill in the first part; a few not even that. These were smart youth, without this critical skill.

I am impressed by the library staff at the Iola Elementary School in Iola, Kansas. They have a commitment to the students that many folks don’t understand. I am lucky; I spend time with these librarians/teachers and also with members of the community. The latter happens often at the local coffee shop.

The youngsters in Allen County Kansas are lucky. They have these great librarians in school, our local Iola public library managed by an equally great librarian. The Rotary Club of Iola sponsors the Dolly Parton Imagination Library and there are many other ways in which reading is encouraged in this area.

Kansas supports this through a regional library system of which our public library is a part through the Southeast Kansas Library System. However, the most important support comes at home; that is the foundation that allows students to benefit from these resources.

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Ham Radio

Ham Radio

Amateur Radio, the original international wireless social media.

I suppose the first question is why is it called Ham Radio? I don’t know. I think the origin of that is really left in history. The story of ham radio is as old as radio itself. In the early 1900s, shortly after radio was ‘discovered’, experimenters all over the world started building receivers and transmitters.

Radio communications became important for many uses and the amateur radio operators were restricted to certain frequencies so they wouldn’t interfere with other commercial and emergency communications.

Within those sets of frequencies or bands, ham radio became a world-wide phenomena. Hams would make contact with each other across political and language boundaries. The use of codes allowed the exchange of names and locations and a few other limited pieces of information regardless of language barriers.

It isn’t surprising this hobby has kept pace with technology, many young hams went on to become engineers and scientists of our technology age. There are amateur radio satellites, ham radio on the International Space Station and hams operate many forms of digital communication ‘on the air’ and some use the internet to connect radio stations.

My ham radio journey started as a short wave listener at my grandparents house. They weren’t impressed by the squeals and squawks from the stations I found on that radio. It was quite a few years until I finally traveled to the FCC office and passed the test for my advanced class license. Many adventures on the air followed this.