Another Essay and the Cunning Fennec Fox

Ok all you crazy cats . . .  oh and, Patient Readers too, of course . . .

       I am truly sorry for once again taking so long to post anything new of interest.  School is kicking my ass; I am having a bear of a time in my computer class.  Good thing I am a computer sciences major, huh?
       Everything is going as well as can be expected otherwise . . .  which is saying something since I am a pessimistic cynic . . .  or am I a cynical pessimist?  I guess it just depends on the day.
       Both of my Tues./Thurs. profs were sick today.  The AM one was here but warned us that she was going to cut the class short.  The PM prof emailed us saying she was just staying home.
       OK, faithfuls . . .  I have some other deeds need doing, so I will bade farewell for now.  I'll try to post something tomorrow . . .  tell you all about how I pissed everyone off in one of my classes.  All because I was asked for my opinion.  I warned them not to do that!

       Maybe, Patient Reader, an essay I wrote for one of my classes may tide you over until another post comes your way.  Take a look and feel free to keep me updated on your likes and dislikes.  Your feedback is always welcome . . .

Here Goes.  Are you ready?  Splendid!

Hidden Intellectualism

As one may infer from my ardent participation in the class discussion regarding “Hidden Intellectualism,” I am planted firmly on the side of the affirmative. That is to say, one can indeed be an “intellectual” having only been educated by Pop Culture.

I can only write, in this case, about what I know from first-hand experience, so let me couch my adamant statement in the introductory paragraph with the following caveat: To truly be an intellectual on all discernible levels, one must augment the lessons learned from Pop Culture with knowledge he or she has sought out on his or her own.

A very good source, spark may be a better word, for this form of learning can, and should be, pop culture itself.

My own education is mostly autodidactic. I learned much in school, but for the most part school was simply a starting point. For example, arithmetic, mathematics, and algebra were all taught to me by the yawning zombies that are K-12 educators. However, due to an illness in the family I was forced to leave public day school and help in the caring of said family member. But years before that I was quite a curious lad, and the seed of inquisitiveness had been planted.

I knew the Pythagorean Theorem via geometry, but when I became interested in learning the distances between two cities, and the Rand-McNally atlas only told me road distances, I was left wanting. What was the distance between Rome and Lisbon as the crow flies?

In order to answer this question, I surmised, I had to know the geographic coordinates of both cities; I had to know their latitudes and longitudes. Without boring you to tears, Patient Reader, I used these coordinates, and the trial-and-error calculations that rendered for me the quantity of miles per degree of longitude on the oblate spheroid we call planet Earth, to begin my self-appointed project. Since Earth is an oblate spheroid, and lines of longitude do not intersect as lines of latitude do, these intra-degree distances vary as one moves north or south of the equator. Therefore I had to figure out this rate of deviation with a pencil, several Pink Pearl erasers, and a lot of college-rule paper.

But the Pythagorean Theorem, though effective in calculating the hypotenuse of the right triangle I had reached halfway through the exercise, simply seemed like it was lacking. First you have to get the east/west distance in whatever units by which you are measuring, from the difference in longitude between the two cities. Then the north/south distance of their latitudes. This information provides the lengths of legs A and B, the hypotenuse becomes readily evident at that point

What, I wondered, would be another way to discern the rest of the information and solve for X? I remembered a conversation I had with my older brother in which he said he could look at a tree and tell me how tall it was and how far away he was from it, all without breaking out a measuring tape and a climbing rope (which would have terrified my mother).

Surely this magic would apply to the right triangle I now had on my map of Europe. After consulting my brother and my sister, the math whiz of the family, I decided to check a trigonometry book out of the library. SOHCAHTOA was one of the first mnemonics I had learned. Sine= length of the Opposite leg divided by the length of the Hypotenuse; Cosine= length of the Adjacent leg divided by the length of the Hypotenuse, and Tangent= the length of the Opposite leg divided by the length of the Adjacent leg. The mysterious superpowers of the Scientific Calculator did the rest, once I learned what functions the keys performed. Using the trigonometric functions on the angles of the triangle, I could calculate extremely accurately and then check my figures with the Pythagorean Theorem.

Now I am able to calculate the distance between any two cities on the globe within 8 feet, plus or minus. I’m not yet sure from whence the margin of error comes, but I figure if you are within sixteen feet of the destination city and you can’t see the airport, you have much bigger problems than the miniscule margin of error found in the calculations of an eleven year-old boy.

When I left public school at the age of 14, I had not yet earned a high school diploma, a driver’s license, nor had I even taken a typing class, though I was signed up for it the following term.

Yet I never stopped loving to learn. The Brady Bunch made me wonder who Benedict Arnold was, and then Thomas Payne’s name showed up in the research, and I realized that you can question organized religion and remain intact, not destroyed by the Wrath of an Angry God. You can even remain a devout Christian, as Payne was. I broke out the family Bible, blew the dust off the cover, and the Serpent beguiled me and I did eat.

On the TV show Laverne and Shirley someone compared the short and greasy character Squiggy with Napoleon. Napoleon? Who was that? Well, as it turns out, he was a horrible dictator who sold (us Americans) Thomas Jefferson one-third of our country, known as the Louisiana Purchase. Until then Louisiana slept quietly in the shadow of the flag of France. But Napoleon, this despot, was also foolish enough to invade Russia in the winter. I found that to be quite interesting. I had learned a short while before that Adolph Hitler had done the very same thing after immersing Germany in a war already being fought on the Western Front. Both military campaigns failed miserably, and winter played a large part in the demise of both Napoleon and Hitler.

Graff begins his essay with a quote that struck home: “Everyone knows some young person who is impressively ‘street smart’ but does poorly in school. What a waste, we think, that one who is so intelligent about so many things in life seem unable to apply that intelligence to academic work.”

I have heard this said time and again, most often in reference to myself, and I wondered why these individuals could not understand that School is not the same for everyone. I was soured against school by my own experiences with it; the boring subject matter; the apathetic teachers; the lazy and vicious kids who, as peers of mine, run the world today.

My dad pulling me out of high school my sophomore year, just when I was starting to find my way, finding my place in the hierarchy of idiocy within which I navigated daily, was the proverbial Straw That Broke the Camel’s Back. School was just not for me, who needs it, it’s a terrible waste of time . . .

But I know how fast light travels in a vacuum, don’t I? I know that sound travels at 1100 feet per second at sea level. I know that hyperventilation can cascade into a high blood pH, which in turn causes calcium to bind to protein, which in turn disrupts the electrochemical balance in the mammalian brain, which in turn can induce petit mal seizures in children. I’ve seen it, and no one ever taught me that. I read it in a book I borrowed from the Neurology Library at the university where I worked. I learned all these things from books I chose to read simply out of curiosity.

I know of another quote and, unfortunately, I am unable to attribute it to anyone, but it goes like this: “One does not read (James Joyce’s) Ulysses; one rereads it.”

I immediately checked this splendid book out of the local library and read it. Then I reread it.

Pop culture in a broad sense- news media, gossip rags, Prime-Time television-, all of these sights and sounds that bombard us as we drop our shoulders and muscle our way through our lives can make us better educated, but only if we have the “street smarts” to know what can benefit or harm us.

21 October 2013

1630 hrs

Works Cited

Graff, Gerald “Hidden Intellectualism”

They Say, I say 2^nd Edition

Gerald Graff, Cathy Birkenstein, Russel Durst,

New York: Norton, 2012. Print