jumpingfish

1. Ron

We worked in a big room filled with desks and tables. One wall was made out of glass and looked out onto a hallway.

This used to be the mainframe room, the 60s era computing technology that got the astronauts to the moon. Our computers were Sun workstations that sat on the tables. Each of us had one to work at, a luxury in those days. I sat in front of batman. Next to me was robin. And then gothamcity. The workstations for the other teams had different themes. Lots of computers, but the mainframes were long gone. Cold air still blew in thru vents in the floor—a relic of the need to keep the mainframes cool. On some days, we had to wear gloves to keep our fingers warm.

On the far wall, there were some partitions where a select few had real desks. But most of us sat at the tables where our clients would daily walk by to gaze at the software technology being built in that lab.

Ron was our system administrator. He installed the workstations. He named them. He gave us our login credentials. He set up our email. And when we had a computer problem, he would solve it. 

Ron was always available. He always had a smile on his face, unlike most of the system administrators most of us had worked with. He always found a solution to our problems.

2. Six-Figure Salaries

These were the early days of the dot-com boom. Software companies were spinning off and pulling talent from our team on a daily basis. To our disbelief, those who left for the dot-com world commanded six-figure salaries.

At the time, the expression six-figure salary was reserved for consultants that went out on their own and job-shopped their technical skills. The notion that you could get a six-figure salary just by jumping from one software job to another was inconceivable, which is why so many people were leaving.

One day, I bumped into our boss after Ron had solved some problem that I was struggling with. (I think it was an email problem that required Ron do a traceroute on in order to figure out why gothamcity had stopped delivering email.)

“How are things going?” he asked.

“Great,” I said. And I explained how Ron had just solved my email problem.

He nodded, not really understanding much about email.

“I have to tell you,” I added. “If anyone on our team deserves a six-figure salary, it’s Ron. We’d be lost without him.”

He looked at me blankly, nodded, and walked on.

3. Essential Personnel

You see, Ron was one of our truly essential personnel, even though we didn’t use that term them. But six-figures? Except for independent consultants, back then no one made that kind of money except consultants… or managers. And system administration was perceived as a blue collar job. What I learned that day as my boss silently nodded and walked on was that blue collar jobs were almost by definition not essential.

Ron left not long after that. A dot-com six-figure salary was calling.

I tell this story, because I bumped into this story on Naked Capitalism, today. It pokes at this pathology: why essential work pays poorly (think delivery drivers, grocery store workers, transportation workers, air conditioning technicians, meat packers, farmworkers, sanitation workers, …). 

Plus ça change…

1. Tangential Background

Years ago, the University of Illinois had a 5-year joint liberal arts/engineering undergraduate program. I was curious. Eventually (some time during my freshman year), and in spite of the Engineering Dean’s pronouncement that “that program is meant for civil engineers who want to build bridges in South America,” I enrolled.

What degrees to choose? The engineering degree had been a known ever since my father introduced me to the word astronautics in a Scrabble game years before: Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering. What remained was to choose was the liberal arts degree.

In the event and for (poor) reasons that I won’t go into here, I chose Political Science.

2. Quite Meta

Without exception, the best class that I took in the Political Science department was International Relations. Dr. Weinstien was a marathon runner (something I could not conceive of back then). And he had very high expectations.

We were expected to pepper our comments during class with specific examples drawn from history, which intimidated me from the beginning. We were only allowed three punctuation errors (!) in our semester précis. (Yes: He called it a précis, although there was nothing abbreviated about it.) We did a very close reading of Hans Morgenthau’s Politics Among Nations.

Morgenthau’s notion of a bipolar international order was a dominant thread in late twentieth century. It provided a framework for studying foreign relations. And what we did that semester was analyze his framework (analyze his analysis).

Sorta meta, and undoubtedly (in retrospect) why I loved the class so much.

3. Very Meta

Summer 2020 is coming to an end, and I am in a sprint to finish at least one of the books I recently started.

“What are you reading?” Ben asked.

“I’m trying to finally read Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine. Only 200 pages left. I’m going to make it.”

“I thought you had read that several times!” he chuckled.

Sadly, this is the plight of many gems on that shelf. Boo! Happily, Nasim Taleb tells us that an anti-library such as this is the best. Yay!

Klein’s book is a masterpiece. It presents principles (and importantly, principals) to explain twentieth century foreign affairs (including the Cold War tensions that were the favorite of Morgenthau’s realists) in a way that explains equally well foreign affairs in our time. It’s the same people doing the same things time after time in place after place.

Klien’s is a framework that looks at things not just from a power/politics perspective but also from a power/economics one. Least among the appeals of her approach is the lie it puts to the notion of Political Science and Economics as distinct academic disciplines — a bifurcation that would be mended by return to Political Economy.

If I were a political science (or economics) professor today, I would have a class on international relations (or international economics) that used Klein as the text. Much as we used Morgenthau’s text those many years ago, we would read Klein very closely. And we would analyze her framework (analyze her analysis).

Very meta. (And undoubtedly why I like the book so much)

1. The End of Dreaming

Years ago, something happened in my brain. I stopped remembering my dreams. Stopped remembering so completely that I wake up every day with a blank slate, as if nothing happened all night. 

Sometimes there’s an echo of a dream. Once or twice, I have recognized where the dream took place — a dreamscape I used to frequent. But those are exceptions. Such echos have lingered at most a half-dozen times in the last twenty years. Otherwise, no dream evidence whatsoever. 

Except this morning.

2. A Dream

[ed: Keep in mind this is a dream and that nothing matches up with anything I know in real life, my grandfather’s Jeep being the exception.]

Andrew was a big kid, a star football player. I didn’t know him, but he came up to me at school at the beginning of lunch and asked for some math tutoring. I said ok.

The cafeteria was downstairs. It was busy. I told Andrew I’d meet him at a table. But things were so busy and the lines so long that by the time I got there, the cafeteria was empty, and Andrew and several other students who wanted tutoring were gone.

Someone on the stairs told me where they were. I put my lunch down and went to find them. They were upstairs milling in the hallway, and now they wanted to go out for ice cream. I said ok.

We met in the parking lot at my 1950s Willy’s Jeep. The kids piled into the back. There were more than a dozen of them. Andrew asked to drive. I gave him the keys and went around the back to jump in with the others.

Andrew began driving off before I was in. I ran and jumped and grabbed onto some kind of pole that was in the bed. The kids helped pull me up.

The ice cream shoppe was off the side of a narrow road in the mountains. The place was mobbed. I had given the kids my wallet to buy their ice cream. They were in line before me. When it was my turn to order, I could see the kids at a distant table. One of them came back with my wallet just as it was time for me to pay.

I handed the bills over to the cashier. She looked at the money hesitantly and then looked at her manager and whispered.

“Wait,” I said. “This doesn’t look right.”

The bills were too large and clearly counterfeit. I fumbled in my wallet and got some other bills to pay with. Same problem. So I gave her a credit card, but she said that it was ok, because she and the manager had figured out that Andrew had swapped my money for these fake bills, and that it wasn’t my fault. I didn’t have to pay.

I took my order and walked to the table. The kids were gone. They had finished eating and returned to the Jeep. I put my ice cream on the table and rushed out. There was a commotion at the front door. Someone rushed in and said that Andrew had hit somebody’s child. I ran outside.

The family was sitting in the grass. The girl sitting in her mother’s lap. She was shaken but seemed to be ok. The grandfather came up furiously asking who had hit his granddaughter. I said it was my Jeep and that the kids had driven off. I wanted to run to see if I could catch them before they were gone.

I took off my hat and handed it to the grandfather as a token that I would return. Realizing that my hat was not a convincing token, I took out my wallet so I could give him my driver’s license. My license was gone. Andrew had taken it. I gave the man my wallet and said I would come back.

Andrew was gone. The Jeep was gone. Except for one student, a girl who was in one of my classes, all the other students were also gone. It was getting late. The sun was going down. 

I walked back and passed a lawyer’s office. She was just opening for business. There were two men and a woman in line waiting to talk to her in her tiny office with glass windows that looked out on the green lawn where the ice cream shoppe crowd had been parked. She let the two guys in. I looked in the glass windows and watched them sit down. The woman behind them offered to let me get in line in front of her. I shook my head and left.

I began walking back to the family who’s daughter Andrew had hit.

And I woke up in a cold sweat. What a lousy way to return to dreaming after twenty+ years.

1. Jotting Down Songs

There was a time when I would jot down a song or singer whenever I heard something I liked. Sometimes it was on the last page of the journals I used to keep. Sometimes it was a quickly scribbled note on a notepad. Sometimes it was on the outside of the envelope of some bill that was sitting (likely as yet unpaid) on the kitchen counter.

(Ask the industrious Trudy about the piles of paper that used to sit on my kitchen counter.)

2. Cleaning the Garage

This weekend, we spent a lot of time in the sweltering heat trying to bring some order to the garage. Yes, there was a similar project last summer, but this time we went deeper, tossing ultra-old paperwork that we tentatively retained last year. 

And in some box that had my name on it, in some folder in that box, there was a small pile of jotted down songs. I set them aside with the intent of writing them here and including links to whatever I might be able to find. Mind you, the scribbled notes were often my rendering of whatever it was I heard on the radio. So there was no telling if I’d be able to reconstruct what it was that originally caught my attention.

3. The Jots I Found

Hank Jones. On the outside of an envelope from Johnson Federal Credit Union, I scribbled this: Sara-la. Hank Jones. Mandinko Music. (Africa/Mali) Shake-tidian Sek. Yeah, good luck figuring that one out, I thought. Yet with the help of Duck Duck Go, here is what I found: Hank Jones, Cheick-tidiane seck and the Mandinkas : Sarala.

Bade Ghulam Ali Khan. On envelope sent to me when I rented a house in Clear Lake, I scribbled this: Pak. Quaali Music, Badra Ali Khan. Not as hard to find, except I got the Badra thing incorrect, and I misspelled qawwali. Here is a sample of what I was probably listening to: Ustad Bade Ghulam Ali Khan.

The Iguanas. On the top of a page ripped from a spiral sketchbook was The Iguanas — I move too slow. Ok, that shouldn’t be too hard. But no, I only find a link to the lyrics of their Super Ball album, which includes a song, “I moved too slow”:

I moved too slow
I took my time
I should’ve let you know
But I moved too slow

Perhaps those words resonated with me. (Sounds about right, right Trudy?) Anyway, here’s a link to something else of theirs which probably captures what it was that I liked.

Ramblin Jack Elliott. On that same sketchbook page, there was Ramblin’ Jack Elliot “Friend of Mine”. Evidently that was from the album “Friends of Mine.” Jerry Jeff Walker and Ramblin Jack sing “He Was A Friend of Mine” on that album, a song with an interesting history.

The Mozart Sessions. There were three scribbles on a small sheet of paper torn from a tablet: Chick Corea, Bobby McFarrin, “The Mozart Sessions”. No, those aren’t three separate references, they are a single one, and when I played part of it, I remember how it blew me away.

Ricky Scaggs. On a piece of paper from the Lutheran General Medical Group Family Practice in Park Ridge, where my brother once worked, I scribbled Ricky Scaggs Ancient Tunes (Bluegrass). It was bluegrass alright, a Ricky Scaggs album entitled Ancient Tones (not “tunes”). Walls of Time might have been what caught my attention. 

Mustafa. On that same sheet below Ricky Scaggs I drew a line, and below that I wrote two blanks followed by Mustafa. Fat chance. I’m not even trying to figure that one out.

Martin Sexton. Evidently it was 3:15 on Friday, and I was listening to KPFT. At least that’s what the scribbled note on the back of a LinCom paycheck envelope says. Above it, I wrote Daimler and crossed it out. Then I wrote Dinner and crossed it out. Finally, Diner followed by three dots and My Shiny Shiny Love. Here it is. It makes me smile even now. I mean, who says lyrics need to be profound!?

Diner my shiny shiny shiny love

Chicken ‘n’ biscuits
With a side of gravy (peach cobbler)

Scribble Forensics. That particular note has information that helps me guess what I was doing at the time. If I was working at LinCom, then I was still living in Clear Lake. And if it was 3:15 on Friday, I must have been on my way to the airport to pick up Ben for the weekend (otherwise why wouldn’t I be at work instead of listening to KPFT). Indeed, at the bottom of my scribbles are two URLS written in Ben’s handwriting: www.thislife.org and www.pulcina.org. We must have been on our way home from the airport, listening to This American Life, and I must have asked Ben to jot down the links. Who knows why.

…and now I can toss those pieces of paper into the recycle bin.

As I already said, days and events are jumbled up, but that’s not significant. Let me tell you one more thing about the lessons, and then next time I’ll wrap up this pain-in-the-back story.

1. Grace Over Grades

Our grading philosophy for the last ten weeks of the school year was grace over grades. I am proud to say that our school system explicitly set that as our guiding philosophy for distance learning during the COVID-19 shutdown. Our kids were under a huge amount of stress, and jumping on them about lessons and homework and tests would not have been helpful. So we didn’t.

We weren’t alone in this. Although I heard of many distance learning teachers that did have daily interactive video sessions with the entire class, most of us did not, because many of our kids have no laptops and no internet at home.

In the end, there was much grace dispensed from my grade book. Just today I got a thank you note from one of my students who had expected to fail the class but didn’t, because they were on track to pass originally and … grace over grades.

2. Distance Teaching

Our weekly Algebra 2 lessons mostly consisted of a two sets of notes (PDF files) with several brief videos of me stepping thru the notes (for example, this video) and then some traditional homework, which the kids turned in by snapping pictures of the work they did. The kids didn’t really have to read the notes. All they needed to do was watch me talk about the math — kinda like what we did in the good old days.

Preparing for each week was therefore an exercise in writing up the notes (which used color and cartoons just like in the good old days) and doing about a half-dozen screencasts. To start with, I’d embed a picture-in-picture video of me into each screencast where I’d be talking and making faces. But in the end, I found that doing that only on the intro video made it easier for me to get things done. There’s something about your face showing up on every minute of every screencast that makes it easy to procrastinate. #COVIDhair

You’d have to ask my students, but I think it went pretty well. It was a simple way to deliver the lessons. It allowed them to do all the work on their own schedules. And they still got to see the little cherub face of their teacher at least twice a week, albeit crammed in that picture-in-picture.

However, there was one weekend when I knew I wasn’t going to be able to pull that off.

3. Relying on Khan Academy

I have talked about how there was one night where I burned the midnight oil to pull off those lessons. Not long after that, there was another where it was clear by Sunday morning that things were not going well with my back. There would be no writing of notes. There would be no sitting at the desk making screencasts. I needed another plan.

I used Khan Academy. I have a teacher account there, and I had already assigned some Khan Academy material to my pre-AP students. I figured I could grab some stuff there and maybe from other online sites. I could pull together links to some videos and articles as a substitute for my hand-crafted notes and videos. Indeed, some teachers ran their classes this way the entire time. I started Sunday morning. (No more waiting until after dinner!)

It took almost all day. Because so many videos and articles covered concepts we didn’t. And because of so many (non-Khan Academy) videos were just plain lousy. And finally because of my bed-ridden horizontality with laptop angled toward face as I pecked awkwardly at the keyboard. Still, at 7:00pm, the lessons were ready to post to Google Classroom.

I had found what I needed — collected links, written instructions, and created homework assignments. I was relieved, because I had been running for the cliff again and wasn’t quite sure it was all going to come together. Until it did. And the sun hadn’t even set, yet.

Or at least I think it came together. You’d have to ask the kids.