The best thinkers move alternatively between doubting all of their thoughts, seeking a defense, and being supremely confident in their thought.

In my “Enlightenment to the Present” class, we discussed Marx’s theory of alienated labor over the past few classes. I assigned a “creative non-fiction” memoir assignment due this Friday, and I said that they will not be paid in some abstracted grade. If you do the assignment, you get an A. If you write poorly, you get an A. If you write excellently, you get an A. If you put an enormous amount of effort, you get an A. If you spend five minutes on it, you get an A.  The paper is a reflection of yourself. You are your paper.

I wonder how this would work as model for an entire semester worth of grades. Imagine a syllabus that said, “If you show up, do your assignments, and don’t give me excuses when you don’t, you’ll get an A. If your attendance is mediocre or you miss a couple of assignments, you get a C. If you miss six classes or more than two assignments, you don’t pass. No exceptions. The quality of your work will not reflect on your grade. The quality of your work will reflect on your character.”

From our usual capitalist paradigm, the lack of a grade motivator will surely result in mediocre work. From the Marxist paradigm, the grade is a purely abstract and flat value that does not reflect even a fraction of the full value of a student’s creative products, and by fetishizing the grade, we are promoting a deadening of creativity and an obsession with grade achievement.

And to my excellent students who say, “But I want my grade to mean something!” I reply, “Get over it. There are more important things than a single letter on a transcript full of letters. Instead of making your grade mean something, why don’t you concentrate on making your essays mean something?”

And today is exactly why I need to stick to the new commandment that no matter how much work I have to do, I must go to the gym first thing. I woke up at 6:20am again, but felt very sluggish. I thought I would skip the gym, get 40 extra minutes of sleep, and get to work. It is now 8, and I have accomplished nothing except to shower and get half dressed. And, I didn’t get anymore sleep so I’m still sluggish. If I had gone to the gym, I’d be sitting right here typing right now, but I’d also have had a decent workout. Boo.

It would be relatively easy to be honorable ’til death if one is convinced there is an afterlife that rewards the good. But to be honorable ’til death as a nihilist? That is an even more remarkable honor. Is the atheist more capable of genuine good than a theist? It seems so, although (and because) the motivation for being good has been infinitely reduced.

5 mile run came in at 40:15 today, shaving 38 seconds off my previous record.  In the Marines, our standard physical fitness test (PFT) requires an absolute minimum of 24 minutes for a 3 mile run, or 8 minute miles. 40:15 is running 8 minute 3 second runs, so I could probably make the basic PFT.  At my best in the Marines, I ran a 20:30. There were many guys who were faster, but I have never been an excellent runner (hell, I was 16 before I could even run a single mile without stopping).

In addition to running, I am intent on wasting less time in the mornings. My inefficiency in the morning is probably my greatest cause for lost time, especially since if I start slow, I continue slow. This semester, with all my evening classes, I don’t have any days where I need to move fast in the morning. I hated my commute in previous semesters: 4:30am wake up, out the door at 5:30, 2 hour commute to school. But at least there was at least twice per week where I had to kick the shit out of myself. I would teach three classes by 12:30pm. This semester, it’s sometimes an accomplishment to do anything before 12.

No more resting. Until I build better habits, I’m going to record how long it takes me to get my morning under way. This morning, I woke up at 6:20am, and was at the gym by 6:40, which is really good for me. It is now 7:46. I have yet to shower, but my goal is to be out the door by 8:15am. Writing this post takes about 10 minutes, but if recording my times in the morning causes me manage my time better, then spending 10 minutes can save 2 hours.  It’s like a psychological time investment. Anyway, I better close this post now and not check any other websites.

Update: Ended up leaving at 8:30am, 15 minutes late. Appalling. I can do better. The day has been productive since then, as I stayed focused on reading and preparing notes for today’s classes. The first hour was the best, and I’ve gradually slowed down since then. Improvement, but still in need of more improvement. Need more mental efficiency.

I’ve added a “practical philosophy” page above. It will be a storage area for articles around the web that discuss how philosophy can be used outside of academics. There are two good reads there now, but I hope we can find more.

Addendum: Changed the page to “Non-academic philosophy,” because “Practical Philosophy” often refers to ethical philosophy.

I’ve decided to report my running times here because it will be better motivation to keep training.

I was definitely feeling sluggish this morning, despite 10 hours of sleep (I did not get much sleep the previous night). When I get on the treadmill, I usually start at a speed of 6.5 mph for .5 miles to warm up. Then I step it up, although the next speed is dependent on how hard I’m running that day. Wednesday, I went right to 7.5, but I was still feeling very sluggish, so I went to 7.0 mph. I didn’t feel as aggressive or motivated as I did Wednesday. I felt tired and thought that my body was still recovering from the excellent Wednesday run. At the one mile, I felt like quitting. By 2.5, I told myself that I will stop at 3, maybe do the stair climber after that. At 3, I thought, “just do .2 more miles.”  I thought that maybe I had a stored amount of energy on Wednesday that I expended, and now I was simply out. But after awhile, I started paying attention to the parts of my body instead of my feelings, and I asked myself, “Where is the pain? What is going on in my body that is preventing me from running?” I found pain, but there is always pain. The pain in my legs was neither crippling  or piercing. The pain in my chest and belly was the same. I felt a little nauseous in the belly, but again, nothing I hadn’t felt before, and I learned in the Marine Corps that is the feeling that must be fought through. I thought about my form, and realized I was being sloppy. So perhaps if I straightened my back and consciously breathed deeply and rhythmically. I lowered my shoulders and made sure my arms were moving parallel to the track. That seemed to get me through another 40 seconds or so, but then the desire to stop returned. I tried to get myself angry or excited or ambitious by thinking about various things, but it didn’t help very much. Wednesday I felt like a machine. I felt the same amount of pain and weariness, but I just ran through it without inner-struggle. Today, inner struggle abounded.  My mind was my enemy.

Well, part of my mind was my enemy. There was an obstacle, but I knew my body had very little, if anything, to do with the obstacle. I couldn’t dismiss the force, so I needed a strategy.  I thought that at my current pace, I wouldn’t get anywhere near the 40:53 run time, so I decided that the best thing to do is to incorporate much faster run segments (but not sprints)  to strengthen the leg muscles.  At 3 miles, I decided to do the following. .2 miles run very slowly, 6.0 mph. At 3.2 miles, I upped the speed to 8.8 mph, for .25 miles. Then back down to 6.0 mph for .2 miles, then 8.8 for .25. I did this until about 4.1 miles into the run. I shot for a more steady speed of 7.7 until the 4.6 mile mark, and as I approached 4.6 I was preparing to go all out. Could I sustain 8.8 for .4 miles? I didn’t know, but I knew that I needed to expend everything I had left in me. I ran 8.8 for .2 miles, then I upped the speed to 9.0. At 40:10 seconds into the run, I realized I might actually finish before 41:30.  I increased the speed again and again, and finished at 40:54. One second slower than Wednesday, despite all the emotional stuff. I was both pleased and dissatisfied. Pleased, because I did much much better than I thought I would do throughout the vast majority of the run, and I overcame the obstacle. Dissatisfied, because I was certain had I managed the last .5 miles a little better, had a been more confident in my estimation, I could’ve beat my Wednesday time. Oh well. Lessons for next time, and really the greatest victory is just having been on the track for 40 minutes.

Now, I’m running way behind on my schedule, but I’ve got the whole day ahead of me to grade papers. I’ve done my run, eaten a healthy breakfast of waffles covered in butter and syrup, and have done some writing, so I don’t think there will be as much to distract me from here on out. On to Dollop, which will soon be my new local coffee shop after next months move. Then I’m checking out my new apartment , back to Dollop for a few hours, and if I finish my work, I’ll treat myself to a beer at Bar on Buena and do some more writing.

When I am fifty, what are the sorts of things I will regret? If I don’t think about the past, I won’t regret anything. But I know I will think about the past, and I wouldn’t allow otherwise. I want to know myself thoroughly, and be honest with myself and the world about who I am and what I have done. If I were to buy a nice television, for example, that will last, what, 5 years? Will that have added anything to my life when I’m fifty, after the television has been gone for fifteen years? That is the sort of thing I might regret. If I send that money off to some charity, but do not get involved in any other way, will I regret that? It may even have less of an impact on my life, and I will know less about the impact on lives in general, than the television set. Of course, I’m helping something that way, possibly, but I won’t have any knowledge of how or if I did. And all I would be able to do is construct a lie to myself that says, “I’m sure that money helped someone,” when in fact I wouldn’t know. On the other hand, what about the actual experiences? The community work, the development of relationships, the actual caring and improvement of other people through reliable and verified methods? To feel wholesome and complete?

And this isn’t just about charity. It’s about my own intellectual stimulation as well. For example, I have attended woefully few plays, zero operas, and there are so many books I want to read that I have not. Will I regret not having done that? I think so. Wouldn’t it be heartbreaking to go through one’s entire life, and never to know what it is like to think and read about Proust? I have not read it, but from all the commentary I hear and read, I am fairly certain that it would add a level of complexity to my mind.

Moments of pure pleasure just make the passage of time more enjoyable. But when they are past, they are truly past. A novel like The Brothers Karamazov is pleasurable, but although it may not be as immediately pleasurable as watching some TV, the Brothers has an enduring pleasure on my mind, and is certainly capable of shaping my mental life in ways that few other experiences can.

There is a difference between non-additive experiences and additive, and perhaps that is the difference between living a life that is worthy of regret, and one that is simply worthy.

I’m summoning the inner Marine and waging a war against my own laziness. I’ve been physically inactive all winter. I’ve had a couple runs here and there, but nothing to keep me in shape. That stops now. Been to the gym four times in the past week, and I eeked out a damn good runtime, considering how long I’ve been off my legs: 5 miles in 40:53. Not super-star, obviously, but it is one of the better times from my past few years.  I certainly was pushing my hardest, swallowing and embracing the pain,  and pouring sweat at the end.  I always forget how much better I feel, think, and work when I’m in shape until I’m getting back in shape again.

The conditions of my work demand long hours of concentration.  A lot of work needs to be done, from class preparation to paper grading.  I’ll wake up in the morning and think to myself, “I don’t have time to go to the gym: I need to do work if I’m going to finish on time.  I’ll go to the gym tomorrow.”  But slowly, my body deteriorates, and my body and brain cannot sustain the necessary levels of productivity. I fall further behind, and have more motivation to skip the gym.  I get to the point where I can work for the first hour of the morning, and suddenly I can no longer concentrate. Moments of productivity are rare and unpredictable. Something has to grab me, instead of me choosing to work on something. I can do the minimal amount of work for class prep, but the minimal level is not nearly good enough.

My priority is going to change. Although from the big-picture perspective, being a philosophy, class prep and grading are a higher priority than my own physical fitness. However, from a daily-conduct perspective, I am moving physical fitness to a top priority. I understand that physical fitness is the battery that allows the other things. In the morning, when I have to choose between class prep and going to the gym, I will go to the gym. If I have a lot of work to do, then at the very least, I will go to the gym and get on the track for 20 minutes. Just something to keep me going and to stay alert and productive for the rest of the day. That way, I can be more productive during the fewer work hours and get more work done at the end.

I knew all of this before, but it has not been on my mind lately, not in the active sense. And my habits had completely broken away from what I needed to do.

Over the past winter break, I read a book titled “What the Best Teachers Do.” It was an excellent and exciting book because it confirmed my beliefs about the fundamentals of education, and then expanded on those notions as well.

One notion that I became hooked on is the concept that a student who is motivated by external rewards, such as grades, gets less from the semester as a student motivated by internal rewards, such as the pleasure of learning.

In retrospect, I may have been a little too hooked on this concept. To use this concept in practice, I scaled back my emphasis on grading, and tried to increase the emphasis on learning.  But I feel as though my students are simply more confused and not trying as hard as they usually are.  I have also found it even more difficult to grade papers This is not a scientific study, obviously, and maybe this feeling is simply a bias. But maybe its not. Certainly, a change of cause will lead to a change of effect.  But that doesn’t mean that I can trust my memory and feeling to figure out how much the teaching strategy cause has changed, how much the student response effect has changed, and how much the teaching strategy caused the student response effect. After all, the students are each a magnificent nexus of ideas, each of which is distinct, and which can in itself serve as a cause that alters the student response effect. It is impossible to reliably and precisely measure how a change in teaching strategy leads to a change in the student experience. Then again, some measurement can be made, and some things can be learned.

Certainly, many people are engaged in this type of research. But there are many things that researchers are currently not studying. For example, me, and all the subtle things that I do that no one else does, at least not in the exact way that I behave.

Anyway, returning to my original point of going too far in de-emphasizing grades. Perhaps the only way in which I added to the internal goods was by paying it lip service, without having the appropriate class activities and assignments that actually nurture those goods.

Do I need to return to the emphasis on grades? Maybe. Maybe the nature of the student body I deal with simply requires it in order to get a substantial number of students on board with the program. But maybe  if I focus my attention on class practices, and recognize that maybe I’ve depended a little too much on class propaganda, I can get the best of both worlds.

Tomorrow, we are starting a significant new phase in my two Ethics classes. We are playing the Reacting to the Past Athens game, and this will certainly be a radical shift in class practices. It will be interesting to see how those two classes diverge from my others. I spent the majority of Spring Break thinking about and preparing for those Ethics classes (of the time that I was preparing…I admit I spent substantial time with friends whom I haven’t seen in a long time). Now I can turn the bulk of my attention back toward my Enlightenment to the Present and Philosophy of Religion class, both of which need attending to if the greatest goods of the class can bloom.