Long-term learning plans

So back when Wordle became big, and I discovered Worldle and started the geography project, I was also doing the CliftonStrengths evaluation at work, which offers suggestions for how to leverage your strengths to get more out of them.  Long story short, one of the ways to make use of what I'm good at to help achieve goals while also avoiding some of the pitfalls is to plan out what I want to do so that a) I don't get bored with something and b) I don't try to do too much at once.

I'm really good at trying to do too much at once.

Anyway, now I have a list, partly scheduled and partly on an as-I-have-time basis, of stuff I want to learn.  There's kind of a lot.

The realization that I know next to nothing about the Global South outside some general world history partly drove the development of this list, but there's also a lot of hobby-type stuff that I have plateaued on because I haven't taken the time to learn some of the skills I want to have.

So here's the list:

• History:
• Africa (2022)
• Carthage
• Social/political development of major populations
• Native American history (2023)
• Miami/Shawnee
• Iroquois/Mohawk
• Major events & people
• Social/political development of major populations
• North/Central America/Caribbean (2024)
  
• Canada - general history
• Central America - general history
• Mexico - general history
• Caribbean - general history
• Aztecs
• Mayans
• United Fruit
• Federal Republic of Central America
• Major events & people
• Puerto Rico
• Social/political development of major populations
• New York
• Major events & people
• Regional events & people
• Indiana
• Major events & people
• South America (2025)
  
• Incas
• Simon Bolivar
• Nazca lines
• Major events & people
• Social/political development of major populations
• Asia (2026)
  
• South Asia - general history
• Southeast Asia - general history
• Southwest Asia - general history
• East Asia - general history
• Major events & people
• Social/political development of major populations
• Australia/New Zealand/Pacifica (2027)
  
• Major events & people
• Social/political development of major populations
• Antarctica (2028)
  
• Languages
• Yiddish (2023)
  
• Latin (2028)
  
• Dutch (2024)
  
• Mandarin (2026)
  
• Spanish (2025)
  
• German (2027)
  
• Swahili (2027)
  
• French (2024)
  
• Russian (2025)
• Esperanto (2028)
  
• Piano
• Review notation & musical terminology
• Music theory
• Raindrop Prelude
• Memories of Green
• Clair de Lune
• Linus & Lucy
• Moonlight Sonata (full) 
• Guitar
• Recognize & play basic chords
• Learn chords for 3 Christmas carols
• Silent Night
• Joy to the World
• What Child Is This
• Trombone
• F above middle C
• Calculus
• Derivation
• Integration
• Common formulae
• Square roots
• Chemistry
• Common formulae
• Common reactions
• Tree identification
• Progression - 5/15/25 local trees
• Rock identification 
• 5 common rocks
• Most locally common rocks
• Local rock formations/strata
• Geography
• World countries
• World capitals
• Territories, possessions, major cities
• Languages, currencies
• Writing
• Prose editing & revision
• Poetry composition forms
• Yoga
• Progress through app's beginner & intermediate levels (currently beginner 2)
  
• Knitting
• Felting
• Steeking
• Sweater construction
•  Sewing
• Fitting
• Crochet
• Patterns
• Lace
• Quilting
• Advanced piecing
• Full-sized quilting
• Candy making
•  Soft caramels
  
•  Gardening
• Troubleshooting problems
• Consistent yields
• First Aid
• CPR
• Woodworking
• Lumber selection
• Sanding/finishing
• Composting
• Develop hot compost
• Bird ID
• Progression 10/20/30 local birds
• Astronomy
• Calibrate & use telescope
• Identify all the northern hemisphere constellations (currently 17/39)
  
• Learn to swim
• Tai chi

There is a lot!  Most of these topics I already have books for (or in the case of the languages, an app).  Most of the languages I just want to get through the app content, but I'd like to get conversational in German and Spanish.  For the most part I've paired up languages with the area of historical study for the year, but I started doing French this year because we want to visit Montreal at some point.  I remember more from the 12 weeks I took it in college than I realized I did.

I don't have a lot of "bucket list" piano pieces, and at the moment I am working on re-memorizing the first movement of Moonlight Sonata.  That is about 2/3 of the way done.  It is both amusing and annoying that the passages I get stuck at are the same ones I got stuck at the first time I was learning it, 25 years ago.  What will slow me down more than anything on learning new things is that the more I play, the more I compose, so my piano time can easily get sidetracked into writing music.  This isn't the worst problem to have, but I would like to learn the handful of pieces I have on my list.

Of all of them, the swimming goal will be the most logistically difficult - adult swim lessons at the local Y are only open to members, and they cost $78 a week on top of the membership.  They are supposed to be building an aquatic center near us, but I don't know if/when it will be completed, or if they'll offer adult lessons when it is done.

Europe, 718

So I'm running a D&D campaign again.  Despite having (probably literally) dozens of fictional worlds to pull from thanks to twenty years of writing (crappy) fiction, I like running campaigns set on Earth.  Past, future, either works.  So the current one is set in the era of Charles Martel, 718, before the battles definitively keeping the Moors in Spain and not in France.

The twist, of course, is that a dragon wiped out Constantine and his opponent at the battle of Milvian Bridge, so Constantine never became sole emperor of Rome.  The dragon has taken up residence in Rome, the eastern empire has split off as Byzantium, the Franks moved into western Europe, the Celts still have some small footholds, and Christianity didn't become the dominant religion in the region.  Islam is still moving up through North Africa, but the cultures in Europe are still more varied.

There's also magic and elves and classical monsters and all of that, so it's not exactly your vanilla European backdrop.  Teasing out which cities exist, what the plagues of Justinian did to the population, who's in charge where, which languages are extant, what the technological levels are, and things like, has a bridge been built here yet? have all taken some digging, guesstimating, or sometimes sheer fabrication.  It's interesting for me finding textual gaps in the historical record, or areas of sparser research - in a hundred years it's Charlemagne Charlemagne Charlemagne and you can find tons of information on life and culture at the time, but back up to Charles Martel and you're doing a bit more guesswork.

So the party has arrived in Gundelfingen an der Donau, and I'm being reminded that I'm much more comfortable pronouncing German than French.  I think they've decided to continue up the Danube to Regensburg, which means I get to switch encounter tables from what they were facing in the Black Forest.  I think this one includes angry fish!

A Few Books for Today

Today is the 93rd anniversary of the armistice that ended the fighting in World War I.  That number seems huge to me now: all the veterans of the war, save one, are dead; in three years we'll see the 100th anniversary of the war's beginning; in seven years we'll see the 100th anniversary of its end.

World War I is one of the time periods that I feel I don't know enough about (along with the French Revolution and the Korean War); over time I've been trying to remedy that.  Here are a few books I've read on the era, and a few I've yet to read:

All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque:  I read this for one of my Western Civ classes (taught by Dr. Dan White, who was also my undergraduate adviser, and who assigned amazing non-textbook works for course reading).  It's set from the point of view of a young German soldier during the war.

Regeneration, Pat Barker:  This was assigned for a class on historical fiction I took during my master's program.  The story is set in a psychiatric hospital for British officers during the war.

The Guns of August, Barbara Tuchman:  I picked this up to read during our trip to Washington, D.C., while we were taking the trains back and forth from our hotel to the Washington Mall.  She is one of the best writers I have read, and she tells how the war unfolded.

A Peace to End All Peace, David Fromkin:  One of the books I've bought but have yet to read, it lays out the effect of the end of the war on the Middle East.

Seven Pillars of Wisdom, T. E. Lawrence:  I'm not sure where I picked up a copy of this, but I've got it sitting on my to-read list.  It's Lawrence's description of the war in the Middle East.  (If you've seen Lawrence of Arabia, this is the Lawrence in question.)

Literary references

So I read somewhere - I think it was that Pew Forum survey that was going around about religious knowledges - that less than half of Americans know who Job was in the Bible. That bothered me, since probably half of my literary references are biblical. I don't have the background to reference Plato and Cicero and all the other Romans, or the Greeks, or even Shakespeare, really, but I read most of the Old Testament in first grade.

I suppose having to explain what a griffin was (with visual aids) in 11th grade should have clued me in that the mythic and fantasy background that I did have at that point, while limited compared to true readers/scholars, was still more expansive than most of the people I knew outside my family. It was kind of weird to realize that what used to be commonly recognizable heraldic elements have started trickling out of common knowledge.

At this point, the realizations leave me with two trains of thought: firstly, to fill in the gaps in my own literary knowledge (via reading classics) and secondly, what the hell do I do about my tendency to reference Biblical characters? What's the point of setting up a Job character if no one's going to recognize it?

I come from a relatively mainstream Protestant background; vacation Bible school, confirmation, Bible in first grade, Sunday school, youth group - relatively active and engaged up till leaving for college. We didn't really talk religion much at home that I recall; most of my exploration of spiritual issues came after I'd left for college, when I took a couple courses on the Renaissance and read some Erasmus and other Renaissance philosophers. I picked up enough to realized that I had learned practically nothing about the history of Christianity at church.

Taking the Pew Forum's short quiz, I've come to realize that most of what I know about religion that isn't based on scriptural knowledge, I learned in my American Lit class in high school, as well as the courses I took on Byzantine history and the Renaissance in the course of my undergraduate degree in history. Most of the rest? From the New York Times. And that's still really a drop in the bucket; there are vast swaths of humanity about whom I know nothing of what they believe (or believed, for religions that have died) on a spiritual level.

Knowing what I do know, and what I don't know, and being involved in education from a library point of view - how do you teach literature when so many people nowadays don't understand the underlying implications of the text? Do the underlying implications matter, or can literature be studied devoid of knowledge of its influences?

I think I actually had this debate with my sister, regarding art. If art is removed from its context - if you have a poster of a famous painting, but know nothing about the painting other than that you like the picture - is it still art? Is it somehow devalued by not knowing the artist's intent? Does making posters of famous paintings devalue the original art? I believe I actually came at the reproduction debate from a point of access: hundreds of thousands - millions, even - of people will never see most works of art in the flesh, such as it is. But sell it as a poster in a print shop, and thousands more people are exposed to it. I guess it comes down to the purpose of art: the artist has one purpose, each individual viewer his or her own. Does mass distribution devalue art, or does it just give more people the opportunity to reap its benefits?

So if you consider something like Animal Farm: can it be read, and studied, as literature, without getting into its references to the Russian Revolution? Something written as a direct commentary on an event or era - what, if anything, is lost when the reader has no knowledge of the topic being referenced? If you don't know anything about the Russian Revolution, can you still get value out of Animal Farm, or is its value lost without the underlying theme?

I think, really, the answer for me lies in the quality of the work in question. A great work of literature or art will be timeless even if its content is, like that of Animal Farm or Picasso's Guernica, directly commenting on a historical event or era. It has value outside its context. Not all works achieve this.

So is understanding of the literary references necessary? I think a reader will have a much richer experience with it, but if the work is of good quality, it will be able to stand on its own without needing understanding of the references.

1903

So I want to run a d20 "modern" game in 1903.

I'm not sure why 1903 - maybe because the Harry Nilsson song about Dayton, OH, is 1903. Maybe because, subconsciously, I know it's when my great-grandmother was born. (The one I knew, anyway, of the four.)

Anyway, 1903 is fascinating - the first World Series, Ford's Model A came out, the Wizard of Oz was on Broadway, the Wright Brothers' first flight.

Hopefully the gaming group will go for it.

Ich bin...

I was 9 when the Berlin Wall fell. I remember seeing it on the TV - the people in the streets of Berlin, traffic at a standstill, people standing/sitting on VW Bugs, standing on the wall, champagne flowing. I was in third grade; the significance of the scenes were, more or less, lost on me at the time. It wasn't until high school that I really had an idea of what had been going on.

Today I realized that most if not all of my student workers were born after the Wall fell. Communist Eastern Europe was gone by the time they were in third grade. The Soviet Union was already gone; Czechoslovakia had split; Yugoslavia had broken up. Instead, they have 9/11 as their grade school historical reference point.

I guess some kids get JFK's assassination for their grade school memories, and some get the man on the moon.

I think I'm glad I got the one I did.

In defiance of October...

Ok, so I may have screwed myself for NaNoWriMo.

On the other hand, I'm 17 pages (~9k words) into this story I started September 30. I didn't mean to. I really was going to try to save it for NaNoWriMo. I just couldn't let it sit. Even though October is historically atrocious for story survival.

It does remind me why I like to write in fictional worlds, though. It's set in about 1903 in a fictional town probably in Nevada. This is somewhat problematic, since I've never been to Nevada, and my knowledge of details about the history of the Western U.S. are still sketchy.

Like, the details of Chinese-American citizenship in California. And the development of electricity in homes, and the gramophone, and street cars, and fashions.

I'm thinking about emailing the UC-Berkeley library about the degree offerings of the university in the 1890s.

I don't mind if it gets a steam-punkish flavor in the technology realm, but the other historical details will irk me if I try to guess or fabricate.

Have I mentioned here before that I have a history M.A.?