Memories!

"His father has Alzheimer's, and doesn't recognize his own son," she said.

Getting old is not for the faint-hearted!

Ever since I read Sherwin Nuland's How We Die, I have always worried about falling victim to Alzheimer's.  I keep reassuring myself that there has not been any case of dementia in the family, including the extended family.  But then I don't want to be the first either.

When I drafted a will more than two decades ago, my attorney laughed off this worry of mine.  Because, he said, I won't know anything as an Alzheimer's patient--the problem will be somebody else's.  But then, I don't want to become somebody else's burden.

"It is a bleak picture."

There is no known cure. Some medications can reduce memory loss and aid concentration, but these merely alleviate the symptoms or boost the performance of those neurons in the brain that remain unaffected. They do nothing to stop or slow down the killing-off of brain cells by this neurodegenerative condition.

Yes, there is a great deal of research being done to treat, if not cure, Alzheimer's.  But, ...

Especially for someone like me who believes that my memories are all that I will take with me, the loss of memories will be terrible. But, then is any ending any more pleasant than another, really!

Perhaps even my blogging is an extension of creating memories.  A modern day version of how through the ages we humans have told each other stories enough and more times. Most of the old stories that we talk about are heartwarming. But then there are those that make us dwell on the unpleasant tastes that life leaves on our tongues.

I remember coming across a wonderful line by Haruki Murakami:

Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart.

May you create your memories that will warm you from the inside, about which you can then talk and blog about--and keep Alzheimer's away, forever.

The market speaks. But the deniers can't hear!

One can be in denial forever.  But, eventually, one has to face the truth, and accept it.  Such a day of reckoning for the deniers of climate change, aka tRump's toadies, might arrive sooner than they think.

This reckoning will not happen because they will voluntarily admit to the reality.  Nor will the message be delivered to them by their churches.

Instead, their almighty dollar will beat the crap out of them.

If the coming climate-related business crises will have one positive side effect, it’s that acute financial losses are likely to force policy changes in a way that environmental damage on its own has not. As one commenter on a recent Wall Street Journal article about PG & E. put it: “When capitalists decide the scientists are right, then the free market will adjust accordingly.”

They can complain all they want about science and government and Europeans, but the market will make them see Jesus!

California's PG&E is already suffering from the consequences and "would be filing for bankruptcy protection as a result of costs related to recent wildfires in the state."  It is the mere beginning.  The reality of climate change is also reflected in the real estate industry:

“The market is already reacting,” First Street Executive Director Matthew Eby said. “There’s no longer a conversation of what sea-level rise will do in 2050 or 2100.”

How is it reacting?

Sea-level rise has cost homeowners on the East and Gulf coasts nearly $16 billion in property value as floods and the threat of flooding drive some buyers away, according to a study released this week.
Analysts at the nonprofit First Street Foundation in Brooklyn studied millions of residential home sales in 17 states from Maine to Alabama and found that coastal property values were rising at a slower rate in flood-prone areas than in areas that did not flood.

What is holding the market back from a full-fledged reaction to climate change and, therefore, from delivering a blow to denialism? A "focus by policymakers in Washington on making changes that could actually turn things around."

“People in this field say, ‘We know what the problem is, and we know how to solve the problem,’ ” Usher said. Our politicians, however, “don’t have the willingness to do something. That’s where we are.”

There are a few politicians willing to do something; cue the Green New Deal!

Are you average?

Years ago, during my California days, when talking about teaching and students, a colleague--who also moved out of the state--described the challenge this way: we need to target the "average student."  That means there will be students who will be above average, and there will also be students who are below average.  To make things worse, odds are that most faculty were consistently above-average students, which means that we have no idea what it means to be an "average student" leave alone the below-average.

My conclusion has always been one additional step--this is all the more the reason why the factory-style mass education system won't work.

So, of course, I am always delighted when more important people say stuff that appeals to me.  Like when a Harvard professor, Todd Rose, says this about higher education:

In higher ed we have a brutally standardized system. It doesn't matter what your interests are, what job you want, everyone takes the same courses in roughly the same time and at the end of the course you get ranked.

A brutally standardized system.  A system that even developed the idea of the "average" grade, even when we insiders know all too well that grades are useless!  Especially the grades via the puke-inducing bubbling approach!

To make things worse, we blame students!

our system of judging people according to their deviation from the mean (faster, slower, stronger, weaker) is smothering our talents. The sweeping generalisations of averagarians, as he labels them, cannot but gloss over the multifaceted nature of an individual. The effect is pernicious in the extreme. Schools, for instance, rate pupils largely on their ability to learn faster than the average, and design curriculums to suit the speediest. Yet learning slowly does not preclude a student from ultimately mastering a subject.

So, what can we do?

There's plenty of ways we're making smaller units of learning to combine in ways that are useful to you. To me, competency based education is nonnegotiable. I don't think you can have fixed-time, grade-based learning anymore. I don't see how you justify diplomas.

I am all in favor.  Oh wait, who cares about the students, right!