Interview: Polyglot and self-educator Alexander Arguelles, Ph.D. (Part 2 of 2)

(This is part two of my two-part interview with Alexander. The introduction and first part of the interview can be found here. Thank you, as always, for reading.)


Wide Awake Minds (WAM): Your educational accomplishments, style, and scholarly output seem to be quite different from those of most people in academia. For instance, it seems like you may have originally chosen your particular Ph.D. program (in History of Religions at the University of Chicago) because of what you wanted to learn and know rather than because of your desire to join that particular field as a scholar. Is that true?


Alexander Arguelles (AA): Yes, it is true that I never aspired to join the particular field of history of religions as a scholar. Right after college I did have some other reasons for ending up there, but the main one was that I believed I could do more comparative historical philological work there than I could anywhere else, and I think I was right in that. Quite frankly, I don’t see a Ph.D. as a certificate to be a specialist expert in the narrow realm where it was minted, but rather as a license to learn, and as proof that one has completed the whole formal schooling process. That’s what going there meant to me – completing the schooling process. I discovered when I was quite young that getting good grades was easy and brought many rewards (such as scholarships) in terms of both being taught some things and being given the freedom to teach oneself even more, so that is what I kept on doing as long as I could.

Unfortunately for me, my concept of what a Ph.D. represents is rather rare, and as a result my own academic career has definitely suffered. I was happy to head out into the wider world to get actual exposure to languages when I was a bit younger, but now I would be quite content to go “home” and have an office on the Quads or in Morningside Heights or any other Ivy League town. It doesn’t seem I’ll ever get one, though. I’ve applied for a fair number of professorships advertising for people with international experience and innovative approaches to foreign languages, but I’ve never been gotten any interested responses. It appears I have published in the wrong way – I’ve been told that full-length books like my multilingual dictionary and my analytical guide to Korean verbal conjugation - which I think are far more scholarly than my dissertation and which certainly took a lot more time and energy – are “just reference works” and that they “don’t count” – the only thing that counts being articles in scholarly journals.

I clearly remember my first advisor at the University of Chicago telling me to enjoy my graduate school years because, once I was a professor, I wouldn’t have nearly as much time to continue to explore and learn new things. As I’ve since had occasion to observe, he was all too often right. Many of my colleagues, instead of continuing to widen their horizons throughout their careers, only have time to delve deeper into their specific area of specialization. I think that is a shame, for I believe the primary duty of a scholar ought to be to continue to learn and study new things throughout life. Particularly in the area of foreign language learning, I think it is a travesty that linguists conduct research by theorizing and by testing on and observing others rather than by learning languages themselves so that they know first-hand what works and how that process works.

Interview: Polyglot and self-educator Alexander Arguelles, Ph.D. (Part 1 of 2)

Interviewer: Ryan McCarl

Featured self-educator: Alexander Arguelles, Ph.D.

Self-educator’s position: Language Specialist, Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organization

Date: 21 December 2010

A "polyglot" is a person who knows many languages, and Alexander Arguelles is one of the foremost self-taught language learners in the world. In many ways, Alexander embodies the ideals of self-education and liberal education that are promoted on Wide Awake Minds. He has spent countless hours over the years on self-directed education with the aim of developing an "encylopedic mind," and he sees the learning of languages as his "passport" on a lifelong educational journey.

Alexander grew up hearing his father, another self-taught polyglot, teach himself languages by reading aloud from foreign language texts. By the time he was completed his undergraduate degree at Columbia University, Alexander had been exposed to the "Great Books" method of liberal education and had "obtained a solid foundation in six languages: French, German, Spanish, Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit."

After graduating from Columbia, Alexander pursued a Ph.D. in History of Religions at the University of Chicago, where he wrote a dissertation on Old Norse and developed his abilities in a number of other ancient and modern languages while making the decision to work systematically at becoming a polyglot later in life. After graduate school, Alexander gravitated away from traditional academic research and toward a career of language learning and teaching. During one five-year period, Alexander devoted himself nearly full-time to the study of languages.

Alexander's website reports that he has achieved his goal of being able to comfortably read classic books in their original languages with little or no use of a dictionary in over 30 languages, but he has a considerable knowledge of many others as well. He has managed to build a personal library of language learning resources for over 150 languages, and he has reviewed different language learning materials in a series of YouTube videos. His published books include a multilingual dictionary as well as reference materials on Korean, German, and French. His website, www.foreignlanguageexpertise.com, is a treasury of resources on language learning, great books, and liberal education, and self-education.

Here is a video of Alexander demonstrating some of his language learning routines to Michael Erard, a writer who profiles polyglots (among many other fascinating projects); my interview with Alexander begins below the video:



(This is part one of my two-part interview with Alexander. The second portion of the interview will be posted in the next few days. Thank you, as always, for reading.)


Wide Awake Minds (WAM): When did you first take an interest in learning? Why did you decide to make it your goal to "develop an encyclopedic mind," as you put it - and what do you mean by that term?

Alexander Arguelles (AA): I have always loved learning. I have been an inveterate reader from my earliest years, and from boyhood onwards I have always carried several books around with me wherever I go, together with a notebook for writing down quotes as well as my own observations and reflections. By early adolescence, I had developed a taste for both serious literature and for histories of all sorts: chronicle-type (important names, dates, battles, events, dynasties, etc.), historiography, the history of ideas, histories of philosophy, histories of literature, other cultural histories, etc.

I don’t remember just when I first consciously articulated the desire to develop an encyclopedic mind in those precise terms, but it was certainly a long time ago, and even before that I was working in the same direction.

What do I mean by the term? There are three main components: first and foremost, I want to have a wide ranging and well organized knowledge of facts; second, I want to have a deep understanding of both the true connections between those facts that are actually related and also of the patterns that are represented by those that are merely parallel phenomena; third, I want to digest all of this, to have it available for immediate access right inside my head.

Why? Well, I suppose I am simply enamored of the idea of making my brain a repository of knowledge, a primary reference source that goes with me wherever I go and in which I have facts ready at hand without needing to look them up in external sources. What do you do with all the footnotes at the bottom of the pages of an annotated scholarly work? I suspect most people tend to skip them altogether, but if you do read them the first time you read the work, and you then read it again, it is simply a much richer and more meaningful experience upon that second reading because you already know the content of the explanatory footnotes. Going through life with an encyclopedic mind is rather like that, that is, a more satisfying experience when you know most of the context that you otherwise have to get by reading footnotes if you even bother to look at all. Conducting yourself in the conscious light of what others have done and thought is more fulfilling than living without that awareness.

There is so much to know that there is always something new to learn, and while it is always wonderful to do so, still it is somewhat mortifying to first realize that you are completely ignorant of something. I mean, when I first learn the name of an important historical personage or of an ancient civilization, I am excited to add that information to my encyclopedia, but I also feel a twinge of shame that I knew nothing about it before.

In reality, whenever I move around the world I ship a large physical library around with me, but I really like the idea of having no possessions, and I think it would be nice to have nothing physical, but to still have a full rich world of knowledge inside my mind. I haven’t written it yet and maybe I never will, but I have a fleshed-out dystopian novel in my head in which exactly that is all that is left – what is inside our heads. I fear that for most people that would leave them with very little indeed, but I think it would be magnificent to be able to sit down and write out an encyclopedic work such as Vincent of Beauvais’ Speculum Maius.

Excerpts from Jacques Barzun's "Begin Here"

From Jacques Barzun's Begin Here: The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning, one of my favorite books on education:

From "Schooling No Mystery":

Forget EDUCATION. Education is a result, a slow growth, and hard to judge. Let us talk rather about Teaching and Learning, a joint activity that can be provided for, though as a nation we have lost the knack of it.
...
As for the means of learning and thinking, that is to say, reading and writing, the colleges are at the same point as the grade schools - helpless in the face of illiteracy. The exceptional teacher is still trying in graduate school to get decent writing and intelligent reading out of his bright students.
...
Learning to read, write, and count meant equal opportunity. Lincoln, as everybody knows, had to teach himself.
...
In the name of progress and method, innovation and statistical research, educationists have persuaded the world that teaching is a set of complex problems to be solved. It is no such thing. It is a series of difficulties. They recur endlessly and have to be met; there is no solution.... Teaching is an art, and an art, though it has a variety of practical devices to choose from, cannot be reduced to a science.
....
...Knowing a subject and wanting to teach it are the chief prerequisite to success in the profession....

From "Teacher in 1980 America: What He Found":

The manifest decline is heartbreakingly sad, but it is what we have chosen to make it, in higher learning as well as in our public schools. There, instead of trying to develop native intelligence and give it good techniques in the basic arts of man, we professed to make ideal citizens, supertolerant neighbors, agents of world peace, and happy family folk, at once sexually adept and flawless drivers of cars. In the upshot, a working system has been brought to a state of impotence. Good teachers are cramped or stymied in their efforts, while the public pays more and more for less and less. The failure to be sober in action and purpose, to do well what can actually be done, has turned a scene of fruitful activity into a spectacle of defeat, shame, and despair.

From "The Alphabet Equals the Wheel":

All children can learn and do learn. By the time they first go to school they have learned an enormous amount, including a foreign language, since no language is native to the womb.
...
A teacher must believe in the capacity of those he is teaching; it is defeatism to start out with the opposite assumption.
...
Teaching is a demanding, often back-breaking job; it should not be done with the energy left over after meetings and pointless paperwork have drained hope and faith in the enterprise. Accountability, the latest cure in vogue, is to be looked for only in results. Good teaching is usually well-known to all concerned without questionnaires or approved lesson plans.
...
When good teachers perform and pupils learn, the sense of accomplishment produces a momentum that lightens the toil for both. Discipline is easier to maintain and failures become exceptions instead of the rule.
...
...Reform must bear directly on what is wanted, not try roundabout ways next door. The Army is not considered the most efficient of institutions, but when it finds a deficiency in fire power it does not launch a "Right to Shoot Program" or a "Marksmanship Recovery Project." It gets the sergeants busy and the instructors out to the rifle range.

From "The Centrality of Reading":

There is...no excuse for allowing the exercise of reading to be less certain in its results than the exercise of listening and remembering. To tolerate reading that proceeds by guesswork, as if at a later time some one would surely tighten the screws of the loose mental structure and make it solid and precise, is to commit an injury against the growing mind. To allow the written word to be indefinite is to undo the incalculable technical advance that turned sounds into signs.

On this pedagogical ground alone, it could be said that no subject of study is more important than reading. In our civilization, at any rate, all the other intellectual powers depend upon it. No one can compute very far without reading correctly; no one can write decently without reading widely and well; no one can speak or listen intelligently without the mass of workaday information that comes chiefly through reading. As for acquiring some notions of history, government, hygiene, philosophy, art, religion, love-making, or the operation of a camera, they are all equally and pitifully dependent on reading.
...
Imagine the art of reading lost - and with it writing, study, and verbal recovery - and it is hard to see how civilized man could survive the shocks and anxieties of his state, let alone serve his multitudinous desires.
...
The linguists who affect to scorn all utterance but the spoken word, the teachers' group in the Midwest that has discovered the uselessness of reading and asks that it no longer be taught in the schools, the zealots who sidestep the issue but sell futures in a world where only the voice and the image will have currency - all appear deficient in imagination, the imagination they would need still more under their wayward scheme. In any case, their prophecy of the end of reading leaves me unmoved, for prophecy concerns the future, and to reach any future we must somehow get from here to there, and that will require reading.
...
...Reading and its necessary twin, writing, constitute not merely an ability but a power. I mean by the distinction that reading is not just a device (in jargon "a tool") by which we are reached and reach others for practical ends. It is also a mode of incarnating and shaping thought....

Ibn Sina (980-1037), 11th century self-educator and polymath

From "Abu Ali al-Husayn ibn Sina [Avicenna], The Ideal Muslim Intellectual (eleventh century)," in Gettleman and Schaar, The Middle East and Islamic World Reader. Original source: A.J. Arberry, "Avicenna: His Life and Times" in G.M. Wickens, ed., Avicenna: Scientist and Philosopher (London: Luzac & Company, 1952), pp. 9 and 11-17:

When the Abbasid empire broke into small competing states, brilliant intellectuals such as Abu Ali al-Husayn ibn Sina (980-1037) found many rulers willing to patronize their scholarship. The political instability resulting from the weakening of Abbasid authority did not stifle the tradition of cultural and intellectual exchange among Islamic cities and centers of learning. Born in a village near the Central Asian city of Bukhara, ibn Sina continuously traveled in search of knowledge and work. In the course of his voyages he distinguished himself as one of the most famous physicians, intellectuals, and men of science in the world, and Europeans continued to teach from his celebrated writings on medicine up to the eighteenth century. Not only did he master the many texts of ancient thinkers in Arabic translations, but he also added to knowledge in the fields of law, theology, philosophy, optics, astronomy, medicine, poetry, and philology.

[The following selection is from ibn Sina's autobiography]:

By the time I was ten I had mastered the Koran and a great deal of literature, so that I was marveled at for my aptitude.
...
(My father and my brother would discuss theology) while I listened and comprehended all they said; but my spirit would not assent to their argument...[T]hey began to invite me to join...rolling on their tongues talk about philosophy, geometry, Indian arithmetic; and my father sent me to a certain vegetable seller who used the Indian arithmetic [and algebra], so that I might learn it from him.

Then there came to Bukhara a man called Abu Abd Allah al-Natili who claimed to be a philosopher; my father invited him to stay in our house, hoping that I would learn from him also. Before his advent [arrival] I had already occupied myself with Muslim jurisprudence, attending [studying with] Isma'il the Ascetic; so I was an excellent inquirer, having become familiar with the methods of postulation and the techniques of rebuttal according to the usages of the canon lawyers. ...He marveled at me exceedingly, and warned my father that I should not engage in any other occupation but learning; whatever problem he stated to me, I showed a better mental conception of it than he. So I continued until I had read the straightforward parts of [Aristotle's] Logic with him; as for the subtler points, he had no acquaintance with them.

From then onward I took to reading texts by myself; I studied the commentators until I had...mastered...Logic. Similarly with Euclid['s Elements of Geometry] I read the first five or six figures with him; and thereafter undertook on my own account to solve the entire remainder of the book.

I now occupied myself with mastering the various texts and commentaries on natural sciences and metaphysics, until all the gates of knowledge were open to me. Next I desired to study medicine, and...[proceeded] to read all the books that had been written on this subject. Medicine is not a difficult science, and naturally I excelled in it in a very short time, so that qualified physicians began to read medicine with me.

Interview: Self-educator Hoossam Malek

Interviewer: Ryan McCarl

Featured self-educator: Hoossam (Sam) Malek

Self-educator’s location: Baltimore, Maryland

Date: 4 March 2010

I met Sam Malek three summers ago, when the two of us were summer interns at Lehman Brothers, an investment bank, in Chicago. Sam has one of the most incredible minds I have ever encountered: his worldview is informed by a deep understanding of mathematics and economics as well as an insatiable curiosity and drive for growth, understanding, and academic and professional excellence.

The son of first-generation Syrian immigrants, Sam is proficient in Arabic, English and French. After earning a B.A. in Economics at Princeton, Sam spent a year working with the American Red Cross through AmeriCorps VISTA in West Baltimore City. He then worked for the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, VA for three years while taking advanced courses in mathematics. He enrolled in the full-time M.B.A. program at the Chicago Booth School of Business and graduated towards the top of his class while also earning an M.A. in Near Eastern Studies. He began a career as an emerging markets bond analyst at Lehman Brothers in the turbulent late summer of 2008, and has since moved on to another firm where he focuses on high-yield Middle Eastern bonds.

WAM: On Wide Awake Minds, I promote a vision of education as a lifelong process in which certificates and degrees are important thresholds or signposts, but not signals that we have become "educated" persons with no need of further intellectual growth. You are someone who has gone far beyond the requirements of your profession and continued to pursue new learning opportunities at every stage of your life.

SM: What you are saying about thresholds - that you don't just cross a threshold and then be done - is, I think, very important. Human beings, especially here in the United States, are sometimes encouraged (unfortunately) to see life as a series of doors that you go through for whatever reason. Even that - to stop and think about that and reassess it may be very uncomfortable for some people.

Why learn? Why have a job? We have to put food on the table, we need to exist. We need knowledge to do our work as human beings. God puts you on this planet, and if you're lucky you have health - but education is supposed to take us beyond that and help us thrive in a difficult world. We don’t just get an education to check it off the list, but to survive and thrive.

It's kind of like the saying: "The truth can set you free." Life can be pretty oppressive at times. But education can prepare us for that by giving us foresight, the ability to be proactive, the ability to manage our passions, and the ability to see clearly in spite of whatever is going on around us. We are sentient people, not just rational creatures that see everything clearly - education can help us channel our emotions and not be slaves to them.

For example, you and I both do some of our work remotely, over the Internet, and I sincerely believe that that's the future of a lot of labor markets. This idea of making a living without waking up and going to a physical office building will be very uncomfortable for a lot of people. But there are ways to make the prospect of an uncertain future and new work environments more manageable and exciting; some of these ways include being aware of the world, seeing things, reading things, knowing things - in short, education.

And some people seem to be driven to go beyond the basics of what they need to know. Earlier tonight I was reading a friend's blog - he is in the field of bioengineering, but he really wants to be a philosopher. His post was explaining to his readers what an "axiom" is. Not everyone wants to be that thoughtful about the world around them, but some people need to - for these people, learning itself is a powerful need.

WAM: What you said about your friend's blog is very interesting - do you see anything significant about the fact that he was using the format of a blog? For example, was he "working" as a philosopher or exploring his identity as a philosopher? Was he self-educating by clarifying his thoughts on an issue and distilling these thoughts into a blog post? Was he performing the function of an educator, teaching his readers about a topic important to him?

SM: Absolutely, his use of the blog format is very significant. He has 800 friends on Facebook and seems very Internet-savvy - not only can he test the waters as a philosopher or public intellectual, but he can try to create a market for his ideas and attract a readership for his views. If readers with limited time feel compelled to go to his blog and read his writing, then he may be on to something that he can use to build new opportunities.

One good thing about technology is that it creates these marketplaces of ideas - not just for testing ideas, but for communication. If you feel passionate about something, you can go online and talk about it with others. Passion and sincerity are contagious - people will sense them in your writing and respond. My friend is lucky because the invention of blogs and the Internet gave him the opportunity to experiment and branch out beyond the narrow function of his career.

Reflections on my first three weeks of full-time teaching

I am currently in my third week of full-time preservice teaching, and I have been fully immersed in planning, designing, teaching, and grading three 10th-grade World History and Geography classes (one course or "prep," three classes of 26-34 students). I am having a blast so far - I've never enjoyed any job so much, and the experience has been very challenging, rewarding, and educational. The school day flies by, but for the first two weeks, I found myself putting in ridiculously long hours planning and grading at home. Finally, I am settling in - and today, the school is closed due to a snowstorm (I had forgotten how much anticipation and joy a snow day can create), so I am taking the opportunity to update Wide Awake Minds for the first time in a few weeks. Thank you for sticking with the blog through such periods of silence. (If you haven't done so yet, please consider joining the Wide Awake Minds Facebook page as well).

Curriculum: reading, writing, and ideas

One of my teaching goals this semester has been to push back against what I see as low expectations about the quality and quantity of reading and writing thought to be appropriate for non-honors/non-AP high school social studies classes. I am building a lot of writing into my world history curriculum, including making highly-structured extended essay prompts account for around 1/3 of each unit quiz grade and offering a lot of writing-intensive extra credit opportunities - but I'll save the details on the writing dimension for another post.

Reading tasks in my World History class take several forms. It is crucial, I have learned, to pair practically every resource (reading, video, visual image, audio, etc.) with some sort of assigned task to actively engage students and ensure that they take what you are asking them to do seriously.

First, I give 2-4 page (usually closer to two, and often including visual images with explanatory captions) take-home assigned readings, and I assess whether students have done the reading (and been paying attention in class) two school days later with a somewhat informal, generously-graded short-answer "warm-up" quiz that also offers opportunities for students to earn bonus points if they have been paying attention to current events (on some occasions, they can earn even more bonus points by drawing connections between current events and the World History curriculum).

Second, in the final days of each unit, I distribute 3-page summaries of the textbook chapter covered by the unit; these are created by the textbook company. I pair these chapter summaries with a multi-page, short-answer assignment (due roughly three school days later) I create that focuses on core concepts and is aligned with the shared, district-wide marking period final exam in World History and the Michigan state standards (HSCEs) in World History. I ask students to complete these chapter summary assignments as independent homework in order to study for their unit quizzes, and I ask them to take responsibility for themselves to ensure that they have a solid understanding of the core concepts we have covered; I do not assign the textbook itself, but I regularly suggest that students check a copy out voluntarily or access it online if they would like to deepen their understanding.

Finally, one of my goals as a high school history teacher is to bring a little bit of the intellectual excitement and engagement with the history of ideas that I have experienced into the sometimes boring and sterile world of the standard high school curriculum. I believe that this can be done within the parameters of standards-and-accountability systems such as the Michigan state standards. While not every necessary building-block of knowledge is destined to be experienced by high school students as equally exciting or relevant, none of the core academic content areas, when they are taught passionately and creatively and received by open minds, should be the least bit "boring."

I have experienced the social sciences not just as a student and teacher, but as a reader who has struggled through many challenging and provocative political and historical documents, as someone who has had many spirited discussions about politics and history with intellectually-inclined friends, as an alumnus of the University of Chicago with fond memories of discussing the Great Books in my first-year humanities and social science seminars, and as a former graduate student of international relations who has engaged in intense, high-level seminar discussions and thesis-writing with some of the greatest political thinkers in the country. In short, I have experienced the study of history (and the pursuit of knowledge, the research and writing processes, and the acts of non-fiction reading and writing) as an exciting and high-stakes activity, and I want to give my students some sense of what that experience feels like.

To that end, I am trying to sneak high-quality reading and viewing materials - the Great Books, "good books" on the outskirts of the established canon, and excellent contemporary writing and other media - into my students' hands and minds as often as possible.

In the first week of class, the take-home reading on nationalism I assigned them included excerpts from a recent debate between bloggers Jonah Goldberg (National Review Online) and Ilya Somin (The Volokh Conspiracy).

In another in-class activity, I asked students to write down examples of how they saw nationalism expressed (through flags, rallies, music/anthems, heroes, traditions, rituals, love/hate passed down across generations, "us vs. them" mentality, exclusivist behavior, love of the "homeland," etc.) in a series of YouTube clips that included a Michigan vs. Ohio State pre-game "hype video," a clip from a British documentary about Margaret Thatcher and the Falklands War, a clip about Slobodan Milosevic and the Bosnian War, a news story about recent controversies surrounding the issue of nationalism in Japanese schools, a CBS feature story about ultranationalism in contemporary Russia, and a patriotic American slideshow set to the music of Lee Greenwood's post-9/11 anthem "God Bless the USA."

Last week, I had my students read and answer a four-page questionnaire about excerpts from Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations and Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels' The Communist Manifesto - the central ideological documents of capitalism and communism, respectively. I assigned the students into groups (I randomized this process rather than allowing students to choose in order to ensure (1) that the class activity would be the primary thing bonding each group together and (2) that the most advanced readers would be distributed around the room rather than clustered together in a single group), and each group chose to either read the readings aloud or individually and then worked together to proceed through the questions and discuss possible responses.

We are currently wrapping up our unit on the Industrial Revolution. Then, we will move on to study the late 19th-century social reforms aimed at ending the slave trade, banning child labor, promoting women's rights, and creating free, universal public education. In every case, instructional time is very limited, but I hope to be able to bring in excerpts from some of the most important documents that fueled each debate. I want to find new ways to promote student understanding of these documents (even among my struggling readers) through creative scaffolding, and I want to steer students toward high-level, idea-conscious historical thinking.

Trying new things and seeing what works

This semester is a time for experimenting with different instructional methods, and I am thoroughly enjoying the process of trying new things and seeing what works and what does not. I plan to share some of the success stories on this blog and post some of my course materials on my website for those who are interested. Many of the ideas I generated before I began full-time teaching did not pan out for one reason or another, but some ideas have seemed to work - and the act of teaching and reflecting on teaching has helped me generate many new ideas every day.

The art of memorization

Memorization gets a bad rap in education circles, but it remains a fact of life for students and adults in many settings: anatomy and other subjects in pre-medical or medical school; "black-letter" legal rules and terminology in law school; dates and locations in undergraduate history survey courses; the names and dates of artworks in art history courses; and vocabulary and grammatical structures in the study of world languages.

In the professional world, there is an acute need to remember names and faces: all of your networking will come to naught if you can't remember anyone's name. And if you are a K-12 teacher, you are expected to learn something like 150 new names within the first week or two of each school year.

It is helpful to approach memorization tasks as challenges requiring a clever solution rather than as pure drudgery.

As a new preservice teacher, I have worked hard to memorize every student's name in my first few encounters with my mentor teacher's classes. The kids noticed my effort, and several complimented me on it - I am convinced that it has helped me build their trust and allowed me to project an image of competence despite my lack of experience. I used several tricks: immediately addressing each student by name, using the seating chart as a crutch when necessary; memorizing names in pairs or rows according to where students sit; repeating the names as often as possible; and frequently testing myself, never allowing myself to glance past students I don't know or get away with not knowing a student's name.

I am also currently taking a survey course in early American history to fulfill a certification requirement. I will be tested later today on my knowledge of the first sixteen Presidents and their years of service:

George Washington (1789-1797); John Adams (1797-1801); Thomas Jefferson (1801-1809); James Madison (1809-1817); James Monroe (1817-1825); John Quincy Adams (1825-1829); Andrew Jackson (1829-1837); Martin Van Buren (1837-1841); William H. Harrison (1841); John Tyler (1841-1845); James K. Polk (1845-1849); Zachary Taylor (1849-1850); Millard Fillmore (1850-1853); Franklin Pierce (1853-1857); James Buchanan (1857-1861); Abraham Lincoln (1861-1865).

One's first instinct when looking at a list like this is to despair - or to fall back on that favorite excuse of students everywhere, demanding to know why one needs to learn this. I saw the list and immediately envisioned myself writing the names and dates over and over again, making flash cards, and in general wasting my time on a very frustrating activity.

But then I thought it through again and devised a strategy that enabled me to memorize the list in less than two hours:

1. Break up the task. I find it especially helpful to break it up "vertically" rather than "horizontally" - rather than memorize three Presidents at a time, memorize all of the Presidents' last names and first initials in order before even looking at the dates.

2. Memorize the last names in pairs and chunks: I had trouble with the second half of this list, so I first solidified my understanding of the first half, then remembered "Tyler-Polk-Taylor" before moving on to "Fillmore-Pierce-Buchanan-Lincoln." I then wrote the list - last names only - out from memory a few times, then waited a day and did it again. The first names are easy and can be picked up gradually as you move through the activity.

3. Having the last names and first initials down pat, I looked at the dreaded dates for the first time. Before banging my head against these, I paused to notice a few things:

-The range of dates is 1789 (NOT 1776), President Washington's inauguration, to 1865, the assassination of President Lincoln.

-Because of the safeguards for Presidential succession built into the Constitution, there has never, ever been a time in the history of the United States since 1789 that we have not had a President. Therefore, you only need to memorize the first date of every pair. The second date of each pair - i.e., the last year of each presidency - is identical to the first year of the next presidency.

-A single presidential term lasts four years; two complete terms last eight years. Are there any Presidents in the list who served less than a single term? There are only three: Harrison (1841), Taylor (1849-1850), and Fillmore (1850-1853). I memorized the length of each of these three short presidencies first.

-Only five of the 16 Presidents on this list served two full terms, so I memorized these five: Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and Jackson.

And that is all the information you need to memorize to complete the list! The list begins with Washington in 1789 - he served two terms, so you add eight years to get (1789-1797) - and so on.

It's a lot more fun and sensible than flash cards.

Benjamin Franklin: America's greatest self-educator

The following excerpts are from Carl Van Doren's "Meet Dr. Franklin," in Van Deusen, ed., Readings in American History:

Franklin had, I think, the most eminent mind that has ever existed in America. No wonder there are so many legendary misconceptions of him that it is difficult now to restore and comprehend him in the great integrity of his mind, character, and personality. He appears, somehow, to be a syndicate of men. We study him as a scientist, as a diplomat, as a statesman, as a business man, as an economist, as a printer, as a humorist and wit, as a great writer, as a sage, and as a great landmark in the history of human speech about the common ways of life.
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Franklin's eminence was in his almost supreme mind that moved to its countless tasks with what seems perfect ease.
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The experiment which Franklin proposed, to prove whether electricity and lightning were identical, and his own separate demonstration with the kite, must be ranked with the most fundamental as well as the most striking experiments in scientific history. The story of the kit is now so old and so familiar that it has come to seem a pleasant legend.... Franklin, drawing the lightning from the skies, removed it from the dread region of mythology. Kant was not speaking for picturesque effect when he said Franklin was a new Prometheus who had stolen fire from heaven. The expression meant, literally, that Franklin had made men equals of the gods and therefore free of an ancient slavish dread. Nobody in 1752 felt that the kite story was a quaint little incident.
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Though from 1773 to 1783 Franklin was so much absorbed in politics he had little time for general ideas, he had hardly signed the final treaty of peace with England when his mind was alert with bold conjectures again. Having seen the first ascent of human passengers in a free balloon, in Paris in November 1783, Franklin at once - and apparently alone among his contemporaries - foresaw the possibility of aerial warfare. This discovery, he wrote in December, might "give a new turn to human affairs."
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Though Franklin was an excellent and successful business man, he retired from active business at forty-two and spent forty-two years more in the service of the public. He might have made a fortune if he had patented his stove or his lightning-rod. He refused to patent anything which he thought might be of benefit to mankind. As he did not hungrily gather wealth, so he did not cautiously guard his comfort or safety. It must never be forgotten that in his seventieth year Franklin might with decency have done what his more conservative son advised him to do: that is, retire from active affairs and let younger men settle the conflict between England and America. Instead Franklin, at the risk of peace and even of his neck, took his stand with the revolutionaries. Life with him began all over again at seventy. The older the bolder.

Carl Van Doren
--"Meet Dr. Franklin" in Van Deusen, ed., Readings in American History

Interview: University of Chicago Professor Charles Lipson

Interviewer: Ryan McCarl
Featured self-educator: Charles Lipson
Self-educator's hometown: Chicago, IL

Date: 26 August 2009

(Editor’s note: This is the third in a series of interviews Wide Awake Minds will be conducting with educators and self-educators. If you enjoy these interviews or other material on this blog, please consider linking to us, mentioning us on Facebook and Twitter, and emailing and sharing our articles. If you would like to share your story as an educator or self-educator, please contact me. Thanks for reading!)

Charles Lipson is the Peter B. Ritzma Professor in Political Science and the College at the University of Chicago. He chairs the university’s major in political science and directs a graduate program called PIPES, the Program on International Politics, Economics, and Security. Besides publishing extensively in political science, he has written several books to help students study more effectively.

WAM: What is the source of your interest in political science and international relations?

CL: I’ve been interested for a long time in the intersection of three areas: politics, economics, and history. I can remember these being my interests even when I was in the sixth or seventh grade. I lived in rural Mississippi, but I subscribed to The New Republic and lots of other magazines, not just newsweeklies but other interesting magazines as well, and I developed those interests for a long time.

I happened to grow up during an interesting period. I am a baby boomer, and I was in high school in the midst of the Civil Rights struggle and in college during the Vietnam War and the cultural revolutions of the late 1960s. All of these issues led to my ever-deeper interest in politics.

As an undergraduate, I majored in both political science and economics and then went on to graduate school in political science. Originally, I thought I would study American politics. But I kept an open mind and the most interesting questions at the time seemed to be in international politics. So I went in that direction, and I’m very happy I did.

WAM: Do you consider yourself a self-educator, a lifelong learner?

CL: Yes, absolutely. I view myself as a lifelong learner, and I think most professors do. After all, we never really left school! We think of learning and teaching as being a kind of seamless web. Also, I really enjoy learning about new fields. Almost every summer, for example, I tackle a new area that I haven’t really read a lot about, one that might not necessarily have anything to do with my primary field.

One year I read a lot of 19th-century fiction, and another I spent a lot of time reading about new developments in evolutionary biology. I continually read about the Western historical tradition. But until a few years ago, I hadn’t read so much about Ancient Greece and Rome. Now I’ve read a lot about the classical Mediterranean world.

For these projects, I simply find a subject that pricks my interest and start reading. I’ll stumble on something that interests me and follow the trail as one book or article leads to another. These days, I supplement my reading with podcasts or courses on CDs. As I explore a topic, I will often find a podcast for an introductory course and “take the course” through the podcasts.

WAM: Do you use blogs or other online resources in addition to podcasts?

CL: Sure, and I find them invaluable. The Web is a great resource. I’ll often look at course syllabi from around the world and see what books they assign in areas that interest me. I also look at blogs in whatever field I am exploring and at blogs like yours that identify resources.

A blog like Wide Awake Minds helps me in two ways. First, it identifies sources of learning in fields that interest me. Second, it discriminates among those sources, telling me which ones are best and why. When I’m looking for podcasts, for instance, I always read the analysis at Anne is a Man, which specializes in reviewing educational podcasts.

We are still at the early stages of a convergence of new media that allow people to acquire knowledge in new and different ways. Although I grew up in the age of print, I am now able to take advantage of countless electronic resources such as JSTOR, a database of academic articles, which I can access through the University library.

WAM: You devote a portion of your personal website to links and information about education, and you have written several books on higher education. What is the source of your interest in the subject?

CL: I think of myself as a teacher with an overarching goal of helping students learn. Of course, I spend a lot of time and effort studying my own subject (international politics and history), but my teaching interests range well beyond that. Some of the things I like to work with students about are not specific to my field. They are about how to study with real integrity or how to write a senior thesis. I have written books on both those topics. (Doing Honest Work in College and How to Write a BA Thesis, both from the University of Chicago Press). Many students I work with come from around the world, from China or India or Turkey or Mexico, so I wanted to write a book that addresses the specific challenges they face in studying here. I looked around and there weren’t any other books on that, and I felt I had something to say about it, so I wrote Succeeding as an International Student in the United States and Canada.

Besides teaching and writing on more specialized topics, I enjoy teaching courses on big ideas to incoming freshmen. In the morning, I might teach a course like that and, in the afternoon, teach a seminar on international politics to students at the M.A. and Ph.D. level. Ranging across these different levels is a lot of fun. It’s more interesting, at least for me, than teaching only one kind of course to one kind of student. Fortunately, I’m at a university that encourages this range of teaching and research.

WAM: Is there anything special about teaching at the University of Chicago?

CL: I think there is. One of the things I love about the University of Chicago is actually one of the things I love about your website, Wide Awake Minds. What really makes our undergraduates special is that so many of them actually love learning for its own sake. That’s what your website is all about, too.

There is certainly nothing wrong with learning something because you want to get something concrete out of it – say, studying organic chemistry because you want to be a doctor. But our university seems to have more students who love chemistry, even if they ultimately want to be a doctor, not a research chemist. Even in my own field, students might be going to law school or public policy school, but they often seem to love the ideas themselves. When I talk to professors at other selective schools, we tend to agree that our students are equally smart and hard-working, but we notice other kinds of differences. The rare thing about University of Chicago students is that they really seem to love learning for its own sake. What more could a teacher ask?

That brings me to another point - the value of self-education after you finish formal classes. I was an undergraduate at Yale, which was and still is a very fine undergraduate school, with smart, wide-ranging students. But one thing I noticed was that after graduation many of them become very focused on their own subjects – if they studied the blood system or investment banking, that’s all they thought about. They seemed to discard so many of the broad interests they once had.

By contrast, I had several other friends who went to what I would call mid-range state universities – not the top state schools like Berkeley or Michigan or Texas, but more mid-range state colleges – and some of them underwent pre-professional training to become nurses or businessmen, things like that. But after graduation, some of them persisted in educating themselves well beyond their jobs. They always had a novel on their bedside table or went to concerts, movies, and plays that were challenging. Watching them continue to learn helped me overcome some of the snobbery that comes attached to a fancy degree.

When you’re 21 and you graduate college, you’re only 3 innings into a 9-inning ball game. Maybe you think you’re done, but you won’t be able to bring a mature, adult worldview to your work unless you keep on learning. Who can really appreciate the depth and anguish of King Lear at age 19? It’s a play about old age - its fatal traps and personal betrayals.

So many of the goals of a liberal arts education ought not to be cast aside because we’ve entered a world of being a doctor or lawyer or because we have less time and more obligations to family and work. The value of reading War and Peace or The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is just as great when you are 30, 50, or 70 as it is when you are 17. The greatest books always reward repeated readings.

WAM: Do you see self-education as a form of self-help?

CL: We have too narrow a view of “self-help.” We think it’s a small section of the bookstore that deals with losing weight or improving your relationships. In fact, almost the whole bookstore is a self-help section. If you walk into the classic fiction aisle and pick up something by Stendhal or Balzac or into the biography aisle and pick up something by McCulloch, you are helping yourself. Such books amply repay the effort it takes to read them.

Thank you, Professor Lipson, for your time and for the good work you do.

Please take a moment to visit Professor Lipson’s website and check out his books at Amazon.com. If you enjoyed this interview, consider posting it to your Facebook wall or emailing it to a friend.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

Some books are an education in themselves

I was struck again today by the realization that some books are so good and so chock-full of ideas that reading them can be an education in itself. Two books I am currently reading meet that standard: Charles Taylor's A Secular Age (philosophy, religious studies, history of ideas) and Erich Auerbach's Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (literary criticism, religion, history of ideas).

Neither of these books are easy reads. I intended to read both during my August vacation, but it looks like it could take me as much as six months to finish them, since I can only read about ten pages of each at a time before I have to turn to something else. But when you read for self-educational purposes, it is important to sometimes choose books that are slightly above your comfort level in terms of their difficulty. Even the most advanced readers can easily find books that are "above their heads" - books written in distant places and times, books written in difficult English or in another language, books in a field that you have little background in. If you choose such books wisely and then rise to the challenge and struggle through them, you can have an immensely rewarding and educative experience.

On page after page of Taylor's book, for example, the reader is bombarded with references to ideas, religious practices, sects, and thinkers familiar and obscure. The trick as a reader is to remember to be curious about these allusions: don't be so concerned with making your way through the book that you forget to ask, for example, who Gregory of Nyssa was, what beliefs characterized the school of Arminianism, or what the word neuralgic means. (And that's where a quick Google search can come in handy).

I recently posted excerpts from both books on my general-interest blog if you are interested in a sample.

Other books which have struck me as providing an "education in themselves" in the hands of advanced, curious, self-educating readers and with the assistance of good secondary literature or teachers include:

-Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (history, international relations theory, psychology, narrative, military strategy, literature, etc.)
-The Bible (Biblical Hebrew, Koine Greek, literature, poetry, narrative, history, religious studies, mythology)
-Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (religion, psychology, literature)
-The plays of William Shakespeare (psychology, history, religion, drama, language, literature)

...and many anthologies, including:

-William Theodore de Bary, Sources of Chinese (also Japanese and Korean) Tradition (literature, history, art)
-The Norton Anthology of Poetry and The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry

I'd like to hear your ideas about books that fit this description, and why you feel they do - please share in the comment section if you are interested.