Christmas Cookies

What kind of cookies does Santa like?  I mean, this is not the time to aggravate the big guy, and by the reputed looks of him, he knows his cookies.  He must get tired of the same old cookies, but putting something novel on the plate is risky.  We put out some homemade gingerbread cookies this year.  He seemed to like them, but I don't think he was thrilled with those hard little ball decorations, which are like tiny jawbreakers.  But at least it was better than the same old sugar, chocolate chip, and the rest that he sees millions of times.  And I think it is good form to leave a couple of carrots out for the reindeer.

But what I really want to know is who decided that oatmeal and raisins go well  together?  Raisins are just rotten grapes, and they certainly don't belong in cookies.  Sometimes its nice to have a cookie that's not quite so sweet, and oatmeal can be OK, but raisins just spoil them.  I bet Santa would like a nice oatmeal cookie without the raisins.

I really like some homemade Christmas cookies, particularly the almond spritz cookies that my mom used to make and took my wife 15 years to approach near-mom quality.  She makes a few batches just before Christmas, perhaps a gross or so, but those last about a day (I really like those cookies).  Then I have to go through withdrawal and wait another year.  Why are Christmas cookies made only at Christmas?  Can't the same recipe be used to make these cookies at other times of the year?  We're not talking about vomitous eggnog or toxic fruitcake here. Those cookies would go great with a lot of holidays.  In fact, many all holidays need cookies.  It's just not right to restrict these tasty delights to Christmas.  As Jacqueline Suzanne said, "Once is not enough."

Why do the prettiest people do the ugliest things?

The answer, as with so many things, may be because they can.  But that is too facile.  Conventional wisdom says that pretty people are treated better than others.  I don't think there's much question about that.  But rather than focusing on why that is, and I'm sure there's been a lot of studies on that, I wonder whether very attractive people, and by that I mean pretty, powerful, famous, and whatever is attractive, do unattractive things at a higher frequency than the rest of us.  Superstars obviously play by different rules than we do, but does that make them worse people?

What prompts this is the recent disclosures regarding Tiger Woods.  You can bet that when a cheater gets caught, it is not his first time cheating.  And it is not as though he had Hilary Clinton for a wife, which would allow some mitigating circumstance.  No, it is not so unusual that Tiger was an adulterer; so many are.  But beyond the salacious details of his "indiscretions," (as Rick Pitino says), was the extraordinary juggling of over a dozen women simultaneously. I'd like to think that I've never cheated on my wife because I choose not to, though the painful truth may be that no one else would have me.  Yet I'm quite confident that if I was a cheatin' weasel that there's no way I could attract and handle that many women.  Sure, Tiger is young and handsome, but what possesses so many women to be involved with this married man?  Yes, I know that many women like the bad boys, the powerful, and the hunks.  But isn't the explanation just so much simpler?  The guy probably makes $100 million a year.

Class envy?  I think not; there's no class to envy here.

A side note on distance learning

Some months ago after my first harangue against distance learning I got a call from a fellow from a fitness magazine who wanted an interview.  Even more surprising than the notion that anyone ever reads these narcissistic, self-indulgent blogs (though that's redundant, as aren't all blogs, really?) was the spin he had for his article.  He was interested in the tie between fitness and distance learning.

I hadn't really thought about it before.  Of course we are becoming more sedentary; can you imagine our ancestors' reactions to people paying money to go exercise?  And everyone knows how overweight we Americans are. (The U.S. Government's Center for Disease and Prevention reports that the percentage of noninstitutionalized adults age 20 years and over who are overweight or obese is 67% [2005-2006]! I've also read that the fraction of overweight and obese children is over a third!)  But is there a connection between distance learning and fitness?

I don't know if it's a strong connection, as the physical exertion needed to get to class seems pretty minor, but perhaps distance learning is just one more symptom of a lifestyle now manifested by our inactive, unfit society.

Virtual learning

I have written before about my concerns about distance learning.  One of those objections is the belief that college represents an evolution not just of mind but of spirit.  When I talk to people about their memories of college, the conversation is almost invariably about college life, not college courses.  College is sort of a "halfway house" between childhood and adulthood, where people find out who they are and who they want to be.  It is the formation of mind and the evolution of character, "knowledge" in a far greater sense than book larnin'.  For those who claim they don't need the "college experience," then just buy a book.  If you're motivated to learn, you'll learn from a book, a classroom, an experience, or distance learning. I suppose that there are some interested in learning and are attracted to the structure and dynamics of distance learning, but for most, it is not so much about learning as a short-cut to the credits and degree, with more convenience and less rigor the carrots.  And colleges increasingly are anxious to sell the academic indulgences (in the 16th century Catholic sense).

I am well aware that test scores for distance learning vs. traditional classrooms are not significantly different, which doesn't surprise me in the least since most tests only evaluate content or sterile skill-sets, which really can be communicated by just texts and manuals (or similar "show me" mechanisms).  In fact, I'd think that distance learning would be more effective in delivering content than a classroom in that there is a record of that content, so that the content may be accessed repeatedly and at one's own pace.  So now we have what amounts books and directions for study being delivered electronically.  Nothing wrong with that, and for those content-laden courses, and to a large extent the skill-set transfer courses, distance learning is fine, especially in augmenting traditional classroom experiences.  But just as the college experience is lost in distance learning, so too is the classroom experience.  It is that real-time thinking, the give and take, the argumentation, the unplanned and spontaneous, the group dynamics and synergies, the learning experience that is very difficult to capture in cyberspace and is another source of my concerns.  However, I think that some distance learning instructors are trying hard not to lose too much of the learning experience, and strongly suspect that technology will further enable this effort in the future.  In fact, I think that we are at the point where virtual learning can and will become commonplace.  It seems odd to me that virtual classrooms are not more sophisticated.  We have so many virtual worlds online now, and I'm confident that education will be part of the virtual world to a far greater extent.

And now we've arrived at my purpose in this entry.  In the last blog I wrote that our children are becoming avatars, parts of virtual worlds of play at very young ages, and lamented the ironic reduced development and atrophication of real world social skills and experiences.  We will very soon see, if we haven't already, these living avatars enter college.  I have a visceral objection to continuing the inculcation of our children into the world of The Matrix, where the unreal is the real. Socially, we already have to plan "play dates" for our kids to see other children, struggle to determine how much time on the addictive virtual world and electronic games is appropriate, limit social experiences out of fear of all the bad people out there (Jerry Springer isn't just a TV show anymore, it's the world outside our doors), and now we have to consider virtual education too?  How far away are we from strapping electrodes to our heads to go to work, go to school,  play, have sex, and essentially live most of lives in a world of seamless connection between brain and machine?  While that specter may be the extreme, the notion that social development is being eroded by virtual and electronic worlds and will only get worse with virtual education is not the fear of a technophobe or Luddite, but the fear of a parent and educator.