How I Learn Stuff

Time. That’s what.

As a consultant, I’m frequently unemployed.  It’s the nature of my business. I sell bits and pieces of my time for good money, then use the time I don’t sell to get better ideas. Today I’m going to learn how to use a cool tool I just found called Processing. I want to use it to create some visualizations of learning processes.

I remember the dot com bust, in 2001. I had a stretch of almost six weeks without work. Yes, I was worried and depressed, but I also decided it would be fun to learn about network security– something very easy to learn online. I downloaded and played with security tools and read tutorials on how network protocols work. That knowledge allowed me to get several projects, later on, including two gigs doing security testing, and one stint as an expert witness on a networking-related court case.

If you are out of work, then start learning like your future depends on it.

I hated school. I’m so glad I quit. I wish I had left even earlier. But, sure, there were a few good things that happened during my school career, too.

I want to tell you about one of the three most important teachers I ever had. Her name was Alice Mossey. At NCCS high school in Champlain, NY, she managed the study hall (really just a glorified bouncer, as far as I could tell), ran the school play, and served as a substitute at times. I think that’s all. She never actually taught a class I was in.

I didn’t think much of Mrs. Mossey at first. Like a lot of high school staffers, she seemed grumpy as a bosun, most of the time. Comes from years of herding wild kids from place to place, I guess. I personally had no run-ins with her, because I liked study hall. It was an opportunity to sit quietly and work on my Dungeons and Dragons world, or design some new bit of software. I doubt Mrs. Mossey thought much of me, either, until she read a letter to the editor I wrote to the local paper…

(Press Republican, Plattburgh NY, Oct 9 1981)

Reading this today, I’m not happy with the tone of my rhetoric or the quality of my argument. What lay behind the letter is a simple idea: liberation. I wanted to be free. I wanted everyone to be free. But mostly me. (Actually, at the time I was more free than most. I lived alone in a motel room in North Hero, Vermont.)

When Mrs. Mossey read this letter, she seemed to see past its anger. When next she spoke to me, at study hall, she used a different voice. Softer and more respectful than I had heard before. She spoke to me as one adult to another. Mrs. Mossey had a favor to ask.

She wanted me to do the sound for the school play.

The Day I Became an Adult

There must have been many transformative moments in my childhood education. The one I remember most is this final one.

When Mrs. Mossey asked me to do the sound, it was a challenge, because the sounds were all out of order on the reel-to-reel tape. There were no instructions about which sounds were to be played when. There were no instructions at all.

I remember being stuck for a moment. I almost gave up. Then a new part of my mind woke up and took over: the pathfinder. The idea came to me that I should get a script and mark every place that needed a sound. Then I would create an index of the sounds on the tape and make a plan for winding and rewinding the tape. Finally, I would find out what cues would let me know when to play each sound.

Now, this sounds simple to you, I’m sure. If you are an adult, too, you’re thinking “that’s bloody obvious.” But at the time I felt infused with wonder and confidence. I had made a PLAN from NOTHING. I created order from chaos, on purpose. On demand. I did it and knew that I had done it. Later when I became a professional consultant (someone who drops into murky situations and makes sense of them for money) I would have that same experience, and I would connect to that memory of organizing the sound for the school play at NCCS in 1981.

It was my intellectual baptism.

What Mrs. Mossey did was so simple! Such a small part of her career! I probably spent less than 30 minutes in direct interaction with her, my entire time at NCCS. What makes her special is that those few interactions were like precious water to a boy dying of thirst. She offered respect.

Did Alice Mossey look into my soul and know how to talk to me and what challenge I needed at that exact moment in my life? I don’t know. Maybe it was an accident. Still, I feel that I’m in her debt. There are a few teachers I wish I could go back and thank. I found Mrs. Mossey. My eighth grade English teacher, Kaye Creveling, unfortunately died before I thought to go back and thank her. The few other teachers I want to thank I have not been able to find. (Where are you Mr. Bedrin of Fayston Elementary, 1977? Mr. Izor of Harwood Union High, 1978? Mr. McManus and Mr. Callisti of NCCS, 1981?)

The year 1990 was meaningful to me for two reasons. It was one decade to go before 2000, and it was the year my first marriage broke up. It seemed a good time to reinvent myself, so I began to take my education seriously.

There’s a silly part of me that wants to be the master of the universe. Another part of me wants to be wise and helpful. These two aspects of my soul came together and began rushing about, reading and exploring. They sought the Great Secrets that would unlock the treasures of life.

I studied history, philosophy, and epistemology. Well… I sort of studied… For the most part, I dabbled. But, I dabbled obsessively. Though I acquired many books, I read few of them in any depth. One of those that I did read was Operating Manual to Spaceship Earth, by Buckminster Fuller.

Fuller is the kind of thinker that inspires me: mysterious, encyclopedic, visionary, completely unconventional. In chapter 2, he offered a very strange view of history. Basically, he said that pirates (specifically those whom he called Great Pirates) ruled the world for many years. He claimed they could do so partly because they were generalists. Fuller offered no evidence for the particulars of his theory, but that’s no matter. What thrilled me was the metaphor: pirates as thinkers. How does the mobility, diversity, and technical mastery of sea travel relate to how we might educate ourselves and think about life?

That’s when I coined the term “buccaneer-scholar.” I decided that I wanted to be one. Looking back, I realized I had always been one. I could never sit quietly in a classroom and simply accept what I was told.

I have resurrected the idea of buccaneering for the modern era. It once referred to men who sailed about the Spanish Main, attacking mainly Spanish ships, and hijacking treasure. The buccaneers were independent-minded people. They were fortune hunters who lived by their wits. Yet they were capable of organizing, too. They established a culture for themselves.

Buccaneering could exist back then because, in the 17th century, there was a power vacuum in the Caribbean. Today there is also a sort of vacuum. But it’s an idea vacuum, not one of physical force. Major corporations no longer control the expression of ideas. Anyone with ideas may prosper. The Internet has made this so. And since no corporation or business will offer much job security, anymore, it’s becoming increasingly attractive for eager minds to live and learn independently.

I thrive in a rough habitat. I am self-employed and self-educated. I have been a consulting software tester for many years, and that’s fine. But now I’d like to expand my horizons and start talking about thinking, learning, and explore the true nature of education in the modern world.

A buccaneer-scholar is anyone whose love of learning is not muzzled, yoked or shackled by any institution or authority; whose mind is driven to wander and find its own voice and place in the world.

This way of being has sometimes been called autodidact, individualist, anarchist, non-conformist, contrarian, bohemian, skeptic, hacker, hippie, slacker, seeker, philosoph, or free thinker. None of those terms quite fit for me.

In this blog I will be exploring and exemplifying what it means to be an intellectual buccaneer. I hope to meet other buccaneers along the way.

Welcome aboard.