The lying sky

6.00 AM a couple of days ago. I've been lying awake for an hour. I get up, toddle downstairs and glance out of the patio doors. In Glasgow at this time of year the Sun rises about 8.45 so it's still dark. I step outside to a clear, starry sky. It's cold but beautiful. Just west of the meridian the stars of Leo have begun their slide to the horizon. To its east Arcturus glares down balefully. Further round towards the north-west are stars of winter: Castor and Pollux, Procyon, Capella. Sometimes in our suburban skies you can spot the star cluster Praesepe, highlight of dull wee Cancer but this morning there's slightly too much glow in the sky.

This photo was taken on late on a February evening in 2014. The constellation Leo is to the left, Gemini to the right. Jupiter lies in Gemini on this date, the brilliant starlike object at the far right. You can spot the little smudge of Praesepe in between these two brilliant constellations. None of its stars is bright enough to spot easily with the naked eye but there are enough of them that the whole thing is visible as a "smudge". Equally evident, less charming is the general red glow of light pollution all through the sky.

Feeling cold I go inside and make a cup of tea. I pad about a little then step outside again, still nursing my tea. A few steps further away from the house I can turn round, spot the Plough overhead, Lyra and Cygnus round to the north. It's still dark and splendid but there's now a hint of morning glow to the south-east. I'm suddenly sad that the sky will soon lighten and this panorama will disappear.

In the night sky we're brought face to face with our immense, ancient universe. Each star is a Sun like ours, some of them enormous by comparison, all so distant that they're reduced to mere twinkling points of light. If the Universe were infinite and stars stretched to infinity the night sky would be filled with light. Instead we see individual stars with dark spaces in between. So the darkness of the night sky points our thinking to a universe that has not existed forever, that began at a finite time in the past. Each of us, a once-only project, only makes sense in the context of this once-only Universe. Under the night sky we think more deeply about our fundamental nature.

But then the Sun comes up. Its light floods the daytime sky, the stars are hidden and we see only our immediate surroundings. Our thoughts are directed away from our cosmic context and the essentials of our physical nature to the immediate: people we despise or desire, jobs, booze, sport, politics. Clothes and furniture. The daytime sky is a bright, cheery liar.

The Journey

Locked down Britain is clasping Strictly Come Dancing to its bosom as never before. We need glamour, glitz, dancing, celebrities in this desperate state, economy and life expectancy both quailing under the shadow of COVID-19. And the journey, always the journey.

Consensus is that Maisie is clearly the best dancer. Already she's had very high marks, barely below eight in the first three weeks. But she won't win; no journey (I rely on the Guardian Strictly liveblog for this sort of insight; maybe better than actually watching). Ranvir Singh, on the other hand, has no background in dance but she works hard, has previously unrecognised talent, improves from week to week, with the odd setback now and again. She's on a journey, growing and discovering a new side of herself. We love the journey - but why?

Do we watch those celebrities with barely concealed envy? We'd like to be on that journey ourselves, becoming something new; blossoming; adding a further string to our bow. So often it seems that we're supposed to be finished articles after school or university. The educational factory has done its job, we've had twelve or sixteen or whatever years to benefit and that's it: completed, abilities and attributes in place, now find your niche and stay there. We love to see somebody throwing off those constraints, becoming something new and unexpected.

In reality change is a core ingredient of our natures. " The self is a style of being, continually expanding in a vital process of definition, affirmation, revision, and growth..." If our lives, our societies were arranged to suit this style of being, would we be less enamoured of the journey? All of us would be more aware, more of the time, of each of our own, unique, individual journeys and we'd feel less need to get carried away in a little pantomime of change featuring a celebrity. Strictly's viewing figures might suffer but this would surely be a price worth paying for a society more in harmony with the basic nature of its constituent citizens.

Difficult terrain

Even the dourest may act in a spirit of optimism. The ridge in front of us looks pinnacled, exposed. We take it in for a few minutes, put the scary comments from the guidebooks to the back of our minds and press on going, "We'll be fine!" Eventually we find ourselves somewhere challenging. The climbing moves are tricky, on small holds, in exposed situations where it's difficult to move freely. For a while we are uncomfortable, unsettled by exposure, feeling at or beyond the limits of our competence. Difficult terrain. But we press on, feeling tested and a bit scared and nothing terrible happens.

I've been reading about Michael Scot. I was intrigued by this Scotsman who made his way to Continental Europe and became one of the leading intellectuals of the 13th century, court astrologer to the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II. Through translations from Arabic and Hebrew texts he was important in re-introducing the works of Aristotle to Europe, and promoting the commentaries on them that came from the Arab world. From our modern perspective this may have been his most important role in the history of ideas. Scottish border country legend remembers him as a wizard and he features in works of Walter Scott and James Hogg, in particular using malign magic to split the Eildon Hills in three.

We know some of what Michael Scot did from his books but the man himself remains mysterious. He was born, probably, about 1175 and died around 1235. He clearly thought of himself as Scottish and he probably was. There is a stone in his memory in Melrose Abbey but he is probably not buried there. He is embedded so firmly in folklore that one feels he must have returned to Scotland but there is no real record of this and he may equally well have died in Italy, where he also features in popular tales of wizardry. He first pops up unambiguously in 1217, among the community of scholars in Toledo who were translating works from ancient Greece and the Arab world into Latin. We can only speculate about precisely where he was educated, what journeys he'd been on before this point.

I thought Michael Scot might be useful in talking with Scottish people about astronomy. Rooted in place and people, stories from history are a great way to lead in to scientific ideas. With grown-up humans I think we should be discussing scientific ideas in their cultural context. In this case we're talking so long ago that astronomical knowledge was not yet detached from the worldview of astrology but that's OK; perhaps we could use him to discuss the emergence of scientific ideas, what makes an idea "scientific", mathematics in science... So I've been delving into Michael Scot history, in particular reading a book called just Michael Scot, written in 1965 by Lynn Thorndike.

Looks great, doesn't it? I got it second-hand from a bookshop specialising in occult topics!

Professor Thorndike's book is scholarly, detailed and academic. The chapter on "early life" for instance avoids unfounded speculation and looks for hints in Scot's own writings, e.g. an instructional anecdote about an impoverished young man whose education was being paid for by a supportive uncle: was this autobiographical? Translations from the original Latin are used to discuss his beliefs under several headings: "The Universe", Meteorology, Medicine, Sociology, Physiology and Physiognomy, etc. Reading these chapters as a scientist in the 21st century I feel I'm tackling the pinnacly bit of the ridge, or maybe negotiating the boggy peat hags: difficult territory. I knew I was meeting somebody from a time very long ago when people thought very differently but this detailed discussion, very close to primary sources, really rubs your nose in how differently. Astronomy is just part of the practical knowledge underlying astrology, which in turn is a central ingredient of a theological view of the universe and the people within it. Matters now regarded as belonging to different domains of science are all jumbled up together. The moral, theological and natural worlds are conjoined. There are large doses of numerology.

Some fairly random examples: under "Universe" we read

In the Paris manuscript such celestial virtues are compared not to columns supporting edifices reared by the exercise of mechanical art, but to suspending cables and the action of the magnet. It is further stated that the four cardinal winds are said by the sages of the world to be four such virtues.

and

Michael believed further that demons could not endure the sound of harmony and fled from music, whether vocal or instrumental, or from the songs of birds. He thought that the ninth sphere [of the Aristotelian universe] was silent as well as starless, but that the eighth sphere of the fixed stars revolved melodiously 'with smoothest sound and sweetest voice', because outside itself it had an essence (i.e. the ninth sphere) by which this sound was reflected.

and

Besides the twelve feathers in a bird's tail and twelve signs of the zodiac, there are twelve prerequisites for any art: what it is, of what material, genus, parts, what workers, what the office of the art and of its masters, what its purpose, utility, goal, instrument, why so called, and to what part of philosophy subordinated. Scot lists twenty-eight kinds of divination in his prologue, and there are twenty-eight mansions of the moon. The statement that God made twenty-two creatures in the six days of creation seems derived from Isidore, Etymologies XVI, 26, 10, who in turn borrowed from Epiphanius, Liber de ponderibus et mensuris. Scot, however, lists eight creatures for the first day against Isidore's seven, the latter omitting fire of the four elements, while Isidore counts four on the third day against Scot's three; but they cover the same things. ...

Do we do better with a familiar topic like "Meteorology"? Let's see:

Intemperate air ...[may arise from]... change of air from the seasons of the year, such as a winter which was hot and dry, that is, not rainy, and summer contrariwise, that is, cold and wet. And if in its quality it shall be hotter or colder than an even temperament, this happens in five ways. First, by reason of the time of year. Second, from the rising and setting of the great stars by their distance from or nearness to the sun, as Alabor and the bear's tail. Third by reason of the winds, for the north wind prolongs life and adorns men's bodies. The south wind does the opposite, and the like in the case of women, whence the south wind is good for women. And all this is apparent in winter by men being improved and women deteriorated, and the opposite in summer....

"Intemperate" air, by the way, is defined by how people feel in its presence.

Sociology:

A lunar person tends to mediocrity in occupation, as that of a sailor, runner, letter carrier, common crier, courtier, jester, weaver, gardener, shepherd, guard of city or castle, servant of lord or lady, ruffian, prostitute if she be female, petty salesman or peddler, fisherman, wanderer from one house to another. He may sew chasubles and underwear, that is shorts and drawers, wash linen, sweep house and street, draw water to sell, steal garden fruit, indulge in vain glory and so be pleased, if praised for beauty or probity.

How is this "sociology"? The word is Professor Thorndike's, of course, not Scot's but the point is that the place filled by the person in society and his or her interactions with others are ultimately determined by the character of the person, which in the medieval world view is astrologically determined. Those long lists, by the way, occur quite often - apparently it would not have done to give a general characterisation, as modern writers might do, and just a few examples.

From the time of Copernicus the writers on scientific questions sometimes seem surprisingly modern, even although they still respect astrological ideas. People can find passages that suggest they pay only lip service to the practice of astrology - as well as passages suggesting the opposite. But Scot was 250 years earlier than Copernicus, at the height of the Middle Ages. The "leading intellectual in Western Europe during the first third of the thirteenth century" (Thorndike's words) he may have been, but he was still a representative of a profoundly different world view from ours, from a time in which our procedures for asking questions about the world were still mostly undeveloped.

Although he was a major figure of his time, no paradigm was shattered by his hand. His historical importance rests probably in his promotion of and influence on the work of others. Why do we remember him in Scotland? As a close advisor to the Emperor Frederick II he occupied a position of great importance in medieval Europe; a spectacular example of "local boy done good". He certainly wrote about demons, necromancy, etc., although the opinion of both Professor Thorndike and Dante is that he did not practice himself. It's not hard to imagine how the stories of wizardry might arise, adding to his legend.

Can we rescue him for modernity, tie him into some modern story? No. But there probably are great stories to be spun from this material, of world views and how they change and evolve. Starting those stories in familiar, Scottish places will help to coax listeners through the door. For now I'm still clinging to the pinnacles, conscious of the vertical drops at my back, but soon I'll be on flatter terrain and I can start to think about putting those stories together.

Happiness is a by-product of function

A man has a house. It's a beautiful house, big, unique, spectacularly sited, tastefully furnished, with a fine garden creatively stocked and laid out. The man has worked very hard over many years so that he could buy this house and develop it exactly to the style he wanted. He is so proud of his house. Everybody admires him for the house, for the effort that led to it and the thought invested in it. Every guest leaves profoundly impressed. Every moment he spends in his house or in the garden is a happy one. As he arrives home from work each day, turns into the driveway, his heart sings.

One day he has to make a long journey by car. Crossing a high, empty moorland his car breaks down. The battery of his mobile phone is dead. He sets off on foot, trudging along an unfrequented road through dull, featureless country. Some miles further on there is no relief in the landscape but a track, possibly a farm road, runs off across the moor. Hoping to find a house with a phone he starts following it. He crosses a barely perceptible rise. There is some mist, still no sign of any human habitation. He stops walking, looks round. The public road has vanished and there is nothing familiar to be seen. Where is he? How did he get here? Is it safe? For a moment, in his imagination, he's in his sitting room, feet up, gin and tonic in hand, basking in a little glowing cloud of wellbeing. But the air's getting cold and the mist is thickening to fog. The house is another world, far away and no help at all; family too. He sits down on a tuft of heather, a little damp but not too uncomfortable. A breeze whistles across the moor. Across the track a funny little bird is hopping about, black and dark brown, with a cream-coloured patch at its neck,chirping. At his feet a patch of moss, the most unlikely of subjects, slowly reveals a kaleidoscope of colour: greens, yellows, reds, browns... The mist thins slightly and the grey of the sky begins to lighten.

Will he ever see his house again? Family, friends? No doubt, although they're a million miles away for now, meaningless visions of another existence which may not even have been his, visions from which no consolation flows. But maybe this is enough, to be the thing that, during some finite interval of time, hears the wind, sees the birds and the clouds, watches the light change.

Untethered

I enjoyed this blog post from Athene Donald: Where's your place in the world? Professor Donald addresses some of the human side of lockdown, the disruption, the damage to the sense of self, that must go hand in hand with the abandonment of normal practises; the psychological consequences of situations when "we are untethered from our moorings and face periods of confusion or loss".

I've felt "untethered" for a few years now. I spent most of my career in academia working on an activity few universities now value; possibly even an unforgiveable sin. Ten years ago I was proud of staying REF-returnable while engaged in the labour-intensive - human-centred, transformative! - project of Access and the rest of the continuing education work. A decade later most of that is dismantled. I don't have full-time employment and I'm employed at all only until the end of this month. Don't worry, I'm fine, I won't starve or even have to forego anything much.

"Happiness is a by-product of function," said William S Burroughs. When professional identity leaves, function skips off down the road hand in hand with it and with them, sense of a place in the world. This will be still more of a problem if professional identity has involved some sense of "mission". One can no doubt find other things to do, and in time reassemble a sense of self. How to persist in the meantime?

This professional sense of self is of course an illusion. Events - a pandemic for instance - could strip it away unexpectedly at any moment. There can be situations where it is irrelevant, for instance in a deserted, unlit lane facing somebody bigger, strong and angry who has a knife. More benignly, it may mean little or nothing in a group of adults gathered together for some non-professional reason like skiing lessons, volunteer park clean-up, parents' evenings... Maybe it wasn't really that central after all? Possibly even a distraction from something that should have been more important?

If we're lucky there are people who care about us, for reasons mostly disconnected from professional standing. What's left that they care about? Must be something. Anyway we might make some awful political or aesthetic judgement that would turn them against us. They might head down some road where we could not follow. You never know what's going on inside somebody else's head. What happens then?

A man has a house. It's a beautiful house, big, unique, spectacularly sited, tastefully furnished, with a fine garden creatively stocked and laid out. The man has worked very hard over many years so that he could buy this house and get it exactly to the style he wanted. He is so proud of his house. Everybody admires him for the house, for the effort that led to it and the thought invested in it. Every moment he spends in this house or the garden is a happy one.

One day he has to make a long journey by car. Crossing a high, empty moorland his car breaks down. The battery of his mobile phone is dead. He sets off on foot, trudging along an unfrequented road through dull, featureless country. Some miles further on there is no relief in the landscape but a track, like a farm road, runs across the moor. Hoping to find a house with a phone he starts following it. He crosses a barely perceptible rise. There is some mist, still no sign of any human habitation. He stops walking, looks round, sees nothing familiar. Where is he? How did he get here? Is it safe? For a moment he's in his sitting room, feet up, gin and tonic in hand, basking in a little glowing cloud of wellbeing. But the air's getting cold and the mist is thickening to fog. The house is another world, far away and no help at all; family too. He sits down on a tuft of heather, a little damp but not uncomfortable. A breeze whistles across the moor. Across the track a funny little bird is hopping about, black and dark brown, with a cream-coloured patch at its neck. At his feet he notices a kaleidoscope of colour in a patch of moss: greens, yellows, reds, browns...

Will he ever see his house again? Family, friends? Maybe. No doubt there will be a future of renewed function. But for now maybe this is enough, to be the thing that, during some finite interval of time, hears the wind, sees the birds and the clouds and watches the light change.

A special embrace to the people who usually see these. If I don't advertise a post on social media you're very few in number. Not sure if I'll advertise this one.

Escalante

John Kusel taught Biology on the Access course for many years. It was great for Access students to meet such an eminent academic as they took their first steps towards university study. Neither he nor I are involved in Access any more but we've both retained an interest in that project and we have regular chats about it. John continues to be a source of insight and inspiration - as well as additions to my personal reading list. He lent me Escalante: The Best Teacher in America by Jay Matthews.

Jaime Escalante was a Bolivian who spent most of his working life in the USA, teaching mathematics in a Los Angeles high school. He came to the attention of the rest of the USA in 1982 when 16 of his students in Garfield High School, Los Angeles passed Advanced Placement Calculus. Designed to facilitate progression to College, this is a more advanced Mathematics examination than most taken by American high school students. It was unusual for 16 students from any one school to attempt this examination, never mind actually pass it. That Garfield High was an inner city school with a poorer, substantially Hispanic catchment only compounded the abnormality. Still, none of this might have caught the headlines except for the similarities between some of the students' exam papers which led to suspicion of cheating. In the event most of the students agreed to sit a second exam, passing without any issues and vindicating their original results. In subsequent years more and more Garfield students passed this most testing mathematics examination, highlighting Escalante's rare excellence as a teacher.

I enjoyed the book. It is first and foremost a biography of a very successful teacher and a strong character but we should look for lessons. Surely such a success can be replicated, its key elements extracted and reused? I am, of course, particularly interested in ideas that might be useful with Access-like teaching, for adult students. So here are some thoughts from my own particular perspective, probably still a bit disorganised.

The author, a journalist rather than a teacher or educationalist, aims to draw general lessons in the concluding chapters:

1. "Teachers who bring students up to high standards are precious commodities. ... If good teachers ask for help, give it to them, but only the way they want it."
2. "If left alone, teachers who work hard and care for their students will produce better results than ten times their number dutifully following the ten best recommendations of the ten latest presidential commissions on education."

   "Even the best ideas to come out of the Garfield story probably would have turned rancid if they had first been cooked in a school board committee and reduced to short numbered paragraphs."

3. "... seems to apply just to minorities, but it ought to work with nearly all human children: Demand more than they think they have to give.... the door to that classroom was open to nearly everyone, even students with weak records." Many stories in the book are of people who were not necessarily academic high flyers, or whose backgrounds were particularly challenging. "Calculus need not be made easy; it is easy already"

The first two points, opposing "teachers" and "commissions", address the management of education rather than what individual teachers do. We still have to ask how a teacher can "bring students up to high standards" and why those who can are such "precious commodities". I like the third point. If people wanted to take Maths or Chemistry on Access we asked for some previous knowledge, about the level high school kids would reach at about age 14 or 15. Apart from these requirements our doors were more or less open. Access is based on the belief that "there are many people potentially able to benefit from university who have not had the opportunity" (we used to use those words in the course literature). School is not the right time for many people for a host of reasons, most of them so far beyond the individual's control that they effectively kill off the "opportunity" that school should represent. After school roads back into education are harder to find. I like this attitude in a high school teacher and I imagine it helped some people who were beginning to look unsuccessful. Many of the profiles of individual students were of people who were not academic high flyers. I like that. Perhaps their achievements were all the more impressive because of this.

Teachers may find it more useful to look at his practices and these are described in some detail, brought together in a useful way later on in the book. As he would say himself, there are no great secrets; perhaps the best teachers simply succeed in getting the students to do what everybody knows they should be doing. So, hard work is emphasised, completing and handing in of regular exercises, regular habits: a test every Friday, "...you must take them in class; no make-up tests will be given"; quizzes almost every day, in the class, again with no opportunity to make any that are missed. The sort of notebook to be used is specified, and what goes in it; it is handed in once a week and its contents inspected and graded. No late homework is accepted.

With adults I had to be more flexible. One can't hold it against a student if she misses a class, is late with a homework because her boss insisted she do an extra shift, or because a kid is sick or the normal childcare arrangements fall through. Handing in of exercises can't be extended forever but there has to be a degree of flexibility.

This demanding class, college level calculus, was extraordinarily popular. Why? The charisma of Escalante himself seems to have played a major role: it was seen as a cool class to take. "What they liked about Escalante's class was the spirit of camaraderie, the jokes, the pep talks about the AP, and especially the warm-ups." There was a musical warm-up, Queen's We are the Champions! Many of the mathematical ideas were dressed up in his own little jokes, language: "She gritted her teeth every time she missed a negative sign lurking outside a function. The secret agent, Escalante called it." I'm sure every good Maths teacher does something like this, has their own way of talking about things that the students get sucked into. But I also think it's something very personal to the teacher. Getting every teacher to call a minus sign outside a bracket, "the secret agent" wouldn't work. Perhaps that's what the author meant by the comment about the best ideas from Garfield turning rancid "if they had first been cooked in a school board committee and reduced to short numbered paragraphs." But that's a difficult lesson for organisations because it puts far too much emphasis on the character of the teacher, on personal attributes that are difficult to pin down. It shifts the balance of power from the organisation to the individual worker. It makes it harder for the organisation to treat all workers as interchangeable, disposable.

Mr Escalante was working in a high school. The young people he met were obliged by the state to attend. They had limited life experience. Adult students have all chosen to attend the course. They have status in their own lives, careers, communities. One is practising andragogy and the accommodation between students and teacher works differently. "Escalante felt he needed money to motivate. It was something these kids understood." Adults have already worked out, to some extent, why they are in the class although they may need help seeing how some aspect of Mathematics is relevant to their future studies on an Accountancy or Psychology degree - I took some trouble in that respect. We'll talk elsewhere about situated cognition.

So, for me as a teacher primarily of adults, this was a really interesting book, one with lessons certainly but also one that threw aspects of my own adult teaching into sharper relief. There's lots more to think about and say but that will be elsewhere.