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Either way, I slept in and did eventually feel much better.
I had a delightful phone call with my cousin B. We’re making plans to see each other in the next year. Woot!
I made some cocoa ginger cookies:
https://fooddoodles.com/chocolate-gingerbread-cookies/
I left out the mix-ins (chocolate chips and crystallized ginger) and the cloves and nutmeg (because I hate those). They were great! I made them because the cut out holiday cookies I made Saturday were all gone:
https://delishably.com/desserts/How-to-Make-Cut-Out-Sugar-Cookies
Everyone liked the cutout cookies; R. and I liked the chocolate-gingerbread cookies
I am really happy that my cookie expertise has extended now well-past the three ingredient cookie and its myriad variants.
I’m reading _Trading Secrets_ by JAK, a recent e-republish of one from the 80s. It has all those problems, obviously. But it’s weirdly awesome, in that early-JAK writing to a formula way.
Today, I did a bit of a rabbit hole on home automation, including zigbee, z-wave, Thread, Matter, and related things, mostly from the perspective of, what do you do if your internet connection is gone? I also looked into whether Starlink was available at the address in question (it seems to be) and got in touch with E., who uses Starlink at a location in Wisconsin (he has had a great experience with it). I don’t think I need to commit to anything right now, and in a year-ish, I should have a pretty good sense of whether Matter is going to really “take” or not. I hope it does; an Alexa garden within Matter/on Thread would work pretty well for me.
Yesterday I did a really deep rabbit hole on teaching learning, and ran across the ever-so-creepy SLANT teaching method(s) and KIPP and other behaviorist approaches. *shudder* I’m increasingly convinced that no one out there is doing a particularly good job of teaching listening. A _good_ job of teaching listening would involve something like this:
First: context! _Why_ are you listening? _Why_ are you interacting with this person or these people? You individually and ideally you collectively should have a goal and know what it is and collectively be able to determine whether it has been attained.
Second: how to handle the two categories of distracting Thoughts triggered by processing what you are listening to. First, when the speaker says something Really Wrong! If what they are saying is so wrong that it invalidates most of what follows, an interruption might be needed. If interrupting the speaker to address the Wrong is not possible, it really calls into question whether the goal from the first part will ever be attainable. A new goal is needed, and maybe it’s time to just walk away. The other category of distracting is: you said something and I had a Eureka, a great idea! We are often tempted to interrupt to share our idea, and in a one-on-one where we are paying for instruction, this is a great time to interrupt because it may accelerate or help the instructor tailor things better for you. In a one-to-many, especially if you are not the one funding the activity, you might need to wait. An important listening skill is learning to keep the Eureka! idea off to the side, and to run a comparison of the idea against the rest of what the speaker or speakers are offering in related information and ideas. The Eureka idea might show up later in the presentation, or it might become apparent over the next several sentences that the Eureka needs significant modification to work, or it might be replaced by a better Eureka, etc. Having that idea off to the side can help you actively engage internally with the speaker’s presentation in a very fruitful way.
Third: if it is your turn to speak, it’s good to know some things about your turn to speak. How much time do you have to speak? Do you have something to offer that will advance the goals of your listeners? If you can fit what you have to offer within the time available to speak, how can you present it in a way that is most likely to be processed accurately and — hopefully! — enthusiastically by your listeners. If you are presenting a You Did a Wrong, two approaches can work well. You can say, “I heard you say: repeatwrongthinghere.” Did you mean that? And if the answer is yes, add, “I believe that is not accurate, here is what is accurate, here is where you can find supporting evidence for my assertion. Do you have a way to reconcile this with your perspective?” Another approach is, Are you aware that hereisevidence appears to directly contradict your assertion repeatwrongthinghere? The idea of both approaches is to create an opportunity for the speaker to accept your perspective and reconcile it with their perspective. If they reject that opportunity, but accept your perspective and acknowledge that their proposal or whatever is gonna need some work, then you will probably have to wait for future developments, but you know you have a plausible conversational partner. If they reject that opportunity AND reject your perspective without engaging with the evidence, you have strong indications that you do not have a plausible conversational partner here. If you can leave, it’s probably a good idea. If you feel some degree of commitment, you will basically be listening with a view to identifying usable chunks that are incorporated into an unusable whole. If they provide a reconciliation (a true acceptance of the opportunity you gave them), then you must assess whether you find the reconciliation acceptable to you. Your Eureka idea — assuming it survived subsequent elements of the presentation — may or may not fit at all into your opportunity to speak and honestly, you might want to save your presentation of your Eureka idea to a context that is more rewarding for you and more appropriate to the idea.
A lot of How to Listen advice focuses on technical matters such as how to emotionally regulate, how (not) to interrupt, repeating back words (active listening, NOT rewording), nonverbal cues to demonstrate that you _are_ listening, being forthright about your own confusion or difficulties with attending or if you just fail to hear something because of airplane noise or a zoom dropout or whatever. These are all very helpful things, but without the core elements of the project of listening, I’m not sure how helpful they really can be. Added to the core elements of the project of listening, they are often helpful, but very secondary.
I had a delightful phone call with my cousin B. We’re making plans to see each other in the next year. Woot!
I made some cocoa ginger cookies:
https://fooddoodles.com/chocolate-gingerbread-cookies/
I left out the mix-ins (chocolate chips and crystallized ginger) and the cloves and nutmeg (because I hate those). They were great! I made them because the cut out holiday cookies I made Saturday were all gone:
https://delishably.com/desserts/How-to-Make-Cut-Out-Sugar-Cookies
Everyone liked the cutout cookies; R. and I liked the chocolate-gingerbread cookies
I am really happy that my cookie expertise has extended now well-past the three ingredient cookie and its myriad variants.
I’m reading _Trading Secrets_ by JAK, a recent e-republish of one from the 80s. It has all those problems, obviously. But it’s weirdly awesome, in that early-JAK writing to a formula way.
Today, I did a bit of a rabbit hole on home automation, including zigbee, z-wave, Thread, Matter, and related things, mostly from the perspective of, what do you do if your internet connection is gone? I also looked into whether Starlink was available at the address in question (it seems to be) and got in touch with E., who uses Starlink at a location in Wisconsin (he has had a great experience with it). I don’t think I need to commit to anything right now, and in a year-ish, I should have a pretty good sense of whether Matter is going to really “take” or not. I hope it does; an Alexa garden within Matter/on Thread would work pretty well for me.
Yesterday I did a really deep rabbit hole on teaching learning, and ran across the ever-so-creepy SLANT teaching method(s) and KIPP and other behaviorist approaches. *shudder* I’m increasingly convinced that no one out there is doing a particularly good job of teaching listening. A _good_ job of teaching listening would involve something like this:
First: context! _Why_ are you listening? _Why_ are you interacting with this person or these people? You individually and ideally you collectively should have a goal and know what it is and collectively be able to determine whether it has been attained.
Second: how to handle the two categories of distracting Thoughts triggered by processing what you are listening to. First, when the speaker says something Really Wrong! If what they are saying is so wrong that it invalidates most of what follows, an interruption might be needed. If interrupting the speaker to address the Wrong is not possible, it really calls into question whether the goal from the first part will ever be attainable. A new goal is needed, and maybe it’s time to just walk away. The other category of distracting is: you said something and I had a Eureka, a great idea! We are often tempted to interrupt to share our idea, and in a one-on-one where we are paying for instruction, this is a great time to interrupt because it may accelerate or help the instructor tailor things better for you. In a one-to-many, especially if you are not the one funding the activity, you might need to wait. An important listening skill is learning to keep the Eureka! idea off to the side, and to run a comparison of the idea against the rest of what the speaker or speakers are offering in related information and ideas. The Eureka idea might show up later in the presentation, or it might become apparent over the next several sentences that the Eureka needs significant modification to work, or it might be replaced by a better Eureka, etc. Having that idea off to the side can help you actively engage internally with the speaker’s presentation in a very fruitful way.
Third: if it is your turn to speak, it’s good to know some things about your turn to speak. How much time do you have to speak? Do you have something to offer that will advance the goals of your listeners? If you can fit what you have to offer within the time available to speak, how can you present it in a way that is most likely to be processed accurately and — hopefully! — enthusiastically by your listeners. If you are presenting a You Did a Wrong, two approaches can work well. You can say, “I heard you say: repeatwrongthinghere.” Did you mean that? And if the answer is yes, add, “I believe that is not accurate, here is what is accurate, here is where you can find supporting evidence for my assertion. Do you have a way to reconcile this with your perspective?” Another approach is, Are you aware that hereisevidence appears to directly contradict your assertion repeatwrongthinghere? The idea of both approaches is to create an opportunity for the speaker to accept your perspective and reconcile it with their perspective. If they reject that opportunity, but accept your perspective and acknowledge that their proposal or whatever is gonna need some work, then you will probably have to wait for future developments, but you know you have a plausible conversational partner. If they reject that opportunity AND reject your perspective without engaging with the evidence, you have strong indications that you do not have a plausible conversational partner here. If you can leave, it’s probably a good idea. If you feel some degree of commitment, you will basically be listening with a view to identifying usable chunks that are incorporated into an unusable whole. If they provide a reconciliation (a true acceptance of the opportunity you gave them), then you must assess whether you find the reconciliation acceptable to you. Your Eureka idea — assuming it survived subsequent elements of the presentation — may or may not fit at all into your opportunity to speak and honestly, you might want to save your presentation of your Eureka idea to a context that is more rewarding for you and more appropriate to the idea.
A lot of How to Listen advice focuses on technical matters such as how to emotionally regulate, how (not) to interrupt, repeating back words (active listening, NOT rewording), nonverbal cues to demonstrate that you _are_ listening, being forthright about your own confusion or difficulties with attending or if you just fail to hear something because of airplane noise or a zoom dropout or whatever. These are all very helpful things, but without the core elements of the project of listening, I’m not sure how helpful they really can be. Added to the core elements of the project of listening, they are often helpful, but very secondary.