Spend your principles wisely

Missed my update earlier this week, but I have another day off today, so here's a somewhat belated post.

I mentioned in my last post the "Lost Fleet" books by Jack Campbell, which I've been rereading lately (the main reason I didn't have a post together on Monday). While I'm still not convinced that the books are 'good' by any conventional standard, they do have the occasional flash of very keen insight so contrary to the general level of the books that I wonder if they slip in by accident (example: earlier today I read a passage where a character witnesses an orbital bombardment and muses that this is what hell must be: not a place of torment, but a place where death has come and gone and human hands have wiped away any trace that life - human or otherwise - was ever here. I had to stop and think about that one for a bit.)

Another bit that has stuck with me comes from an earlier book. A central theme, inasmuch as these books can be said to have themes, in the series is the conflict and mistrust between military and political institutions and mindsets. One character, attempting to explain the latter to the former, uses an interesting comparison. While military leaders must carefully husband their forces and, if necessary, risk and sacrifice them reluctantly and only in pursuit of essential goals, a political leader must do the same with his principles, defending and stewarding them until the day comes that they must be dearly spent for a more urgent purpose. I thought that was very insightful at the time, and the more I've thought about it sense, the more it has affected my understanding of both military and political conflict and leadership.

Which brings me to the present.

Three stages of mastery

It's a little dismaying to look back at the coursework I did in education classes and realize how little I actually know today about how people learn things. Some I've forgotten in the 5-ish years since Ed Psych, but most I don't think I ever learned in the first place, nor realized I hadn't until I got to actual teaching. But while I don't have much to show for my academic training in learning, I have found a model that I quite like to explain the stages - if not the process - of learning, and on a related tangent, when, whether and how rules ought to be broken.

This almost - almost - pushed me to figure out how to resubmit memebase posters so that I could
say something along the lines of  'Oddly enough, Marvel seems to agree with you ...'