The Other End of the Tunnel

Not quite six months ago I wrote a post called Trying to Flatten My Personal Downslope from Aging that was intended to motivate me to stick with a regime of not drinking alcohol, this to reverse the situation with my liver, which was diagnosed with stage 2 of Fibrosis.  This Friday I have a blood test and the following Monday I have a Fibroscan, which together should give a good picture of how my liver is doing now.  I am writing this post before knowing the results from those tests, but with the knowledge that I stuck to the regime and, in addition, for the last several months I also stopped taking Tylenol, the pain medicine I had been taking regularly to deal with my arthritis.  Apparently, it too can cause liver damage.  I want to give a recap of the experience, but also some reflection on how it compared to my behavior in adolescence as well as some forecast for how it will impact my behavior from here on out. 

I've had issues with impulsive behavior for as long as I can remember.  When I was a kid my mother, who grew up in Germany, called me a fresser. It was an apt description as I ate a lot and ate very quickly, including indulging in many snacks that I should have avoided.  Much later, when in mid-career and campus learning technology was getting the better of me, where I had no other way to relieve the stress, I drank too much.  There is a relationship between drinking alcohol and overeating and during this period my weight ballooned.  This happened after I stopped jogging, because my knees went out, and I didn't find an alternative form of exercise to balance me both physically and emotionally.  Nowadays I go for long walks and that really helps.  But it didn't occur to me then that walking might be the answer.

As I am rather thoughtful about many other matters, it may at first seem puzzling that I have this issue with impulsivity.  I have subsequently reconciled myself to this duality with the following observation.  When my creativity can find a focus for its expression I get absorbed in that and find the experience enjoyable.  However, when I am angry and/or frustrated, the thoughtful part of me is stymied and it is then that I get impulsive, with the eating and drinking serving as some kind of compensation, unhealthful though they are, for those negative feelings.  It is why nowadays I try to avoid situations that predictably would upset me.  So, for example, I spend much less time reading the newspaper than I used to do, though I haven't eliminated the habit entirely. 

I believe there to be a genetic component to all of this.  When my younger son was four or five, the folks at daycare recommended that he be tested by a psychologist, who found he was mildly autistic, along the lines of Asperger's Syndrome.  When I did a Google search on that and read about it I said to myself - this is my mother.  Indeed, I've come to realize that I have some of the symptoms, while others didn't manifest, and still others I learned to suppress as a teenager.  Further, my mother had the disposition herself to be a fresser and my sister has that as well.  Plus, my dad was a type-1 diabetic and I believe there is some correlation between diabetes in the parent and obesity in the child.  Here I want to say that the genetic explanations produce inclinations only.  Impulses can be controlled.  Alas, I didn't learn to do so when I was a teenager.  I went on a diet near the end of 10th grade, which was facilitated by some medication, perhaps an amphetamine of some sort though I can't recall that now.  While the diet worked, when the medication stopped I put the weight back on.  It was only much later, after graduating from college, where I was able to lose weight without the aid of medication and keep it off, more or less, for about 20 years, when I was just getting started with learning technology on the administration end.

The tail end of my earlier post can be thought of us a plan for impulse control, based on finding non-alcoholic alternatives that I could persist with also on going to sleep earlier than I had been doing as a "nudge" toward impulse control.  Regarding the latter, I stuck with that assiduously.  As to the former,  while I did utilize a variety of substitutes for alcoholic beverages, what I ended up doing changed over time.  First, let me report that non-alcoholic bourbon is dreadful and while holding a drink in your favorite glass has its merits, this is no way to wean yourself off of the good stuff.  Next, I had previously given up drinking sparkling water, reasoning that since I seem to have excess gas in my gut I didn't need to consume sparkling water as well.  But I was having non-alcoholic beer, Coors Edge in my case.  It was okay but not really a substitute for the dark beer I used to favor.  (Recently I wrote this rhyme, to emphasize the point.) And it started to seem like needless calories, which is why my wife won't drink it.  So I went back to buying La Croix, although my favorite flavor in the past, Mixed Berry, no longer seems to be available.  I also started to have, on occasion, diet tonic water, a different taste and another reason to use a good glass for drinking.  I can report that the Schweppes version is much better than the store brand, but when the name brand is not available you go with what is.  

There is another aspect to impulse control that I hadn't considered in my earlier post and it goes as much toward eating as it does toward drinking.  This is about planning what will be consumed.  In the language of the decision making I learned in graduated school, this is a rolling plan, on a meal by meal basis, a snack by snack basis, and a drink by drink basis.  And it is made somewhat in advance an hour or two before the event, not written down but done in my head.  I am compulsive in planning this way, especially since as a retired person I am time abundant, so don't need to have my attention elsewhere.  And the planning itself isn't very time consuming, as the choices to be made come from within a limited set of alternatives.  The point is to reduce spontaneity from the consumption process.  It does that although it's not perfect.  Sometimes I will tell myself - I'm still hungry or I want a treat now.  For the latter I try to restrict myself to sensible alternatives, IQBars or Go Macro Bars, though I will have a sweet treat that my wife buys now and then.  Yet even with this deviation, there is far more control in my food and drink consumption than there used to be. 

Let me turn to how I think about these matters moving forward.  First, there will be a bit of celebration Monday evening and maybe Tuesday evening as well, regardless of how the test results turn out.  There will be a bit of deferred Halloween candy, I'm thinking of a small package of M&Ms with peanuts, after which there will be some dark beer and then maybe some good whiskey.  This is to celebrate that I stuck with the regime for the full six months and learned that it was within me to do so.  After that, however, I  expect to go back to the straight and narrow, with perhaps one or two nights a month as celebration, but not more than that.  Here is why.

Two weeks ago I had rather severe pain in my right hip.  I suffer from lumbar radiculitis and sacroiliitis and it was acting up.  But last week the pain went away and it has stayed away since then.  I don't know why this happened but I conjecture the following.  I have also have been diagnosed with a tortuous colon, which makes me prone toward constipation.   I have verified that there is a correlation between the pain from sacroilliitis and constipation, so if I can do things to control the latter I end up helping myself out with the former.  Not drinking alcohol lessens the chance of constipation, as does keeping my weight under control.  Since I'm into rhyme, I really wish it were - no gain, no pain.  But I'll content myself merely with making this more likely and then dealing with it at the time, when the pain does return.  I will try not to drink for pain relief.  I've been able to do that these last six months, so I know it's possible.

There is one way this cuts against the grain.  I get up frequently during the night to go to the bathroom.  Recently, it's about once every two hours.  Alcohol dehydrates you, so should lessen the frequency.  The getting up part itself is not so bad.  The issue is whether I can go back to sleep after I'm done.  Recently I've been finding that's getting more difficult to do, especially after the third or fourth time.  (I usually go to sleep by 8 PM.)  I do take Melatonin, which I've been doing for a while.  Maybe it's time to stop with that.  But would I get to sleep at all without it?  I'm going to wait a while before I experiment with that.

Let me make one other point and then close.  While doing the pre-writing for this post I was wondering about the impact of something cataclysmic happening on my decision making, whether that were to my own health or the situation in the community where I reside.  I didn't get very far with this.  I suppose the underlying issue is whether I felt a sense of agency in addressing the situation.  But as to what would bring about that sense of agency, I'm not sure.  On the flip side, I'm making more mental errors these days than I used to.  Yet most if not all of them have been uncovered immediately and so far none have caused irredeemable damage.  I'm hoping the decline that way is very gradual.  When that ceases to be the case, all bets are off. 

Puzzling

Nowadays, I'm so frightened about what is going on in the (sur)real world that I want to vanish into my own head, to hide from it all.  One way I do that is by writing these blog posts.  Sometimes I find that gathering my thoughts and then composing the piece is absorbing, at least for a while.  On occasion in doing so I will try to tie into my thinking from from an earlier time, when I was still working and reflecting on teaching and learning with technology as well as on teaching and learning without the technology modification.  There were many ways in which we were coming up short as to what I thought should be the norm, so I wondered quite a bit and would give air to my musings in writing. The post today is of that sort.  But first, here are a couple of things I need to confess.

When I was teaching undergraduate economics, I found a great gap between how the students seemingly went about things and how I go about my own learning.  While I could readily identify factors that explain this disparity - generational, locational, parental, etc. - and drill down on each of these, thereby developing an abstract argument to explain what I was observing, in my gut that abstract argument never held sway.  Over time you get quite accustomed to your own patterns of thought, which are then a kind of habit.  Those patterns seem normal to me and my gut tells me they should be a commonplace with everyone else as well.  That it is not so, I will admit.  But why it is not so remains a puzzle to me, one I haven't solved.  This post is a kind of wishing that it were otherwise.

The other confession is that I'm completely out of it, having retired in summer of 2010, teaching one course a year after that for the most part through fall 2019, with Covid putting an end to that.  I stopped teaching before AI entered the vernacular and have no experience with it on which to base my arguments.  For many readers, that will disqualify what I have to say, giving them a legitimate reason to stop reading right here.

But it does make it easier for me to maintain that the elements of thinking, problem solving in a situation which has not previously been resolved, where some creativity is expressed in finding a solution, my belief is that these things are within us and don't change much at all over time, even if the technological environment changes enormously.  In my ideal, this should provide the focus for teaching and learning, from grade school through college and thereafter as well.

Near to when I retired I started to write a book based on the idea that there must be joy associated with creative problem solving, with that joy emerging from a spark of intuition, the prelude to the Aha moment. Yet that intuition itself couldn't provide the right answer for certain.  Indeed, it might lead one astray.  At best it was a guess as to to right answer.  I called the book Guessing Games.  I thought the first several chapters went reasonably well, but then my inclination to lecture took over.  The argument became overly pedantic and I got frustrated with the writing.  That's why I stopped.  But there is enough there that might pique the interest of others.

I recently reread a chapter I had long since ignored called Assessment.  The first half has perhaps too much recounting of the economics we were taught during my first year of graduate school at Northwestern.  But the second half makes a rather compelling argument in the support of embedded assessment which happens mainly via an ongoing conversation with the student, where each particular item to be assessed is done in a low-stakes environment.  We have inadvertently made school anti-democratic with our emphasis on high-stakes testing.  The very good students become the elite, receiving a variety of privileges from that, including that we professors teach as if they are the norm.  The rest become the riffraff and develop the emotional scars associated with that determination.

I began to wonder whether one could teach a full course with only embedded assessment and how that might be done.  I should note that during the teaching I did in retirement,  I had students write weekly blog posts, which I would comment on.  And I relied on portfolio grading - individual posts didn't receive a grade.  Instead, I gave one grade for the posts during the first half of the course and another grade for the posts during the remainder of the course.  But the economics department still wanted me to give exams, so I complied with that, though I did so unenthusiastically.  

I suspect that AI would obliterate the benefits from the blogging approach I used.  Plus, reading each post and commenting on it is time consuming.  That was no problem for me, as a retiree, but it might otherwise make the approach unattractive to other instructors.  And even so, it really would only work in small classes, the type you see in upper-level courses.  Something else would be needed  for larger classes.  For now, I'll leave that something else to still be determined.  Here, I only want to propose a framework, nothing more.

And with that, let me report that nowadays I spend an inordinate amount of time on puzzles, mainly word puzzles from the NY Times, also a lot of Sudoku.  For Wordle, those without a subscription can access the puzzle.  For Spelling Bee, those without a subscription can solve a few words in the puzzle before access to the rest is denied.  But my favorite puzzle is Letter Boxed, which can only be accessed with a subscription, so I will illustrate with a screen shot from today's puzzle.  I believe that the process of solving this puzzle is very much in the spirt of the problem solving that one does in an open-ended situation.  The steps that one goes through can then be generalized, which I will do at the conclusion of the post.

The puzzle has 12 distinct letters arrayed around the box, with 3 letters on each side of the box.  To make a word the next letter in the word must be on a different side of the box from the previous letter.  This rules out words with double letters and it rules out a lot of letter combinations as well that might occur to you while trying to solve the puzzle, for example "er."  You hit the Enter button when you want to enter a word.  The next word then starts with the last letter of the previous word.  Letters can be used as many times as you need to solve the puzzle.  The goal is to use up all the letters and do so in as few words as possible.

Some years back I surprised myself when for the first time I solved the puzzle in only two words.  I then wondered whether there always was a two-word solution and to convince myself of that I started to record my solutions at this site.  I subsequently found another site that generates such solutions and later that the NY Times has a site with their solution. So now, each day I try for a two-word solution.  I don't always find one, but I will spend quite a while looking before I give up.  It's what one goes through in that search which I consider below. 

Step 1: Familiarize yourself with what's there. 

This seems so obvious, on the one hand, yet I believe that students often expect to find an answer to a problem on their homework or to an exam question before getting sufficiently familiar with what is being asked.  In this case, I first look at the vowels, there is no "a" in this puzzle, as well as what vowels are on the same side of the box, so can't be used in combination.  Then I look for the "hard letters," which in this case I take as "q" and "v."  I'll want to find words which have at least one of these, unless I've found another words that already uses both.  Regarding the latter, you might initially try "quiver" but then note that the "er" combination is not allowed.  If you give up on finding a word with both of the hard letters, a different approach is needed.

Step 2: Frame the problem to admit a solvable subproblem.

In this case, it means finding a first word that doesn't end in a hard letter but contains one of them and that uses at least 8 letters of the puzzle, so the second word isn't too hard to find.

Step 3:  Guess at a solution to the subproblem.

Now I will admit that I use an online dictionary to help me solve the puzzle.  One feature of these dictionaries is that you can search using a non-word and it will return possible alternative words that seem similar, so have many of the same letters.  I prefer to try first without the dictionary, but I don't wait too long before I start to use it.  In this case my original word, which I think is pretty immediate, is "question."  If that is my first word, can I find a second that starts with "n" and also has "c," "d," "r," and "v?"  It occurs to me to try "noncurved" and I check that in the dictionary, but it's not a word.  So, anticipating the next step, we're not done yet.

Step 4: Are we done yet?  If not, is there another subproblem to solve?

If we're done, great.  If not and there is another subproblem to solve, return to Step 3.  If you're not done but you can't find a suitable subproblem to solve, you're stuck.  Then go back either to Step 1 or Step 2 to get unstuck, but try something else this time around.

* * * * *

Whether puzzles of this sort could be constructed for a variety of different subject matter, I leave as food for thought, as I really don't know whether that's possible or not.  But if it were possible and if students developed the yen for solving such puzzles, it would address the mystery of intrinsic motivation and these students would really learn.  Wouldn't that be nice?