Flight Lab Reflection

This project didn't exactly change the way I think about how math can be applied to the real world since I kind of already assumed that parabolic curves were used for flight and nothing else. The surprising thing for me, with parabolas, was finding out all the other ways that they could be used. I didn't know that they were for finding maximums and minimums and that's been very cool to learn. I've worked in the bar industry most of my adult life and those people just trial-and-error everything and I thought that was how it was done, so finding out that you can actually figure this stuff on paper before applying it has been eye-opening. I actually got a chance to very clumsily try to use parabolas a few nights ago when my friend asked me if I could help her figure out a good argument against some changes that her work was trying to make to improve productivity. This was a really fun assignment. These are my favorite kinds of assignments and I'm really looking forward to doing more like them in 1050 next semester.

Finding Fish Reflection

Reflect on what you learned about “real life” in doing this project. How has doing this assignment changed the way you think, feel or behave in your own life or career?

This was easily one of the best assignments I have had the pleasure of doing this semester, in any class. The entire Lifespan course has caused me to realize so many things about why my life has gone the way that it has gone. It has made me have a better understanding of my parents and of my siblings, and it has caused me to be a more careful and empathetic person. This book report brought up a lot of things for me and I feel I’m better for having done it.

How has doing this project enhanced or your understanding of developmental psychology? How will you use this information in the future?

Well, it was a good project to finish this class with. In some part of this book, every single stage of the lifespan is covered. It’s a memoir with representations of everything from pre-birth to very old age. You could see a lot of the consequences of actions that were laid out in our textbook put to work in Finding Fish and it was interesting to see all of the theory tied together. It’s funny, I’ve been reading stories my whole life and I’m sure I’ve come across many that had such representations in them, but this was the first time I took a good, hard look at the why of what characters in a story do, and it made the reading a much richer experience. I feel like I will use everything that I learned in this class every day for the rest of my life.

Finding Fish: An Analysis

            What an exceptional book. I have to imagine that this book is used by psychologists, particularly by social workers, very frequently. I’m not much of a reader, I’ll be honest. I didn’t want to slag through Finding Fish at all, but I am so glad that I did. This book was more identifiable and more relatable to me than just about anything that I’ve read in my life. Antwone Fisher’s life very, very closely mirrors my own. Like Antwone, I come from very low SES, from severe domestic abuse, from foster care, and from homelessness. In fact, he and I hit almost identical points at almost identical ages more times in the book than I cared to count. I found myself reading my own thoughts and feelings in this book over and over again. There were parts where I had to put it down because I could feel myself starting to go into shock, which is something that happens if I think too hard about my history.

The only major differences between Antwone’s life and mine are that I know my parents, I was never a victim of sex abuse, although I’ve seen the ramifications up close and in person, and instead of going into the military after homelessness for eleven years, I fell to drug and alcohol abuse for the same exact time period that he was in the military. In fact, at the end of the book, Antwone is 33 years old and finally starting to self-actualize, which means finding out who he is, which means finding out where he came from. I am 32, turning 33 next year, and I am just barely starting to hit that point myself where I’ve come far enough and met enough of my own needs that I can focus on more frivolous things like repairing my relationship with my father or getting back in touch with my mother’s very extensive family. It seems to me that Antwone and myself, after a long interlude, both managed to finally meet all of our more basic needs and can now start finding out what on earth brought us to this point.

I can absolutely see why this book would be selected as a final project for a Lifespan class. The story begins before Antwone’s birth, which is an important part of any life story, but one that often gets left out. Antwone Fisher got a bad hand before anybody even dealt the cards. Seeing the circumstances of his birth, being fatherless before he was even born and being born inside of a prison institution had lifelong effects on Mr. Fisher, even outside of the effects of being in foster care and having a difficult life.

The First Two Years

The first two years of any person’s life are massively important. Antwone was accepted as a ward of the state as soon as he was born. He was placed in an orphanage for a few weeks before going into the care of Mrs. Nellie Strange. Antwone had a number of good people come and go in his life, and Mrs. Strange was the first. It is fortunate that a good person got him first, because the first two years of life are formative, to say the least.

            “Antwone crawls all over the place, stands and walks holding onto things, says hi and bye bye… He likes pancakes and mashed potatoes… He smiles a good deal and appears to be a well-cared for child.” (Fisher, 2001)

            An early caseworker report shows Antwone in good health and good spirits in those first few months with Mrs. Strange, indicating that he was not undernourished and that the home was a caring and loving one. Antwone’s standing and holding onto things, and his interaction with people indicate that he has reached at least Stage Three of Piaget’s Six Stages of Sensorimotor Intelligence, and possibly even Stage Four (Berger, 2014). Given that this is the first year of Antwone’s life, he is precisely on track.

It frequently seems that the first two years of Antwone’s life, under the care of Mrs. Strange were likely the cause of his intelligence and his resilience later in life. A stable, loving environment not only allowed little Antwone’s brain to develop normally, it likely gave him the confidence to know that he was worthy of being loved, if only subconsciously.

Unfortunately, Antwone began to show signs of insecure-resistant/ambivalent attachment, which the foster mother was not comfortable with, and he was passed along.

Mizz Pickett, Foster Care, and Abuse

            There are villains in this world that are almost likeable. The Joker, though a mass murderer and a psychopath, is still an interesting enough character that you find yourself rooting for him from time-to-time. Then there are villains who hide in the shadows and deceive and manipulate in order to prey on the weak. They hide behind fake smiles and polite public attitudes and know when to accept defeat in public, and how to take that defeat out on their wards in private. Dolores Umbridge from the Harry Potter series was such a character. Mizz Pickett is another. There is simply no way to redeem a villain whose m.o. is so terrible.

            Mizz Pickett was a hard character for me to read. She was about as authoritarian as it gets, but worse than that, she was arbitrary, mercurial, and capricious. Much later in the book, Mr. Fisher finds himself fitting right in in the military and he opines that it must be because of all of the practice he got obeying Mizz Pickett’s orders and doing her chores. (Fisher, 2001) I have a different theory.

If Fisher is anything like me, and I believe that he and I are very much alike, then he has probably craved institutionalization his entire life. There’s a reason for this. When you grow up in a house like Mizz Pickett’s, the same job that gets you praise one day, will get you beat the next. You never know where the consequences or the beatings are going to come from, so you’re always on edge.

Being in a predictable environment, where he was guaranteed a hot meal, a warm bed, safety, and consistent consequences, and all he had to do for that is put his head down and work, must have been like a breath of fresh air for him. After all, all he’d ever done up to that point was put his head down and work and all he ever got was abused for it. I imagine being in the Navy felt like pulling a great big blanket around himself, knowing that he finally had something that nobody could take away from him. He must have felt safe for the first time in his life.

The abuses that he, Dwight, and Flo experienced at the hands of Mizz Pickett were broadly varied. Mizz Pickett used physical abuse, verbal abuse, and a constant barrage of shaming tactics, like only ever referring to them as “nigga”, or embarrassing Flo after her menarche, or telling Dwight and Antwone that she was going to cut their penises off, to keep her foster children quiet and subservient. (Fisher, 2001)

She also referred frequently to Antwone’s parents as “no-account”, saying that she had the children just to pay her notes, causing Antwone to think “The shame of parents who didn’t have bank accounts was confusing enough, but why anybody had to pay money for notes I really didn’t understand.” (Fisher, 2001) With Fisher being around five years old at the time, this is a good example of

“…many studies have found that mistreated children regard other people as hostile and exploitative; hence these children are less friendly, more aggressive, and more isolated than other children.” (Berger, 2014)

This is something that is easy to see happening throughout the book, not necessarily to Antwone, but certainly to Dwight. As Dwight gets older he becomes less and less trusting, more and more hostile, and more ill-equipped to understand other peoples’ intentions. (Fisher, 2001) This is a place where Antwone and myself split off, because where Antwone tends to internalize his problems, Dwight and myself both began to see other people as the enemy and to lash out against them because of it. In my home, physical fights between my brother and myself were constant whenever there were no parents around. My brother was like Antwone. He mostly just wanted to be left alone, but I did not and I lashed out at him frequently. Much like Dwight, I became a bully at home and bullied at school.

Dwight went on to adult antisocial behavior. He fell into drugs and alcohol and began engaging in criminal and destructive behaviors that eventually led to his untimely demise. “Adults who were severely maltreated often abuse drugs or alcohol, enter unsupportive relationships, become victims or aggressors…” (Berger, 2014). Unfortunately, this was all too true for Dwight. Antwone said many times through the book that Dwight was smart and could have been or done anything, but that he lacked love. He just needed someone to love him. I think that’s why, in the end, Dwight came back around to that terrible home. It was a sick situation, but it was as close to love as he ever got.

On top of abuse, Antwone was a victim of severe neglect. At no point in his childhood were his needs ever fully met. Child neglect is three times more common than abuse and the results can be far more devastating. Research shows that children who were neglected often experience greater social deficits than abused ones because they are unable to relate to anyone. The best cure is a close friend, but close friendships are hard to build and even harder to maintain for victims of neglect. (Berger, 2014) This is likely why Antwone spent most of his adult life alone. Aside from it being difficult to feel worthy of a friendship, it’s also very hard to maintain one when you have no roadmap for what they look like. Much like Antwone, I have spent the majority of my adult life alone, if only because I feel awkward when people are nice to me.

There were a few parts of this book that really broke my heart. “…without friends, no longer able to daydream, I lost all interest in school.” (Fisher, 2001) Watching Antwone completely lose interest in school was one of the more devastating.

Like him, I didn’t see a point in trying, although I didn’t understand why at the time. When your life is all about survival, things like schoolwork are a luxury that your brain just does not have space for. Among the other types of abuse/neglect, Antwone was not even given winter clothes to go to school in and the clothes that he did have were shabby and falling apart. (Fisher, 2001)

This is bottom-rung Maslow we’re talking about here. This is before love can happen, it’s before even safety becomes important to a person. This is the most basic physiological stuff there is. Hierarchy level one: “Need for food, drink, and shelter.” (Berger, 2014) All-encompassing, that has to include warmth, dryness, not having to walk to school in the winter in a t-shirt.

A person like Mizz Pickett, so controlling, so uneducated, could not possibly understand that by denying him something as basic as a winter coat, she was denying him everything. Everything from safety, to self-esteem, to genuine accomplishment and even greatness was denied Antwone by her actions.

“Since no punishment loomed any worse than what I was already getting, I kept up the routine – slipping out from school in the morning and then, at lunchtime, returning to school for a little while before I’d leave again, going back just before the afternoon bell to go home.” (Fisher, 2001) The first part of that is the best example of the consequences of authoritarian parenting that I have ever seen. I’m not really sure how to cite a lecture, you’ll have to excuse me this is my first semester of college, but this was something that we talked about in class and I remember it pretty clearly. When all punishments are the same, when the only option on the other end is the nuclear option, a victim of abuse just figures “Screw it, I’m getting beat no matter what.” This is the same stuff I went through as a teen. I had no interest in school whatsoever and I got very criminal very quickly when I started realizing that I was in trouble no matter what I did.

Mrs. Profit

            Mrs. Profit was far and away my favorite character in the book. It is unfortunate that in a victim’s life it is the abusers who have staying power. Throughout Antwone’s interactions with Mrs. Profit, I felt that she was a person who was attuned to his needs.

“’Anything wrong?’ ‘No.’ ‘Is everything okay at home?’ ‘Yes.” She says, ‘Okay,’ and lets it go at that. But I know from the concern on her face that she wiser than she is in a position to tell me. When I go to the coatroom to put on my winter gear, she gives me another long look, and I try to think how to bring myself to tell her what I’m feeling. But where to begin, I don’t know, so I forge on – going to get my coat, and walking slowly down the corridor, away from the love and light of her classroom.” (Fisher, 2001)

She was empathetic without being pushy and she understood that trying to dig the truth out of young Mr. Fisher would only serve to alienate him. I made a lot of annotations about Mrs. Profit because I loved the impact that she had on Antwone’s life.

            “With constructive criticism, she encouraged rather than condemned. She found something to compliment in each of us – a neat paper, a good attitude, an eager face – and rewarded the whole class for our overall positive efforts with impromptu parties, field trips, and other celebrations.” (Fisher, 2001)

I can remember people like her passing through my life, stooping down to my level to talk directly to my face, speaking as an adult, and being understanding without being pushy. To this day I have an enormous appreciation for every one of them. Mrs. Profit was Love and Logic embodied and it seems that this time period would have been before those principles became more well-known or widely used.

She was as fair with discipline as she was with encouragement and she became the first married couple that Antwone had known to show believable affection, which is something that Antwone carried with him for the rest of his life. She also provided the first instance of positive continuity in his life by mentoring him and his classmates from fourth grade to sixth. (Fisher, 2001)

            This book and this class have been instrumental in my development. Taking an objective, birds-eye view of the consequences of things as early as the circumstances of one’s birth is more than a little cathartic. Understanding that although I am responsible for my actions, some of the things that have happened in my life were beyond my control, like how coming from low-SES indicates an enormous number of risk factors, has been fairly freeing. Reading Antwone Fisher’s story was like meeting a long lost brother for the first time. I wish that I’d had this book when I was 10 or 11. It would have helped me a lot back then. It helped me a lot now, as a matter of fact.

Bibliography

Berger, K. S. (2014). Invitation to the Lifespan. New York: Worth Publishers.

Fisher, A. (2001). Finding Fish. New York: Harper Collins.

Vinny Genovesi
English 1010
11/1/14

Like Sand Through the Hourglass...

 English 1010 has been a really great class for me. I've been out of school for a long time
so it's been a while since anybody challenged me to stretch my legs and try writing some things that I normally wouldn't normally write. One of my favorite assignments was the Thomas Kincaid description that we did after listening to Monkey Garden. I liked describing the same thing in two different styles and I enjoyed the freewrite-to-final-draft place description that we did after that. It was a good chance for me to play around with adjectives, which is something I haven't done in a long time. I also liked the group picture activity. Writing as a group was a very different experience. I'd love to do something more involved with that one day. And, of course, the personal narrative was a lot of fun to do. My favorite part about that one was the process.Selecting a picture, trying to come up with a good narrative for that picture, then doing first draft to peer review, to revision, to final draft was really enjoyable.

 The response essay has, so far, been the most interesting assignment for me in this class.
One of the biggest problems that I had in writing it, was that the first time I read through the original essay, it actually had me somewhat convinced. Here's this essay about how we shouldn't help the poor and we should protect and defend resources within certain borders, and my ultra-liberal self is sitting here nodding along, saying "Yeah! Let's keep those brown people out of America so that my kids' kids can be just as spoiled as I am!" That's the power of persuasive writing, I guess. Overcoming that was pretty simple. It was just a matter of refocusing on the overall tone and rhetorical style of the writer, rather than paying attention to specific facts and figures. There's this great line in The Simpsons where Homer says "Facts? Facts are meaningless! You can use facts to prove anything." Funny, but soul-crushingly true.

 The reason that I enjoyed doing the response so much is because I love picking apart
nonsense, and that's something I'd forgotten in the time that I've been out of school. As I stated above, the original essay was well-written enough that on my first read-through I did actually question a few of the things that I originally believed. I found myself wondering if there was a case to be made for all of the Fox News "We built this" (remember that?) nonsense. Is there validity in nationalism and selfishness and hoarding of resources? But I took myself out of it and I took a step back and I thought about what it is that we're really talking about here, and all I could think was that these are human beings that we're talking about as statistics. It's a cliche statement, but it's a true one. It's funny how quickly you can dehumanize an entire race, or a continent, or, in this case, about 66% of the planet, just by transforming them into numbers. So I did feel my own ideals being challenged, both in reading this essay, and in writing a response to it, but I also found them more solidified by the experience.

 When I wrote my response to Garret Hardin, the audience that I had in mind was
essentially myself. I was thinking about another person who was just like me reading this essay for the first time. When I first read it, I actually posted it on my Facebook wall because I was curious what other people thought of it. It seemed pretty airtight to me and I wanted to know where some holes could be poked. So when I wrote my response, I wrote it with myself and those people who read it in mind. I thought of myself wanting to someone to poke a few holes and I thought about where would be most satisfying to do it and I began at that point.

 I feel like my tone may have been a little sterner than it ought to be for this kind of paper,
but it honestly irritated me and I couldn't help dropping some sass in there. I tried for a very ethically-based response. The best way that I could see to counter a stone-cold fact-dropper, is through an appeal to ethical responsibility. I didn't feel like an appeal to emotion would stand up to such calm reason. Appeals to emotion rarely do stand up to reason; they usually end up looking manipulative or cheesy. In my opinion, though, social justice trumps all. You can sit here and throw numbers all day, but if I tell you that you have a duty to your fellow human that supercedes all logic, I think you'd be hard-pressed to find someone who'd disagree. They wouldn't do it publicly anyway.

Vinny Genovesi
English 1010 Night
10/17/14

Network Ethics: A Response to Garrett Hardin

As human beings, we share certain ethical responsibilities, both to ourselves and to our
fellow human. Most of us feel a natural need to defend, protect, and assist our brothers and
sisters in all corners of the globe. But where does our ethical responsibility to all humans around
the world end and the responsibility to be prudent with our local resources begin?

Garrett Hardin has made a case for defending the future of one's homeland over the
immediate needs of people who are currently alive in his article "Lifeboat Ethic: A Case Against
Helping the Poor," published in 1974 by Sussex Publishers, Inc.

Hardin warns that rather than being like a spaceship, which is mobile and under the care
and guidance of a single authority figure and can always collect more resources, Earth is more
like a lifeboat: limited in it's comforts and stockpiles. His analogy switches modes quickly,
though, to compare not Earth, but the richer countries on Earth to a lifeboat, with the people in
poorer countries compared to those who are still thrashing about in the water. He claims that
helping the people on the outside only serves to swamp our boat and drain our resources, or, at
the very least, rob us of our safety factor. He goes on to say that even if sharing our resources
were feasible, we'd be met with unchecked reproduction and disrespect for the commons we've
created. He imagines a world where some people give and some people take, with very little
overlap between the two and a certain amount of ingraditude from the takers. He gives the
example of a World Food Bank and compares it to a pasture that is privately owned versus one
that is commonly shared and says that a privately owned pasture will always be better kept than a common one. Hardin believes that teaching students about the dangers of sharing should be at
our core curriculum. I didn't make that up, that is actually in the article. In his final example of a
commons in action, Hardin attacks U.S. immigration policy. He begins on the defensive, stating
that anyone who calls in to question the policies we've adopted thus far is labeled a bigot and
then goes on to use several racially insensitive terms as examples of how the press acted not two
decades before his article was published. He claims that with a net inflow of roughly 600,000
immigrants per year, immigration accounts for 19 percent of our yearly population increase.

 While on the surface Hardin's argument seems to have a basis in sound reasoning and
while he certainly has a great deal of data at his disposal to back up his claims, he comes across
biased and xenophobic. He makes an interesting point during his essay that providing education
and technology to poorer countries might be a good solution, but he dismisses this epiphany and
veers from it rather quickly. His analogy of spaceship-versus-lifeboat is a clumsy one, but the
reader is expected not to notice this, and once a person has agreed to the initial metaphor, it's
easy to guide them further and further away from it until they're agreeing with things that they
normally wouldn't. Hardin is a man who has a great deal of interest in the big-picture
sociological impact of his theory, but little thought or care for the individual human side of
things.

 Let's start with what's good here. Our planet certainly does have a limited number of
resources. A sociological longview is a good thing if we're talking about humanity's future peace
and comfort. Allowing the Earth's resources to be drained hapazardly without regulation will
absolutely doom us all. Big business has made a practice of skirting regulation at the cost of
resource and it has cost us dearly. Hardin's point about the energy crisis showing us the limits of
what we have available to us stands, as that crisis was caused by peak oil, which was caused by too many people drawing from a finite pool.

 Hardin offers a large of amount of data to support his claims in an attempt to sway more
liberally-minded people. Facts and figures are hard to argue with, and Garret Hardin quickly and
expertly lays down a logical framework for his opinions. He presents the alarming statistic that
poorer nations are reproducing at nearly double the rate of rich ones and makes it sounds like
these rapidly-doubling rabbit-people are waiting at our gates, shaking the bars, always moments
from breaking through and spoiling all the pretty things that us rich white folk have worked so
hard to collect and protect. His perspective makes a lot assumptions and he expects us, the
readers, to agree with each one so that we'll agree with the next one. He has an practiced hand at
disguising his slippery slopes, so much so that I found myself nodding along on my first
read-through.

 The truth, though, is more complicated. His initial argument, that earth is a lifeboat and
not a spaceship, seems fairly sound on the surface, but I want to dig into that for a second. First
of all, this a bad metaphor. He gets you to agree with it by giving you a false choice and then sets
it up with his personal bias so that you make the decision he wants you to make. "Earth is not a
spaceship, that's silly. My only other choice is lifeboat and he makes it sound pretty plausible, so
sure, it's a lifeboat." From that point it's easy to get you to agree with the other characteristics of
a lifeboat. Then he immediately and subtly changes tacks so that now the reader is agreeing that
rich countries have a lifeboat and poor ones do not and that we need to protect the rich. It's very
clever if you ask me. The fact of the matter is, the best analogy for Earth, if we're talking about
it's human population, is that Earth is a computer and each human represent a small fraction of
it's processing power. If we think of the sum of human progress as being the result of collective
and cumulative human processing power, it seems that the most logical course of action would be to activate and network every node. We can do this by providing each "node" with a power
source (food) and information (education) and then networking each one via the Internet. Poor
people get fed and get a chance to stop being poor (not to mention, they'll stop rattling the
proverbial "gates"), and those of us who are more fortunate get better touch-screen phones.
Everybody wins. Hardin touches on this very briefly, but shies away before he gets a chance to
explore it. I don't typically like to invoke my own accomplishments, but I'd like to point out that
I was once a homeless alcoholic who lived on the streets and ate at the Cathedral D'Madeline for
lunch every day. Through hard work and aid from the state and AA I've managed to pull my own
life together and provide myself with shelter and an education. People don't want to be poor.
They don't want to struggle. If you give them a chance to get out, they will take it. Most times
they will be so happy for the opportunity, they will do whatever it takes to succeed.

 Moreover, our author has lost sight of what is actually important. Yes, we need a
sociological overview so that we don't kill ourselves as a people. But he wants to draw lines in
the sand and say that one part of the planet deserves more than others simply by virtue of their
birth. We're not a nation. Those lines are imaginary. We are human beings and we are inexorably
interconnected until we find a way off this rock. What happens to one of us, happens to all of us.
If things fall apart out there in the poorer parts of the world, believe me when I say that we're not
going to keep our temple gates up for very long. Those people we're sidelining have immediate,
pressing needs. Hardin would ignore and forgo those needs in the name of some imaginary
desendent who he's never met and who has not yet suffered. We have a responsibiltity to our
future, yes. But not at the cost of our present. Without our compassion and humanity, we simply
have no future. Our bodies are corporeal and will wither and die one day. It is our ideals that live.

It is then our ideals, not our bodies, that must be allowed to flourish and reproduce and spread.  To summarize, Hardin is a convincing writer but it's all rhetoric. His ideals are more
short-sighted and more harmful than he'd like to believe. They favor exclusion and
xenophobia-disguised-as-prudence over humanity and progress. His logical arguments are less
than logical and his facts and figures mean little when they're outdated, uncited, and very likely
cherry-picked. The article is written as though it were an appeal to logic, but in my opinion this
is a pathologically fear-motivated write-up and I believe that any alert person who isn't looking
to have their own biases confirmed will find it falls fairly short in it's goals