Hi everyone,
I have been struggling this week with the overarching questions of philosophy and epistemology AT THE SAME TIME I am learning to play a video game. That’s what I call balance! The academic and the obscure? Or perhaps the grand and the stupid? Whatever you want to call them, both have their positive and negative attributes, both intrique and frustrate, they cause me to delight as I learn something new intersperse with throwing up my hands in the frustration of “just not getting it.”
I’m convinced this is universal pay backs for some moment of mental idleness – as I have been assigned doctoral level classes covering the theories of education at the same time I am teaching philosophy and epistemology of human inquiry. The great bit is free books and being paid to learn something. The awful part is the uphill learning curve where every week I realize that if I had only known what I know now, I would have taught last week differently. UGH.
As for the computer game (FATE is the one I am playing) I see why they are addictive. Where else can you know the agonies of defeat and yet, by and large, come out ahead after every session? I wish my chart of the evolution of philosophy and education brought me the same thrill of satisfaction. That mostly leaves me feeling as though my head is just too thick to let new things in. I decided to write an analogy between learning this game and becoming a professional writer, but it could be an analogy for learning anything. I’ll give you a sneak preview of some of my experiences so far…..
I noticed that my new HP laptop came packaged with a series of games, all tied together in a console. With no particular time on my hands I nevertheless decided to investigate. A game called FATE caught my eye and I opened it up.
I chose a random name as my character. I also had a choice of my appearance (male) and my role in life. Do I want to play a page, a magician, an adventurer? No fool me, I decide to start at the low end as a page. I get a helpful companion (I choose the cat) and off I am sent into the town. Immediately it becomes clear that there is a town (safe and full of resources) and a dungeon (not safe and where I earn my keep). My ultimate quest (given me right at the start) will be to roust bad guys on dungeon level 44. Still my simple page self (ranked level 1) doesn’t have to worry about that yet, so I explore a little, pick up what seems like a simple quest, and off I go.
I am equipped with a club and so (quite naturally I feel) I start smashing everything I come across in the dungeon. This seems to have positive effect because my bag of gold in the lower left column grows in amount (I remain clueless as to why, but go on nonetheless). I have to comment that this is much the same as the strategy I use when I take on learning a new subject – I smash all the knowledge I can and hope to figure out as I go how it fits together.
I get pretty good at level one, and (three days later) after playing for about an hour, I lay down the $20 required to buy the game and start fresh. This time I choose myself as the character and go for a dog instead of the cat companion just to add variety. I enter the dungeon once again, and this time strategically smash everything (as opposed to what? Smashing everything without a strategy behind it). I have definitely improved, I know now to be on the look-out for bad guys and I efficiently leave them in puddles on the dungeon floor. I am also very good at finding weapons and gold – and efficient at maximum storage. Lastly I know how to watch my life force and to refuel as it gets low (although I don’t know how to keep my pet alive and worry when his life force gets low – fortunately it just as magically seems to refill). The first three levels of the dungeon have been conquered and the game is getting a bit repetitive. I leave musing about what I am supposed to do with these extra weapons, how I feed the fish to my dog in the heat of battle in order to transform him (a wonderous power hinted at but the specifics of which still make no sense), nor how or why I would want to change weapons, let alone cast spells, etc.
Going back to my chart, I have also mastered the types of philosophy (metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and aesthetics), have sorted out some of the main periods of growth and change (not surprising that the renaissance figured here) but am still frustrated by the links to what happened in educational idealism. Weren’t people learning and transforming even in the 1600’s?
My time in town (in safety) is spent organizing, catching up with those who owe me and sorting through what I want to keep with me as I go into the dungeon on my next quests. I know now to keep my pack open so that I can pick up weapons and gemstones as I find them. I make one mistake by selling a weapon with a gemstone in it (I find out later that I could have smashed it and saved the stone). Of course it is hard to make decisions when you have little or no understanding of the consequences you face. For instance are gemstones hard to come by? Should l keep them at all costs? Nevertheless I feel badly, as though I will regret later this hasty decision.
The same happens with teaching. When I haven’t taught a class before, I look ahead to see the material that is assigned for the next week and plot a course that I believe will help students navigate these waters. However, even though I have expertise in the general area, I don’t know these resources, and half way through the week I realize that things could have been much more efficiently handled another way.
Today I did something really stupid. In the heat of battle with green men with orange hair, I left clicked on my health potion instead of right clicking. As I was almost out of health (another reprehensible state of affairs I should have avoided) this mistake resulted in my death. While all is not lost (if they really killed you off you would stop playing the game) it cost me money and fame (ha! as if I had any fame). It’s bad enough making mistakes you don’t see coming, but dismal to do yourself in because of lack of focus or attention to details.
Alas that brings me back to philosophy and epistemology, “dismal to do yourself in because of lack of focus or attention to details. While not a graduate student, teaching these classes reminds me of the frustrations of the roles my students are in. Not only do they work full time jobs but they add on to their lives the headaches that we take on when we ask ourselves the bigger questions of life and try to make them meaningful to our everyday practice. For instance, is life something that exists outside of ourselves and therefore we can measure it and learn about IT (as though it has external truth to teach us)? Or is life something we create from the inside out, giving it meaning and having it reflect to us the meanings we give it?
Well I think you all know which one is true for me: strongly in the camp of those who see our internal selfhood and connection to universal energies creating our ideas about and therefore experiences of reality.
My potential for the rest of my day is to sort through those philosophical ideas again to find order between them and the ways in which people teach. I also want to spend a little more time in dungeon level 5; I have to figure out how to use the spells I have supposed learned before I try to finish the quests I have accepted on levels 6 and 7.
Better get back to it,
Love you all ,
Alana
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