Josh's Site

Amsterdam Adventure

2018-06-22T00:00:00+00:00

Hear this post narrated here.

Description

I took a summer trip to Dubai in the UAE, in part to celebrate my college graduation, in part to help some friends who live there to move homes. On the way, I explored the city of Amsterdam during a 6-hour layover. Here’s what happened on that adventure.

Credits

Once again, almost all music is from the Bakemonogatari OST by MONACA and by the genius Satoru Kosaki. It just fits so well, since it is literally music composed with the intent that it would be over-dubbed with narrative speech. I’ll probably use it for every story time. Music used in this recording, in order of appearance:

“In Motion+”, by FELT
“Sanpo”
“Hourousha”
“Ouma Ga Toki”
“Hoyoku”
“Iiwake”
“Classmate”

Text Notes

Story time! Let’s talk about my adventures of Day 0 of my post-graduation trip to Dubai.

They say beginnings are always exciting. I’d have to agree. This beginning started at 5pm on Tuesday May 15, when my plane took off from Atlanta bound for Amsterdam. Amsterdam is six hours ahead and an eight hour flight, so I landed in Amsterdam at the local time of 8am. I’m starting to get used to longer flights, so the length wasn’t a problem. But, if you do the math, such a setup basically skips the main part of the night. The time we were in flight, my body thinks it’s 5pm, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, midnight. Just early enough so that I had a hard time catching any kind of sleep. And then, right when my body thinks it’s time to go to bed, bam, we land at 8am in the Netherlands.

I had a six hour layover here before continuing onto Dubai, so I decided to head into the city and explore, an opportunity I had missed the last time I visited while transferring to and from Copenhagen.

After my Copenhagen experience, which I’ve recorded for your listening pleasure on my website, I was determined to do better at navigating my airport exit. And I did! Launched out of the terminal, got my visa stamped at a familiar booth, and went upstairs to the train platforms. I knew what a ticket kiosk was this time and how it worked. I knew how to press the English button to give me English buttons. I knew where I was going, Amsterdam Centraal. I knew I needed a return-trip single-trip ticket. I knew how to interpret the signs above the train platforms. I knew how to hop on the proper blue-and-yellow train.

I even knew how to get off at the right stop, even though there were no signs on the train! …never mind that there were no stops between the airport and Amsterdam Centraal. I got off the train at 8:10am. I had until 11:40, when I needed to head back. 3 and a half hours. Let the adventuring begin!

Amsterdam Centraal is aptly named, for it lies in the very center of the city, within walking distance of most things. For that reason, if you’re planning a day trip, I’d recommend nothing more than a single train ticket to get to Centraal and a pair of legs. You can easily get to the canal tours, the red light district, the scenic Dam square, and the giant library, all of which we’ll talk about.

My first view of the city

As for me, I shot out of the Amsterdam Centraal station, ready to take in the city for the first time. And three things immediately struck me, one negative, one positive, and one neutral. Negatively, everyone looked and smelled like they had been baking a little too long, if you know what I mean. They looked like they’d been cutting the grass, if you know what I’m saying. They smelled like they — look, one of Amsterdam’s “features” is the legalization of that sweet Mary Jane. And as far as my nose was concerned, everyone was participating. By their faces, most people looked like they had been smoked today, smoked before, or really wanted to try. Even if it wasn’t marijuana, there were cigarettes everywhere, more than in Copenhagen.

And that’s the second, positive thing. I experienced a wash of sensations I hadn’t experience since I left Copenhagen. Bikes, everywhere. The smell of quality cigarette smoke. The smell of a European ocean breeze… which you honestly just have to smell yourself and you’ll know what I’m talking about. Hole in the wall stores lining modern and traditional buildings. Preserved nature saved in small chunks around the city: canals, tree groves, pigeons, all slotted between the architecture. Teenagers and college age students just standing around laughing like they aren’t worried about anything in life. And fun fact: they aren’t. Felt good to “be back”.

I love cities that run on bikes

And lastly, the neutral thing. I had to pee. I looked around the busy square with criss-crossing traffic: cars, bikes, pedestrians, and street cars all in surprising disarray. Not many traffic signals or well-painted indicators. Even though it looked like Copehnagen, it honestly felt more like Santo Domingo. Anyway, there were not toilets to be seen, so I retreated back into the train station and found the restrooms. Except, they were blocked! With turnstiles! That only accepted change, in euros! One dollar to use the bathroom! That wasn’t gonna happen, and I didn’t have coins either. Meh, I guess I didn’t have to go that bad. So I decided to hold it and begin my wandering, but I’d keep my eyes peeled for a bathroom. Good plan! HEH HEH

There are water canals running all around the city. I really wanted to do a 1-hour canal tour to see the city, and those were really close to me. However, at 9am on a Wednesday, there were no tourists lined up. In fact, there was no one but the tour guides there, and I was told they wouldn’t shove off till they had seats filled. So I eventually gave up on that idea. Besides, the boats certainly didn’t have toilets and sitting near the water wasn’t helping.

The other thing on my Amsterdam bucket list was to visit the OBA, the self-proclaimed biggest library in central Europe. But they didn’t open till 10am, so I did what I do best. Picked a spot on the GPS, found which direction to walk, turned off the GPS, and started walking. And this time, I shamelessly decided to check out the red light district.

It’s so popular and everyone talks about it. Amsterdam’s red light district. Oooh, so interesting. Having walked it now, I gotta admit. It wasn’t thaaat interesting. At least not at 9:10am. Just a single long strip of street, buildings on both sides separated by a canal and bridges spanning the wet median. Only a few people walking through, one guy walking his dog. Though I’m sure it becomes much more populated in the later hours.

In case you’re not familiar, red light district just means it’s the place for edgy, border-line illegal stuff. Which in this case meant shops of a sexual nature and shops of a green, hazy, druggy nature. I won’t go into any more detail than that, honestly. If you value your holiness, and you should, then obey what that kids song says and be careful little legs where you walk and little eyes what you see. I just don’t think there’s any reason to go. It looks the same as all the other streets; it’s just that the content of what’s being sold is evil. If you want my recommendation, take a pass on Amsterdam’s red light district. There are nicer things to see in this city.

…there was a place called the Bake Shop, selling bake in baked goods, which I thought was pretty funny.

There, you’ve seen the Red Light District. What’s next?

The Bake Shop

Next stop was Dam Square, which is just an open plaza surrounded by pretty buildings. Namely, the Royal Palace, the New Church, and the Bijenkorf department store. It was pretty, I guess. None of them were open for me to step inside. Too early in the morning still. There weren’t even that many people around. Maybe I’m biased or making bad comparisons, but I couldn’t help but think that the historic square in Copenhagen was much nicer. Dam Square did feature a number of plump pigeons that didn’t take anything from nobody. Seriously, I’ve never seen more bold pigeons before. There was also a Starbucks nearby. And my brain running on 3 hours of restless airplane sleep and feeling like it’s 1am, realized that if I go to Starbucks, I can get… a bathroom visit! So I went in there! And confidently walked right past the baristas to the bathroom! And the bathrooms… were locked! Nooooo! Each had a security pad, the password which was given to you on your Starbucks receipt. Well, I wasn’t going to pay for overpriced coffee I didn’t want to drink (I didn’t feel like it, my body said it was 1am, remember). So, I walked right back out, ignoring the confused looks of the baristas. I pretended to fiddle with my phone as I walked past, to make it look like I knew what I was doing. Whatever. I’ll just keep holding it. I was starting to get a little antsy at this point though.

Ok, from here, the library was just over a half mile away and would open in 10 minutes. Perfect. So, I strolled over, passing more totally fashionable and chill, happy students, college-age by the looks of them. I seriously believe that we American college students could learn something from the Scandinavian/Amsterdam-ian attitude… I’ll make a recording about that one day. Anyway, I got there about 4 minutes early, but there was another Starbucks outside. So I went in, and they had the same bathroom situation. I was at the point where I was okay if I was walking, but seriously in danger of doing something I’d regret if I was standing still.

I made a guess that the library would have bathrooms that wouldn’t cost money. But if that turned out to be wrong, I was gonna have to go out and buy something from that Starbucks outside. Just great. There was a small crowd, 15 or so folks, standing at the front entrance of the very tall library. I wanted to stand with them for the four minutes before it opened, but I literally couldn’t stand still, too much pressure. So I walked around the building. Straight up, just walked all the way around. Which, silly as it was, actually allowed me to see some things and think about things, maybe the most important things. I’ll come back to this at the end.

Anyway, the doors were just opening when I got back to the front entrance. And lo and behold, there were the bathrooms just to the left of the entrance. And there weren’t even any doors blocking my path to the urinals. At the time, it seemed like the bathrooms were just beckoning me to enter, but looking back, it was pretty strange that the bathrooms didn’t have doors. You could just stand in the hallway and look in to either bathroom and see the men’s urinals and the women’s sinks.

Anyway, two missions accomplished. Found the library and found a bathroom. I was relieved.

This was a tall library. Not very wide, but seven stories tall. Six of them had books and the seventh was a cafe. Most of the books were in Dutch, so I didn’t have much of a chance (or a reason) to look through them. It was a nice environment though. There was lots of open desk space, and most of the bookshelves were illuminated with lights running vertically along the shelves. It was like an IKEA that you were supposed to stay at and study or read in.

Truly a tall library

I still had over an hour before I needed to return to the train station and the airport, and I didn’t have anything else I particularly wanted to see (or smell) in Amsterdam. So, I grabbed a desk at the sixth floor and typed this script. You can see a meta picture of me writing it on my website. It’s now 11:03am, so I’ll maybe find a place to grab a quick bite to eat and then head back to the airport.

Here is me, breaking meta to tell you in second person to look at this meta picture as referenced in a meta-sense in the audio.

That was my Amsterdam adventure! Who would have known that trying to find a bathroom would be the most exciting part of adventuring through this city. Having explored Berlin in a similar fashion with my buddy Nikolaj from Copenhagen, I must say that I am strongly convinced that traveling with someone else is infinitely superior to traveling alone. Dull moments become more interesting, and you both have insights about the things you see that will help the other to enjoy their time more. Definitely grab a friend when you travel if you can.

And, about the thinking I did while desperately circling the library. While walking, I got to peek into an alley window to see a small office like that of a start-up. There was one fellow inside, well into his 20s, slouching in his chair nibbling on some brunch and browsing his smart phone. And it washed over me in that moment, as it so often does, that even though I was adventuring here, other people live here, and work here, and do daily life here, and all probably without knowing the God that I so desperately want to see glorified and delighted in. These people grow up here and have jobs here. They pack their lunch and go back to their families. They have hobbies. They know where the free bathrooms are. Honestly, I love when I have opportunities to step back and be reminded Seeing people candidly, like the guy in the office or the two men talking about sailboats outside one of the Starbucks, or the students sitting around me in this library, studying for final exams. I love it because it reignites my heart to reach out to others. I felt it in Copenhagen too. A bunch of people that I got to know and came to love. Strangers that spoke an unfamiliar language in a familiar sounding way. Growing up in a place radically different from my own, with lives filled with blessings and never accurately knowing or acknowledging the Giver of those blessings. In my desire to see God glorified and cherished in my own life and the lives of others, these are the moments that make me stop and question whether this is what it’s like when people say they feel “called” to the missions field. At the very least, it makes me stop and pray for the people of this city, that Jesus’s light and life would be brought to them and would catch fire and ignite a passion for worship.

Strange to end so abruptly, but I’m glad it’s on what mattered to me at the time. On my website, you can see photos of some of the things I’ve talked about here. I won’t be making one of these for Dubai itself — too much happened and it would take far too long. Come talk to me sometime though, I’d be happy to tell all my stories. Until then, thanks for listening.

My Review of "Ask More"

2018-04-07T00:00:00+00:00

Hear this post narrated here.

Description

A torrential storm catches you on your way to meet me at the local coffee house. Luckily, I’ve just finished reading Frank Sesno’s 2017 book Ask More, and I can tell you about it to help fill the long, rainy afternoon.

I’ll tell you about what the book is about, and I can try to help you decide whether it’s worth your time.

Credits

Mixed bag of artists this time around. I’m excited that I finally have a place to regularly use and share “Cut My Hair”. Don’t do drugs, kids.

Songs in order of appearance:

“Game Over” by Bknapp
“Rainy Streets” by DOMINANT
“Outro (Love Makes Problems Disappear)” by Mounika.
“Large Americano” by .anxious.
“Cut My Hair (feat. Cavetown)” by Mounika.

Text Notes

More specifically, the full title is, “Ask More: The power of questions to open doors, uncover solutions, and spark change.” By Frank Sesno. Sesno is a former CNN correspondent who has interviewed, that is, asked questions of, many highly important people in the last few decades, so he knows his questions.

My goal with this review is to give you an idea of what the book is about, and to let you know if this is a book that is worth reading for you.

First, what’s between the covers? The content is organized in a very straightforward way, with Sesno providing examples for 11 different question types:

Diagnostic, questions that help to figure out what the problem is. What is the root cause of this dead battery?
Strategic, questions that explore the entire picture and plan for a big decision. What are the consequences of taking this job offer?
Empathetic, getting to the feelings and emotions of another. How does that make you feel?
Bridging, questions that build rapport and connect you to wary, distant, or hostile people. He makes you furious?
Confrontational, questions that accuse or call someone out. Were you or were you not eating carbs after 8pm last night?
Creativity, questions that encourage originality, dreaming, and risk-taking. Imagine it’s the end of the project, not the beginning. What does it look like?
Missional, questions that invite others to a shared purpose or common goal. How can we help stop cancer in youth?
Scientific, questions that test reality using data, experimentation, and fact. What are ways I can test to see if this car is worth purchasing?
Interview, questions that take place in an interview. These questions peer into the future and determine whether a job match and culture match can be found. What do your opponents say about you?
Entertaining, questions that you can use as a host spice up the dinner conversation. If you could go anywhere in the world just for tonight to have dinner, where would you go? What would you eat?
Legacy, questions that ask about what you’ve done with life. What’s one story you would like me to tell my grandchildren about you?

Each question type gets its own chapter, and each chapter contains these three primary ingredients.

Example questions that correspond to each type. No surprise there, but it was a pleasant surprise to see all the different ways a certain domain can be attacked with questions. For example, diagnostic questions are not just about asking “What is the problem?” but also “How do we know? What are we not seeing? What can we do?”
Stories of how the question type has been used by others. It was interesting to get to hear the experiences of a minister who asks legacy questions to patients on their death beds, and many other stories.
My favorite part, ways to listen once the question has been asked. When the answers start coming, what do we listen for? How do we follow up? This aspect is addressed for each type.

Some chapters contain more or less of these elements, as appropriate for the topic. For example, much more time is given to exploring how to listen when asking empathetic questions.

So that’s what you’re getting. I should also add what you’re NOT getting. You’re not getting these three ingredients in some well structured order. There’s no list of bulleted questions followed by story time, followed by a section on how to listen. No, they’re all mixed in with each other, switching from one to another from sentence to sentence. This can make a given chapter feel a little disorganized, despite a well-organized book as a whole.

Ok, based on that, for whom is this book worth reading, or not worth reading? I’ll say right of the bat that the content of the book is useful for just about everyone. Maybe every single sentence or chapter won’t pertain to you. But, due to the huge scope of the book, covering many aspects of questioning, you’re guaranteed to find something to take home with you. And there’s a little more to it than that, so let’s get into some specific recommendations and warnings.

If you’re someone who likes to mark up your books, you’ll have fun with this one. Due to the scattered nature of each chapter, it’s a really good book to take a pen to. Because there’s a lot to hit and a lot to skip, it’ll be a rewarding highlighting experience for you. Your book will look very involved at the end, a highlight here, a highlight there. I always find that super satisfying. I’d even say it’s important to mark this book up. There is a firehose of content to drink from, some of which you’ll want to come back to, and some of which is less important. You may not be planning to interview to fill a position now, but you might in the next 20 years, and then you’ll be glad you are able to quickly find those questions and notes on how to listen to interviewees.

f you’re someone who enjoys stories about discovery and learning, you’ll enjoy these pages filled with stories of great questioners. The Mexican reporter who asked Confrontational questions of Donald Trump. The government interrogator who uses bridging questions to get a confession from a tight-lipped criminal. It’s fun stuff, though you gotta remember that it’s mixed in with example questions and principles.

That said, f you really need organized structure as you read, with clear direction and movement from point A to point B, you may not enjoy reading this one as much. But fear not! One of my favorite things about Ask More is that a final chapter of review is included. Each question type gets a couple pages or more, each covered with a shotgun blast of example questions, brief reminders to important stories, and ways to listen. It’s incredibly useful to remind yourself at the end of where you’ve been and what you’ve seen. It’s so useful in fact, that I daresay it might make the rest of the book obsolete. There’s no deep science to asking questions, and no such science is explored in the book’s chapters. The only thing the chapters give that the review page doesn’t is more background info on each question type, and detailed stories of how the questions are used. But even the stories aren’t anything surprising. In the Mission Questions chapter, a doctor fighting disease uses mission questions to rally others to the cause. In the Entertainment Questions chapter, an Italian-American couple hosts the author and some other friends for dinner and ask wonderful Entertainment questions. Except, all the questions that they ask are in one-sentence form in the review chapter.

So, the review chapter is where it’s at. I’d happily recommend that one chapter to anyone who happens to get their hands on this book, even if the idea of disorganized chapters kind of puts you off, as it does me. It’s a great resource to whip out when you know you’ll be engaging in a certain type of questioning soon, or just to review so that you have more questions in your day-to-day arsenal.

In short, this book has something for everyone. The only question is, are you someone for whom diving into its pages will be a fulfilling and enjoyable experience? Or are you someone who will get as much or more from the final review chapter as from the rest of the book? Only you can answer that.

And that’s it! A pretty straightforward review for a pretty straightforward book. And now I want to ask of you, listener. How did I do in answering my goals of explaining what the book is about and who it’s for? Is there anything I should add for future reviews? I plan to do these as often as I complete books now, so I’m interested in making them as valuable and worth your time as possible. You can reach out to me IRL or visit my website, joshuakoh.me/contact. I look forward to hearing from you. Thanks for listening!

Is Fortnite's Guided Missile Good for Game Health?

2018-04-03T00:00:00+00:00

Hear this post narrated here.

Description

The Guided Missile was recently added to Fortnite Battle Royale and has been making a name for itself. My thoughts are that, of all the weapons that could have been added to the game, the Guided Missile is the best option. Listen to find out why.

Fortnite is a free-to-play Battle Royale game where 100 players fight it out in an arena until one man remains. Think Hunger Games with less hunger and more disco grenades.

This is more the style that I hope to fall into with the Koh-reative project. Less lecturing and more bite-sized though blurbs to get people thinking. As always, I welcome feedback on what you like and don’t like about each format.

Credits

Music by Levi Doron, the 80’s video game remix man.

“Fortnite - REMIX” (listen here!)

Text Notes

More specifically, I just had a few thoughts on how I think this weapon effectively and positively impacts Battle Royale.

For game designers of a game that is regularly receiving updates, Fortnite certainly being among them, one of their intents is always to recognize bad play patterns and to eradicate them. In the case of Fortnite, an hypothetical example of a bad play pattern would be if it turned out that hiding in a bush was a super effective strategy What if the bush was so good at camouflage that players could hide in the storm’s circle in their bush for the whole game, without being detected, until 2 people were left. And then, since they could always get the surprise first shot, they would win the final fight and thus the round. That does not encourage what Fortnite Battle Royale should be about as a game, and so the developers would surely take steps to make the bush camouflage and hiding to be less effective options.

So, what was the state of the game right before the Guided Missile was added? I don’t see streamers doing this as much, but if you ever made it alive into the top 5 yourself, you probably saw a lot of sniper tower building from high hills, hiding, or both. Sniper tower players would scope out hiding players or trade shots back and forth, until the storm circle forced players to rush each other and engage.

I don’t have any proof that the Epic Games devs think so, but I think that this is a bad play pattern for Fortnite. Ideally, as the number of players dwindles, the action continues to ramp up. From the start of the game, players transition from hunting+gathering, to stalking and multiple firefights, to the final epic showdown in the small storm circle.

Except, the final showdown isn’t so epic when there’s a five minute downtime period where we all just build up into our towers or hide behind trees, taking the infrequent potshot at other players, waiting for the circle to close more. I’m not saying that such a playstyle is completely bad. It has it’s place, but it’s not the spirit of Battle Royale mode. I know that because they made an alternate game mode to highlight this hide and snipe playstyle, the Sniper Showdown mode.

A more ideal play pattern would be to see players charging each other, using rifles at longer ranges and shotguns at shorter ranges, brawling it out in one epic final fight. How would you do that? How do you get players to stop camping and start finding each other AND charging each other?

Add a Guided Missile.

The Guided Missile was added in Patch 3.4 on March 28, 2018. It’s a rocket launcher that allows you to take control of the rocket you fire, though your player must stand still while you fire. It has tight enough controls that navigating it around structures or in 180 degree turns is not really a problem. Direct hits do 100 damage to players.

This addition forces the ideal play pattern we just described. I had a personal experience in this. In one of my first games on the day of the patch, there were six players remaining. As I had always done before, I found the tallest unoccupied hill within the circle and towered up with my metal. Then I started peeking over and looking for movement through my scope.

And then I heard the sound of the missile. It was then that I realized that the existence of the Guided Missile instantly obliterated the “tower up and snipe” strategy, which was previously the most ideal late game strategy according to the meta. By towering up, you were telling the player with the Guided Missile, “Hey, I’m right here in a spot that’s easy to guide a missile into from above. Shoot me!” For the record, I died to the Guided Missile that game.

The missile pilot can also use the rocket as reconnaissance, scouting out and finding those players that are hiding instead of sniping. This forces the hiding players to not just buckle down until 2 remain, but instead to get up and look.

Look, because the information about player location is shared mutually. As observant players shoot Guided Missiles out of the air, they are able to see where the missile is coming from, thanks to the long smoke trail. And since constantly shooting down missiles that will otherwise kill you sucks, you’re highly incentivized to charge the missile pilot, who needs to stop firing missiles soon, lest he die while standing still and in missile vision. This is the epic fight that we envisioned. The missile pilot player has fun flying the rocket, while the other players get an adrenaline rush from having to shoot down the rockets. Then, the gameplay ramps up further as all the other players charge the missile pilots.

Gone is the bad play pattern of quiet towering up and sniper battling in the finale. Gone is bad play pattern of the highly successful passive players who sit back waiting for the other players to fight it out before making a comeback. This is the way that the Guided Missile effectively and positively impacts Battle Royale.

Further, does this mean I think the Guided Missile is perfect? Nah. Weapons will often be pushed on release so that players can have fun using them, but I don’t doubt that Epic will dial the Missile back soon. For all these good things its brought, there are plenty of games where Missile Pilots win from just non-stop bombing the other players and dealing 100 damage or more with each impact, and that doesn’t seem very healthy either. My gut feel change would be to nerf the missile projectile health from 100 to 50.

As the game gains ever more popularity and players continue to build a meta, Fortnite will always be battling the game design problem of how to remove bad play patterns, and how to make the finale feel like a finale. But given the state of the game right before the Guided Missile addition, I think the weapon has done a great job of allowing players to experience more novel gameplay in more healthy ways, at least in the short term.

Those are my thoughts for now. This is more the style that I want to fall into with the Koh-reative project. Less lecturing, more chatting about thoughts. Let me know what you think. Talk to you later.

How Do Good Students Harness the Power of Questions?

2018-03-28T00:00:00+00:00

Description

When I was in high school, I had a youth pastor who loved to challenge us students by asking good, tough questions. By studying under him constantly, I picked up on a a mindset that maximizes the value I am able to extract from a teacher’s questions, meaning I learn deeper and pick up on things more quickly. I hope it can help you too.

Text Notes

Wow, even after four recordings, my ideas for the format and look-feel of this project have changed so much. I thought about re-recording the first part of this two part Socratic Method talk, but I think it’s probably okay. This is the one I’m more excited to talk about anyway.

The point of this short discussion is to suggest to you a mindset that you can use to get more out of being a student, which is a skill that all of us should constantly be honing, because we’ll be learning for the rest of our lives.

I don’t in any way mean to say that this is the only way to approach learning. Rather, this is just something I’ve found helps me grasp concepts more quickly and more deeply. In past years, I’ve often been confronted by fellow students about how quickly and easily I seem to pick things up. If you know my academic life, maybe you’ve asked the question too. I’m not saying that this technique is the secret to my success or anyone else’s, but it is something I do regularly and it does help. So let’s jump into it.

Let me tell you the story of when I was sitting in class and my professor asked this really difficult either-or question. The professor looked out in expectation, waiting for a student to respond. All the students kinda looked at each other or looked down, but no one gave an answer. “OK,” the professor said. “Then we’ll put it to the vote. Everyone things it’s option A, raise your hand. Okay, now all for option B.” I looked around, and some students had silently voted with their hands, but more than half the students had abstained from voting altogether. The end.

Maybe you can relate? This happens regularly enough, despite the instructor’s best efforts. My best teachers regularly ask questions that are difficult, provide a few well-defined answer choices, and force me to commit to an answer. And by the way, if this sounds familiar, I talked about the teacher mindset for asking good questions in my very first recording, so check that out if you’d like. The link is on my website blog.joshuakoh.me and will also be in the show notes for this episode.

When my teachers ask me one of those good questions, my most NATURAL inner monologue is something like, “Hm, that seems like a tough 50-50. Or maybe it’s both options? I’m not sure. I don’t want to be the one to speak up and be wrong though.” And apparently, everyone else is thinking the same thing, be cause everyone just sits and stares at the instructor in silence. Or maybe my most natural inner monologue isn’t even that complicated. Sometimes I’m thinking about something completely different to the question or about nothing at all in particular. I’m just waiting it out, for someone else to guess or for the teacher to give the right answer. And my hypothesis that one of these two mindsets held by many of the 100% of students sitting silently while the teacher waits for an answer.

And here’s where I think an opportunity is being missed. There is something better to be actively thinking about that will give a super boost to your ability to learn deep and learn fast.

And that thing is, you must come up with an answer, and you must commit to it. If the teacher is going to provide a good question, then you must respond by selecting a good answer, or at least the best answer you can. Think hard about why one choice might make more sense than the other, given what you’ve just been learning about. You should be able to have some rational reason for coming up with your answer, beyond random guessing or that it hasn’t been Option C in a long time.

And then actively commit to that answer. Speak up and give your best answer to the teacher. Raise your hand when its time to vote and pick just one option. You must come up with an answer, and you must commit to it.

Ok, now the principle is out there, I’ll color in the nuances in a question and answer format.

Question, what if I’m wrong? Answer: Being wrong is okay. Let me define the difference between getting something wrong and failing when it comes to learning. I’m going to say that being “wrong” means you provide the incorrect answer to a question. But “failing” means that you were unable to achieve your goal in the learning session, which should be to learn as much as possible. If that’s not happening, you’re failing in your role, your goal, your duty as a student. Being wrong and failing are two completely different things. Being wrong is okay, failing is the fatal state we’re trying to avoid.

The key to all this is that learning has to be the goal for you personally if this is gonna work. Learning has to have been the goal the whole time. Ask yourself, “What do I really want by sitting in this educational environment?” If you really don’t want to be there, or have been tuned out and in a text conversation instead, or if you’ve been half-asleep the whole time, then this isn’t going to help you. If this is you, you have a different issue related to the definition of your role as a student that needs resolving first.

But some alternate goals can be sneaky but just as damaging. In the face of a tricky question, we all would naturally say, “I don’t want to be the one to speak up and be wrong in front of everyone.” But this reveals something about what you really want by sitting in this educational environment. One of your motivating goals is to appear smart! If instead your goal was to learn and get better, then the possibility of being wrong won’t hinder your willingness to get humble and dig in. The worst outcome would be that you don’t dig in, and then you don’t learn as much. That’s the failure state.

And bear with me a second, I probably stepped on a few toes or emotions by saying that looking bad shouldn’t matter to you, and that’s not my conclusion. I’ll re-address that in a second.

On the other hand, being wrong can actually amplify learning. Remember where you actually had some rationale for why you chose your answer? Now that you’ve been exposed as being wrong, you get to flesh out assumptions that you previously made that in fact aren’t correct. You get to identify where the gaps in your understanding are, which helps point you to good questions to ask back to the teacher, and helps you to identify where you need to study more on your own. If you hadn’t committed to an answer and if you hadn’t been wrong, it is very possible and, and in my experience, common, to hear the teacher eventually give in and provide an answer when no one responds, and the student walks away with their very wrong assumptions never being challenged, and their very real gaps in knowledge never being identified.

Question, what if I’m consistently wrong? Won’t that affect other people’s perception of me? Answer: No, not as much as you might think. I’m not going to say that if your goal is learning, then you should completely ignore how others perceive you when you’re wrong all the time. That would an unnatural and not very human mindset. But think back to the last time one of your classmates answered incorrectly. Or, if nothing comes to mind, be on the lookout next time you’re in an educational setting. When they get something wrong, do you think, “Wow, what a doofus who just can’t shut up about how wrong he is?” No, your mental thought, if you have any at all, is either, “I disagree with that person because I have a different rationale that led me to a different answer,” OR “Hm, I agree with that person because my line of thinking led me to the same answer, so I wonder where we both went wrong?” You being wrong really doesn’t color the opinion of your classmates the way you might feel it does.

And what about the teacher? Well, what do you think the teacher prefers, to ask a question and receive no answer from anyone? Or to receive an answer from a student that’s incorrect? Hey, now’s a chance for you, the listener, to practice this principle. Commit to an answer, which is it? It’s the second, they’d so much rather hear a wrong answer than no answer. With a wrong answer, they can challenge the student’s potentially-flawed assumptions and help guide their thinking away from a flawed line of thinking to a more accurate one. And pay attention, the teacher is not helping just any student to improve by directly speaking into the student’s line of thinking. The teacher is speaking directly into YOUR line of thinking and helping YOU identify your potentially-flawed assumptions and guiding YOUR thinking to be more accurate, because you’re the person that spoke up. That sure sounds like a lot of learning, doesn’t it? And you miss out on all of it if you don’t speak up.

Lastly, being wrong repeatedly gives the teacher more opportunities to interact with you directly, which only strengthens your relationship with the student. Any student committed to learning would rather have a more connected relationship with their teacher than a distant one. The more you get to interface with the teacher directly, the more rapport you build with them, and this is true regardless of whether the way you’re interfacing with them is by providing right answers or wrong ones.

These are the benefits of interacting directly with the teacher. I have a vision where teachers teach and students listen, and then both naturally and comfortably slide into a question-and-answer dialog like it’s a conversation, back and forth. Doesn’t that sound nice?

Question, what if I try but I can’t come up with an answer? Answer: That’s okay! That’s the flip-side of this idea. By thinking deeply about a question, you draw on your knowledge and mental resources. If, doing so, you find that you don’t have the resources to reason out a good answer, then we’ve reached success, the opposite of failure! We’ve learned something! We’ve learned that there’s something we don’t know. And you know what, identifying these gaps in your wall of knowledge and filling them is just as important as laying new bricks. With this newfound learning, you can take down a note to look up something later, like “I couldn’t answer a question about how I would defend my faith in some area. I need to look up some Scripture and maybe look into some books.” Or raise your hand and ask your teacher to fill that gap for you, earning you all the benefits interacting with your teacher. Or best of all, do both!

Question, I’m supposed to come up with and voice an answer, but what if I’m too shy or it’s the wrong situation? Answer: That’s fair, there are situations where speaking up is just not an appealing option. I’ve been asked a question along with the rest of the audience by a panelist speaker in a big conference venue. And I’ve been told to not answer the next question because I attempted to answer the last three. Depending on the context, you may not be able to speak up. And that’s a little unfortunately, because without speaking up, you won’t reap the benefits of dialoging with and building a relationship with the teacher or getting direct feedback on your ideas. But the next best thing is choosing to actively decide on an answer in silence. Then, when another student speaks up or the teacher provides an answer, you can compare your line of thinking to the voiced one. This will help you discover perspectives you didn’t consider, or it will affirm that your line of thinking is consistent with others.

Question, what if my teacher doesn’t ask the good kind of questions where I can commit to an answer? Answer: Instructors need to create an environment where giving a wrong answer is not punished, and communicate that environment to the students. One way I love to see this happen is when the teacher asks a good Socratic question and then says to any student that responds, “How did you get to that answer?” This makes transparent to everyone the line of thinking that resulted in the conclusion being voiced, and it allows the teacher to identify and correct a faulty premise without calling the student as a person wrong. This ends up feeling way better for everyone, since the teacher puts himself on the same side as the students. When that doesn’t happen though, well, I’m not sure. This technique doesn’t really work unless the teacher is at least asking good questions, and hopefully responding well to answers. I’ve yet to figure out how to influence a classroom where that isn’t happening, but let me know if you’ve seen something. Maybe link them to the Socratic Method teacher recording?

So, to wrap up these two recordings. You’ve heard how a Socratic teacher thinks: they want to give you the intuition to think about the problem the same way that they do. You’ve heard what the teacher wants from the student, a committed, selected answer made from a few choices and with intentional decision-making. And you’ve heard one way to maximize the value you can make for yourself as a student, but fulfilling that ask and being the one who picks and commits.

Altogether, these principles give rise to the penultimate place to be as a student, the place that I am personally always working towards in any learning setting. It’s where you can, on your own time, ask yourself the questions that the teacher should be asking. When you learn something new and can recognize a gap in your own understanding, and then ask a question about that gap and filter that gap down to just the realistic options, and then be able to commit to one of those options as making rational sense, man, that’s critical thinking and self-learning at its best. And if you can form the question but don’t know the answer, those are the best questions to ask your teacher.

Finally, let’s practice. Here’s two questions for you. Think back on the key principles in the Socratic Method for the teacher recording and this one. They were:

The point of the Socratic method, to pass problem solving intuition to the student
Next, what makes a good Socratic question, that is, they force the student to commit, they’re centered on a core truth, and they make the student dig deeper.
Lastly, the student mindset, which includes reasoning out the best answer to a question using the resources you have, and either identifying that you don’t have enough resources, in which case you have a good question to ask the teacher out loud, or committing to and voicing your answer, or at least critically comparing your answer with a given answer.

Of these principles, which one are you the most qualified in, do the best? And second, which one do you need to work on the most?

Think about it. Let me know if you want, I’d love to hear. Thanks for listening!

My First 24 Hours in Copenhagen

2018-03-22T00:00:00+00:00

Hear this post narrated here.

Description

In the spring of 2016, I studied abroad as an exchange student in Copenhagen, Denmark, a land full of bicycles and happy people. I had many adventures there, but in this recording, I’ll just talk about the amazing things that happened on my very first day.

The picture above is two views of the apartment where I satayed. You can see the river on the left, and the entranceway columns on the right.

I’m particularly proud of how this one turned out from a production standpoint. The music, sound effects, and timing are all really fun, so I hope you enjoy!!

Credits

Except for the first song, all music is from the Bakemonogatari OST by MONACA and by the genius Satoru Kosaki. Music used in this recording, in order of appearance:

“Way Back (feat. Cozi Zuehlsdorff)” by Vicetone
“Sanpo”
“Hourousha”
“Sappuukei”
“Shianchuu”

Text Notes

Author’s note: I had a ton of fun producing the audio version of this post, and I think it turned out great. I hope you give the audio a shot!

It’s story time, and I’m gonna do it over the OST to Bakemonogatari because I can!

It’s January 2016, which makes me just over 19 years old. I don’t remember my plane ride from Atlanta to Copenhagen being anything but uneventful, even considering the 1 hour transfer window in Amsterdam and the fact that I was battling a nasal infection. I touched down in the really wonderful Copenhagen airport, with it’s really aesthetic little shops and wood paneled floors and big windows, though it was completely foreign to me at the time.

My goal was to get from here to the apartment where I’d be living, and I had come prepared, kinda. There wasn’t any accessible wifi at the airport, and I didn’t have cell phone with a European SIM card, so I had no way to contact the outside world. Not like there was anyone waiting for me anyway. To help me not lose my way (reference?), I had printed off some a Google map with the route, which was now in my hand. Now I had to execute my three step process. Step 1, get my bags and find my way out of the airport to the trains. Step 2, take the right train and get off at the right stop. Step 3, walk to the right building. Simple enough.

Ok step 1. While waiting for my bags at the carousel, I realized that I had no idea what was required to ride the train. I’d probably need a ticket, but where do I get one of those? To be honest, I don’t remember what drew me to the little ticket kiosk at the end of the baggage claim. Does the sign over the machine say “Tickets” in English? I can’t remember. I know it says “Billetter” in Danish, because you see that white text on a maroon background at every metro and train stop.

Copenhagen transportation works on a zone system. The city is divided into zones. The more zones you pass through on your trip, the more you pay. And, for visitors, you buy a ticket declaring the number of zones you want to travel before you begin your ride. Given my prior experience as a traveler… I had never seen this system before, and I unconfidently way overpaid out of fear of not knowing how far I would need to go. Turns out, I would be traveling less than 2 zones, the minimum payment required.

So, with a ticket for 6 zones or so in pocket, one suitcase in each hand, and a duffel bag on my back, I followed the signs into the main hub of the airport. The big windows revealed that it was grey and cloudy, and 1pm afternoon in the local time. There were not many people by the ticketing counter or kiosks in the large space, much fewer than I would come to see in future visits. And ah, there was the sign for the trains, which conveniently stopped at a station underneath the airport. Step 1 done.

Oh wait, there are actually four signs for trains. Why are there four train platforms? Let’s see, one goes northwest, one goes east, and, oh wait, the other two are just alternate ways to get down to the train platform. So, in pursuit of step 2, to take the right train and get off at the right stop, I headed to the platform for the train going east. The escalator going down to the underground level wasn’t stepped. It was a smooth slant, which was cool and all, except that both my suitcases were wheeled. Let’s say it was an awkward effort keeping the heavy things from rolling away from me as we descended.

The platform was domed with stone and the airport above. Two lines of tracks lay in the middle, presumably going one way or the other. Before I could step out towards the track, I had to pass two employees in uniform, conversing in what I assumed at the time to be Danish (it was). Were they there to check my ticket? Could I communicate with them? I approached them, curious to find out and holding my ticket up to them. One of them, the male with navy blue cap, warm wrinkles around his eyes, and a hefty silver white mustache, spotted my ticket and nodded without looking too hard. He asked me something in Danish, and I definitely heard the word “pas.”

“Is this ticket okay?” I said in English, shaking the little piece of paper gently. I had paid decent money for my ticket, though I wasn’t convinced that it was a sufficient pass for a train ride. I don’t remember what else I was expecting at the time.

A familiar realization replaced his neutral grin, and he graciously switched languages for me. “May I see your passport please?” Turns out, “pas” means passport, not pass.

“Why would he want my passport here?” I asked myself, but I pulled the little blue book from my bag. Unsurprisingly, the question was readable in my face and body language.

“Where are you trying to go?” the man asked. “You know this train goes to Sweden?”

Sweden! No, Sweden was definitely not part of Step 2. I learned from the man that I was on the wrong side of the tracks, and that I should go back up to the airport hub and down to the platform on the other side. Looking back, I also learned that it was because of current refuge issues that passports were being checked, and that they often weren’t for the Denmark-Sweden train. At a different time, it might have been that I had gotten on that train, and that would have ended my Denmark visit real quick.

So Josh Koh, professional traveler, re-ascended the escalator ramp to the airport and overcoming another cumbersome fight against gravity as my bags tried to roll down to Sweden. And Josh Koh, professional traveler, took the second of four ramps down to the train platforms, still unsure. Was this the right platform? As I stepped out, I saw that a train had pulled on the opposing platform side and was now idle. Another uniformed lady blocked my way.

She looked up at my bag filled arms as I approached. “Does this train not go to Sweden?” I prompted.

“Oh, yes it does,” she said. “If you want to go towards the city, you need to be on the opposite site. And you’d better hurry, that train is pulling out soon.” She pointed to the train that sat idly across the tracks. I looked around, and behold, there were the two folks that I had spoken to before, on the same side of the platform as me, just on the other end.

And so, Josh Koh, professional traveler, re-ascended again, after making the wrong choice of train platform twice. I was a too pressed with urgency to recognize my embarrasment. The train was leaving soon? How long did I have? When would the next train be? I went down ramp 3, letting the weight of my bags pull me forward at an accelerated speed. There were no security folks on this side, presumably because there was no need to check passports for a domestic train ride. I stepped onto the train, and the doors closed about 90 seconds later. We were off.

This was a real train, not like a metro or the Atlanta MARTA. The seats were nice and cushioned, and there was a little table between each set of opposing chair rows. There were only a few people in my car, and I don’t remember anything about any of them. I observed the train’s route posted on the wall, and saw that my destination, Ørestad, was only three stops away. Not far at all. Professional traveler that I was, I had worn my contact lenses for the flight over from the States, and my tired eyes were killing me. I took the time to retrieve my toiletry bag and swap for glasses. Six minutes later, we were close. The cab’s intercom beeped to life. “Naeste stop, Ørestad.” I was the only one to get off on my stop. Step 2, complete.

It was a lonely little train platform I stepped onto, just a slab of concrete with foliage on both sides and open to the quiet foggy winter day that was only half passed. It was a little strange, to have left home at 7 in the evening, to have flown for 11 hours, and to have landed in the afternoon, 16 hours later. If you asked my body what time it was, it would say breakfast time.

Outside, it was cold, but not at all bitterly so. I had on a sweater and that was more than comfortable enough. I exited the empty platform through a small tunnel and ascended some stairs to the street level. I looked around at my first real view of this new country that I’d be calling home for the next half a year. I was on the top of a small hill, looking down a long stretch of straight paved street that ran down hill then up again, disappearing into the cloudy horizon. The sidewalk was uneven gray stones, hard to roll bags on but very aesthetically pleasing. Above me was another staircase leading up a metal tower to some more tracks. The then unfamiliar but incredibly useful metro. But what caught my eye the most was this gigantic building immediately across the street from where I alighted. “Fields” read gigantic silver letters attached to the side of the building. Its size and height cannot be understated, something between a shopping mall and a football stadium. Aside from its name, the building boasted no other features, just plain, high walls and nothing to indicate exactly what it was.

In any case, the paper map that had returned to my hand routed me down the hill, alongside this Field’s building, then turning left at its far corner to walk about the same distance to my destination. Not far at all. So that’s the way I went. It was a bit surreal going down the street, because I didn’t encounter a single person or see a single vehicle, bicycle nor car, in my 5 minute walk. There were not even any visible parking lots or unoccupied cars. As I got more accustomed to my surroundings, I had noticed a few business buildings encased in dark glass, farther down the street and back in the direction I had come, but they gave no indication of having any life in them. It was as if the town was completely abandoned, though of course it actually wasn’t. Looking back, I think it was probably just a combination of the time of year and current weather and the time of day that kept people indoors, but I’m not positive. It felt very unusual to walk a ghost town though.

I was suddenly concerned that I would have serious issues if I became lost or couldn’t find my apartment, as there appeared to be no one to help me. I’d just have to find the apartment right away.

The scenery changed after turning left. The Fields was still to my left, continuing all down the street. On the right, were some of those dark glass buildings, very bank-looking in nature. There were two parallel lanes of sidewalk to the right of the road, one very smooth and the other those aesthetic, baggage un-friendly stones, separated by a channel of shallow but moving water about 10 feet across, with bridges every so often to connect the two lanes. As far as I know, the water was only there for aesthetic purposes, and I never met any other paths in Denmark with similar sidewalk rivers. I strongly feel that Atlanta would do well to consider them as a design option, as they were very nice to look at and walk over. Of course, I took the smoother sidewalk until needing to cross over the little wet channel to the far right side where my apartment was. I would later find out that what I thought was smooth sidewalk was actually the bike lane. Not that I would have known since there were no bikers that day.

Ah, and there was my apartment building, right where it was supposed to be. Step 3 complete! And I should note at this point that this was a student apartment, but it wasn’t associated with any school. It was merely a normal apartment complex with normal tenants; the owners just prioritized students attending a nearby university. But what an interesting building it was. It stood on five concrete “turret”-like columns with hollow interiors. These were the entrance ways. Each entrance had at ground level a set of mailboxes in the walls, an elevator shaft, and a stairwell, both leading up. The first floor of actual building content was actually 50 feet or more off the ground, such that you would need to pass into one of the entrance ways, ideally the one closest to your room, and then walk or ride up to whichever of the five floors was yours. Beyond this, at ground level, there was also a small office where the housing managers worked, and another glass-windowed room with laundry machines and a couple of foosball tables. On this particular day, there was clearly some maintenance being done on the laundry room, as six black washing machines were sitting out on the pavement outside the room, half-wrapped in their packaging like giant metal cupcakes. Two men with all the looks of maintenance workers were standing near the machines, occasionally speaking to each other in Danish. The first and only two humans I would see at Ørestad for some time that day.

Having taken this all in, I realized that there was a Step 4 that I hadn’t considered: how to get into my room. The door into the mail room slash elevator slash stairwell was locked behind a key FOB scanner, the FOB that I didn’t yet have. I knew which room was supposed to be mine, room A1-105, and I had been instructed to visit the housing office to get my key. I dragged my bags to the housing office door, but surprising no one, the lights were off and there was no one inside. They had told me while I was still stateside that they closed at 1pm normally for the day and would try to wait for me, but it was now already 2. I had missed them. Further, for whatever reason, they were only in on Monday’s and Wednesdays for those few morning hours. It was Monday today, so no one would back in the office until Wednesday. Oh boy.

I circled around the housing office again, then the entrance way again. The apartment entranceway door was glass and I could see inside to the elevator, just standing there waiting to take me up. Taunting. Inaccessible. What could I do now? I had been stuck circling back and forth for about 20 minutes now. I could call the housing… no, I didn’t have a working phone. I could go to… I don’t know where, I hadn’t prepared to navigate anywhere but here, and I couldn’t wander off far for fear of getting lost and not being able to find my way back. I could talk to… no one, I hadn’t seen anyone except Mr. and Mr. Laundry-worker. And that’s when Mr. Laundry-worker walked up to me… not that one, the other one.

His name was Bjern, the first Danish person I met by name. He might have been in his 40s or even 50s, but he was still handsome. The sharp European jaw line and not a lot of silver brown hair but styled in messy spikes, very cool. Maybe my memory has idealized him as my physical savior, I don’t know. To make a long set of interactions short, as a maintenance guy, he had access to the housing office as well as the cabinets. With his all-powerful keyring, he was able to get me my housing contract, my set of room keys, and my FOB. He told me, “Just come back down some time when the housing people are in and let them know what happened, and you can give the signed contract back to them then.”

I thanked him as we parted ways, he returning to the machinery on the sidewalk and I to the entranceway. My bags and I rode our quiet elevator up to the first floor. I ignored the zoo of stickers and marker-inscribed writings on the walls of this particular cabin. The elevator opened to a door to my immediate left and right. My room was on the right. I unlocked the door and stepped in. Step 4 complete!

I could go on to tell about how I took a well-needed shower immediately after and enjoyed the common heated floors in the tile bathrooms of most living spaces there. Or how I kept a prearranged appointment with someone only an hour later to buy a bike. Or the conditions of the living space I was in, both its highlights and lowlights. Maybe one day I will.

For now, I’ll just point out two things. One, just how incredible it was how everything worked out with getting my key. I don’t believe the whole situation was anything but God telling me that he was with me even in this strange and exciting new place. That very evening, I was thinking about what might have happened if it hadn’t been Swap-Out-All-The-Laundary-Machines Day. Not like that’s a common occurrence. I could have walked up to the apartment and seen no Bjern and no black cupcakes and then what would have happened? The way things worked out all around me without me making hardly one conscious decision in all of it is just crazy, and it’s become one of my favorite stories to tell, so thanks for listening through it with me.

The other thing to point out in closing: I wonder if my method of getting my room keys and contract struck you as odd, as it did me at the time. Anyone who’s been through a housing process in the States would surely find it odd or even pushing legally questionable to hear of a maintenance guy handing out keys and housing contracts to some random asian guy clearly out of place. And to be clear, he verified my passport against my contract before making the exchange, but still. Looking back though on my Denmark experience, this wasn’t nearly the odd or unprofessional event that I first thought. Rather, it’s a great example of just how chill and laidback the entire country is, both its systems and its people. Things are done responsibly and the people in general have incredible amounts of integrity, and this both causes and results in an incredibly relational and chilled out atmosphere, where Bjern can do that, and the housing department people later completely understand and aren’t phased at all. This is just one of the stories that contributes to making Copenhagen my favorite place to live. But for all the other stories and reasons why, you’ll have to stay tuned. So thanks for listening for today, especially if you didn’t hear this story when I blogged it. Please let me know what you think. All of the music used here is listed on my website, blog.joshuakoh.me. I hope you enjoyed, thanks for listening, and see you next time for another story!

How Do Good Teachers Harness the Power of Questions?

2018-02-28T00:00:00+00:00

Description

Everyone has known that one stand-out teacher who knew how to ask the best questions. Questions that challenged us fairly. Questions that made us think hard and discover new things just by trying to come up with an answer. How did they do it?

I won’t claim to have the single solution, but I have started to notice a few things that my noteworthy teachers have in common. Further, at this point in my life, I have accrued a decent amount of experience teaching and tutoring.

This recording is about what I think is the best way to use questions to teach. I’ll also highlight ways questions shouldn’t be used, and I’ll outline what an ideal “Socratic” question looks like.

Credits

Music used in this recording:

“A Closing Statement” by Dexter Britain
“Sunrise in F-Major” by dep

Text Notes

I want to discuss the effective teaching technique of the Socratic Method, because I find it to be often underused or misused.

In this recording, I’ll be speaking on the part of the teacher, and will shortly return to speak on the part of the Socratic student. This recording will have two parts. First, I’ll define what the Socratic Method ought to be. Then, I will discuss what I find to be a good Socratic question versus a bad one.

Ok, first, I’ll discuss what the Socratic Method is and ought to be. I never want to use particular terms without defining them, so when I say Socratic Method, what do I mean? I mean the process of learning through questioning. The teacher asks a question, and the student responds and learns from the response.

What’s the primary goal of using this method? Why not just state the facts and teach the material declaratively? Now, please own this. You ready? The Socratic Method ought to be used to teach the student to think like you do about a problem. That is the primary goal. When you first engage with a student about a problem, there’s an imbalance of knowledge about a problem. Not only do you know more about a problem, but you know how to approach the problem. You know how to guide your own thinking in order to solve a problem. You know the right questions to ask in order to solve the problem. Wait, you know the right questions to ask in order to solve the problem. That’s the key. These questions, the questions you ask yourself, these are what you ought to be asking students when using questions to teach. You’re passing on your intuition and experience about how to solve a problem by providing an framework for how to approach the problem to your student. But not only that, you force your student to engage with that way of thinking, more on that in just a minute. In my experience, questions are the best way to teach this kind of intuition.

And you can’t tell me, “Everyone thinks differently. It’s inconsiderate to tell other people how to think.” The Socratic Method is not about teaching people to restructure their thinking — if it was, you’d be right and no one would use the method. It’s about providing necessary and desired structure where there is none. Say we’re talking about movie soundtracks. If I show you a piece of music and then tell you, “This is a creative masterpiece. You must love this song because of it’s creative construction.” That would be bad, because you already have structured thinking in that area. You know what you like and don’t like, and my instruction is attempting to restructure your thoughts, where structure already exists. But instead, what if you tell your student, “To really appreciate this song, you’ll want to look at the chord progression. What do you notice?” And I don’t know, maybe the chord letters actually spell out the name of the character the song represents. Before hearing this, your student may not have any intuition of how to approach analyzing this song. Where do you even start? But after hearing your comment, they now know that as an analyst, one of the places you look is the chord progressions. So next time the student goes looking at a song, they’ll know to look there too. Through your statement, you’ve applied how you think to them. That’s not inconsiderate.

Ok, second, I want to talk about what makes a good question. So you’re studying Scripture in a class, and the passage is 1 Samuel 2. And in verse 25, the priest Eli is rebuking his wicked sons, and he says, “‘if someone sins agains a man, God will mediate for him, but if someone sins against the Lord, who can intercede for him?’ But they [that is, the sons] would not listen to the voice of their father, for it was the will of the Lord to put them to death.” Now, there’s a lot that can be asked about that one verse, but say the instructor asks this question: “So whose fault was it that the sons would die? Is it God’s or theirs?” After all, it says, “for it was the will of the Lord to put them to death.”

First off, I think this is a great question. And not necessarily because of its context and meaning, but rather its form and function. Here are three ways that question is a good question. As you hear these, think about how you see these used by other good teachers, and how you can use them to help others discover beautiful realities.

1) The question forces the student to commit. There are two very real options here. There’s not just one obvious option available, like in the question, “Did sin prove to have consequences here?” And there’s not an infinite number of options with many correct answers either, like in the question, “What do we know from the Bible about God’s will?” That question could be answered 100 different ways and they’d all be right. The best, hard questions that promote learning are ones that have a cap on the number of possible answers, but only one correct answer. You know, I really love it when my professors ask the question, “What will this computer code do?” We’ll be looking at a snippet of code, and they’ll ask, “So if I run this code, what will it do?” For any snippet of code, there are only a few options. Maybe it’ll either print a “1” on the screen, print a “2” on the screen, or it will error out and crash because the code is bad. But which is it? By forcing me to look at the code and then determine for myself, I’m learning to think about what each line is actually doing. Thinking this way, about “what is this line actually doing?” will help me to think more like a computer scientist when I write my own code in the future. I’m gaining structure in this area of thought, meaning that this question is accomplishing the primary goal of the Socratic Method. It’s a good question because it forces me to choose one answer out of a limited pool of one right answer and one or more wrong answers, and forces me to stick to my answer. I believe getting this commitment is so important, and I’ll talk about why in the next recording.

2) The question is centered on an important truth. Questions can appear deceitfully deep, but if they have no relevance to the student or their mental growth, they’re pointless. Questions should not be dogleg left turns leading away from answers that matter. A bad kind of question in this vein be, “How do you think the father tried to communicate with his sons?” This question might help to paint the story scene more vividly, but is that of benefit? Is that what we want to teach people to think about when they study the Bible? Please say no. So back to the original question: “Whose fault is it that the sons would die?” This question also makes you think, but now you’re wrestling with truths that matter. “Is it really the case that the sons had no choice but to die because God willed it? I believe that man is responsible for his own actions, but this doesn’t sound very much like that. But I believe the Bible is perfect and doesn’t contradict itself.” The student wrestles with truth. When teaching math, you want the student wrestling with why a proof is true, and not whether it was Proof 7-1 or 7-2 in the textbook. One’s important truth, the other doesn’t help the student think about the problem any better. When teaching knife skills in the kitchen, you want the student wrestling with the potential consequences of their grip on the food and knife, and not on keeping their workspace clean. Note that just like in every example here, the bad option is not wrong. It’s important to keep your workspace clean as much as it is to have a lively mental image of Biblical narrative or to know where to find resources in the textbook. But don’t lose sight of what you really want. If you’re teaching knife skills, you’re primary concerns are keeping fingers safe and cuts consistent. Cleanliness, like all secondary things, comes after.

3) The question causes the student to dig deeper. This is not a question that can be answered from mere intuition, like “Did Eli’s sons get what they deserve for their sin?” It’s not a question of exaggerated contrast, where the wrong option is bloated with hyperbole, like, “Is sin just a little, unimportant thing to God, or is it important?” Rather than all of that, this is a question that requires the student to draw on all of their resources and then some. They need to bring what they know and what they’ve experienced to the table and synthesize what they know to realize something new. The question is not one that’s so easy that it’s trivial. On the other hand, it’s not one that’s so hard that the student has no chance of knowing it. It doesn’t matter how many times I ask you, “How do you map a column of strings to upper case in a pandas dataframe with a lambda function?” If you aren’t familiar with data science, you won’t ever get the answer without looking up a lot of stuff. Questions that dig deeper are often not purely fact-based. The best questions involve what the student already knows and combining it with what they ought to know next.

So, in review, use the Socratic Method to help others to think like you do about a problem. Do this by asking questions that force the student to commit to their answer. Don’t get waylaid by questions that aren’t centered on important truths. And use questions that cause the student to synthesize what they know. And hey, that’s not easy. Obviously. It requires work on your end as a teacher. We’d have a lot more good teachers in the world if it were so easy, but as it is, we have a lot of bad teachers who aren’t willing to put in the work or don’t know how. Now you know how. So be thinking about how you can ask good questions that really help people. Good luck.

Play Audio & Video with mediaelement.js

2015-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

mediaelement.js is like magic. It’s browser and device support is perfect. To activate the video or audio player just set the following variable in front matter to true.

mediaplayer: true

To use the player just use some HTML5-magic like…

<audio src="http://path-to-file.com/music.mp3" type="audio/mp3" controls="controls"></audio>

All possible functions and how to use mediaelement.js is well-documented on the players website.

»Music From All Around The World«

»Music From All Around The World« is a compilation curated by Jeannette Corneille and Moritz “mo.” Sauer for Phlow-Magazine.com. Cover Artwork designed by Jeannette Corneille. All tracks were released under a creative commons licence.

B-Ju - »Philly Run«

Comfort Fit - »Freeze The Cut«

The Black Atlantic - »Dandelion«

Download Compilation ›

Wonderful Typography

2015-08-16T00:00:00+00:00

Table of Contents

Lato – A Sans Serif Typeface Family
About Volkhov <h2>
- Feeling Responsive uses Volkhov for… <h3>
  - Heading in Volkhov <h4>
    - Heading in Volkhov <h5>
Modular Scale
Typographical Elements
- <hr> Horizontal Line
- <pre> Displaying Code
- <blockquote> Quotation
- <blockquote> and <cite> together
- <ol> Ordered Lists
- <ul> Unordered Lists
- <dl> Definition Lists
- <a>
- <em>
- <strong>
- <small>
- <s>
- <cite>
- <q>
- <dfn>
- <abbr>
- <time>
- <code>
- <var>
- <samp>
- <kbd>
- <sub>
- <sup>
- <i>
- <b>
- <u>
- <mark>
- <br>
Footnotes
<h1>-Heading in Volkhov
- <h2>-Heading in Volkhov
  - <h3>-Heading in Volkhov
    - <h4>-Heading in Volkhov
      - <h5>-Heading in Volkhov
        
        <h6>-Heading in Volkhov
- Tables

Lato – A Sans Serif Typeface Family

Lato is a sans serif typeface family started in the summer of 2010 by Warsaw-based designer Łukasz Dziedzic. »Lato« means »Summer« in Polish. In December 2010 the Lato family was published under the Open Font License by his foundry tyPoland, with support from Google.

I do not think of type as something that should be readable. It should be beautiful.Ed Benguiat

In the last ten or so years, during which Łukasz has been designing type, most of his projects were rooted in a particular design task that he needed to solve. With Lato, it was no different. Originally, the family was conceived as a set of corporate fonts for a large client — who in the end decided to go in different stylistic direction, so the family became available for a public release.

When working on Lato, Łukasz tried to carefully balance some potentially conflicting priorities. He wanted to create a typeface that would seem quite “transparent” when used in body text but would display some original traits when used in larger sizes. He used classical proportions (particularly visible in the uppercase) to give the letterforms familiar harmony and elegance. At the same time, he created a sleek sans serif look, which makes evident the fact that Lato was designed in 2010 — even though it does not follow any current trend.

The semi-rounded details of the letters give Lato a feeling of warmth, while the strong structure provides stability and seriousness. “Male and female, serious but friendly. With the feeling of the Summer,” says Łukasz. Learn more at www.latofonts.com

About Volkhov <h2>

Volkhov is a low-contrast seriffed typeface with a robust character, intended for providing a motivating reading experience. Volkhov was designed by Ivan Petrov.

Feeling Responsive uses Volkhov for… <h3>

<h1>-headings
<h2>-headings
<h3>-headings
<h4>-headings
<h5>-headings
<h6>-headings

Heading in Volkhov <h4>

As a four-weight family it is well-suited for complex text environments being economic and legible, contemporary and prominent. Many of its design solutions relate to this purpose: large open counters, rather short descenders, and brutal asymmetric serifs.

Heading in Volkhov <h5>

Spacing in Bold is slightly increased compared to the normal weight, because the bold mass is mostly grown inwards. The Italic has a steep angle and a distinctive calligraphically reminiscent character, as a counterpart to the rigorous Regular.

Modular Scale

Feeling Responsive explores the 2:3 perfect fifth modular scale created with www.modular-scale.com. This is the modular scale of Feeling Responsive.

44px @ 1:1.5 – Ideal text size
16px @ 1:1.5 – Important number

Modular Scale
44.000	1	2.75	338.462
36.000	0.818	2.25	276.923
29.333	0.667	1.833	225.638
24.000	0.545	1.5	184.615
19.555	0.444	1.222	150.423
16.000	0.364	1	123.077

Typographical Elements

Here you’ll find the complete list of HTML5-Tags and this is how they look like.

<hr> Horizontal Line

<pre> Displaying Code

<html>
    <head>
        <title>Code Blocks</title>
    </head>
    <body></body>
</html>

<blockquote> Quotation

Everything happens for a reason. (Britney Spears)

<blockquote> and <cite> together

Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter. Mark Twain

<ol> Ordered Lists

Ordered List
Second List Item
Third List Item
1. Second Level First Item
2. Second Level Second Item
3. Second Level Third Item
  1. And a third level First Item
  2. And a third level Second Item
  3. And a third level Third Item
Fourth List Item
Fifth List Item

<ul> Unordered Lists

Unordered List
Second List Item
Third List Item
- Second Level First Item
- Second Level Second Item
- Second Level Third Item
  - And a third level First Item
  - And a third level Second Item
  - And a third level Third Item
Fourth List Item
Fifth List Item

<dl> Definition Lists

Definition List: Bacon ipsum dolor sit amet spare ribs brisket ribeye, andouille sirloin bresaola frankfurter corned beef capicola bacon. Salami beef ribs sirloin, short loin hamburger shoulder t-bone.
Beef ribs jowl swine porchetta: Sirloin tenderloin swine frankfurter pork loin pork capicola ham hock strip steak ribeye beef ribs. Hamburger t-bone ribeye ham prosciutto bresaola.
Pancetta flank sirloin pork: short ribs shankle prosciutto landjaeger. Beef ribs turkey shoulder drumstick. Leberkas pork belly ribeye, bresaola jerky strip steak tenderloin bacon landjaeger short ribs beef ribs. Flank pork chop fatback tail kielbasa filet mignon jowl landjaeger bresaola tongue corned beef biltong.; Landjaeger spare ribs fatback corned beef tenderloin drumstick, swine chicken beef turkey biltong doner tri-tip filet mignon.

<a>

Links make the web exceptional.

<em>

Let’s emphasize how important responsive webdesign is.

<strong>

This looks like bold text.

<small>

This is small text.

<s>

It’s nice getting things done. Just strike through ~~finished tasks~~.

<cite>

Albert Einstein

<q>

If you use <q> your text gets automagically quotes around the text passage.

<dfn>

The <dfn> tag is a phrase tag. It defines a definition term.

<abbr>

The WHO was founded in 1948.

<time>

The concert took place on May 15.

<code>

Some code: lucida console displayed.

<var>

The <var> tag is a phrase tag. It defines a variable.

<samp>

Text surrounded by <samp> looks like this in monospace.

<kbd>

Copycats enjoy pressing CMD + c and CMD + v.

<sub>

This text _{lays low} and chills a bit.

<sup>

This text ^{gets high} above the clouds.

<i>

This looks italic.

<b>

This looks bold, too.

<u>

Underlining content for emphasize is not the best choice. You can't read it so well.

<mark>

Let’s mark this hint to give you a clue.

<br>

Need a break? I give you three!

Footnotes

If you need footnotes for your posts, articles and entries, the Kramdown-Parser ¹ got you covered. How to use footnotes? Read this footnote. ²

<h1>-Heading in Volkhov

<h2>-Heading in Volkhov

<h3>-Heading in Volkhov

<h4>-Heading in Volkhov

<h5>-Heading in Volkhov

<h6>-Heading in Volkhov

Tables

Even tables are responsive thanks to foundation. A table can consist of these elements.

</table> </div> </div>

<table> defines an HTML table
HTML Tag	Defintion	Style
<caption>	defines a table caption	`font-weight: bold;`
<colgroup>	specifies a group of one or more columns in a table for formatting. The <colgroup> tag is useful for applying styles to entire columns, instead of repeating the styles for each cell, for each row.	no styling needed
<col>	specifies column properties for each column within a `<colgroup>` element	no styling needed
<thead>	is used to group header content in an HTML table	`font-weight: bold;`
<tbody>	is used to group the body content in an HTML table	no styling needed
<tr>	defines a row in an HTML table	no styling needed
<th>	defines a header cell in an HTML table	`font-weight: bold;`
<td>	defines a standard cell in an HTML table	`font-weight: normal;`
<tfoot>	is used to group footer content in an HTML table	no styling needed

Find out more about Kramdown on http://kramdown.gettalong.org/ ↩
Kramdown has an excellent documentation of all its features. Check out, on how to footnotes. ↩

Now with Comments!

2015-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

If you want to use Disqus-Comments with Feeling Responsive, just open config.yml and add your disqus_shortname. More on how to use Disqus ›

By default comments are turned off. You can customize the default behaviour in config.yml. To turn on comments just add comments: true to front matter using the page layout layout: page.

No Header

2015-08-11T00:00:00+00:00

Silence is beautiful. Sometimes you just want no distractions at all. Whether you like the content to speak for itself or enjoy pure typography on a plain background: Feeling Responsive got you covered. Just say no like this:

header: no

Josh's Site

Amsterdam Adventure

Description

Credits

Text Notes

My Review of "Ask More"

Description

Credits

Text Notes

Is Fortnite's Guided Missile Good for Game Health?

Description

Credits

Text Notes

How Do Good Students Harness the Power of Questions?

Description

Text Notes

My First 24 Hours in Copenhagen

Description

Credits

Text Notes

How Do Good Teachers Harness the Power of Questions?

Description

Credits

Text Notes

Play Audio & Video with media­element.js

»Music From All Around The World«

B-Ju - »Philly Run«

Comfort Fit - »Freeze The Cut«

The Black Atlantic - »Dandelion«

Wonderful Typography

Lato – A Sans Serif Typeface Family

About Volkhov <h2>

Feeling Responsive uses Volkhov for… <h3>

Heading in Volkhov <h4>

Heading in Volkhov <h5>

Modular Scale

Typographical Elements

<hr> Horizontal Line

<pre> Displaying Code

<blockquote> Quotation

<blockquote> and <cite> together

<ol> Ordered Lists

<ul> Unordered Lists

<dl> Definition Lists

<a>

<em>

<strong>

<small>

<s>

<cite>

<q>

<dfn>

<abbr>

<time>

<code>

<var>

<samp>

<kbd>

<sub>

<sup>

<i>

<b>

<u>

<mark>

<br>

Footnotes

<h1>-Heading in Volkhov

<h2>-Heading in Volkhov

<h3>-Heading in Volkhov

<h4>-Heading in Volkhov

<h5>-Heading in Volkhov

<h6>-Heading in Volkhov

Tables

Now with Comments!

No Header

All Header-Styles

Play Audio & Video with mediaelement.js