A Shortcut To Wisdom
A weekly dose of motivation, inspiration and education from Masha and Jedrek.
Ahoy Sailors!
The captain is back! Masha’s mutiny has been quelled. (Just between you and me, Masha, I wouldn’t mind if your mutiny lasted a bit longer next time and, say, you prepared 3 newsletters in a row? :) But seriously folks, this issue is brimming with novelties starting from a refreshed font. What else is new? There’s my very personal text about my early motivation to work as a teacher, there is Maciek with another useful phrase. Agata with a cute story showing the quick witted mind of children. And Mateusz with quality pop music. A couple of recommendations top it off, of course, as always. Browse them cerefully!
Last but not least, we’re about to launch a survey regarding our newsletter. Sometime during the upcomming week we are going to publish a separate post with questions about this little publication. We want to get better and we need your help, so stay tuned and be generous with your feedback!
But for now, have a beautiful Sunday!
A Shortcut To Wisdom
By Jedrek Stepien
I know it’s embarrassing, but I was once searching for a shortcut to wisdom. When I said it on our podcast, I saw in the corner of my eye that Masha was giggling. But it’s true. Living in the age of making-all-things-easy and hacking stuff, I thought there might be a way to get wiser before getting seriously old. Being wise is time-consuming but it is cool: you understand a lot about the world and yourself in it, most of your choices are right, you're calm and you’re happy. At least, that is how the young (and dumb) me saw it. So, please don’t laugh, this was my idea for a startup. Back then, everybody at the Warsaw School of Economics (where I was studying) was busy transplanting practical ideas from the Silicon Valley, such as storage depots and food delivery, but I was hypnotized by the idea of mass-producing wisdom.
Almost all my early activity as a teacher was motivated by this ambitious (if not arrogant) goal - to find a shortcut to wisdom. I wanted to design a teaching method that would be simple and light, i.e. easy to grasp without any sophisticated instruction. It was clear to me from the very beginning that such teaching should be based on conversations. I remember one quote from Sebastian Thrun from Udacity, which I saved on my hard drive. It was about the future of education that he envisioned as being short and sweet like Twitter (shut up, it was before Elon bought it) and he compared it also to an evening conversation. I found that second part of his quote especially inspiring.
“I believe that 50 years from now, education will be as short and sweet as Twitter is today. It will be like an evening talk. And that will be a fantastic moment.”
Sebastian Thrun
So, I started experimenting with conversations. And I couldn't have chosen a better profession for that purpose than being an English teacher. Because language itself has an enormous educational potential reaching far beyond what we typically associate with it, that is vocab and grammar. I started designing conversations that would not be empty, boring, stupid, or otherwise over-intellectualized. And I found that words, or rather concepts, are the best material to work with. So simple and so pure and at the same time so powerful with direct links to wisdom cached inside by the generations that came before us. One of the things I remembered from my earlier studies of English was that no two words are 100% synonyms, that is they cannot replace each other in all contexts without altering the meaning of the sentence. Each word, or each concept, was coined because people saw a particular shade of meaning in the world. And that was all I needed to know to start mining them for wisdom.
I knew that wisdom is about understanding, not knowledge. And I knew also that you can only expand your understanding based on what you already know. So, I picked familiar concepts from the dictionary, like a soldier, a warrior, charisma or charm and started contrasting them with each other. It resulted in creating easily understandable questions with not so obvious answers. The effects exceeded my wildest expectations. Over the years I met with incredible minds. I met with engineers and music teachers, coders and policemen, baristas and scientists, all of whom shared their unique perspectives on something otherwise familiar. They were connecting the dots, making discoveries, surprising me and themselves with their insights. Not everything was great linguistically but given such exquisite intellectual work who cares about a misplaced preposition or other occasional grammar mistake? We were working on our linguistic skills and creating brand new neural connections; it was an offer for which I received tons of gratitude from my students.
But what happened to my mission: have I changed my mind, or has it failed? Well, the fire in my heart is for sure still burning, but as for finding the shortcut to wisdom the results are inconclusive. Wisdom turned out to be quite amorphous and elusive. There’s a lot of sense me and my students have pumped into this world, but there is still a lot more left to pump. I have an impression that I managed to build only a handful of truly productive questions that lead to a deeper understanding of some concepts, but a lot of other ones remain inaccessible due to their abstractness or remoteness from more familiar concepts. Also, the nature of understanding is so hazy that even if we explored all concepts from A to Z, I doubt we could attain a Buddha-like understanding and lucidity. It is possible to understand something in one way, but it’s also possible to understand the same thing in a completely opposite way, and still sound logical and convincing. But this is not to say that being wise means being a relativist who doesn’t care about the truth. On the contrary, being wise is about climbing to such a vantage point from which we can see the path through even conflicting points of view. It may be that wisdom exposed my arrogance and showed me that I need more time to understand it. But be what it may, me and Masha are still there for you, ready to ask you questions that will take us on a journey from which we return more linguistically competent and if not ultimately wise then at least not dumber.
THIS WEEK IN ToL:
Thinking Out Loud 091: Can Technology Solve Loneliness?
We tried hard as we could with Masha to avoid speaking about AI this week but I think we have given in ;) I have been reading a lot about the phenomenon of loneliness lately, trying to use it as a potential sprinboard to my defence of lessons with human teachers, and it was only a small step from there to discussing whether chatbots can be the solution to the devastating wave of loneliness. No thinking out loud proper this week, just some good old chinwag from the two of us.
THE PHRASE OF THE WEEK
By Maciek Skulski
Bite the Bullet: Choosing Courage Over Comfort
Have you ever had to make a difficult decision, knowing that it would not be easy? That's exactly how I felt recently, deciding to move forward with a project that faced many obstacles. This brings to mind the English phrase "bite the bullet," which means facing a difficult situation with courage. This dates back to the days when patients would bite a ball of lead during surgery without anesthesia to dull the pain.
Examples of use:
- When it was clear that the negotiations were not going to be postponed, I just had to bite the bullet and proceed.
- She bit the bullet and finally asked her boss for a raise.
- As the storm approached with no safe harbor, the sailors had to bite the bullet, all in the same boat, readying for rough seas😃
THE BRIGHT SIDE OF LIFE?
By Agata Kasperczak
Superpower
- If you could have any superpower, what would it be? – asked my child the other day.
- To understand all animals in the world – I replied without much thinking.
- Really? – my daughter wondered. Think about all the ants around you speaking all the time, or spiders, or - my goodness - moskitos beging you: “don’t kill me! I have to feed my children. Let me bite you. I am beging you!”
So, that is how she ruined my dream of communication with animals, but come to think of it, maybe it suffice to know catish, dogish and horsish?
What do you think?
And what is your dream of a superpower?
WE RECOMMEND:
SUBSTACK: Naked and Alive by David Deubelbeiss
David is my latest discovery on Substack. He writes a lot and he writes good. I started following him only few weeks ago and he has already written a couple of great texts about Germany, keeping up, or the AI hype (although the last text is from a separate publication called the ELT BUZZ). He’s got everything I am looking for in a writer/blogger: freshness, independent thinking, and a little bit of amateur footages from his bike trips in Korea.
VIDEO: The video on Palestine that got Yanis Varoufakis BANNED from Germany
There has been quite a shitstorm lately in Germany caused by the growing support for Gaza. The German anthorities demonstrate an unswerving support for Israel in this conflict and it is pushing them to make ever harder choices. One such choice was made against Yanis Varoufakis, a former minister of finance of Greece. His video speech (linked above) was supposed to be shown during a conference in Berlin, but it was banned and Varoufakis himself was banned from entering the country. This smells really bad, but I would like you to watch this video not so much because of it’s aura of a scandal, but because of Yanis’s English. I know he spent a long time in the UK, but I think he takes it as a point of honor to keep his Greek accent and not to sound like a native.
VIDEO: Four Words. Liverpool Media Wall
Creative Pink
I found out about this initiative from who else if not David whose substack I’m linking above. The city of Liverpool organized a series of provocations, one of which happened on a giant screen normally showing ads. The idea was very simple: challenge our way of thinking using only four words.
THE SONG OF THE WEEK:
By Mateusz Borowik
Emiliana Torrini - Let’s Keep Dancing
Emiliana Torini is back with a new album after 10 years. The album "Miss Flower" is announced for June 21, 2024, and listeners have just got its first preview. Based on love letters found in an attic, the story of love and desire flows with music and references to the 60's. Turn it on and dance. This is the kind of pop radio stations need!
YOUR ToL:
I think you recognize the car, it’s Maciek’s VW Passat. Look at the clock and the number of the episode. It’s not accidental I think 🤔 Anyway, what a great way to start your day! Thanks Maciek!
AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT…
Have a Beautiful Week!
That’s almost all from us this week. We’re super happy to have spent the last 13 weeks with you, but to carry on we need some feedback from you. During the week we are going to publish a survey about our newsletter, so please, be so kind and fill it out 🙏
Stay tuned for the survey and we meet again in the next issue of our newsletter 🫡.
Don’t forget that you can co-create this newsletter by sending us your texts, reflections, jokes (anybody?), photos and whatever you want! We are waiting for your contributions - tolpodcast@hotmail.com
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