Vision

He trains like this: experiencing the mental process I will breathe in, he trains like this: experiencing the mental process I will breathe out.

The things we cook up! So that perhaps there is a strong sense of how we think things should be, what we want to have happen, etc. If you drop your bicycle or car off at the shop for repairs, you want a certain set of repairs done.

"While I was working on the transmission, I noticed your brakes were gone, so I fixed those as well, that's going to be an extra $600."

"But I didn't ask you to fix the brakes."

"Well, it wasn't safe to drive on like that!"

I'm imagining what it might be like to start a paragogical charter school (see Business Models for Paragogy.net) or even a model for learning like the International Baccalaureate. It would have been pretty different from my high school, though my home state did have a nice feature whereby students with a "B" average or better could take courses for free at local colleges and universities, up to full time. So for my junior and senior years of high school I got to take pretty much whatever I wanted to take, because I wasn't in a degree program. In a way this sort of spoiled me for disciplined work -- but that didn't matter because by the time I was ready to "go away to college", I mostly wanted to study mathematics courses anyway, so I got something resembling discipline for free.

Still, both of these model are pretty different from the way people learn in free software communities. I'd say that even though I was a good student during my 6 years of undergraduate training, I didn't have the same kind of the kind of "plugged in" feeling that I had later, when I was learning how to program in Emacs Lisp by posting my questions and ideas on the Help-GNU-Emacs mailing list.

It was actually pretty cool: getting help from the people who really make this program that I really use, with the sense that I could contribute things too. In a way it's similar to the undergraduate research stuff I did in math, through the NSF's Research Experiences for Undergraduates program. But Emacs hacking felt even more "real", since I was making up my own goals as I went along.

(I mean, what's real? Is academia like Santa Claus for young adults?  I don't think that's quite what I'm saying.)

He trains like this: making the mental process calm I will breathe in, he trains like this: making the mental process calm I will breathe out.

One thing's for sure: around the time when I was learning how to program in Lisp, I stopped being such a good student. This was grad school. Discipline, again, wasn't particularly attractive to me, especially when it meant doing what I was "supposed to do". I was big into questioning the system, and I was saying "this doesn't make sense, it doesn't seem particularly efficient". My professors for the most part didn't get it. Those who did sort of understand what my interests were were saying, "Well, supposing it was worthwhile to work on this sort of system stuff, but you should do it when you're a professor, not when you're a student -- when you're a student, you should be focusing on passing your exams."

The only problem with this way of thinking is "When you're a young academic without tenure, you should be focusing on getting tenure" etc. System stuff is this no-man's-land. I remember the graduate advisor in the mathematics department saying that the things I was working on were "secretarial" in nature. And he was right -- but the thing is, since I didn't have a secretary at my disposal, I felt I had to do the secretarial work myself.

Things got to the point where the program really wasn't going so well, and I had found some colleagues on the internet, and I was like, "You know what, I don't really need this place, and they clearly don't really need me. If the exams are such an important obstacle, maybe I can pass them later after I've gotten some of the system stuff taken care of."

It's certainly somewhat odd that I didn't really want to go to class or anything when I was in that program. I kept telling them "Oh, yes, I will turn my behaviour around" and I would try going to class for a while. Some of them I was getting A's in. But there were other classes I didn't care so much for, and I just wouldn't go to those, and I wouldn't officially drop them either, then I'd get "F's".