När då då

Today, I finally got to test my latest pedagogical innovation in the classroom. Inspired by the boardgame “När då då?”, I have created hundreds of cards with different political philosophers, works and events that the students are to place along a timeline, making their knowledge and reasoning visible to each other as a form of collaborative learning. While attendance was not the best, the students who did show up seemed to really enjoy the game.

And, for once, this impression was not entirely based on wishful thinking on the part of the teacher. At the end of the seminar, I asked the students to fill out a digital exit ticket.

On a five-point scale, the students gave the game an average of 4.47 for helping them get a better sense of the chronological order of political thinkers, texts and events. The group discussions scored 4.20 for helping them understand how the different pieces of intellectual history fit together. Even more pleasingly, the statement that the game required them to actually use their knowledge and reason about where to place the cards, rather than simply guess, scored 4.60. But the real triumph came with the final question: would they like to do this kind of activity again in another course? Average score: 4.80 out of 5. Thirteen of the fifteen respondents simply ticked the maximum score.

The free-text answers were perhaps even more interesting. One student noted that the history of political thought somehow tends to exist entirely “before 1900” in their head, and that seeing everything on a timeline made it apparent that many philosophers and ideas are actually not that old. Others mentioned suddenly seeing how interconnected the different political thinkers were, how ideas influenced one another, and “how quickly development happened”. Another wrote that the game made them reason their way towards plausible conclusions from the different texts.

Obviously, fifteen enthusiastic exit tickets do not demonstrate that playing a homemade board game produces superior learning outcomes. There is selection bias, social desirability, a teacher standing next to them who seemed to really like his game, and all the other things that tend to ruin causal inference. Still, as a first classroom experiment, it worked remarkably well. More importantly, walking around the room and listening to the discussions, I could hear students doing precisely what I had hoped they would do: not asking “what year was this?”, but reasoning from what they already knew. If Hobbes wrote after the English Civil War, and Locke comes after Hobbes, and The Communist Manifesto surely has to be somewhere around the revolutions of 1848, then where on earth do we put Mary Wollstonecraft?

Which, pedagogically speaking, was exactly the point.

Flower power

Taking the train down to Malmö to pick up my bib in preparation for next week’s marathon, Linnéa and I got to eat some highly authentic Malaysian nasi lemak at Cantin (which is closing for the season this weekend) and have a cup of coffee at Solde. Best of all, there was the Dahlia Festival at Slottsträdgården and clear autumn skies across Öresund.

Being both public transport super-users, we found ourselves reflecting on geography and how monthly tickets (especially this autumn, when they are available at half price) contribute to regional enlargement, making it possible to wake up in Halmstad, have a full day in Malmö, and still be back in time for a sunset half marathon out to Tylösand.

Perhaps there is a rebound effect of sorts here: as trains become cheaper and more convenient, we simply get used to travelling ever greater distances. In my case, 260 kilometres today.

Duplex

With much trepidation, I made one of the biggest financial decisions of my life today as I signed the contract on a duplex apartment in Gothenburg. Located in Munkebäck, it will let me once again follow the seasons around Delsjön and go for early morning forest runs among all the deer. More importantly, it will mean that I can be an active parent and share in the everyday lives of my two boys as they grow up.

When I brought Eddie along to see the apartment, we were both blown away by its charm. Built in the 1940s, the apartment is split between two floors, with unobstructed views to both the east and the west. With the move-in date set for 2 November, I will give notice to my landlord at Hallandsgatan tomorrow, although I am afraid I will be on the hook for two months of paying for two homes.

Now on the train back to Halmstad, I am forever grateful to my mother for making all of this possible and for being there when I need her most. As for work, I wrapped up my last statistics class of the semester earlier today, so now I just have a brutal amount of marking and supervision to get through over the coming weeks.

Phase change

With mathematicians talking about something of a phase change in the ability of leading AI models to tackle hard problems (the most spectacular example, of course, being the apparent solution of the Navier–Stokes problem), the road towards AGI appears to be shortening by the day. While recursive self-improvement may still lie in the future, AI is already writing more and more of its own code, and there is clearly room for concern.

Oddly enough, at today’s project group meeting, I realised that some of my colleagues who are more sceptical about technological solutions to climate change, tending instead to emphasise the need for behavioural change, were also less worried about AI. The irony is that it feels as if we have come full circle here: I, historically the techno-optimist in the room, have come to fear the future and distrust our ability to regulate the AI industry, precisely because I believe in the transformative capacity of technology.

Underworld

Just ten kilometres from central Kristianstad, Linnéa showed me around Balsberget nature reserve yesterday. Rising as a wooded bedrock hill above the flat agricultural landscape, it mixed magnificent old oaks with scattered boulders and stands of ancient woodland. With the weather shifting back and forth between blue skies and intense showers, we used my rain jacket as a shared umbrella, only to find ourselves moments later having coffee in the sun and taking in the sweeping views from the top. With 160 metres of elevation gain over six kilometres, I hope to return soon for a trail run, but what I found most fascinating was the world underneath.

One of the largest caves in southern Sweden, Balsbergsgrottan immediately caught my imagination, with some halls stretching twenty metres long and five metres high. Apparently, you can borrow a key during the summer months, so maybe I could make unexpected off-season use of my running torches.

Seattle drizzle

Walking to the railway station through the drizzle, I was reminded of the Pacific Northwest, and of last Saturday when I wished so much that I could have stayed in bed with a cup of coffee. By the time I got to the station, the rain had intensified and my brown corduroy pants had turned almost black with rain.

A day with the boys in Gothenburg made it worthwhile, though. It has now been two months since I was last part of their everyday lives, and I have missed them so much. At least I am grateful for what we got to share: a thousand metres of swimming at Åby with Eddie, dystopian book hunting with William at the city library.

Coming back to Halmstad alone, I ended up running ten faster kilometres on the treadmill despite my earlier promises of taking it easy on my left knee. But sometimes running is the only way to stay sane and, if anything, the knee felt better after I had finished my run and walked back out into the pouring rain.

Made the cover

Considering all my years as a subscriber and how much I tend to follow the “Monocle trail” on my journeys (or maybe it is Monocle that is following me?), it only felt fair that I finally made the cover.

Jokes aside, these AI-saturated times clearly blur the line between fact and fiction, and when teaching statistics, I find myself depending more and more on generative AI to come up with examples, operationalizations, and workshop exercises. For the students, the obvious question becomes: why bother learning how to use JASP or understanding the reasoning behind the models when AI can give seemingly perfect answers on its own? While I can give good pedagogical answers to that question today, we are definitely on a slippery slope, and it is already very difficult to imagine what the education system will look like five, let alone ten, years from now.

Rise and shine

Falling asleep just as a heavy thunderstorm came ashore, I set my alarm for 5:00 a.m., hoping to bring back some of that winter arc energy of autumns past after all the Bohemian bacchanalia. With the sky still dark, I went for the first torch-lit run of the season, limiting myself to six kilometres on soft trails as I am still having a bit of pain in the back of my left knee (even if it is much better after taking a few days off from running while in Prague).

With my mind still on the dunes of Västra stranden, I went through an insanely long day of teaching statistics. To stop hearing myself talk about significance levels and Cronbach's α, I decided to create a bit of culinary content for the blog, even if it was just dinner for one.

After dinner, it is now back to constructing exam questions and running one last load of washing. Tomorrow, I have decided to stick to rowing rather than running, as Malmö Marathon is only 17 days away now and I desperately need my knee to hold up for those fast-paced 42 kilometres on asphalt.

30A

After crossing the Atlantic twice on the upper deck of the 747, it only felt fair that I ended up in seat 30A at the very end of the bus on my morning flight back to Scandinavia after two perfect days in Prague. With the CFM turbofan engines loud enough to block out any music, I find myself exploring the Hebrew concept of “timshel” (תִּמְשֹׁל), or “thou mayest”, in Steinbeck’s East of Eden: the possibility of overcoming what we inherit and, more specifically, the extent to which we can choose to be good.

With clear skies over central Europe, we are just passing Berlin, and I am reminded again of how close all of this is now that I no longer live in Umeå. Having taken Monday off, the rest of the week will be pretty wild, with different statistics classes between 8 and 17, but it was so obviously worth it.

Last night, sipping a “Madalenha caipirinha” and sharing a molten chocolate cake, I found myself thinking that, much like Steinbeck’s novel, these twenty years of blogging have created almost too many cross-references and layers upon layers. Still, tomorrow remains unwritten, and I am very grateful for having you all along for the journey.

Twenty years

When I composed a blog post to celebrate a decade of writing Rawls & Me back in 2016, I hinted at the idea of continuing for yet another decade, even as it felt almost unfathomable.

Obviously, it is impossible to sum up everything that has happened since, both on a personal and a political level. Yet, throughout, I have kept blogging, as toddlers have turned into teenagers, ultra distances beyond my wildest imagination have been conquered, and Halland has come to replace the High North.

There have been moments of existential bliss but also many foregone futures. Democracies have faltered and new wars have broken out. Still, sitting here in Prague on the rooftop of Grand Hotel Europa turned W, it is with a certain Panglossian optimism that I take on the task of continuing Rawls & Me into the future. Over the coming months, I hope to take you along as William and I travel to Montenegro and then, just in time for Christmas, Linnéa and I plan to cross the Atlantic and make landfall in la France d’outre-mer – or French Guiana to be more specific. Beyond that, the road is just as open as it was ten years ago with plenty left to chronicle.