Dysosmia

Having dropped William off at the chess tournament venue, I laced up my red Hoka Rincons and headed out for a short sunset run in Karlstad, a city I have not visited for almost twenty years to the day.

Located on the northern shore of Sweden’s largest lake, the city feels surprisingly coastal, with its large guest harbour. What stood out even more, though, was the strong smell of chocolate or coffee, making me briefly wonder whether I was experiencing dysosmia (I have lost much of my sense of smell over the last couple of years) before I stumbled upon the Löfbergs Lila coffee roastery.

Once back at the hotel, I indulged in the complimentary dinner included in Strawberry’s Home concept. While the value is more obvious in Norway, where everything else is outrageously expensive, it definitely saves a few bucks (if such Americanisms are allowed) when on the road. With heavy rain expected tomorrow, I am happy I got to explore at least the central parts of the city on my run, as I will probably be confined to the gym’s rowing machine.

Matcha latte

This morning, a young woman wearing a hijab spilled what looked like an entire cup of matcha latte across the floor of the train. Rather than telling anyone, she simply walked away. As the train attendant appeared with a roll of paper towels, I felt rather strange just sitting there behind my laptop, so I got up to help.

While we were cleaning up the mess, the attendant began complaining about “Arabs”. And just like that, a rather ordinary instance of inconsiderate behaviour had become something much bigger. Or, perhaps more accurately, something much smaller. What struck me was how readily the stereotype was available, as if it had been waiting all along for an opportunity to be confirmed. The young woman had behaved badly, no doubt, but somehow her behaviour was no longer her own. It had become evidence about an entire category of people, one to which the attendant had assigned her without knowing anything else about her.

Almost at the same time, I happened to come across an old promotional photograph from Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul, where I used to teach. It shows me surrounded by students in a classroom, a little snapshot of a time when my own world was expanding. Looking at that photograph now, I was reminded of how much larger the world is than the categories through which we ordinarily understand it. Of course, meeting people from different backgrounds does not mean that we will always like them, agree with them, or approve of their behaviour. But perhaps it can teach us to let people remain individuals, rather than immediately turning them into representatives of something else.

Listening to the wind

When told by the Swedish Academy that she had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, Anne Carson apparently replied that she was in Iceland listening to the wind. Hard to match, but at least I grabbed the one book of hers I had on my shelf and jumped aboard a metallic Öresund train into the autumn rain.

Compared to Carson's Eros the Bittersweet, with its exploration of desire in classical literature and philosophy, I must admit that my own final edits to the När då då? manuscript feel rather flat. Still, I am happy to have finally submitted it for review, meaning that I can now turn my academic attention back to those elusive biogenic hydrocarbons, courtesy of the Swedish Energy Agency.

Beach runs

Moving north in less than a month, I am trying to maximize my beach running by chasing the morning light along Västra stranden. Yesterday, I was even able to squeeze in a lunch run as the waves kept rolling in.

Today, I attended that APT-turned-lecture on cognitive perspectives on education, which I greatly appreciated, with my only reservation being the insistence that learning science is not a “perspective” but rather an entirely inductive enterprise. In fact, claims that something is not theoretical or in any way ideological are often an indication of the exact opposite. Unsurprisingly, it did not take many minutes before someone in the audience took the content as a vindication of their own views on education, emphasizing “hard work” and the importance of homework.

While I prefer to remain on the sidelines of these pedagogical debates, I think it is important that we all recognize our own biases and preferred interpretations. Just as “evidence-based policy-making” often becomes “policy-based evidence-making” in practice, translating cognitive research into educational practice inevitably involves values and priorities of its own.

The president

On the train this morning, Linnéa and I came to reflect on the fact that Donald Trump first became president in 2016, and that for our younger kids, he is simply “The President”, in much the same way that Ronald Reagan was for our generation. Like yesterday, when we watched a rather disturbing documentary about Sweden’s minister for civil defence, Carl-Oskar Bohlin, it is difficult to fully grasp just how much political discourse has changed.

Considering the speech Trump recently gave at the United Nations, it is worth remembering that, for all his faults, Ronald Reagan told the 42nd session of the General Assembly in 1987:

“In our obsession with antagonisms of the moment, we often forget how much unites all the members of humanity […] I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world.”

Science fiction, alright. But perspectives like that mattered. Democracy itself depends on something similar: losers’ consent, the willingness to accept temporary defeat because one remains committed to a political order larger than one’s immediate interests. The same is true internationally. Politics cannot function for long if every disagreement is reduced to the satisfaction of our basest instincts.

Perhaps that is what feels most different today: not simply the policies, but the shrinking of the horizon.

Too cool for school

Returning to Halland in time for tomorrow’s workplace meeting (APT) on learning science and the cognitive psychologist Daniel T. Willingham’s book “Why don’t students like school?”, I am struck by the basic point that our brain is not designed for thought, that thinking is hard work, and something we often do our best to avoid, especially when it comes at a social cost.

At the same time, humans are naturally curious. We want to see what lies beyond, to better ourselves (if we are to speak Star Trek), and to learn new things. But curiosity is fragile. What we seem to enjoy is not thinking as such, but the small reward that comes from successful thinking. Problems that are too easy are boring; problems that appear impossible are frustrating. Somewhere between the two lies the pleasure of figuring something out.

This also means that good teaching cannot simply consist of making students “active”. To think about something, students need something to think with: factual knowledge, previous examples and procedures stored in long-term memory. Asking students to critically discuss a question for which they lack the necessary background knowledge is no more intellectually demanding than asking them to guess.

Perhaps the better question for teachers is therefore not whether a class is a lecture, seminar or game, but: where is the cognitive work? Who is actually doing the thinking? Willingham notes how easily a lesson can become a long series of teacher explanations, while the students themselves solve very few problems. And perhaps we are sometimes too eager to supply answers before we have created a question that students actually want answered.

Seen this way, the challenge is to design teaching in which students repeatedly encounter problems that are difficult enough to require thought, but sufficiently accessible that they can experience the satisfaction of solving them.

C4

Founded by the Danish king Christian IV in 1614, many things in Kristianstad, including the city itself, bear his name. Taking the bus out to the C4 shopping mall, I started the day with an upper-body strength session at Nordic Wellness (my legs are still trashed from the marathon) before sitting down to mark 47 exams in Inspera, a marathon in its own right.

However, as so often in my life, I had already received the reward before putting in the work, as Linnéa baked the most delicious cinnamon buns yesterday while I cooked an old favourite dish of mine (minced lamb with sage and lemon) for dinner. We also got to play a game with all the flags of the world, which I am bringing along to Karlstad to play with William next weekend, as well as a round of the feminist edition of När då då?. Linnéa’s daughter won the latter, presumably thanks to Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls: 100 Tales of Extraordinary Women having been her favourite book when she was younger.

Malmö, again

Being a city full of memories, reaching back to the 1980s in Beijers Park, through the late 90s of coming of age, to the open skyline of Kasai this summer, Malmö has always held a special place in my heart. Today, I got to race 42.2 kilometres through its streets.

For the first half marathon, I lived the dream of running in under three hours and thirty minutes, even if my heart rate was well above 170 bpm. Having passed the 21k mark in one hour and 43 minutes, it only took a few more kilometres for reality to catch up with me. With my knee hurting like hell and my stamina simply not there, from 32 kilometres onwards it became pure suffering, often with my pace dropping to between six and seven minutes per kilometre. Finishing in 3 hours and 53 minutes, I felt horribly nauseous but, luckily, both my parents were at the finish line and took extraordinarily good care of me.

A few hours at a Parisian café later, all parameters were back to normal and I could take the train back to Halmstad. Looking back on the race, I am still happy about finishing in under four hours and having had such a beautiful day by the water. Contrary to the forecast, the sun broke through the mist in ways that almost reminded me of California, and it is no exaggeration to say that I could see myself living in Malmö again sometime in the future, when the kids have grown up.

200 papers

According to the Washington Post, a tenured professor at the University of Chicago managed to produce more than two hundred papers in just nine months, largely thanks to generative AI, before fellow academics started raising questions. As such, I should perhaps not be surprised that I recently had to wait three months for a journal to even decide whether to send my manuscript out for review. Luckily, they did, so now I have one more article out there awaiting its fate.

Hopefully, I will have another one joining it next week, as Kalle and I are wrapping up our co-authored article on the board game När då då?. Compared with my work in environmental ethics, pedagogical research really is such a blissful world of encouragement and supportive comments. I mean, few people are going to object to students learning the history of political thought or being exposed to voices outside the established canon.

After spending six hours in the classroom, I stopped by Nordic Wellness for a quick gym session before making a massive carb-loading feast of pecorino meatballs and spaghetti, served with a glass of Argentinian red (as per tradition). Tomorrow, at 7:37 a.m., I will take the high-speed train down to Malmö, where the gun goes off at ten sharp at Ribersborg, sending me everywhere from Limhamn to Värnhem before eventually bringing me back to Ribersborg – hopefully with the clock showing something under three hours and thirty minutes.

Kennedy

After twenty years of blogging, I might be forgiven for thinking I have written things here on Rawls & Me that I in fact have not. Talking with Linnéa yesterday about the not-so-clear-cut distinction between democratic debate and foreign influence operations, I was reminded of a speech John F. Kennedy gave in 1962, which I was certain I had mentioned on the blog. I searched in vain, but I remember the quote as speaking directly to a democratic ethos that seems all but lost these days:

"We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people."

Much like Linnéa's wish to raise her kids as world citizens in a time dominated by chauvinism, many of my values (such as the idea that everyone on this planet deserves a reasonable material standard of living) would, I often feel, have been plain common sense sixty or a hundred years ago. But as the discourse has shifted, they, like Kennedy's words above, have come to seem almost like fringe positions, now that "safety" and group egoism have taken precedence over everything else.