THINKER'S ALMANAC - April 5

Despite the fact that they were all white, how did a third-grade teacher give her class a first-hand experience of what it is like to experience racial discrimination?

Subject:  Abstract and Concrete - Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes Experiment

Event:  Jane Elliot conducts a classroom experiment, 1968; Helen Keller learns language, 1887

As her third-grade students entered her classroom on the morning of Friday, April 5, 1968, Jane Elliot was thinking about how to deliver some bad news.  The previous day, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee.  Elliott’s students had studied Dr. King as one of their “Heroes of the Month,” and throughout the year they had talked about racial discrimination.  But Elliott’s students lived in an all-white town, Riceville, Iowa.  How could she truly help them to understand what it was like to be a victim of discrimination?

After a weekend of thinking about this problem, Elliott returned to class on Monday morning with a plan.  Instead of talking about discrimination, she was going to give her students a first-hand experience of what it feels like to be discriminated against.

She began by dividing the class into two groups based on eye color:  blue-eyed kids and brown-eyed kids.  She then made an announcement, explaining that brown-eyed kids were superior in every way:  they were smarter, nicer, and neater than blue-eyed students.  She then gave the blue-eyed students collars to wear around their necks to make them stand out, and she rearranged the 

classroom:  blue-eyed kids sat in the back and brown-eyed kids in the front.  To further the immersion of the experience, Elliot segregated the children at recess.

                                                                    Image by Gitti Lohr from Pixabay 

Elliott was astonished at how quickly the atmosphere changed in her classroom:  “I watched what had been marvelous, cooperative, wonderful, thoughtful children turn into nasty, vicious, discriminating little third-graders in a space of fifteen minutes.”

The next morning Elliott made another announcement:  she was wrong.  Actually, blue-eyed students were the superior ones, so they must now give their collars to the brown-eyed inferior students.

Not only did students feel worse when they were labeled as inferior, but they also performed more poorly.  In a timed reading exercise on phonics, “superior” students took on average 2.5 minutes to complete the task.  The same students, when labeled “inferior,” took 5.5 minutes to complete the same task.

As Chip and Dan Heath explain in their book Made to Stick, the genius of Elliott’s exercise was that it transformed an abstract idea into something that students could see and experience tangibly:  “Elliott’s simulation made prejudice concrete -- brutally concrete.  Studies conducted ten and twenty years later showed that Elliott’s students were significantly less prejudiced than their peers who had not been through the exercise” (1).

Coincidentally on this day in 1887, another great teacher made a breakthrough in transforming abstract ideas into concrete, tangible objects.  The teacher’s name was Anne Mansfield Sullivan.  She had been working with a seven-year-old blind and deaf girl named Helen Keller for over a month, trying to teach her language, struggling to help her “see” the connection between words and the world.  On April 5, 1887, Sullivan was hard at work spelling words out on Helen's hand, trying to help her understand the distinction between the words “mug” and “water.”  Having no success, Sullivan took Helen outside for a walk.  Seeing a water pump, Sullivan had an idea: she placed Helen’s hand under the pump’s spout and began to draw water.  As the water streamed over Helen’s hand, Sullivan spelled out the word w-a-t-e-r into her palm.  This tangible combination of words and water was exactly what Helen needed to begin communicating and experiencing her world.  As Helen later recounted in her autobiography The Story of My Life (1902), this experience of learning a single word broke down all her barriers to learning language:  “The living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free! . . . . Everything had a name and each name gave birth to a new thought.  As we returned to the house every object which I touched seemed to quiver with life.  That was because I saw everything with the strange, new sight that had come to me” (2).

Recall, Retrieve, Recite, Ruminate, Reflect, Reason: Why did Jane Elliot divide her students into blue-eyed kids and brown-eyed kids? What did Jane Elliot’s lesson for her students have in common with Anne Sullivan’s lesson with Helen Keller?

Today’s Challenge - Pouring Concrete: In 1987, the Partnership for a Drug-Free America (PDFA) produced what is probably the most memorable public service announcement ever shown on television.  Just as Jane Elliot transformed the abstract idea of racial discrimination into a concrete, tangible experience, the PDFA’s commercial made the abstract idea of the dangers of drug abuse vividly concrete for the nation’s viewers.  The scene begins with a close-up of hot butter sizzling in a hot frying pan.  The voiceover says, “This is drugs.”  A raw egg is then plopped into the pan.  The voiceover then says, “This is your brain on drugs.” As the viewer watches and listens to the egg fry, the voiceover concludes, saying, “Any questions?”  What is an example from your experience where you have seen, heard, or felt something that transformed an abstract idea in your mind into a vivid, tangible thing, which deepened your understanding and left you with a lesson you could not forget?

ALSO ON THIS DAY:

-April 5, 1792:  Today is the anniversary of the first veto in American presidential history.  President George Washington was presented a bill that would apportion representatives among the states, and he vetoed it.  The word veto has its roots in Latin, literally translated I forbid.

April 5, 1588:  The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes was born on this day.  His birth was premature:  his mother had gone into shock after hearing about the threat of the Spanish Armada off the English coast.  Writing about his birth, Hobbes said, “My mother gave birth to twins:  myself and fear.”  Writing about life in general in his famous work Leviathan, Hobbes described it as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Sources:  

1-Heath, Chip and Dan Heath.  Made to Stick:  Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die.  New York:  Random House, 2007.

2-Keller, Hellen. The Story of My Life, Chapter IV

THINKER'S ALMANAC - April 4

What political leader demonstrated courage by speaking on April 4, and what literary character demonstrated courage by writing on April 4?

Subject:  Courage to Speak and Write - R.F.K.’s Speech and Winston Smith’s Diary

Event: Robert F. Kennedy speaks after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Winston Smith begins writing in his diary.

Let us dare to read, think, speak, and write. -John Adams

On this day we remember two individuals: one a historical figure who demonstrated courage by speaking, the other a fictional character who demonstrated courage by writing.

On this day in 1968, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, who was running for the Democratic nomination for president, was preparing to give a campaign speech in Indianapolis, Indiana.  Just before he was scheduled to speak to the predominantly African-American audience, Kennedy learned that Martin Luther King, Jr. had been assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee.

Kennedy was warned by the police that the crown had not yet heard the bad news and that they might become unruly or violent once they heard of King’s death. Despite the danger, Kennedy decided not only to address the audience but also to inform them of the tragedy.  

Kennedy spoke for fewer than five minutes, but what he said will never be forgotten.  He began by immediately delivering the bad news. After pausing for a moment to allow the shocked crowd to gather its wits, Kennedy reminded the audience of King’s efforts to replace violence with understanding and compassion.  He showed empathy for his audience, comparing the anger they were feeling to the anger he felt when his brother was killed by an assassin five years earlier in Dallas. Instead of focusing on the racial divide in the United States, Kennedy instead made an appeal for unity and for justice:

What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love, and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.

Like Martin Luther King, Jr. did before him, Kennedy appealed to hope over despair and to peace over violence:

And let’s dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world. Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people.

                                                                Image by Greg Reese from Pixabay 

Kennedy did not have to speak on April 4, 1968, and no one would have faulted him for canceling his appearance under the sad circumstances.  Nevertheless, Kennedy seized the moment to courageously present what was much more than just a campaign speech. His brief words transformed a moment of sorrow into a time of rededication to the mission of Martin Luther King, Jr. and to what Abraham Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature.”

Two months later, on June 5, 1968, Kennedy himself was assassinated after winning the California presidential primary (1).

The second act of courage that took place on this day was in George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

In the novel’s opening chapter, the protagonist Winston Smith commits a forbidden act of rebellion, an act that we all take for granted. In the world of the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, the simple act that Winston performs could lead to punishment by death or a sentence of twenty-five years of forced labor:

The thing that he was about to do was to open a diary. . . . He dipped the pen into the ink and then faltered for just a second. A tremor had gone through his bowels. To mark the paper was the decisive act. In small clumsy letters he wrote:

April 4th, 1984.

He sat back. A sense of complete helplessness had descended upon him.. . .

Suddenly he began writing in sheer panic, only imperfectly aware of what he was setting down. His small but childish handwriting straggled up and down the page, shedding first its capital letters and finally even its full stops:

April 4th, 1984. Last night to the flicks. All war films. . . .

In the dystopian world of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, the one-party government of Oceania is in a perpetual state of war and is led by the all-seeing but unseen leader called Big Brother.  By putting his pen to paper, Winston Smith, a party worker, is committing the radical and unlawful act of expressing his own individual thoughts and questioning his government.

Recall, Retrieve, Recite, Ruminate, Reflect, Reason: How did Robert F. Kennedy respond to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.? In George Orwell’s novel 1984, what courageous act does Winston Smith perform?

Challenge - Courageous Call for Communication: What are the reasons we should not take our ability to read, think, speak, and write for granted?  In the years leading up to the American Revolution, John Adams wrote an essay called “A Dissertation on the Canon and the Federal Law” (1765).  In this essay, Adams laid the legal groundwork for the Revolution, challenging his readers to remember the important role that literacy plays as the foundation of human freedoms:

Let us tenderly and kindly cherish, therefore, the means of knowledge.  Let us dare to read, think, speak, and write.

Write a Public Service Announcement (PSA) that challenges your audience to reconsider and reimagine the importance of literacy — of speaking, writing, thinking, and writing.  Motivate your audience to rededicate themselves to these skills that we so often take for granted. 

ALSO ON THIS DAY:

-April 4, 1874:  On this day entomologist Samuel H. Scudder published the story “Look at Your Fish”  in Every Saturday magazine.  In the story, Scudder recounts his early education as a scientist under the tutelage of renowned zoologist Jean Agassiz (1807-1873), whose first lesson was to have his student scrupulously study a grunt fish. 

-Samuel H. Scudder, "In the Laboratory With Agassiz", Every Saturday, (April 4, 1974) 16, 369-370.

-April 4, 2016:  Julia Galef presented a TED Talk entitled “Why You Think You’re Right Even When You’re Wrong” on this day.  Her talk focused on the Dreyfus Affair (See THINKER’S ALMANAC - January 13) and especially on the heroic efforts of Colonel Georges Picquart who searched for the truth when others wouldn’t.  Galef warns against the “soldier mindset,” which employs “motivated reasoning” to see what it wants to see rather than to objectively seek out the truth.  Her prescription is to take on the “Scout Mindset,”  which sets aside personal bias and prejudice to objectively seek the kinds of facts and evidence that will lead to the truth.

Sources:

1-Kennedy, Robert F.  STATEMENT ON ASSASSINATION OF MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR., INDIANAPOLIS, INDIANA, APRIL 4, 1968.  John F. Kennedy Library.

THINKER'S ALMANAC - April 3

Why did Victor Hugo work in the nude while writing ‘Les Miserables,’ and how can his example help us meet our deadlines on time?

Subject:  Ulysses Contract - Victor Hugo’s naked attempt to defeat writer’s block

Event:  Victory Hugo’s novel Les Miserables is published, 1862

On this day in 1862, Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables was published.  The novel, which has been popularized through its numerous musical and film adaptations, took Hugo 17 years to write.  

While writing the novel, the French writer struggled with bouts of writer’s block that required him to develop a unique strategy:  he removed all his clothes and locked himself in his room with only pen and paper; he would then order his servants not to bring him his clothes until he had produced a complete chapter (1).

Psychologists call Hugo’s strategy a Ulysses contract, where an individual sets up a deliberate negative consequence to help them avoid another negative consequence.  In Hugo’s case, he created the negative consequence of being seen in the nude to avoid the other negative consequences of not finishing his novel.

The Ulysses contract originates with another writer, Homer.  In The Odyssey, he tells the tale of Ulysses’ plan to be the first to hear the Sirens’ song and live to tell about it.  All others had been lured to their death, for the mesmerizing song of the Sirens caused men to lose their wits and crash their ships into the rocks of a nearby island.  To avoid this fate, Ulysses ordered his men to tie him to the mast.  He then instructed his crew to put wax in their ears to prevent them from hearing both the Siren song and any orders he would give for them to untie him.  To get what he wanted, Ulysses knew he needed to think ahead and bind himself temporarily so that in the long run he would be freed up to achieve his goal.

                                                            Image by Dimitris Vetsikas from Pixabay 

Another advocate of the Ulysses contract was the ancient Greek orator Demosthenes.  Knowing that he was not a gifted speaker, his only hope was to put in hours of practice.  Retreating to his room, he gave himself a terrible haircut, shaving off half of his hair.  He knew he needed a haircut so hideous that it would make him ashamed to be seen in public.  The haircut wouldn’t help him be a better speaker, but it would encourage him to stay in his room, working on his speaking skills.

Recall, Recite, Retrieve, Ruminate, Reflect, Reason:  How did Victor Hugo defeat writer’s block with a Ulysses Contract? How did Demosthenes use a Ulysses contract to become a more polished public speaker?

Challenge - Don’t Put This Off:  Procrastination is not just a problem for writers, speakers, or ancient warriors; instead, it's a problem for all of us.  Research what experts say about effective ways to fight procrastination, and report on your findings.

Sources: 

1-”Victor Hugo’s Strange Cure for Writer’s Block.” The Telegraph.

THINKER'S ALMANAC - April 2

What classic fairy tale reminds us of the human tendency toward opting for harmony and conformity rather than telling the truth?

Subject:  Groupthink - “The Emperor’s New Clothes”

Event:  Birthday of Hans Christian Anderson, 1805

“The Little Match Girl,” “The Princess and the Pea,” “The Ugly Duckling,” “The Snow Queen,” “The Little Mermaid,” “Thumbelina”:  these stories are so familiar and so frequently adapted that many people fail to realize that they even have an author; many would probably be even more surprised to learn that they all have the same author:  Hans Christian Anderson, who was born on this day in Denmark in 1805. Anderson's name is so synonymous with fairy tales that his birthday is annually recognized as International Children’s Book Day.

                                                                Image by Lothar Dieterich from Pixabay 

Anderson was born into poverty;  his mother was a washerwoman and his father was a cobbler.  He left home at age fourteen, hoping to work in theater, but he soon discovered that his talent for poetry and storytelling was his ticket to success. 

Of his over 150 fairy tales, one stands out for its psychological and sociological insights:  “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” a tale that has been translated into over 100 languages. 

The story is about an Emperor who is hoodwinked by two hucksters posing as weavers.  They tell the Emperor that they can weave him a beautiful new suit of clothes, but that the clothes are invisible to anyone who is stupid, incompetent, or unfit.  When the “sewing” is finished, the Emperor holds a procession to show off his new clothes.  None of the adults dares to admit that the Emperor is parading naked in public for fear of being labeled stupid or unfit.  There is one child in the crowd, however, who is not afraid to proclaim the truth; he cries out, “But he isn’t wearing anything at all!”

More than a hundred years after Anderson wrote “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” a research psychologist gave the story's main theme a name:  groupthink.

Irving Janis, from Yale, researched group decision-making rather than fairy tales, but he discovered the same psychological phenomenon found in Anderson’s story.  Groupthink occurs when adult groups opt for harmony or conformity over telling the truth.  This often leads to irrational and poor decision-making.

One specific historical case study analyzed by Janis was the poor group decision-making and thinking in the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961.  The plan, put together by John F. Kennedy’s administration, was to invade Cuba and overthrow Fidel Castro.  Even though President Kennedy involved some of the brightest people in the world in his planning process, the invasion of Cuba failed miserably.  This puzzled the president, but once he began to examine what happened, he realized his error.  Instead of encouraging his subordinates to scrutinize and question the invasion plan, he had allowed his men to simply go along with the plan, telling him what they thought he wanted to hear.  The lesson learned from the Bay of Pigs debacle was that to avoid groupthink the individuals in a group need to feel free to speak their minds.  They also should be encouraged to scrutinize the weaknesses of a plan as well as its strengths. When we work in groups, we are often too quick to try to maintain harmony and to establish consensus.  Kennedy was able to capitalize on the lessons learned in 1961 when the Soviet Union secretly deployed nuclear missiles to Cuba in October 1962.  After discovering the missiles, Kennedy made sure that he heard multiple points of view and that everyone involved was encouraged to debate, to argue, and to disagree.  This time, instead of failure, Kennedy achieved success.  The Soviets agreed to remove the missiles from Cuba, and nuclear conflict was averted (1).

Recall, Recite, Retrieve, Ruminate, Reflect, Reason:  How does the story of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” reveal Groupthink?  How did the lessons learned from the failure of the Bay of Pigs help Kennedy overcome Groupthink?

Challenge - Philosophy For Kids:  What is another story that you know from your childhood that contains the same kind of philosophical or psychological insights found in “The Emperor’s New Clothes”?  Summarize the story and its insights.

ALSO ON THIS DAY:

-April 2, 1951:  On this day, Jack Kerouac began a 21-day writing marathon, producing a 120-foot typewritten scroll that would become his best-known work, On The Road.  In a letter to his friend, Neal Cassady, Kerouac described the process and product:   “Went fast because the road is fast… wrote whole thing on strip of paper 120 foot long (tracing paper that belonged to Cannastra.)–just rolled it through typewriter and in fact no paragraphs… rolled it out on floor and it looks like a road.”  The scroll contained 125,000 words, which means that Kerouac averaged approximately 6,000 words per day. On The Road was officially published in 1957.  The original scroll was purchased for $2.43 million by Jim Irsay, owner of the Indianapolis Colts, in 2002.

Sources:

1-Williams, Kelly. “Groupthink and the Emperor’s New Clothes.” Medium.com 8 August 2017.

THINKER'S ALMANAC - April 1

Does drinking coffee make you a better target for April Fools’ jokes?

Subject:  Invention/Persuasion - Caffeine

Event:  Nescafe instant coffee goes on sale on April Fools’ Day, 1938

The first of April is the day we remember what we are the other 364 days of the year. -Mark Twain

On this day in 1938, Nescafe instant coffee went on sale for the first time.  The process of creating this soluble powdered coffee was anything but 

instant.  It began 9 years earlier with the Wall Street Crash in 1929.  Like the rest of the economy, coffee prices collapsed.  The necessity of figuring out what to do with tons of unsold coffee sitting in warehouses in Brazil became the mother of invention for a chemist named Max Morgenthaler.  First launched in Switzerland, Nescafe soon became popular globally during World War II because of the fact that it had a longer shelf life than regular coffee.  A majority of Nescafe’s production was used in C Rations for U.S. soldiers (1).

                                                                        Image by Chris from Pixabay 

The release of Nescafe on April First probably has nothing to do with April Fool’s Day; however, there is an interesting 2005 study that raises the question of whether or not coffee might make you more gullible, and therefore a bigger target for April Fool’s shenanigans.  

Researchers from the University of Queensland, Australia, began their study by giving their subjects orange juice; half of the subjects received orange juice spiked with caffeine.  After consuming their orange juice, subjects read well-crafted arguments on controversial issues.  Results revealed that subjects who had consumed caffeine were 35% more likely to be persuaded by the arguments than those who had consumed just orange juice. 

In a second study, instead of reading well-crafted arguments, all subjects read weak arguments. In this second study, whether or not subjects consumed caffeine had no effect on whether or not they were persuaded.  These results lead to the conclusion that instead of making coffee consumers more gullible, caffeine actually makes them more alert and more primed to process cogent, logical arguments (2).

Recall, Recite, Retrieve, Ruminate, Reflect, Reason:  What event sparked the invention of Nescafe instant coffee?  What was the result of the orange juice study as it relates to persuasion?

Today’s Challenge - Instant Coffee, TV Dinners, and ?: An ancient proverb attributed to Plato says that “Necessity is the mother of invention.”  Just as Nescafe instant coffee was born out of the crisis of the Wall Street Crash of 1929, there are many stories about innovations and inventions born of necessity.  One example is the classic TV dinner.  Just after Thanksgiving 1953, the Swanson Company realized that it had overestimated the demand for turkey.  Not only did Swanson have 260 tons of frozen turkey, it also had the turkey stored in refrigerated railroad cars that only kept their contents frozen when moving.  As the trains traveled back and forth between Nebraska and the East Coast, Swanson executives scrambled to generate ideas for what to do with tons of turkey. The answer came from a salesman named Gerry Thomas who had the idea of packaging the turkey in aluminum trays along with stuffing and potatoes.  Thomas got help from Swanson’s bacteriologist Betty Cronin, who solved the problem of how to simultaneously heat the meat and vegetables so that the meals would be safe for consumers to eat (3).  Research other inventions that were born of necessity, and tell the story of how one such invention came to be.

ALSO ON THIS DAY:

April 1, 1956:  On this day the magazine Saturday Review played an April Fools joke on its readers, publishing an article by K. Jason Sitewell entitled, “The Invention of the Period.”  The article claimed to celebrate the life work of Kohmar Pehriad (544-493 BC), the inventor of the comma and the period.  The article also claimed that Pehriad’s son, Apos-Trophe Pehriad invented another less frequently used punctuation mark.

Sources:  

1-”Celebrating 75 years of the Nestlé brand that invented instant coffee.” Nestle.com.

2-Goldstein, Noah J., Steve J. Martin, and Robert B. Cialdini.

Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive. Free Press, 2009.

3-Biakolo, Kovie. “A Brief History of the TV Dinner.” Smithsonian Magazine November 2020.