The Professor

It was my first class in school that used an auditorium and my school was pretty small at the time, something like 7,000 students and most classes had about 30-40 kids in them, but there were a few of these introductory classes that held over 300 and this one also happened to be an emerging new subject; Sociology.
The professor walked on stage and he immediately became my perfect stereotype of what a professor should be; in his 50's, wild, white bushy hair and a big white mustache. I still remember his first words as his assistants busied themselves passing out papers to all of us in the audience.

"If all you are seeking is an A in this class, merely look up the answers to the questions on the papers I am passing out. If you want to learn about Sociology and the world you are living in, come to my lectures, because nothing from them will be on the test."

This guy tapped into my head like no other had before and created a longing in me to learn for it's own sake. It was as if he knew that there were people that didn't see a grade equalling a good job, and were after knowledge itself.

I learned a lot from him in the 4 years I attended that school. He became my advisor and I remember him predicting that someday there would be machines that would spit out a whole book for us instead of having to borrow them from libraries (this was back in the early 1970's). He knew that computers were going to be big, but it was still too far away in the future.

Dr. Burton Wright retired from UCF a long time ago, but his influence upon me still lingers..

The Garden By The Lake

My friends and family groan whenever I trot out another analogy, but this one presented itself to me quite simply. For years I lived near my grandmother-in-law, who had a nice old house on a lake. I loved to learn from people, especially older people, and she had many things to share. She was getting on in her years and they had finally taken away her driver's license. Her days were spent puttering around the house and in her garden. When I went to visit her, I had to listen while she went on in detail about her garden and all the things she was doing and going to do with it. You could definitely see that she was bringing peace and order to that little spot of land. All around for three acres things were growing wild, but right here in this one designated place, things were just the way she wanted it.

Then, as happens to all of us, she got too old and feeble to do the gardening, and the weeds came in. Finally she passed on and the house was vacant for years, waiting for the next property owner to come tear it down and create his own version of peace and order.

The strange thing was, that for a couple of years I would walk my dogs down to that vacant house and just look at the garden and remember what it had been. Nature has it's own beauty but it wasn't here in the garden. It needed it's gardener and she was gone.

We took some of her plants and put them in our garden where we tend them now. I see that the peace and order is actually inside us and the beauty of the garden is that outward sign of it. Sometimes I wonder if all of our life is an attempt to bring order to chaos, even knowing that we only do it for a while.

 

The Slowest Zebra

The image of a herd of zebras quietly munching the plain grass while a nearby lion munches on the slowest member of the herd has haunted me for a while. Are the zebras just plain stupid, or do they know that at least for now they are safe, because the lion has food and nobody else has to worry for a while? Maybe the lion, being there, will keep other lions from coming around and trying to get some more zebra steaks.
What suddenly occurred to me recently, is that sooner or later, every single zebra in that herd will get older and slower and someday slow enough to be the slowest zebra in the herd. It makes you think a little harder about the 'survival of the fittest'. One day, we will meet that end, and the rest of the herd will keep on about their business, mostly glad it wasn't them.

Gorilla Smart

Gorilla Smart, i.e., guerrilla smart (intentional misspelling, which is something that the gorilla smart person might do, making a joke that we don’t get).

We all know that dogs can hear things we can’t. So we know that sounds exist that we can’t measure with our senses, although we can make machines to measure it.
We know that our vision is limited, some more than others, as I can attest to. For me, can I truly say that something off in the distance is really fuzzy, or is it my vision that can’t get good focus?
My brain tells me it is my eyes that are wrong.

We measure intelligence with tests. We know that we have given tests to people that are smarter than we are, but have we given test to people that are smarter than the people that made the tests?
Could you be too smart to want to be a part of MENSA?
Could you be so smart that you deliberately camouflaged yourself so that you don’t get singled out? (think about the kids in middle school that go from straight A to D-F students)
Me, I think I’m just smart enough to spot these people sometimes, like the kid in movie, Sixth Sense was able to see ghosts.



I think, just as Lance Armstrong, with his superior physical abilities, can ride up a mountain at 30 mph, while I can barely maintain 15mph in flat Florida for 2 hours, there are people with substantially better minds. I don’t mean geniuses. I mean smart enough not to cooperate with the people testing IQ’s. People smart enough to make themselves appear ordinary to those of us that can’t spot them.


Now, the fun part. If there are people that smart, what are they doing with their lives? Where are they? We know that they don’t want to draw attention to themselves. Now the guys I have written about before, the Hummer-driving computer guys, are not part of this group. They are several rungs down the intellectual ladder, the people that don’t brag, but are using their superior intellect to gain material things. They show up on the radar of normal folk and would probably be aware of the ‘gorilla smart’ people if they cared to look around. The Hummer-driving guys have the intellect, but the ego didn’t quite match up, so the need to be ostentatious shows.


We know that they, for the most part, aren’t presidents, CEO’s or just about anybody that you might read about in the paper. The whole idea of being famous or notable would be something they would avoid. What makes this not a conspiracy theory, is that I don’t believe they have a club or sit around making decisions for the world any more than Shaq goes to club meetings for the Extremely Big Men Society. I believe that these people are doing altruistic things, volunteering, reading a lot, and mainly seeing the world whole, instead of that narrow tunnel of getting up, going to work, and going home at the end of the day. Maybe they are involved in church groups, or maybe they stay as far away from them as possible, but I’m pretty sure that they are always in a situation where they are helping others that are less fortunate.


I tried this theory out on a young man that I thought fit the profile. Surprisingly, he went right to it. He said, “Yes, I want people to think I’m some dumb redneck. I want people to underestimate me. It gives me an advantage.”

Sometimes I wonder just how many of these people are out there and are there even smarter ones that I can’t spot?

Is it possible that what we sometimes see as a decline in intelligence in our world is actually that the really smart ones have gone underground?

And Sometime Your Teachers Pick You

This is my best Paul Harvey imitation.

The year was 1970 or thereabouts. In Orlando, Florida, hippies, demonstrations and the revolution in general were pretty much something you read about or saw on the news.

I think they were building Disney World and we pretty much thought it would be a cool place to work until we found out about their dress code.

At high school, you were in trouble for having your hair touch your collar or having bangs touch your eyebrows (if you were a guy).
For girls, the big deal was how far your hem was from your knee. I was trying as hard as I could to distance myself from the ‘advanced classes’ and fully become part of the surfer group.
Most of my high school did not have air conditioning, which wasn’t fun, but then some of my friends didn’t have central air at home either.
My school was about 99% white and probably 75% redneck, although we didn’t say that back then. Mostly we worried about the big guys from the woods to the east of town.

One day, I walked into my new class of History.
Here is this big black lady, with a monster afro hairdo, loud voice, and very casual demeanor.
We were going to learn black history and we were going to learn things in a fashion I was unfamiliar with. I think you could call it organized chaos. I learned facts, but mostly I learned to like her, and went on to become one of her assistants for the next couple of years. I remember how much I enjoyed just being around her and she seemed like our own smalltown rebel. I would have voted her Most-Likely-To-Get-Fired-From-Her-Job and that made me like her even more.

I later found out that the teacher that made so much difference to a bunch of us white kids in our old school in the east end of town, far from any black neighborhoods, had much more to do. Miss Kegler got married while she was teaching us and that might have been why she was smiling so much when she wasn’t teaching us about the world.






I believe that Kattie Kegler became Kattie Adams in 1971.
(from a news article)
Former Orange County School Board Member Kattie J. Adams lost her battle with a long term illness on Thursday, July 24, 2003.
In 1980 Adams became the first African American elected to the Orange County School Board and served for 20 years until she retired in November 2000.

Before she was elected to the school board, Adams was a dedicated classroom teacher. She began her teaching career at Jones High School in August of 1962 and later taught at Colonial High. Both schools are located in Orlando. She worked more than 38 years for Orange County Public Schools and was the job developer for the Women's Center at Valencia Community College.

During her life she worked with zeal and passion to improve the quality of education for all children in Orange County and across the nation. "We have lost a person who truly cared about our children," said Superintendent Ronald Blocker. "Kattie Adams wanted to make sure all students used their minds, not only to process knowledge, but also to make good decisions in life."

Taking The Hit

If you were ever a Boy Scout or Girl Scout, you got the indoctrination to be prepared for anything. I thought were talking about camping and making sure that you didn't forget the mosquito repellent, but now I see the larger implications.
Although I have often made fun of my Dad and his clipboard checklists for every little outing, I see how there is comfort in being ready for the unexpected. Truth is, no matter what you do, something can change all that, but at least you can be ready. In my mind, it goes back to us kids playing Monopoly and trying to make sure we had enough money to handle it if we landed on Boardwalk with a couple of hotels on it. We referred to it as "how many hits we could take". Nobody could be positive they would win, no matter what strategy they used, but the guy that could take a hit and keep going was someone to look up to. I've done it once in real life and the feeling was incredible. I felt positive, strong, and ready to take on the world. I can see those hotels on Boardwalk up ahead and I will own them someday...

Tableau And The Art Of Thinking Differently

After many years of writing Crystal Reports, SSRS and Jaspersoft Reports, I first ran into Tableau. I struggled to create spreadsheet-looking documents for a while and then relaxed into what the product is really for: Analytics.
Instead of trying to decide what I wanted in a SQL query and then deciding how to group the rows and which columns I needed, I just started dragging stuff around. I started getting strange results, and then I started seeing crazy charts, and finally started getting results I liked but wasn't really after. I'm still on the journey, but one thing is for sure. I can give this product to a user with some data and they will come up with impressive results. My thinking now is that you are better off with no idea of what you want to create. Better to think, how are sales? How am I doing with inventory? Are we better off than the last few years? Then start dragging the fields onto the page. Not all of it is intuitive, but TableauSoftware.com website offers a lot of free training.
Now they have a Mac version...it is great, not 100% of the PC version..but very close. Tableau seems to have brought the sizzle AND the steak with this product..

Keep your eyes on these guys...