Doctor Thyself

Learned Vol. 8, Issue 14

Everyone should have a Ph.D. Seriously. Everyone. Your plumber ought to have a Ph.D. Your hairstylist should. Your weird friend who’s obsessed with 70s Scooby-Doo cartoons? They absolutely should. Look, the whole point of a Ph.D. is to show that you have contributed meaningful insight or research to the vault of human knowledge.

Ergo, every one you know, every single motherfucker out there has some unique insight available to them and to them only. We call it being human. So, based on those two thoughts, it’s not unreasonable to suggest that everybody - you, me, Joe the Plumber¹, Jenni the hairstylist, and Scooby-Doo-obsessed Timmy - should all have Ph.D.s. And I’m dead fucking serious about this: we should all be the doctor contributing our own insights to the greater whole of the human experience.

And, let me be absolutely clear²: that we are not doctors and that we are not given the time and leeway to do our research and thereby contribute “meaningfully” is a travesty of time, money, gatekeeping, and plain old elitism. Let’s get into it.

Everyone forgets that Ganesha ain’t above dropping a boulder or three in the path of those in need of an attitude adjustment. Makes him the perfect deity for most Ph.D. review boards. Photo by Artem Beliaikin on Unsplash

Doctor is an old word but in rare contrast to most really old words, which have semantically broadened more than your mama’s ass, it’s kept a pretty singular meaning albeit with a few related terms. Doctor, in short, means teacher. It literally comes from the Latin verb to teach, docere. In the late 14th century it morphed from plain old teacher to teacher who knows everything about a subject, a.k.a, an expert.

It’s also worth noting that, as with most old, Latin things, doctor began as an ecclesiastical term before becoming more secular and being applied to medical practitioners, learned lecturers, and athletes who donate lots of money to greedy institutions more corporate than academic³. Looking at you Oxford. (Sorry, Dr. Hawking⁴.)

To be clear, what I’m saying is that earning a Ph.D. should be hard because the research is hard, not because of bureaucratic hoop jumping. So when I’m out here saying that everyone ought to have their Ph.D. what I really mean is that everyone has the capacity for a Ph.D. and, as a mostly-civilized society, we owe it to each other to provide the space and time to achieve what we can free of artificial constraints.

So, let’s get back to Plumber Joe. Is it possible that a plumber who has been working in the field for a few years has encountered problems that have yet to be written up in a journal or otherwise rigorously fact-checked publication? Yes. Is it also possible that Joe has the necessary expertise and insight to tackle the problem in a unique and meaningful way that would benefit the world should it be written up in a reputable magazine? Fuck, yes. The question then, is, why aren’t plumbers (and hairstylists and Scooby-Doo obsessives) writing up their findings for the benefit of all humanity?

The short answer is access. College is, in theory, at least partly about teaching you how to research, create, support, defend, and critically re-evaluate a thesis. By learning these steps in undergraduate classes, you are then able to apply it across the broad spectrum of a specialty. Showing your ability to do so earns you a Master’s degree. Then, having learned and applied yourself, you find a gap in your field’s knowledge and wield your tools acutely and precisely in an attempt to fill that gap with new knowledge. When you have done this, you are awarded your Ph.D. and the title of doctor*.

But here’s the problem. I know a lot of people with Master’s level degrees for whom the idea of continuing on with a Ph.D. just isn’t worth the professional headache. And this is important so I want to make this very clear: these people I know, myself among them, like doing the research. They enjoy doing the research. They do it well and conscientiously. But what they do not want to deal with is finding the funding, dealing with the review board, and, in general, fighting with the very institutions that should be awarding the degree for the right to earn the degree in the first place.

(To clarify that last point: here in Japan, many part-time employees are not allowed to use the resources of the universities they work for, nor are they allowed to publish in the university’s journals. In short, they are not allowed to use the very tools they are teaching the students to use.)

So, bluntly: access and funding are gatekeeping at the professional level; in a democratized society neither should exist.

What should exist, however, is the basic respect anyone who has put in the time to better themselves. Fortunately, unlike teacher, doctor is still a term of respect. Especially in the medical fields. It’s only when we shift away from medicine to more esoteric fields that the term doctor itself comes under fire, mostly from people who don’t have Ph.D.s.

In recent memory, Dr. Jill Biden, former first lady and wife of former president Joe Biden, was criticized for using Doctor as a title when she is not a medical doctor. It was seen as somehow acting or attempting to elevate herself to the level of “a real doctor.” This is problematic for a number of reasons. Aside from the rote sexism and classism inherent in the issue, it’s a problem because doctor is a term of art. It denotes someone who has put in the time and work to, say it with me now, contribute to the greater whole of human knowledge.

Besides, doctor is a perfect gender-neutral title. For everyone worried about pronouns and who insists that Ms. has taken polite titles to their logical extreme, let me propose this: the title doctor just shows that one has engaged in learning. It’s both respected and respectful, and it doesn’t change based on the perceived gender of the person wielding it. As I said, perfect.

But, hey, what do I know? Maybe not everyone needs a Ph.D. But everyone has a unique insight worthy of recognition and respect. And if Joe the Plumber wants to share his insights he should be afforded the time and opportunity to do so, whether through an advanced dissertation or otherwise. After all, every last one of us is nothing more than a doctorfucking human being trying to make their mark on the world. Let them. Let yourself.

Stay curious,

Joel

1. To use a completely made up and not at all politically charged rhetorical device.

2. To be absolutely crystal clear, none of this is to denigrate anyone who earns their Ph.D. Here at Learned we mock the institutions but not the people. If you can't understand the difference you probably vote Republican.

3. I’d talk more about what absolute bullshit the honorary doctorate is, but my doctor says it does bad things to my blood pressure. Heh.

4. This is what I mean: Stephen Hawking was granted an honorary doctorate from Oxford. He needed something to look nice next to his actual Ph.D. doctorate from Cambridge, I guess.

Doth Profess Too Much

Learned Vol. 8, Issue 13

Professor sounds wrong. The accent is on the wrong syllable. We’ve codified the word into being a role by putting the stress on the second syllable so that it falls in line with doctor and instructor. This is pretty standard in English; having the stress on the middle syllable is deceptively normal for English words of Latin origin. Blame good old iambic stress patterns for that.

But, if English was really the romance language it, ahem, professes to be, it ought to emphasize the last syllable, turning professor from a fancy word for teacher into, wait for it…one who professes. Ooooh. Aaaaah.

“I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore… whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” - Isaac Newton; Photo by Joel Neff on Unsplash (Hey, I know that dude!)

The point is, professor, like teacher and lecturer is a word divorced from its root verb. That distance creates the equivalent of a linguistic rift where all kinds of semantic broadening and imprecision can creep in and fester.

But let’s back up. Just what does profess mean, anyway? It has always been something of a poetic word reserved for public declarations of faith, undying love, loyalty to the king¹, or possibly just your intention to find the ONE PIECE and become king of the pirates. But what it means is best defined by Merriam-Webster in their new(ish) feature where they simplify a word’s definition for younger readers. Here’s the “Kids’ Definition” of profess:

to declare openly or freely

What a lovely word. Stands to reason, then, that one who professes is more than simply a teacher but one who speaks freely, maybe one who tells students what they need to hear rather than just what their textbooks and administrators say they should. Real Dead Poet Society kind of jazz, right? Right? Only, here’s the first of the grown-up definitions, also from Merriam-Webster:

to receive formally into a religious community following a novitiate by acceptance of the required vows

Hold the phone. Those don’t seem like the same thing at all? Etymonline to the rescue:

early 14c., professen, "to take a vow" (in a religious order), a back-formation from profession or else from Medieval Latin professare, from professus "avowed," literally "having declared publicly," past participle of Latin profiteri "declare openly, testify voluntarily, acknowledge, make public statement of," from pro- “forth"

Well. I say to the rescue but there’s actually a lot to unpack there. First off, back formation? Profess is a somewhat rare case of the verb arriving after the noun. Many, if not most, similar words evolve in a familiar verb becomes noun meaning one-who-verbs pattern. In this case, however, profession arose in the early 13th century as a word for someone who had taken religious orders. Over the next three centuries it broadened into the more modern concept of doing a specific kind of work as a source of income.

Profess, on the other hand, has never really made it out of its religious roots. It’s a word that feels heavier than it is, one that seems like it ought only be used for mad, grand gestures, not, say, teaching English on a rainy Tuesday in June. And yet, by definition², anyone who works as a professor, professionally, is, technically…professing.

Which is ten times better than just teaching if I’m being honest. After all, as we talked about in Issue 11, Mr. Sensei to You, teacher is currently devolving. The social climate around education has changed to such an extent that teacher is rapidly becoming something to be looked down on, a job that one takes because they couldn’t do anything else. You know the “joke” - those who can, do; those who can't, teach.

Professor, on the other hand, while still a loaded term encompassing a world of privilege, rank, and (possibly unearned) prestige, denotes someone who has done some work. Someone who has put in the time to become an expert in a field, most likely through extensive reading, study, and contribution in the form of research and reviewing. In other words, just by doing the work of becoming a professor, you’ve done the job of professing your knowledge and skill.

Which is a problem. In the modern educational sense, professor is still, absolutely, a rank. Attaining full professorship goes hand in hand with getting tenure, budgets, grants, and etc. It shows, in a single word, that you have expert level knowledge in at least one domain. However, anyone who has done the work will tell you that the most humbling facet of any post-grad study is learning just how much there still is to know³.

And let’s circle right on back to that issue of rank. Like in the previous issue, number 12, titled Dyslecture, rankness in university is increasingly divorced from the actual job of teaching at that level. To put it unceremoniously, anyone who is actually teaching in a university ought to be termed a professor both as a job description and as a title. It is literally what the job calls for.

And yet, like sensei, professor carries more than just the weight of teacher. It implies that one has not only done the work of gaining the knowledge but that one has successfully jumped through all the hoops necessary to work at a university, which is some bullshit we’ll talk about more next week in Issue 14, Doctor Thyself.

Stay curious,

Joel

1. Your fortnightly reminder of Mark Twain’s greatest quote for our times: Loyalty to country, always. Loyalty to government, when it deserves it.

2. Number six in the list of definitions, sure, but it’s there.

3. The second most humbling aspect is learning to acknowledge that you will never know everything in your field. Life is too short, our brains too limited for it to be otherwise.

Dyslecture

Learned Vol. 8, Issue 12

The worst thing about lecturer is that it’s become aspirational. For an entire generation of teachers the next step on the career ladder is a title derived from talking. I mean, the word is fine, but the fact that it is a common title in academia indicts the entire antiquated, obsolete, bloated system. One in which the majority of the work is being done by people who benefit the least. Welcome to late-stage capitalism.

Now add in 100 kids all looking at their smartphones and you’ll have a pretty accurate picture of what professional lecturing looks like. Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

First, the word lecturer. It’s a derivative of legere, Latin word for to read. Only, before it was reading, it was gathering and collecting. Over time, that sense of gathering began to include information and from there broadened into discussing the collected and gathered information. Eventually, this broadened even further until the early 16th century when lecture went from reading to admonishing as per Etymonline.

As we’ve discussed recently, teacher and its related words are not quite keeping up with the times due to social, pedagogical, and, most importantly, bureaucratic changes. Lecturer is no different. Lecturer started as someone who was reading to an audience. Think of a preacher delivering a sermon or a teacher delivering a, uh, lecture. Over time, lecturer became codified into a title and rank.

By the 16th century, ‘lecture’ didn’t just mean to read. It meant to admonish.”

So, why then, is lecturer an outdated, pedagogically unsound word?

When I was in junior high school one of my teachers was trying to explain to us what college would be like. How we would be unable to have one-on-one time with teachers, how we’d just be one of 200 students crammed into an auditorium, how we’d be expected to listen to the professor, take our own notes, and learn the materials in order to pass the exams.

By the time I actually got to college, that system was already changing. Not only due to technology — why cram students into uncomfortable lecture halls when you could just have the teacher speak on camera — but because universities were beginning to understand just how much of a difference to a student’s grade some one-on-one time could make.

Our professors were required to have several hours of advisory time where they were available to students for counseling, advice, tutoring, or whatever else. Additionally, they were given smaller classrooms and told to have more interaction and group work.

So, while there were still lectures taking place — I remember the nursing students having to sit through lecture after lecture while one doctor or another gave them paragraphs of mind-numbing symptoms and correlations across a dizzying number of illnesses — my classes that took place in the remaining lecture halls had us craning around and sitting backwards in theater-style seats in order to better talk to our group members.

As to why these changes were taking place, the simple answer is research. By the mid-1980s¹, pedagogical research had clearly shown that the listen-and-remember form of education was spectacularly ineffective. Instead, educators, armed with nascent neurological research, began looking at how memory is formed and how sensory input corresponds to retention and understanding. From there the increasingly popular methodologies of multi-modal and peer-centered learning were developed (among others). None of these new-ish forms of thinking supported the just listen and take notes form of education.

Yet even as these changes in education practice were implemented, the title of lecturer stuck around, stratified into the hierarchy of university education. And, had capitalism kept up its end of the bargain, this might all end with a chuckle: isn't it funny how lecturers do everything but lecture?

Instead, we’ve ended up here, where, depending on the country and the university, lecturer means everything from fully-tenured professor with a research budget, international acclaim, and, presumably, champagne in silver chalices, to barely-paid, overworked, overstressed, teacher with all the responsibilities of a full time staff member with none of the benefits. Guess which one of these is more common?

The very items you need to apply to a lecturer position aren’t available to you unless you already have one.

Now, as I said, the actual title of lecturer can and does vary a lot from country to country. But the system I know is the one here in Japan, so here’s how lecturer breaks down within the Japanese national education system:

講師 (koshi) is the Japanese term for lecturer. And like most of the Japanese education system, its roots are over a century old and completely calcified. While it can be a tenured position, it is increasingly a part-time, contract position that provides the backbone of the university system.

Let me give you an example: some recent position listings I’ve seen state that applicants should have at least three recent publications. This seems fair enough as conducting and publishing research is considered integral to working at the highest levels of one’s field.

The trouble is, some universities do not allow part-time staff to do research; they do not provide funding, time, materials support, access to research tools or libraries, nor do they allow their part-time teachers to publish in internal journals (known as a kiyou [紀要]).

So, in other words, the very items you need in order to apply to a lecturer position are not easily attainable unless you already have a lecturer position. It reminds me of when I had to get my Japanese driver’s license and the only way to get to the testing center was to…drive.

So, let’s say you get one of these coveted part-time lecturer roles: because you’re part-time, you’re probably teaching at multiple schools, sometimes on the same day, conducting research in your own time and with your own money, sometimes on the sly, and seeing to your own educational development.

This can feel terribly isolating. You may not feel like you’re truly a part of the university you work at. You’re not invited to staff development seminars, not welcome in certain lounges, maybe not even given access to the wi-fi. And why? Because money.

Here’s a stat for you:

In 1998, there were about 45,370 “full-time” part-time lecturers (専業非常勤講師) in Japan. By 2016, that number had more than doubled to 93,145, amounting to roughly one-third of all university instructors—most living on under ¥3 million/year (≈ US $27 k) despite having PhDs or equivalent credentials.

Now, politicians and senior admin will tell you that this is because of Japan’s shrinking population and stagnant economy. Both of which may be true, neither of which excuses the growth of salaries and increase in the number of administrative positions in the same period.

And that particular pattern is being repeated the world over: lecturers, like all teachers, are under siege: more responsibility, less authority, more work, less pay.

I hope you were taking notes, this will all be on the test.

Stay Curious,

Joel

Sources for info on the situation lecturers face in Japanese universities:

• Supporting part-time ELT faculty in a Japanese university

• The Tragedy of the Part-Time Lecturer: Poverty on the Rise Among Japan’s PhDs

• The problem of full-time part-time lecturers

• Administrative efficiency of National University Corporations

  in Japan

• Academic pessimism on university funding as Japan goes to polls

1. Several methodologies were questioning the educational value of lectures well before that but it wasn’t until the 80s that there was widespread acceptance that things needed to change.

Mr. Sensei to You

Learned Vol. 8, Issue 11

Like every other member of my demographic, my formal introduction to Japanese culture came in the form of Mr. Miyagi, the gruff, wise, older mentor who takes young Daniel under his wing and turns him into the eponymous Karate Kid. The movie presents Mr. Miyagi, and, by extension, Japan as a land of ancient wisdom, honor, tradition, and mystical philosophy-as-self-defense.

In lieu of Mr. Miyagi, I offer you this picture from Miyagi Prefecture, which is arguably lovely, if not quite as kind as Pat Morita. Photo by Denise Metz on Unsplash

And, like every other member of my demographic, I got enrolled in a karate class about ten minutes after seeing the movie in the theaters. I hated it. There were no heart-to-heart conversations about the deeper nature of self and of using mental resilience to move through the world. No, just a lot of getting kicked and lots and lots of push-ups. Like, oh my god, so many pushups.

All of which is a long preface to saying that sensei is not only one of the first Japanese words I learned, it’s one of the first ways I learned to identify my role in Japanese society. I was, and am, Neff-sensei¹ in almost every aspect of my day to day life. Which is odd if only because I do not think of myself as a master of anything.

And, to be clear, sensei means a lot more than just teacher, but, at the same time, it doesn’t not mean teacher. Clear as mud, right? Let’s break it down. This is from jisho.org:

Sensei is a Japanese word that is literally translated as "person born before another". In general usage, it means "master" or "teacher", and the word is used as a title to refer to or address teachers, professors, professionals such as lawyers, CPA and doctors, politicians, clergymen, and other figures of authority.

In other words, sensei encompasses respect, social standing, function, value, and place in a hierarchical society, while teacher…well, we’ll come back to that.

Japanese, unsurprisingly, has several good synonyms or near-synonyms for sensei. There’s “kyouin” which is used for everyone who works in education, and “kyoushi” for instructor, and even words like “shihan” which is a word reserved for your sensei’s sensei, the one true master of a martial art.

English follows a similar path: instructor, tutor, professor, and even words like coach and trainer all define different roles and methods of teaching. The difference being that none is quite the catch-all that teacher is, nor do they have the sneering, “Well, just look at what the teachers are telling the children!” derision that teacher sometimes seems to have. In fact, this slide into derision feels oddly familiar, almost like we’ve discussed something like it recently…

In Learned Volume 8, Issue 7, Possessive Pedagogy, we learned that an early word for teacher was pedagogue. Originally a term of respect, it has become a derisive term for someone who uses their education to elevate themselves over their students, often contemptuously. Teacher, itself, seems to be undergoing a similar decline based on recent discourse.

I asked Google: Why does it feel like teacher is becoming a less respectful term? Among the reasons Google’s AI response returned are:

• Negative media coverage

• High-stakes testing and accountability

• Changes in societal values

• Lack of support and resources

• Boundary issues.

These make a lot of sense. And while Google does provide sources, the caveat in the room is that this is an AI summary designed to provide what it thinks the correct answer is based on exactly how you phrase the question. In fact, depending on how, exactly you ask the question and what your recent search history is, you’ll get different answers. So, to be clear, this result from Google is non-peer-reviewed, “summarized²” from education-adjacent websites like EdWeek, and heavily biased by my grammatical framing.

However, these results feel true to me and, as we all know, we are in the age of truthiness where facts don’t matter nearly as much as vibe, so let’s run with it.

There is a documented and growing anti-education rhetoric being espoused in the U.S. right now. I grew up with a teacher; my mother spent her entire working life as an elementary school teacher. Several members of my family have also worked in education in varying roles. Taken together, from an interested observer, it paints a very bleak picture of the state of education in America. By contrast, here in Japan, education is given a lot of vocal support but surprisingly little funding. So while the senseis are well-regarded, they are overworked, overburdened with responsibilities, and greatly underpaid.

But back to the words sensei and teacher, there’s also a small matter of grammar. Neff-sensei sounds polite, respectful, even, at times, playful. Neff-teacher sounds like someone hasn’t quite gotten the grasp of how we use titles and honorifics in English. The slightly-more-correct Teacher Neff just sounds like someone is trying hard to cover up the problematic Orientalism in their role-playing sim.

So where does that leave us? Does English have a word that contains the scope and respect of sensei? Of course it does. Here are a couple that might fit the bill:

• Preceptor, from the early 15th century means someone who is an expert writer and instructor (Hi! It’s me!).

• Educationist, a British term for someone who works as a, uhm, teacher at a school.

• Inculcator, which is just a fancy word for tutor but which sounds like a role requiring a mask and a red lightsaber.

• Catechist, an older word for a kind of preacher or minister, but which could be adapted into a new usage.

• Docent, a 17th century word that actually derives from the Latin verb docere, which means, wait for it, to teach.

Personally, I’m angling for Inculcator if only because I want there to be an entire series of movies about how much of a badass I am. In the meantime, I’ve got a class to teach.

Stay curious,

Joel

1. Or Joel-sensei or even, for a few badly confused kids, Joel-Neff-Sensei-san.

2. Read: stolen from

Learned Students

Learned Vol. 8, Issue 10

Imagine this: it’s two-thirty p.m. on a rainy Sunday and my kid asks me a question I can’t answer. So, in that bright, innocent, utterly devastating way all children have, she suggests that I ask Google-sensei. Google-sensei. As if I, a teacher with decades of experience bullshitting my way through any and all questions need to rely on <shudder> Google-sensei.

Can’t spell AI without library! Wait, no, that’s not it… Photo by Thomas Kelley on Unsplash

Google-sensei did not originate with my kid; it’s a fairly natural, tongue-in-cheek expression in Japan and reflects how both the culture and the language anthropomorphize inanimate objects. Partly this is animistic (in Japanese Shintoism, literally everything has a spirit or kami) partly this is just habit formed from assigning everyone the correct honorific (you know ~san and probably ~chan at this point, but there are dozens more.). And I, like you, perhaps make heavy use of Google-sensei, right along with YouTube-sensei and ChatGPT-sensei¹.

And, of course, in this particular case I, uh, consulted with Google-sensei regarding how to keep our houseplant from dying and all was fine. Aside from the damage to my ego, my way of life, and my very existence on this planet that is.

Now, I’m not sure whether this is happening in English, whether American or British or Australian kids are referring to Mr. Google or, gods forbid, Mr. ChatGPT, when they go to look something up, but the idea of Google-as-teacher and, by extension, AI-as-teacher is one that is equal parts intriguing and alarming. Because, if the machine is the teacher, where does that leave us as students?

Student is another exception to the old-words-have-lots-of-meanings rule as it comes to us more or less unchanged over the course of several centuries, from latin’s studium through to English’s student, which enters English in the 1300s as “one who studies.”

Learner…implies a degree of freedom or self-directedness

Before we continue, let’s address the synonym in the room. Modern academia prefers the term learner to student mostly for appearances. Because student implies hierarchy and structure while learner, a derivative of learn, which comes to English at about the same time as student with the same meaning only via proto-Germanic rather than Latin, implies a degree of freedom or self-directedness.

This is especially prevalent in autonomy focused pedagogy, which posits that when learners take an active role in their own education, the result is not only better assessment scores but more satisfaction on the part of the student.

So, from a university perspective, students are just there to be taught, while learners are there to participate and to be proactive in their own education. It’s a subtle distinction, but it’s there. As it is, every academic paper published regarding pedagogy has to choose whether to refer to the…pupils in question as students or learners and what that might suggest or imply about the research in question. It’s a maddening yet persistent bit of pedantic drudgery that has results far outside the scope of the question.

Which is, if Google is the teacher, what are we? Or, to put it another way, in this age of AI, are we learners or merely students?

I don’t have any answers. Truthfully, it’s one of the things my research team and I are struggling with. Two of the three of us learned how to do research and to write up the results before Google even existed. Even our third member learned to do research writing well before generative AI was a thing that existed outside science-fiction. As we work on our current research, the question of where is the ethical line with using generative AI? Not using it at all feels a little too much like not going anywhere because you refuse to even ride in a car much less drive one. But none of us want the AI to do the writing or thinking for us either. It defeats the purpose of doing the research in the first place.

So, as authors and teachers in this age of AI are we still learners? I hope so. After all, every author and every teacher can tell you story after story of what they have learned in the course of trying to teach - either from students, from the preparations, or even just the act of teaching itself. Everybody is and should be a learner².

And yet.

If, by asking Google-sensei or ChatGPT-sensei or some other future-tech-sensei becomes less about the process and more about the end result, something is lost. Learn, in its earliest form contains a strong element of continuity - someone who is learning is actively striving to understand and to think about their subject. And someone who is actively engaged in their own learning makes a hell of a good student no matter who, or what, their teacher is.

Earlier this issue, I made reference to Mr. Google only because Mr. is my default title. I’d like to take this opportunity to state unequivocally and for the record that I have no issue with any other title or pronoun anyone else cares to use. As a linguist, I love the idea of people trying on new pronouns until they find the ones that fit. As a humanist, I support whatever it is that people need to do to make themselves comfortable, engaged, and supported in the space in which they live, love, and…learn.

Happy Pride Month. Enjoy it, wherever and whomever you are.

Stay curious,

Joel

1. Bing-sensei can sit in the corner and think about what it’s done.

2. The entire premise of this newsletter is that we are all learners, all the time, all throughout our lives.