Wednesday night driving problems

I've belonged to the professional society for years, but I hardly ever go to the meetings. They have them at dinnertime, which isn't intrinsically unreasonable...but the combination of needing to drive there (needing to drive there in the dark, half the time, and always needing to drive home in the dark), and needing to leave work early, was usually enough to discourage me. Yeah, I suppose there was a bit of a problem in not being able to know a week in advance if I would be able to leave work as early as 5:10.

Now that I'm out of work, nobody can make me work late. And networking for job prospects starts to look more important. (The society says they want students and unemployed members at the dinners, and charges us less.) Driving at night is still a problem, of course. The October meeting wasn't all that far away, and I thought sunset was still late enough that I could drive there in daylight. It was overcast Wednesday afternoon, and I could tell the sun was about to set, so I was a little nervous just getting into the car. I encountered 4 sets of flashing lights before I even got to the highway. (2 police, a fire truck, and something that might have been a tow truck) I would have turned back if that hadn't meant going right past all 4 again. I went on to the professional meeting. It was only 11 miles, but there were 6 more sets of flashing lights. Route 2 at rush hour.

At the meeting itself, I took some breakthrough meds (but I didn't want to take enough to risk being sleepy on the way home, or incautious during the meeting itself), just enough to take the edge off. I'm not sure that level of light triggering is fixable by any amount of breakthrough meds.

The dinner conversation at my table turned to the price of gas, and sighs of "What can you do?" I suggested public transit. *I* prefer walking and public transit to driving for personal reasons, but if other people use them to save money or protect the environment, that's just as useful for making them generally available. Most of the people lived or worked in places where public transit didn't go. The single exception chose a reliable 40-minute drive, rather than depending on buses and long walks to connect with commuter rail (with a train every 55 minutes, and a total commute of 2 hours when everything worked ideally well.) He was making a perfectly sensible decision, but it was discouraging to hear about it.

People were talking about how the job market is looking up for quality professions. They were even handing around job advertisements, places some of them worked were looking for new people, and some companies just advertised through the professional society. Peabody. I could apply for an exciting job in Peabody. There's no way a person who can't drive 12 miles could survive in Peabody. Or Keene. Or Middleton. Or Northboro.

The formal part of the meeting involved speeches and a seminar. After I pass the certification exam I'm studying for, I will need to go to a certain number of seminars every year, to keep the certification. This one was ... not too terrible, in terms of what was said. The terrible part was the photographer. He didn't just use a flash to take a picture of each speaker. He took more pictures every time a speaker changed positions, or pointed at something, or picked something up. At least one flash every 2 minutes, usually much more.

I did make it home safely. The police and fire trucks were off the road. I considered calling and asking for help getting home, because I was feeling so awful. I hesitated because the people I would have called have young children I expected to be in bed at that hour. I actually fretted about whether it would be ok, for longer than it took me to drive home. The drive home was that much easier than the drive out.

this could explain a lot

One of the texts I'm studying for the certification exam includes a section about how to design and evaluate various kinds of job training programs. Part of that is a description of how adults learn differently from children and need to be taught differently.

"Adults need to understand what is expected of them and have their own expectations acknowledged.
Adults learn most efficiently if they can relate new information to their own past experience.
Adults need to see a use for what they learn. It must fit into current needs and serve a useful purpose.
Adults need to feel in control of their own learning.
Adults learn more effectively if they are able to proceed at their own pace.
Adults take errors personally and are protective of their self-esteem. They learn better in a relaxed, anxiety-free atmosphere.
Adults need to consolidate what they have learned through actively applying it.
Adults need frequent opportunities to assess their progress.
If adults are unable to apply what they have learned immediately after training, much of the learning will be lost."
(Excerpt from ASQ CQE, from Learning Management Systems, 2.2)

Some children will put up with "you have to learn this even though it makes no sense," but they generally do better with context. Preschoolers learn better in a relaxed, anxiety-free atmosphere. They need to consolidate what they have learned through actively applying it (over and over and over and over and over and over and over ... adults may need this *less*.) I've taught little kids, big kids, teens, and adults - I've seen people of every age have difficulties when they can't relate new information to what they already know, or when they are pushed to learn at the wrong pace.

Everything they say about adult learners seems sensible enough, except the framing statement that adult learners are DIFFERENT from children. That transforms it to a frightening load of nonsense, and makes me worry about how many people might believe it. In retrospect, it could explain a lot of the problems with primary education, if enough people actually believe:
Children do not need to understand what is expected of them.
Children learn most efficiently when information is presented without connection to anything else they know.
Children need to feel adults are in control of their learning.
Children learn more effectively if adults are in control of the pace.
Children's self-esteem is not related to any errors they might make. Anxiety motivates learning for children.
Children have no use for self-assessment or application of what they learn; they learn to please adults.

I don't know if this is a widespread set of beliefs. It seems outrageous that anyone could teach actual children for more than a few days and continue to believe them...but beliefs about how things should be can be remarkably resistant to observation.