Review: A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

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A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life
A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life by Donald Miller

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Donald Miller’s most famous book is “Blue Like Jazz,” which I have not read. But I heard about it from an article on the Daily Beast. In that article, I learned that Miller has a huge following and that he’s from Portland Oregon, my neck of the woods. I was born in Oregon and grew up in the Pacific Northwest. I also heard that he was applying the principles of “story grammar” to edit his life and help others do the same. That’s why I decided to read “A Million Miles in a Thousand Years.”

This is a book on spirituality, and I’d say that Miller is a “post-modernish” Christian. References to God are sparse, and often they come in the form of questions rather than answers. But I found that appealing, and I’d say that people from any religious or non-religious background could benefit from and even enjoy this book.

I was impressed and moved by Miller’s efforts to edit his life and make it a more interesting story. Perhaps interesting is not the word. It’s more like he’s answering this kind of question. How can I make a better, richer, more romantic, and more epical story of my life? That’s a good question, and after reading the book, I really want to answer it for myself, too.

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Language, Morality, and Evolution

9780802826954smallBelow is the abstract for my thesis at the University of Edinburgh. There’s a good summary of it in the book Evolution and Ethics.

Here’s the argument in a nutshell. We live in a selfish world of evolutionary processes. That is, evolution makes us naturally selfish. However, we see altruism operating next to selfishness on various levels in nature, including in human groups. Therefore, in a selfish evolutionary world how do we get altruistic behavior? This is the problem of altruism. 

Though we can use language for selfish purposes, I argue that we can also use language to create, promote, and maintain altruistic and ethical culture. The argument approaches the problem of altruism from many angles, but the basic focus is linguistic. Language helps humans create and maintain altruistic and moral codes. 

Abstract: Language and Morality: Evolution, Altruism, and Linguistic Moral Mechanisms by Joseph Poulshock, PhD.

This thesis inquires into how human language relates to morality — and shows the ways language enables, extends, and maintains human value systems. Though we ultimately need to view the relation between language and morality from many different perspectives — biological, psychological, sociological, and philosophical – – the approach here is primarily a linguistic one informed by evolutionary theory.

At first, this study shows how natural selection relates to the problem of altruism and how language serves human moral ontogeny. Subsequently, the argument demonstrates how language helps enable cultural group selection. Moreover, as language helps influence human behavior in an altruistic direction beyond in-group non-kin (helping facilitate cultural group selection), we also consider how language can help facilitate altruistic behavior towards out-group non-kin. This therefore raises the prospect of a limited moral realism in a world of evolutionary processes.

With these issues and possibilities in mind, we consider and analyze the properties of language that help extend human morality. Specifically, discussion covers how recursion, linguistic creativity, naming ability, displacement, stimulus freedom, compositionality, cultural transmission, and categorization extend moral systems. Moreover, because language so broadly influences morality, the inquiry extends into how linguistic differences (specifically between English and Japanese) might also cause subtle differences in moral perception between Japanese and English speakers.

Lastly, we consider how moral ideas might take on a life of their own, catalytically propagating in degrees dependent and independent of human intention. That is, we consider how ideas might become memetic. After considering the serious problems of memetics, this approach employs a linguistic version of memetic theory and considers how psychological, social, and linguistic constraints may cause moral memes to attain a memetic state and spread by an independent or semi-independent replicator dynamic. Thus, some moral ideas that we possess through language may actually possess us.

 

The 3-Minute Drill for Big, Easy Reading

3-Minute Drill for Big, Easy ReadingIn this version of the 3-minute drill, I focus on a different data set and give additional insights on how to help students do more big, easy reading. Presented at “Best Practices” for the JALTCALL Conference and ER Seminar at Shinshu University in Matsumoto, Japan, June 2, 2013.

Learning the AWL Online

JALTCALLTalkThe Academic Word List (AWL) contains 570 word families that are probably the most important words for learners to acquire after the top 2,000 words of the General Service List (GSL). Many online resources exist for teaching the AWL, but some of them have serious pedagogical problems. They present words out of context, or the context contains words that are more difficult and less frequent that AWL words.

This presentation introduces a free website (KeyVocab.com) that presents the AWL words in quizzes and in the context of well-written and easy to parse sentences. More importantly, all the context words for the target words come primarily from the GSL top 1,000 words and secondarily from the GSL top 2,000 words. That is, all the context words are easier than the target AWL words.

The AWL words are presented in the form of short and fun quizzes of 30 words each, and learners can easily take one quiz in about 10-15 minutes. When a quiz is completed, learners can note unknown words for future review. The quizzes also contain a hint function, which can be turned on and off for each question. Currently hints are provided in Japanese, and other languages are under development, including Korean, Spanish, and Chinese.

In addition to the short quizzes, the site also provides vocabulary learning tips and short instructional videos to help learners acquire the most important academic words in a cost free, efficient, and effective way.

3-Minute Drill for ER

*Presentation at the JALT Pan-Sig on May 18, 2013, at Nanzan University, Nagoya Japan.

3-Minute Drill

Research supports the claim that extensive reading (ER) helps improve all language skills. Yet in spite of the research, teachers still experience problems when they try to put ER into practice.

One serious problem is getting students to do the “extensive” part of ER. If we are lucky, students may enjoy the reading part, but to make real linguistic gains, they need to do the extensive part. And just how can teachers motivate students to read more?

Students may read more if required to read for at least 3 minutes daily. This “three-minute drill” serves as a prompt for students to read for more than three minutes, but the key is for them to read for at least 3 minutes daily.

This study looks at a group of 79 Japanese university students who practiced the three-minute for the last 40 days during the fall term of a two term academic year. Reading word count totals for the fall term were compared with the spring term when students did not do the drill. The researcher theorized that students would read more during the fall when they did the drill.

The data is correlational. Other explanations exist for why students might read more when doing the drill. But this study indicates that the three-minute drill may increase reading. This success supports the need for more research and discussion about how to improve this technique that may increase student reading and thus help improve their linguistic skills.

Note: Due to the availability of data, this presentation varied slightly from the original proposal given to the Pan-Sig. During 2013, other variations of this research deal with different data sets, comparisons, and variations of the 3-Minute Drill.