Under the Radar
One of my favorite examples of "you would never see this on American TV" is the 2009 anime Kemono no Sou-ja Erin, which tells the story of a girl in a Medieval-like fantasy world who learns to communicate with giant wolf/eagle creatures through - *gasp* - science! The novel the series was based on is now available in English as The Beast Player. My oldest niece got a copy for Christmas.
There's a passage in the book, after the main character Erin has graduated from "beast doctor" school and become a teacher herself. Her mentor tells her, "The knowledge we teach is simply the truth as we know it at a particular time. What we believe to be true now may be exposed as error through the discoveries of succeeding generations. That's how human knowledge has been renewed throughout the ages. Remind your students of this every chance you get. A good teacher is not one who never doubts, but rather one who strives to keep on learning despite the doubts in her mind."
Imagine that! Knowledge is something we renew and build upon through discoveries! What a radical notion.
The mathematical biography series I'm working on has a semi-hidden agenda. I say "semi-hidden" because it won't be any of the official promotional info, but I do reveal it in some of the presentations I do. The six mathematical subjects in the series form a "toolkit" of fields used to study climate change. I keep it hidden because we have potential customers who are homeschooling their children to protect them from demonically liberal ideas. If I say instead that the mathematical subjects are ones their children can use to build their futures, the kids can figure out the climate connection for themselves.
In our current age of Republican "tribal epistemology," where a little more than a third of the population has decided that "truth" is whatever the Dear Leader says it is, writing about math is almost an act of subversion. The idea that "truth" is something you find through observation and logical deduction shouldn't be a political statement, but these days it is.
I want my writing to be more than just entertainment. I want it to make a difference in the world, or at least attempt to make one, even if it's just a small one. My blog-writing has shown me, though, that taking the politics of the day head-on is too much for me, with too much yelling and arguing. How great to discover that I can say something important just by being myself. Flying under the radar works just fine.
There's a passage in the book, after the main character Erin has graduated from "beast doctor" school and become a teacher herself. Her mentor tells her, "The knowledge we teach is simply the truth as we know it at a particular time. What we believe to be true now may be exposed as error through the discoveries of succeeding generations. That's how human knowledge has been renewed throughout the ages. Remind your students of this every chance you get. A good teacher is not one who never doubts, but rather one who strives to keep on learning despite the doubts in her mind."
Imagine that! Knowledge is something we renew and build upon through discoveries! What a radical notion.
The mathematical biography series I'm working on has a semi-hidden agenda. I say "semi-hidden" because it won't be any of the official promotional info, but I do reveal it in some of the presentations I do. The six mathematical subjects in the series form a "toolkit" of fields used to study climate change. I keep it hidden because we have potential customers who are homeschooling their children to protect them from demonically liberal ideas. If I say instead that the mathematical subjects are ones their children can use to build their futures, the kids can figure out the climate connection for themselves.
In our current age of Republican "tribal epistemology," where a little more than a third of the population has decided that "truth" is whatever the Dear Leader says it is, writing about math is almost an act of subversion. The idea that "truth" is something you find through observation and logical deduction shouldn't be a political statement, but these days it is.
I want my writing to be more than just entertainment. I want it to make a difference in the world, or at least attempt to make one, even if it's just a small one. My blog-writing has shown me, though, that taking the politics of the day head-on is too much for me, with too much yelling and arguing. How great to discover that I can say something important just by being myself. Flying under the radar works just fine.
Comments