The Frontier Psychiatrists is a daily health themed newsletter. Today, a palate cleansing sorbet of absurdity!
Owen Muir, May 23, 2036.1
I can’t believe it ended like this. I’m sitting, hands bound behind my back, hood over my head. I have not been able to see anything for the entire trip. I thought being an intelligence operative would be… I didn’t think it would be like this. I thought that it would be some time in Langley. I don’t know. Not in this—a god-forsaken outpost in mybuttiStan.
The very, very cold cement sends its tendrils up through my pants. My thighs and feet know a version of cold that I never imagined possible. I hear a squeak, twist, scrape, scrape, scrape.
“Dr. Muir, I presume?”
Great. That accent says: Senior-Officer-from-the-former-republic-of-mybuttistan-who-was-clearly-educated-abroad.
I croak, “That’s what my mom calls me, Dr., she’s very proud,” definitely.
He responds with a dry, withholding laugh. “We know you’re lying to us. There is one thing we will know to be the truth. We are going to need you to do… long division by hand. We have a pen and paper. All you have to do is solve this long division problem, exactly like you learned in school. And then you’re free to go.”
Can you imagine? None of this is true, of course. I couldn’t do long division if I were in the above situation. I could have a gun to my head. I’d still be a dead man.
There’s a good reason for this to be the case. We don’t teach math with this degree of urgency. We teach math like it’s forgettable.
Humans learn forgettable subjects with the appropriate amount of forgetting. When a class is boring, we are learning two lessons at once. One is that somebody wants us to learn this. The second is that it is not worth learning. It seems like it’s not worth learning because they have signaled to us that it is not interesting. This second lesson comes from their disinterest in us.
This is why engaging teachers are often more effective—it’s not necessarily that the information is more relevant; it’s that the teacher cares about us. When somebody cares about us, we believe what they have to say is important.
Whoever taught me long division did it in a way that didn’t stick. I don’t even remember who taught that class. I probably spent an entire year of my life with that teacher. Mr. S? I got nothin’.
We learn new things as crucial from other humans. The door to learning new information is usually bolted shut. The feeling that someone else understands us—and cares—is the bolt cutter.
This is in the imagined future.