Originally written for a new friend of mine, Josh Roberts, who pastors a little thing called Connect Rome that I've been enchanted by for the past couple of months. It's a church that meets in a bar. And I've been attending it. I'll sit back and allow the shock to subside before I continue.

A couple of weeks ago he threw some questions at me that were part of a project called "You Asked For It" - Josh is getting six messages for six Sundays out of questions he was asked by people who've been attending. He e-mailed me the rejects...ahem, the "leftovers"...and asked if I could handle any of them.

Apropos of nothing, I'd been bothered more and more by how horribly people around me had been acting and how this had nothing to do with how people at a Christian college should act - and how easily I could throw myself into that mix. I got mad and frustrated enough that I sat down at computer keyboard and just typed furiously. I then looked at the list of questions again, and realized I'd mostly answered one of them.

Later, I reconnected with an old friend on Facebook (surprise, surprise) and started catching up, and as part of the catching up she gave me the very standard here's-where-Jesus-changed-my-life schpiel. I think I moaned back that I didn't have anything resembling a testimony that wouldn't put people to sleep or bore them out of their skull, since it wasn't a dramatic event or a single life-changing moment I could point to.

But the more I go back over this, the more that this really feels like that very type of testimony. I don't know if it qualifies as dramatic or not. Regardless, it's mine.

Here's where you can find the original.

Why is it easier for some people to accept the story of Christ than others?

I have really found myself, over the past several weeks, taking a lot of stock in what has led me to this point. I'm careening now towards 20 years of my life knowing Jesus Christ as a personal Lord and Savior, and while I've resisted using that particular language for a large swath of my life because I know the baggage it carries, this relationship with Jesus is very real and very tangible, and it has informed an awful lot of decisions I've made in my life that have brought me here.

Why do I believe in Jesus? Why did I give my life over to Him in the first place, and what has kept me believing that this crazy story about a man who also just happened to be totally God, and who got executed for crimes he didn't do and then turned around and came back to life? I mean, what makes that real?

Thinking about this has led me to a really stunning revelation for me. I'm frequently frustrated talking to students of mine here, and people in this community broadly, about Jesus. Rome is a church-laden town. I work with Christians of many fairly conservative stripes, as do many of you. Christianity is all around us. And it really seems, day in and day out, that if you don't buy in to Jesus and you want evidence that Jesus isn't terribly real, all you have to do is look at the the pastors and church leaders in Rome, the Christians you work with, the very state of Christianity in northwest Georgia, and you've got all the evidence you need. Gossip spread everywhere, people at one another's throats, churches that are cold and unwelcoming, lives that show no evidence at all of a sovereign and powerful God, just stories and legends that may have had weight 2000 years ago - or even 100 years ago - but are worthless and useless in our modern time.

My job has me working for a Christian institution, under a mission that's all about the Lordship of Jesus Christ even over education, engaged day in and day out with Southern Baptists who have the same basic insight into the Gospel that I do. (Honestly? Best job I've ever had, and it's not even close. There aren't too many places in the United States where I could do the things I do, teach the way I teach, and still have the opportunities to advance that I've had. It fits me to a tee. But...) Day in and day out, I see people, in the name of Jesus Christ, treat other people like absolute garbage. Student vs. student, student vs. faculty, faculty vs. faculty, and administration vs. ... well, everybody. I see the command to love one another trashed. I see the bitterness and the resentment and the raw, unadulterated inability to just get over it.

And if I'm not careful, I see it in myself, in how I treat others, and if I start pointing that finger at others, fingers would come pointing right back at me.

And - again, if I'm honest - I see friends at other institutions, and stories from other outposts of Christian higher education, that are a thousand times worse and uglier than any story I could tell about my experience. This problem isn't a problem with any one workplace, or any one city. It's a problem with all of us.

What makes this so stunning is that, nearly 20 years ago, I went to college in Terre Haute, Indiana, absolutely desperate to break any ties with Christianity and make myself a brilliant and logical scientist and engineer, free of any superstitions or any fake god to limit the possibilities in my world. College was going to be my ultimate freedom - not to party hearty and pick up women and live the college life (although if I could get over my geek nature and live that life, that would be a nice side benefit) but to free my thinking. I could follow new heroes of mine like Kurt Vonnegut and e.e. cummings into a mindset where all the stupid traditional lessons from mom and dad and sunday school teacher were broken and I could truly be open-minded - where I could truly figure out what open-minded actually MEANT.

And what completely blindsided me was actually living out that first year trying to figure out what way of living life would actually work, and finding the brainiacs and free-thinkers at Rose-Hulman, and figuring out very quickly that I hated all of them. Just hated them. They were jerks, and not only did they want nothing to do with me, they didn't want anything to do with anyone who didn't fit in their own, neat circle. And there were the guys who pledged fraternities (and I have to clarify "social fraternities" for reasons that will become clear shortly), who were perfectly willing to be your friend over beers and parties. But I tried one dorm party and had a perfectly miserable experience with alcohol, and the moment I started saying "no, thanks" to the booze I found pretty uniform rejection from that crew.

The people who reached out to me and who showed me compassion were the people that ultimately informed my way of thinking. The people who actually treated me with kindness were the people I listened to.

I found myself lining up pretty effectively with a service fraternity called Alpha Phi Omega, figured out that a lot of the old Scouting ideals in that group lined up with my own idealistic nature, and it was very straightforward to pledge what turned out to be a very different sort of fraternity, and find a great deal of fulfillment learning to "be a leader, be a friend, be of service". That was the type of thing I went to college to do.

One of the guys in APhiO decided that I was worth a great deal of time and investment, for whatever reason. I mean, REALLY decided. (I wonder after the fact if he wasn't in need of a friend himself, and if I had listened to him at one point and he decided that I was going to be faithful. The friendship has lasted, that's for sure.) There was a Bible study that met in this guy's room, and halfway through my freshman year he decided that I needed to be in that Bible study. Through forcible dragging out of my dorm room, if necessary.

What stunned me then - and, 20 years on, what stuns me even more - is how RIGHT the relationships were between the people in that Bible study. How much they cared for me, and not just because "hey he doesn't believe this Jesus stuff", but because I was a person and I was worth something because of my humanity. Honestly, at that point I'd called everything into question all over again, because there was so much I had counted on that hadn't gone right. I wasn't tearing up my classes like I thought I would, I had already changed my major once and I was needing a serious GPA win in Winter '91 if I was going to avoid changing majors again, and we've already established that all the free-thinkers I was going to hook up with free-think with were complete jerks who wanted nothing to do with anybody who wasn't already them.

And these Christians were nothing like the Christians I had encountered growing up...which, now that I think about it, remind me a bit of the Christians that I get complaints about around here, the Christians who don't act the slightest bit the way that Jesus did and who don't show any evidence in their lives that God is real and can change their lives. These Christians lived it, day-in and day-out, and they shared Jesus with me without mentioning any four spiritual laws or any need for a relationship or any sort of hard sell. They believed what Jesus said, and even if they didn't do everything perfect all the time (and several didn't even come close), they were honest about it and still welcomed me in with all my flaws.

This is long before I actually began to seriously consider all of the deep theological issues in the Bible, or before I began to work towards reconciling the science I had loved all my life (and that I began to realize was beyond mere love, it was a real and holy calling) with the faith that so many said it wouldn't reconcile with, or before I really made it an intellectual faith. This was me figuring out what unconditional love looked like, and being completely blindsided by it.

So: "Why is it easier for some people to accept the story of Christ than others?" Because those people have actually seen what the love of Christ looks like, and have had to respond to it. If the church around those people is dead, if it's full of gossip, if the people tear one another down instead of sacrificing themselves for one another, then somebody watching that group will say "there's nothing real to that Jesus they claim." When we act like the words of Jesus mean something, and being perfect as our Father is perfect is something that can actually be done, and we show that we love the Lord our God with all our heart and soul and strength by loving our neighbor as ourselves, we should never be surprised when God breaks through and people are changed.

(Facebook note: This doesn't make any sense at all unless you go to the big-blog. Which suddenly looks very different.)

With a hat tip to Miz Richardson (who I'd link if she had web space to link to, apart from a Facebook page), an essay by Martin Schwarz in the Journal of Cell Science with one of the most impressive titles ever in academia.

And the article's just as good, too. In fact, Nicole forwarded it along to me because we'd had so many conversations that plowed exactly the same ground. To wit:

For almost all of us, one of the reasons that we liked science in high school and college is that we were good at it. That can't be the only reason – fascination with understanding the physical world and an emotional need to discover new things has to enter into it too. But high-school and college science means taking courses, and doing well in courses means getting the right answers on tests. If you know those answers, you do well and get to feel smart.

A Ph.D., in which you have to do a research project, is a whole different thing. For me, it was a daunting task. How could I possibly frame the questions that would lead to significant discoveries; design and interpret an experiment so that the conclusions were absolutely convincing; foresee difficulties and see ways around them, or, failing that, solve them when they occurred? My Ph.D. project was somewhat interdisciplinary and, for a while, whenever I ran into a problem, I pestered the faculty in my department who were experts in the various disciplines that I needed. I remember the day when Henry Taube (who won the Nobel Prize two years later) told me he didn't know how to solve the problem I was having in his area. I was a third-year graduate student and I figured that Taube knew about 1000 times more than I did (conservative estimate). If he didn't have the answer, nobody did.

That's when it hit me: nobody did. That's why it was a research problem. And being my research problem, it was up to me to solve. Once I faced that fact, I solved the problem in a couple of days. (It wasn't really very hard; I just had to try a few things.) The crucial lesson was that the scope of things I didn't know wasn't merely vast; it was, for all practical purposes, infinite. That realization, instead of being discouraging, was liberating. If our ignorance is infinite, the only possible course of action is to muddle through as best we can.

I may be projecting, but I think one of the things that occurred to Nicole as she read that was an exchange I frequently have with students even now:

Student: Oh, my word, I completely should have known that. I feel so stupid.
Me: I had that feeling all time as a student. It was better when I figured out what that feeling really was.
Student: What was it?
Me: Learning.

I don't know if it came from this, but there were also several times as I was yammering with Nicole that she was asking questions that I didn't have good answers to. At a certain point when you do science, you recognize that there's just ALL THOSE PAPERS IN THE UNIVERSE and there's no way on God's green earth that you are going to be able to read them all. So you get pretty comfortable shrugging your shoulders and saying "I don't know, why don't you read some stuff and get back to me?" I don't do that to be a jerk; I do that because I'd really like to know myownself, and I don't have time to read the relevant papers on my own.

(I'd like to, but professors get a bit more on their plate than just reading all day - even the guys who do research full time have to write the big-money grant proposals to earn their keep.)

Ultimately, when you do science, you hit that realization that, to paraphrase what David Suzuki once said, you are contributing little bits of knowledge to a vast well of science information. You are an expert on those little bits; nobody knows as much about those little bits as you. But others are going to use those little bits (interpreting what you supply in their own way, which may or may not have had anything to do with what you were thinking) to generate their own bits of knowledge, which they'll contribute to that well. Everybody is building their explanations of how this world really works in their own way, and self-doubt can overwhelm you when you see how vast and intricate the world is; but you can get through that self-doubt by realizing that, in that small realm of knowledge, you really are an expert if you've read it and studied it deeply enough.

Partly, reading this was a affirmation that I'm telling my charges the right things about science.

Partly, this was a reminder of the excitement I have for a large fleet of my students, preparing to go off and start developing their own knowledge and taking part of this wonderful journey.

And then there's the realization that I'm still at the front side of one of these back-and-forths with a new colleague in science...who just so happened to be one of my first students at Shorter. We've got a couple of decades of these back and forths ahead of us.

And then there are all the new colleagues to come.

I'm still starting what's going to be an amazing career.

This was originally published on February 12 on Blogcritics.org; thanks to Eric Olsen for letting me back into the "sinister cabal" so this piece could find much-deserved wider readership.

Of course, the official version was edited likewhoa, and doesn't have all the normal tics of my writing. I've de-edited this from the official version.

I'm sitting at my computer. It's about 11:00 in the morning.

I'm listening to my streaming LAUNCHcast when I hear a familiar tune. It's the tune to "Dig" by the stalwart of early '90s alternative Christian music, Adam Again. However, it's not the dark acoustic and reverb and nasal voice of Gene Eugene - it's lighter acoustics and Dan Haseltine's gentler voice leading the harmonies of Jars of Clay.

I suddenly stare at my computer with a start - I didn't know they covered that!

And I have something to look up later.

Just as I did when I heard a Jimmy Eat World song I hadn't heard before last week - "Dizzy", from the Chase ThisLight album - and was so affected by the song that I just went out that night and - shock, horror - paid money at the record store for the album.

Just as I did nearly ten years ago when the song was a set of snare drums ahead of some thin electric guitars that heralded the start of Sarge's "Charms and Feigns", and I simply had to know who that woman singing that song WAS.

LAUNCHcast has been a wonderful old friend. And it's going away. By the time you read this, it may already be gone.

The guys who started up LAUNCH Media in Santa Monica in 1999 had quite a few good ideas. Iremember hitting up their website several times in the formative days, watching music videos and reading music news. God knows how many people they sucked in - or nearly repelled away - with ads featuring a new video by a new starlet, Britney Spears (those were the days), but there were plenty of music-based content to keep your eyes trained.

And then there was LAUNCHcast.

Customizable radio.

Start rating your favorite artists, your favorite songs, your favorite genres. The scale goes from 0 to 100. Your station is then compared to other stations, especially those who rated similar songs high, and there would be an electronic hunt for songs that you might like. "Music that listens to you" is the promise.

Even if it had been a false promise, I might have still been hooked at the mere concept. It wasn't a false promise. The station began to figure out my favorite styles of music immediately, and select new stuff that I had never heard of and immediately loved. The programming of the widget was simply AMAZING. (I think we frequently overlook the kind of talent it requires to code an app like LAUNCHcast, and to make it work broadly for so many people. So many people whose names we'll never know deserve a rich, deep round of applause for this one. For my part: Todd Beaupre, Jeff Boulter, and every coder around you two who hacked the thing together, SAAA-LUTE.)

It's hard to continue the story too far beyond this point without mentioning the raging battle between LAUNCH and the recording industry. Lawsuits began to crop up, using phrases like "unlicensed use of music" and "unapproved level of interactivity." I simply can't understand the threat behind allowing listeners of music to choose the music they listen to when they listen to a radio station, and the volumes written about the RIAA's control-freak nature are simply too overwhelming for me to add anything of value to them. This isn't for them, anyway; too many people see the commodity and miss the riff, the groove, the killer lyric, the joy of listening to music.

The small community that grew up around LAUNCH - and I especially remember Todd Beaupre's simple username, "hitsman", and the wonderful adult alternative station he assembled that was a pretty essential "influencer" station - had no part of this. There were just a ton of really cool people who had wonderful and interesting tastes in music. As a late 20-something who was in a music-listening rut, so many of those stations were absolute revelations. I discovered Sunny Day Real Estate on LAUNCHcast. The Frames and Glen Hansard. The Promise Ring. Lincoln. American Football. Coheed & Cambria. I rediscovered many of my loves from college radio - Animal Logic, Poole, Kirsty MacColl, Hüsker Dü, and Roseanne Cash's amazing Interiors album.

Of course, when LAUNCH Media got bought out by Yahoo! in 2001, the small community was no longer small, and the attention paid wasn't small either. The paid subscriptions to listen to the station without ads and with an unlimited ability to skip songs you didn't want to hear was necessary - and, honestly, a small price to pay. And if I have one regret about my time on LAUNCH, it was holding out on the subscriptions as long as I did. It probably wouldn't have made a difference in the long haul, but cheapskates like me need to be less cheap-skatey in this economy - nothing proves a concept like the money it can make, and LAUNCHcast never really made enough.

I think a large part of the problem here can be summarized in who I am, who the majority of the American music-consuming public is, and why LAUNCHcast was so suited for me and not for them.

I'm a music geek.

The example at the front of this piece (unless you are one of my brothers who cut his fandom teeth on early '90s alternative Christian music - and if you are, I want to talk to you, desperately) very likely means nothing to you. You listen to music because it can form the background of your workday or your drive home. There may be a few specific artists who you really enjoy deeply, who you're a fan of, but you don't listen to individual songs that intently. That's not a value judgement. That don't make me a better fan than you. Most people are content, if they like one Promise Ring song, with listening to any Promise Ring song, and vice-versa. They don't concern themselves with the subtle differences that make me adore Kelly Clarkson's "Low", not really care about "Irvine", melt over "Sober", get tired of "Since U Been Gone", swoon over "Behind These Hazel Eyes", and just say "eh" over "My Life Would Suck Without You". A monolithic Kelly fan, I am not.

So when Yahoo! Music gets swallowed up by CBS Radio, and it's advertised as an exciting time for music fans because a host of pre-programmed stations are going to become available and the streaming quality will improve and you'll be able to listen to everything on Firefox, I can see where a garden variety music fan would buy in.

But I'm going to hate all those stations. They'll play a song that I love, and then they'll play a song that I hate, and this won't change. There was one thing, and only one thing on LAUNCHcast that was worth the price of admission for me, and that's precisely the thing that's going away - a programmable player on which I could rate stuff on a sliding scale and control not only which songs turned up, but HOW OFTEN they turned up.

A radio station, that you could program to play the songs you like.

I know, I keep coming back to it. It's still revolutionary in 2009. In 1999, it completely fractured my brain.

Pandora is nice, as far as it goes, but it won't fill the need for me. The algorithm isn't as good. I DON'T just either like a song or hate it - thumbs up or thumbs down is no good. I have shades of gray. I will listen to "Cowboys" by Counting Crows (another song I heard for the first time on LAUNCHcast, and completely fell for) any time it comes up. I'll listen to Big Head Todd and the Monsters' "Broken-Hearted Savior", but I don't want to hear it every day. I can take a Wilco song once every other month at most. And so on.

And I have an mp3 player, but I know all those songs already. I'd like to discover new music, too.

Of course, there's the great irony. Because of LAUNCHcast, I now have CD's by Sunny Day Real Estate and The Promise Ring and Coheed & Cambria and The Reputation (because I finally found out who that woman fronting Sarge was, and because LAUNCH helped me find Elizabeth Elmore's other band, too) and so many of the rest - to say nothing of that Jimmy Eat World album. See, because of LAUNCHcast, I did something unheard of in the year 2009.

I actually bought CD's. More CD's. Real, physical CD's.

You can tell me I don't get the new media revolution all you want. I don't care. I found my own way through it. I'm not a revolutionary by any stretch. I'm just a guy who likes music and wants to support the good stuff.

And I'm losing one of my best tools, a tool so familiar that I call it a wonderful old friend. It's just really, really sad.

I just heard one more new song that impressed me - a band called World Wide Spies, a song called "Philosophy." I rated it 90. There's no chance I'll see it come back around on this station before it dies, so the rating was in vain, but it was completely automatic, just like it has been for so much of the past ten years.

I suppose I can always visit their MySpace page.

Gingrich argues that the values debate that has divided America so sharply during the past decade is over. There's a broad consensus about most issues, and anyway people realize that the country's big problems aren't about morality but performance. "We're not in a values fight now but over whether the system is working," Gingrich told me. "The issue is delivery." And that's true at every level -- city, state and federal.

Gingrich's critique of the federal response is as devastating as that of any Democrat. "For the last week the federal government and its state and local counterparts have consistently been behind the curve," he wrote fellow Republicans this week. "The American people overwhelmingly know that the current situation is totally unacceptable," and for that reason, "it is a mistake to get trapped into defending the systems and processes which clearly failed." He observes in another memo, "While the destruction was unprecedented, it was entirely predictable..."

This is the moment for the Party of Performance to take center stage. The breakdown in public life was obvious before Katrina. We have a government that can't control its borders, can't find a viable strategy for its war in Iraq, can't organize the key agencies to address the terrorism problems it has been trumpeting. The yearning in the country for something different has been palpable this year.

America faces an "extreme disaster," says Gingrich, one that will have more lasting and complex effects than any domestic event since World War II. The politicians who rise to that challenge will surge in the 2006 and 2008 elections. The ones who remain stuck in their ruts will suffer. Who's ready to sign up for the Party of Performance?

Now, there are some who question the scale of our ambitions, who suggest that our system cannot tolerate too many big plans. Their memories are short, for they have forgotten what this country has already done, what free men and women can achieve when imagination is joined to common purpose and necessity to courage. What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them, that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long, no longer apply.

The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works, whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified. Where the answer is yes, we intend to move forward. Where the answer is no, programs will end. And those of us who manage the public's knowledge will be held to account, to spend wisely, reform bad habits, and do our business in the light of day, because only then can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government.

Nor is the question before us whether the market is a force for good or ill. Its power to generate wealth and expand freedom is unmatched. But this crisis has reminded us that without a watchful eye, the market can spin out of control. The nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous. The success of our economy has always depended not just on the size of our gross domestic product, but on the reach of our prosperity; on the ability to extend opportunity to every willing heart -- not out of charity, but because it is the surest route to our common good.

As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our founding fathers faced with perils that we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience's sake.

And so, to all other peoples and governments who are watching today, from the grandest capitals to the small village where my father was born: know that America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and we are ready to lead once more. Recall that earlier generations faced down fascism and communism not just with missiles and tanks, but with the sturdy alliances and enduring convictions. They understood that our power alone cannot protect us, nor does it entitle us to do as we please. Instead, they knew that our power grows through its prudent use.

Congratulations, President Obama.

I just had a brain-breaking moment.

I found a book on the shelf at the library today. The book was Quantum Generations, and it was written by Helge Kragh. I got terribly excited when I saw the book, because I had considered adopting it a couple of years back as one of the history texts for my Modern Physics class. I don't teach a classic, calculus-based modern physics that's a prep course for physics majors; the reason for this course to exist at Shorter is to give the students in secondary science education two extra credit hours to supplement the eight they get from the general physics sequence, so they have 10 credit hours in physics to get a secondary certification in a physics (to complement their primary certification in either biology or chemistry, and their inevitable secondary certification in the one they didn't get the primary in. It's a long story. See the Shorter catalog, page 82). And the class follows a trig-based physics, so I can't fairly use calculus in there either; so I have to do some simple trig-based quantum and relativity and do a whole lot more conceptual stuff. Good history helps build that conceptual understanding, in my experience.

The introduction of Quantum Generations speaks very clearly of its intent:

The intended audience of the book is not primarily physicists or specialists in the history of science. It is my hope that it will appeal to a much broader readership and that it may serve as a textbook in courses of an interdisciplinary nature or in introductory courses in physics and history. With a few exceptions I have avoided equations, and although the book presupposes some knowledge of physics, it is written mainly on an elementary level.

It's the phrase "the book presupposes some knowledge of physics" that was supposed to put me at ease selecting the book for PHY 2100, after all. We'll get back to that later.

Start reading the text itself, and engaging in the history, and here's what opens:

THE PHILOSOPHER and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead once referred to the last quarter of the nineteenth century as "an age of successful scientific orthodoxy, undisturbed by much thought beyond the conventions. . . .one of the dullest stages of thought since the time of the First Crusade" (Whitehead 1925, 148). It is still commonly believed that physics at the end of the century was a somewhat dull affair, building firmly and complacently on the deterministic and mechanical world view of Newton and his followers. Physicists, so we are told, were totally unprepared for the upheavals that took place in two stages: first, the unexpected discoveries of x-rays, the electron, and radioactivity; and then the real revolution, consisting of Planck's discovery of the quantum of action in 1900 and Einstein's relativity theory of 1905. According to this received view, not only did Newtonian mechanics reign supreme until it was shattered by the new theories, but the Victorian generation of physicists also naively believed that all things worth knowing were already known or soon would become known by following the route of existing physics. . .

Let me be clear up front: I'm not criticizing Kragh in the slightest, nor the history he's constructing. His intent is to set the real stage for twentieth-century physics by expressing clearly that this is a measure of myth, and not every physicist believed as Albert Michelson did, that "most of the grand underlying principles have been firmly established and that further advances are to be sought chiefly in the rigorous application of these principles" – so that physics was a lot more ready for the early 1900's revolutions than is commonly believed.

Commonly believed.

Okay, here's question one: commonly believed by who?*

Go to your friendly neighborhood engineer, or your friendly neighborhood pharmacist, or your friendly neighborhood high school science teacher – I don't care which of the above, but one of the people around you who is supposed to be reasonably science-literate. Ask them what they know about how the theories of quantum mechanics and relativity came to be.

Relativity they might be able to connect with Einstein; they might mention some of the thought experiments surrounding special relativity (the twin paradox is especially popular), maybe they know about time dilation and relativistic mass, maybe they know of the demonstration of general relativity's accuracy that made Einstein the closest thing physics has ever had to a rock star. But why Einstein had to be demonstrated so comprehensively and strangely correct to turn him into that rock star, the central postulate surrounding the speed of light being the same in all inertial reference frames? Yeah, good luck with that.

And if they can tell you anything at all about quantum mechanics, it usually involves a roll of the eyes and a complaint about its difficulty.

Maybe I'm selling the people around you a little bit short, but I had to teach several of the same types, and I know how they generally approached the theory and the history behind the theory. It's a curiosity. Nothing more, and nothing less.

So again I ask: commonly believed by who?

By people who care about physics. By people who have already heard the simple version of the history. By people who think knowing and understanding physics is important.

And it was that realization that led me to the brain-breaking.

When I first went through this textbook, I knew it wasn't right for the modern physics course I taught, but I couldn't put my finger on why – all I knew was, another book started with the story of Ernest Rutherford and Hans Geiger assigning Ernest Marsden the problem that immediately led to the discovery of the nucleus, and that was far, far more interesting. Now, on second pass, I get it – the book wasn't right for the audience who would be enrolling in PHY 2100. I had to assume those students had never studied the development of modern physics ideas before, and that it would be sufficient to engage them in the history for the first time.

And again – back to the introduction. Quantum Generations was written for a general knowledge, not a class of physicists. It presupposed some knowledge of physics, but should be generally accessible. I should be able to assign that book to a group of students who has had an introductory physics sequence, then, right? Why did I have to resort to a lower level text?

Among most of the academic ranks, there has always been an assumption of a certain level of canon, a certain knowledge set we expect students to have when they walk through our doors for the first time. I honestly am not going to pretend like I know what that set it in other academic disciplines; I would certainly leave myself exposed as the poseur I am when I made my assessment of what a graduating high school senior "should" know in terms of American, British and world literature. I wouldn't know that Steppenwolf was anything but a bad 70's rock band were it not for quiz bowl.

But in the physical sciences, what goes into that canon? For example, you should know how to construct a molecular formula of a compound. You should know the basic thermodynamics – the difference between heat and work, the difference between enthalpy, entropy, and free energy. You should know the difference between velocity and acceleration. You should know the basic principles that lead to those quantum numbers that electrons carry in the atom. And you should know enough about relativity and cosmology to know that spacetime is curved, and the universe is expanding.

Anybody want to take a wild guess as to how many freshmen we see who actually do know all that?

I've been pretty good most of my career at packaging physics in an accessible way, mainly (I think) because I remember how much some of the topics in physics killed me as an undergrad and how bitterly I had to fight to get the explanations of those ideas right as a grad student and a novice professor. But the longer I've taught physical chemistry, and the more I've seriously considered the textbooks in the field from the perspectives of the students who actually have to take the class, the more I'm becoming convinced that too many of us – and from time to time, I fall into this trap – teach what we teach to the students we think we should have, not to the students we actually have. I can talk to as many teachers about as much curriculum as I want, and I can emphasize time and time again what I think should be down cold when the student walks out the door, but the student still learns in a world that thinks that physics is one of life's least important things. I have a sales job to do to convince the student that it's one of life's most important things – or that it even takes a place in the top 100. Trying to find a way to package the ideas in a way that I can get core topics across, in a way that the whole room can understand, and do that sales job at the same time is a task (a whole set of tasks?) that I've had so much difficulty throughout my whole career finding help on, and a lot of the problem has been that I've had difficulty seeing that whatever I might have known walking through the door, I can't fairly assume my students have seen any of it – or, even if they have seen it, I can't assume that they remember it.

And again, we can blame the students for not taking the prerequisites seriously enough or not taking the necessary energy to get the additional information on their own, but that goes right back to teaching the students we think we should have. Knowing that new learning should build on old knowledge is not something that comes naturally to the modern undergraduate. They have to be convinced. Again, it's the sales job.

We can't expect that the whole student population is going to come to us and ask us what they have to do to be academically successful. We have to go to them. We have to go to them deliberately, and with understanding, and with the conviction that we're about to show them the coolest stuff ever.

And once upon a time, to us, it was. And I don't know about you, but in my case, it was because Dr. Moloney and Dr. Ditteon and Dr. McInerney and Dr. Bunch and Dr. Western opened it up to me. I received so much from them as their student; the least I could do for them is provide that same excitement to my own students.

*I'm half intentionally not saying whom there. I know this might rub some kind grammarians the wrong way, but this is what I normally say, and if you think closely enough, you might get my point.

I honestly don't know if I will regularly update this blog again. It's a long time off if I do, that's for sure.

But I got tired of looking at the same dang front page every time I used my links on this thing, and I felt like this page should have something important on it. And I got reminded of this essay all over again. And it honestly says what I'm feeling right now better than anything else I could possibly say. It might even say what I'm feeling about my life better than anything I've ever written.

If I have to leave a bloggy epitath, this should be it.

Shortly after I started at Middle Georgia in the fall of 2000, I read the seventh - and my first - state-of-the-system address given by the chancellor of the University System of Georgia at the time, Stephen Portch. It, frankly, inspired me. It gave me the idea that I was working in the right place. It was very specific about setting goals for the whole university system - and for specific schools in the university system - and relatively specific about specific accomplishments that were in place and accomplishments that needed to happen.

But when I read the speech, I found one primary thing resonating with me more than anything else - in the midst of grading the University System of Georgia for performance to date, he assigned the culture in which he worked a grade of "D". And very deliberately explained why.

It is important to remember we don't operate in a vacuum. We operate in a society and in an environment that has many challenges. On culture, I grade a "D." This is not unique to Georgia. We continue - in my mind -- to have a pervasive, anti-intellectual culture in this country.

When Sherita Denson -- a bright young African-American student at South Atlanta High School - writes an op-ed piece in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and describes how she must endure being called a "nerd" and a "loser" to succeed academically - we have a grade D culture.

When a basketball player with a troubled past gets more ink than the number of new freshmen with perfect SATs - we have a grade D culture.

When I see more emotion generated over UGA's weekend football parking than their Rhodes Scholar output - we have a grade D culture.

When we have too many young people who dream of playing in the NFL and NBA - and who have a better chance at winning the Georgia Lottery -- we have a grade D culture.

When almost 90 percent of Georgia eighth graders watch TV two hours or more daily -- we have a grade D culture.

When we have a culture where too many school boards spend time debating the need to doctor "evolution" out of science books, rather than focusing on preparing young people to face a technologically and scientifically-oriented society -- we have a grade D culture.

When we can come up with the perfect plan to produce talented teachers, but when they graduate they choose the $80,000 non-teaching job with stock options over the $25,000 teaching post with long hours and metal detectors - we have a grade D culture.

It was one thing to say "hey! yeah! isn't it time to change the world now?" as a young-punk, 28-year-old faculty member, new on the tenure track. But I wasn't really prepared for how much that grade D culture would impact my day-to-day work as an education professional in Georgia.

What has boggled my mind as a professor, the more that I've seen it, has been the simple lack of expectation that adults have had for their children. It's true all over the country, I know. But it's true in Georgia (and in other places in the Southeast) in particular. In principle, we want our children to do well. But when they don't do well, we make excuses for them. We understand their struggles. We look to give them a less stressful way.

And we don't even consider that, if they could just work through those struggles and do a little bit more and push a little bit harder, the whole world might open up to them. In fact, we're pretty sure that the whole world won't open up to them. We think, honestly, that's something that the kids from the big cities do. Or the big money school districts. Or the private schools. Or anywhere else but our own back yard.

(Now, playing football on Sundays? Ballin' in the Association? Maybe even getting a preaching gig at a big church and getting to the high-five-figures of income? We might do that. But making important scientific discoveries? Becoming a writer who influences people's thoughts and minds and lives? Being the rare transformative political leader who will actually improve the world instead of demagoguing the mess out of every issue? Sakes, even being the inspirational teacher who isn't content to go to school and pick up a paycheck, but actually wants to develop students? Nope. Not us.)

The hard lesson that you have to learn, when you start in this business, is that changing the educational culture of a place - a city, a region, a state, maybe even a whole country - is difficult work. No. Check that. It's nearly impossible. You're working to spread a gospel - in my case, a gospel of science and the possibilities that the young thinkers might do great things - and you have to preach that gospel repeatedly, day in and day out, to have even a hope that a tenth of the people might actually hear you and take your words to heart.

But even then, when that small fraction of people hear you, their family and friends - and their family and friends have constructed different ideas and different visions of their future. And those visions didn't usually include leaving the small town and seeking out great things to be done. Because people from Rome, Georgia (or Canton, or Trion, or Rockmart, or Cartersville) don't do those things. The men find the steady jobs on graduation and support their families. The women stay at home and raise the children. And if that business hasn't started by the time the kids hit 23, then, well, what's the problem? What's the holdup? We want grandkids, y'know.

I recognize that I'm a terribly blessed man, because I was pretty determined to get the heck out of Hilliard, Florida, when I graduated high school and go off and Do Great Things (whatever those things were), and my parents didn't show any level of doubt in me. On the contrary, they showed disappointment whenever I showed even the slightest weakness. They didn't punish me, but they made it abundantly clear that they thought I was brilliant, and that I Could Do Better. And that steady drumbeat of messages lasted while I was in college, even at points when I really had other things on my mind and I was annoyed by it. But it was a drumbeat. "We're proud of you. You do good work. You should do better work and get rid of the B's. You should be preparing for life after graduation. You're going to be great. We're proud of you."

When I talk to students whose parents don't even attempt to understand what's going on with their schooling, how the college experience is changing them and their parents are offended by the changes and they're feeling alienated and ostracized because of the changes, rather than encouraged...well, it breaks my heart. It breaks my heart over and over again. And the more I see it happen, the more I find myself wondering what in God's name I'm doing here.

Not that anybody has to worry about me throwing in the towel at this point. I said this a while ago, and I was reminded of it this week, and it bears repeating:

Teaching is what I do; it's who I am; it's what my vocation is. For some people, this gig is nothing more sophisticated than a job, the thing they do that pays the bills. For me, I borrow Ludlow Porch's line about being on the radio: "If anybody ever found out I'd do this for free, I'd be in Big Trouble."

But I really wonder if it's time to qualify that. I still have teaching experiences where it's apparent that I've got kids who really want to give it everything, and parents who are willing to throw their backing behind it. (Special props at this point to a group of seven young people I've been meeting for the past three Tuesday nights, that I've taught a bit of chemistry to, and who have taken a couple of those days that had just been ruined beyond all repair and actually reminding me why it's worth it.) But the more I look at the youth of 2007, the more I see the numbers of kids who really give it their all dwindling, and the number of kids who give it their all AND get the full round of support from their so-called loved ones dwindling even more rapidly.

I'm tired of the Grade D Culture. I don't want to hit 65 and see the Grade D Culture still pervasive, and be asking questions about what more I could have done.

(Stephen Portch left the University System of Georgia in 2001. I left the University System of Georgia in 2003, convinced that I could best contribute to the challenge of creating a more educated Georgia outside of the University System.)

(From Something Positive. As Websnark might have said once upon a time, click on the image for full-sized heathen Davan with a point.)

I am an evangelical. Davan is loosely deist; certainly not anything resembling a Christian anymore (although, as I've mentioned before, Davan does have a history with '80s and '90s evangelical craziness). I should not identify with Davan's pain here as much as I do.

But I do. Oh, how I do.

Hrm, the snarks embedded within the past two posts have a little subtext, don't they? I may have to expand on that in days to come.

...he of Kamp Krusty blog fame, on his radio show going national.

And here's what's really exciting me: Brant currently plies his radio trade for South Florida's WAY-FM affiliate. It is natural to assume that it's the national stations carrying WAY-FM programming that are the likely recipients of Brant's syndicated goodness.

Including 90.3 FM in Rome, GA.

W00t.

By the way, Brant also wins "Quote of the Week" honors:

For most people, "Christian radio" isn't on the radar. And, for most people who read this blog, "Christian radio" has an approval rating right up there with, say, polio.

But it's what I do, and I'm thankful for that. I get to annoy, cajole, prod, anger, and -- mostly -- confuse people on a daily basis. Best of all, I'm talking to a lot of Good Churchgoing Folk, so I get to talk about the Kingdom of God to an unreached people group.

How true.

(From my Israel journal, 13 March 2008.

I'm typing this in completely unedited. I wrote it in a mode of complete desperation. To be completely honest with you, I've been almost deliberately avoiding re-reading this. I don't know how to deal with this place. I may not know how to deal with this place ever. But I know I have to deal with this place.)

I still don't know how I write about what I saw in Jericho.

First, the checkpoint. The space between the Israeli check and the Palestinian check is a half mile of straight wasteland. Once you reach Jericho, you are...

...it's poverty. I have never known how to deal with poverty. But it's not just poverty, because if it was, we could propose solutions, and establish order. And we try. You see signs for the Palestinian authority, for the UN, for the European Union, even the good ol' U-S-of-A, supporting this or that public works project (your foreign aid dollars at work!). But does that even matter if Israel won't allow industry to grow?

The major industry in Jericho is tourism. The city's major landmark now is the Intercontinental Hotel that rises over the horizon, presumably for someone to come in and stay and see the sights. (The parking lot is not full.) There are random shops, residences with barren gardens...and I can't think of anything to complete that list. (I remember seeing the office door of a dentist. It was gated and locked.)

There are hopeful signs of life - the Catholic school, with children pouring out. Many children had parents waiting on them patiently, seeming to know that this was their hope. But Palestinians have been among the best-educated of the Arab peoples since the early 1900's. Without the opportunity, what then?

We stopped at what was proposed to be the tree that Zacchaeus climbed when Jesus visited Jericho. What appeared to be a Palestinian family, the older men wearing "VENDOR" tags (approved by the Palestinian authority), with young boys in tow, came out of a small building in back, selling souvenirs. You're always told to beware of children in this type of situation - have they been trained to be pickpockets? - but what do you do if you know that's all this family might have to depend on?

(I retreated back to the bus quietly. Afraid? Me? You think?)

As to what happened next, Robert Wallace can tell the story better than I can.

(My writing ends here. However, Robert Wallace has taken to keeping his own blog, and at this point, I can quote him.)

In Jericho, several Palestinians said to each of us, "Please tell the people of America we want peace. Please don't let a few radicals make them think we are all like that." One man whose words will stay with me for a long time said, "How many fingers do you have?" I replied, "Five." Showing me his hand, he said, "Same as me. Please tell them we want peace. We need peace."

(Permalink...and THAT happened.)

For those of you who are true geeks, you might recognize that as the Tokyo series between the Boston Red Sox and the Oakland A's. Some dork - who sounds like he knows baseball better than he lets on, if you listen closely - scored nice seats behind home plate, and provides sufficiently dorky commentary.

"I'm not sure what that means!" I don't know if I've ever heard baseball commentary so beautiful in my life.

Oh, by the way, apparently the guy is a pretty decent guitarist.

(I have to confess, I find it cool when famous people do vaguely anonymous stuff online.)

It is absolutely essential for me, in times like these, to remember how good I have it.

After an up-and-down week, where I still can't find a way to make the highs anywhere near as high as the lows, my random bouncing around the internets brought me to desperately needed perspective, in the form of two stories from Bunker Hill Community College written by Wick Sloane.

The first, written last year this time, is a piece mourning the death of a 19-year-old student named Cedirick Steele and how this impacted the English class he had been taking. The second, written today, is a broader picture of the experience at BHCC, captured in single snapshots, nothing terribly coherent because "these pages keep spinning out in rage and gibberish. I can’t circle longer, looking for the perfect storyline on this problem 'too big to be seen.'"

Here's the part of the second piece that absolutely killed me (edited so that Baptist-college-stylee SonicWall doesn't start hating my guts - go back to InsideHigherEd for the unedited version):

Slide Five: A Thursday last spring. A textbook publisher has brought lunch for two students whose essays she wants to buy for a new book. On Tuesday, one student had e-mailed his lunch order. Thursday morning, he canceled. He had to quit school. No explanation.

Slide Six: The final paragraph of his essay.

"My stomach begins to churn as I start the last phase of my pilgrimage. The last phase consists of walking out of the train station, down the walkway and into BHCC. I compare this walk to the walk death row inmates take before they are executed. As I take this walk I begin to ask myself, “What the f___ am I doing here?” Within seconds my sensible half answers, “You’re here so that you don’t have to live like the rest of your family. The rest of your friends are in school, and lord knows half of them aren’t half as smart as you. Lastly, we already paid for this s___ so get it done, lil’ n___a.” With BHCC right in front me, I take a deep breath and end this pilgrimage by entering the Mecca that will start me on the path of reaching my pinnacle.”

Why is it that the people who need education the most desperately - and who know it, and are hungriest for it - are the very same people who find it the hardest to get?

(And, of course, this is "first in a series." I'll be reading this some more.)

We interrupt the steady stream of Israel-blogging to bring a reminder of the real world, via Part VI of Cornford's Microcosmographia Academica (last making appearances in this place here and here):

You will begin, I suppose, by thinking that people who disagree with you and oppress you must be dishonest. Cynicism is the besetting and venial fault of declining youth, and disillusionment its last illusion. It is quite a mistake to suppose that real dishonesty is at an common. The number of rogues is about equal to the number of men who act honestly; and it is very small. The great majority would sooner behave honestly than not. The reason why they do not give way to this natural preference of humanity is that they are afraid that others will not; and the others do not because they are afraid that they will not. Thus it comes about that, while behaviour which looks dishonest is fairly common, sincere dishonesty is about as rare as the courage to evoke good faith in your neighbours by showing that you trust them.

No; the Political Motive in the academic breast is honest enough. It is Fear -- genuine, perpetual, heartfelt timorousness.

Never chalk up to malicious intent what can be just as easily ascribed to raw, unadulterated scaredy-pantsness?

There is a lot of truth in that. A whole heapin' lot.

(From my Israel journal, started on 12 March, completed on 14 March.)

I get separated from my group at Banias, past the plausible site of Caesarea Phillipi, walking out towards the waterfalls.

The agents of separation are high school kids.

School kids in Israel appear to travel a lot - and appear to travel well, since tour buses here are so readily available. (Top industry in Israel? Tourism. I don't think there's a close second.) At any of the national parks, it's not uncommon to find several school groups wandering around. On this day, it's groups of early teenagers - girls preening and posing for digital pictures as if they're supermodels, boys playfighting with each other as if they're WWE wrestlers, exasperated teachers and parents trying to maintain a semblance of order.

In other words, not that much different from American school kids.

Except for this - every group we saw, we saw one or two - not appearing much older than school age, if they're older at all - carrying rifles, slung over their shoulders, very visible.

A couple of remarks between us American travelers, when we first saw them, were about how much these guys looked like kids playing soldier. Honestly, I hope you'd forgive me for that. There was no way either of those guys was a day over 19, not even with the beard that one of them was sporting.

But now I'm separated from my guys, and I find myself behind this group of high school kids, and I wind up walking aside these two rifle guys, and we exchange pleasantries. The bearded guy asks, "Where are you from?" "Northern Georgia, in the United States. Do you know where Atlanta is?" He does, but he's never heard of Rome. We get some doses of each others' geography.

I find out that the bearded guy, the guy who's most eager to talk to the Georgia redneck, is named Odi. His job is to provide security for the school kids. Every school group has to have security provided for them when they're out. It really doesn't take much imagination to see why.

Now, I do a lousy job of putting on airs. I don't know if it was politic or not to tell Odi what we thought he was when we first saw him - just a school kid that's too eager to join the military. But when I say this to Odi, it's clear that he doesn't think I was out of line at all. He just laughs. "I am eager to join the military!"

"Well, doesn't everybody have to serve in the military in Israel?"

"Yes, but that does not matter. Everybody wants to serve. See, America is a wonderful country. Everybody wants to serve in the American military, no?"

Oh, wow, that line of questioning blindsided me. I stammer something like "well, you might think so, but these are strange times." All I can think in my head is this: Now is probably not the time to bring up Iraq..

Odi looks at me strangely. "I don't understand. American military pays well, no?"

"Well, yes, but..." but I suddenly realize that Odi's not listening to me. "The Israeli military pays only 700 sheqels a month. But that does not matter. Israel is a wonderful country - but we cannot know what might happen tomorrow. We have to be ready. I want to be ready."

Odi is stiffening, standing straighter, as he talks. He is talking passionately. When he looks at me, I see only one thing in his eyes:

I love Israel, and no one will take Israel away from me.

I say a few things about how admirable his passion is, and how sometimes I wish we felt as strongly about America as he feels about Israel. But at this point his group is stopping, and I have no clue how much farther my group is ahead, and I'm conscious of the fact that I don't want to get lost in a strange land, so I say my goodbyes.

As the week has gone on, and as we've seen the military gather this place or that, the one thing that stuns me is how often the soldiers are having fun, how often there are smiles on the soldier's faces. There are sometimes serious looks, in the stressful places, but never weary or fatigued looks, and only rarely is there a flash of anger. It seems this is a military that genuinely enjoys serving and longs to serve. I may not know much about war, but I do expect it's much harder to defeat an army that wants to serve than an army that doesn't.