The Logic of Long Distance

Since my last (and first!) entry, I've taken a step forward in my writing and a step back in my running. Strangely, the step backwards is more easily recognized as progress than the step forward. I made it through the Flying Monkey Marathon with a second place finish and a harder-than-it-should-have-been 2:58:17. Since then, I've run twice, and basically have decided that it will be in my best long term interests to lay off of "training" and just run when I feel like it until the end of the year. Let my body get strong and healthy and make another run at a fast marathon in April. After I finished the Monkey, I wrote the first chapter of the dissertation. The main idea behind the chapter is to show how the three concepts of education, experience, and experimentation relate to each other in the context of thinking about the value of values. I struggle a bit trying to pull together the style of my writing with the content that I would like to express. This is something ...

Run a fast marathon. Write a dissertation. The two goals for the next year. I thought I'd track my own progress here for myself and for family and friends that want to follow along. We'll see how it goes. I'm working now on the first chapter of the dissertation. The challenge is setting up the context for my ideas about the nature of experience, experimentalism, and a social view of education. The key figures in the dissertation will be William James and John Dewey, and their ideas will be supplemented by more contemporary folks like Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou, Michel Foucault, Cornell West, and Paulo Friere. The basic idea behind the dissertation is that if we properly understand the nature of experience, then we understand ourselves as educational beings. The task of building democracy means building institutions and ways of thinking that allow folks to take education into their own hands. This is the meaning of autonomy--to be able to play a part in the making of one...