Assimilating Learning

When I was in college, we paid a whole bunch of money to get knowledge stuffed into our heads, yet we took the entire month of December off (as well as the usual spring and summer holidays). I didn't understand it when I started classes, but I sure as heck did by the time I graduated. It was all about assimilation.

Cornish is an acting conservatory. This is a fancy way of saying that most of the school year, they owned me from seven AM until eleven PM. My classmates and I worked our butts off. But very often, we'd batter our heads against the same problems over and over. Then the winter holiday would roll around. We'd go our separate ways for a month, and we'd get lost in the flow of family, work, holidays and whatever else suited us. When classes resumed, the issues that had held us back before break had magically vanished. Why? It wasn't the eggnog.

Assimilation. Turns out there's a huge difference between knowing something and owning something. Those long breaks built into our course structure were there for a reason - everything our instructors tried to teach us, all of the technique and all of the physical conditioning work - it needed time and space to sink in. We had to assimilate it, to take what we'd learned out of heads and let it settle into our bones, into our blood and into our breath.

It's the difference between learning how to ride a bike and knowing how. When you get on a bike, do you think about how to make it all work? When your folks first took off your training wheels, do you remember how much concentration and thought it took to remember to keep the handle bars steady and to peddle at the same time? Do you remember the point at which you'd assimilated the learning and no longer had to think about riding as you rode? Yeah, me neither. All of the effort and all of the heart-pounding anxiety over riding the bike slipped away unnoticed.

Assimilation is the final step in learning anything. It's the point at which you've incorporated your lessons into who and what you are. It's also the point at which you forget all of the pain and effort that went into learning in the first place. You take your knowledge for granted. That's both good and bad. Good in that you don't have to think about what you know and how you know it. It's bad if you have to teach someone else and can't remember how you learned it yourself.

The important bit here is to not take yourself and all you know for granted. If only because at some point, you're likely to have to teach someone else how to ride a bicycle.

Send in the Clones

by Allison Pang

Nerd. Geek. Dork.

Badges of honor now, though not so much growing up. As much as we tell our children how important it is to be unique individuals, I almost feel like there's a "but" in there.

Be yourself...but don't be too weird.

Sometimes it feels as though there's a limitation to individuality in mainstream society. (Suppose that's why they call it mainstream, eh?)

There's a certain pride that comes with skirting the edge of normal.For a long time I struggled with that - as a kid I *never* fit in. I was always too loud. Too awkward. Too skinny. Too nerdy. Too ugly. Too whatever. I didn't play with Barbies or read Sweet Valley High. I didn't care about my hair or my clothes. I played Bard's Tale and read science fiction novels. I was the only girl in the D&D club.

Not that I didn't try to fit in. I did. But I was never good enough and I was always worried about what other people thought.  (Still one of my  biggest issues today.)

It took me a long time, but I came to realize it's less about trying to fit in and more about accepting who you are and not trying to hide it. Or not hide it as much. No one *really* has to know the depths of my bacon fetish. Really. (On the other hand - I seem to have become somewhat associated with bacon. And Hello Kitty. It's a tad surreal to have total strangers tweet me things they find online. And awesome.)

I'm actually somewhat envious of the new nerd generations today. With the advent of the internet it has become so terribly easy to reach out across the world and find others who like the same things and who seem to revel in their nerdiness. One only has to look at Tumblr to see how unapologetic the teens of today are. When your only limit is that there are no limits to who you can meet or talk to, it's amazing just how little you care what the people in your home town think.

This is fabulous.

So maybe it's less about trying to be an individual as much as finding the people you're supposed to fit in with.

Partial Assimilation

By KAK   

Assimilation: a notion intellectually revolting yet socially necessary (as Laura explained yesterday). Why do we, as a culture, say we resist it when our actions prove otherwise? Is it a learned fear of Hive Mind? Is our desire for individuality innate? Can we be led by the nose into the homogenization of beauty, value, and ethics yet instinctively rebel when left to our own devices?

You bet your bippy.

Novelists are too familiar with the dichotomy. Every genre has a set of reader expectations that shape rules to which a writer must conform in order to have repeat customers. As a consumer, when I buy a romance, I expect at least two protagonists to develop a symbiotic relationship that leads to a happy ending.  When I purchase a thriller, I expect a protagonist, an antagonist, and imminent peril. To fulfill the expectations, the successful author assimilates these rules, and in so doing becomes assimilated by the writer and reader communities.

Logical, right? Reasonable, even.

Why then do so many authors fight it? Because they are ar-tee-sts? No. They rebel when subjective preferences are masked as rules – be it in structure or content. No head-hopping is a subjective preference. Proper punctuation is a rule. Cock and cunt in Erotica is a subjective preference. Science in Sci-Fi is a rule. Among the writing community there are the clashing views that those who follow all the subjective preferences are formulaic and those who break all the rules are troglodytes.  

It’s reflective of our society over all.

Those who follow all the rules are dismissed as mindless. Those who excel know which rules are actually subjective preferences. Those who win know which deviations enhance the Contract of Expectations.

Assimilation isn't bad, but resisting it is futile.

Assimilation: It Ain't a Bad Thing, Sociologically

by Laura Bickle

In my previous life, I taught classes on deviance. And it taught me that assimilation can be a very good thing.

Yup. Deviance is actually a field in sociology. It focuses on how society's norms are defined and how people wander outside of them. It's a favorite area for criminologists to study. As a graduate student, I was a teaching assistant for an undergrad deviance class for a few quarters. Criminology was my bailiwick, and deviance is a pretty fascinating field. Deviance, in the sociological sense, occurs when people behave in a way that violates formal rules (laws) and social norms (like societal expectations). For an act to be deviant, it's gotta be something that most people disapprove of. Like...murder. Murder's a good example. Stealing is another one. So is wandering around in public nekkid. Alcoholism and drug abuse. You get the picture.

There's a large, overarching theory in sociology called Social Control Theory. It's part of the Structural-Functionalist school of thought. At the time that I went to school, the Structural-Functionalists were not as sexy as, say, the Conflict theorists (because Marx was a Conflict theorist, and you know how people in college love to argue about Marx). But, despite their unsexiness, the Structural Functionalists had some interesting ideas on how deviance and criminal behavior works.

One of those ideas is the "stake in conformity." People who are invested in social structures are less likely to become criminals. The idea was initially posited by Jackson Toby in the 1950's, to explain why some kids were delinquents and why others stayed out of trouble. Those who were more involved with school, families, jobs, community activities, etc., were less likely to be involved in gangs.

The underlying idea is one of commitment. If one has responsibilities and duties outside of oneself, one tends to stay out of trouble. One is, in effect, assimilated into one's community in a desirable way.

The idea was later revisited by Travis Hirschi and others as part of an the concept of crime as stemming from rational choice. Hirschi argued that people make decisions to offend or not offend, and part of that calculation is whether or not you've got something to lose by being deviant.

If you have nothing to lose, a Rational Choice theorist would suggest that you're more likely to be deviant. This is all about the stake in conformity. Stakes in conformity are things you're afraid of losing if you screw up and go to jail. Stuff like jobs, marriages, material assets, strong family ties, home ownership...stuff that means we have things to lose by acting out. The stake in conformity has also been used to explain why many criminals mellow or "age out" of criminal activity - you develop more ties to your community and a larger stake in community and conformity as you get older. People, by and large, settle down as they age and find a permanent place to live, create family units, and get jobs. When they do, the risk of offending goes way down, as compared, to say, offending rates for the early-twenties demographic. Most people in society do tend to chill out, get things they're afraid of losing, and become assimilated. They have stuff they want and act to protect it by staying out of trouble.

And, according to this school of thought, that's why grown-ups are boring and go to bed early. A trip to the pokey will hurt your bank account - you gotta pay bond and get a lawyer. The ride in the police car with embarrass the hell out of you in front of your neighbors. Who's gonna watch the kids while you're in jail? Your wife might decide to divorce you if what you did is really bad. And if your boss sees what you did in the police blotter section of the newspaper, you just might lose your job. And how on earth are you gonna make the mortgage and the car payment THEN? Never mind about your insurance and getting your car out of the impound lot...

Right about now, your American Dream is pretty well trashed. So it's probably best to stay assimilated and keep outta trouble.

I Like My Way Better

by Jeffe Kennedy

I really wanted to lead with a Borg picture, in honor of Assimilation week. But I felt I should save the "you will be assimilated" moment for one of my sister whores.

I've spent much of my life fighting assimilation. For a number of reasons, not all of them good ones.

First off, I'm stubborn by nature. The family line about me is "I like my way better." This stemmed largely from me being a voracious reader and learning new words without hearing them spoken. I decided on pronunciation and, when corrected, would respond with... yes, well, now you can come to one of our family dinners.

I pretty much like my way better on everything.

Oh, I've grown up and discovered I often have to do things other peoples' ways. Work, school, organizations. To get along, to be successful, you have to do things their way. But, I found a work-around. I'll do it their way, but inside? It's still my way.

I went to a good college, sterling education, but I didn't go to the ones everyone else wanted me to. I picked a fairly obscure private, liberal arts college. I pledged a sorority - but the wayward one, that wasn't so popular. Pre-med was my course of study, as it should be for any good little smart girl, but I double-majored with religious studies and added a theater minor.

At this point in my life, I can pretty much dress the part, talk the talk, walk the walk. I finally, after some pain and much coaching, learned not to say everything I think. But inside my head? all subversive.

This is why I like the Hanged Man. He doesn't mean for me what he does for many people. I love how, if you turn the card upside-down, he looks like he's just standing there, relaxing. Normal guy. But, really, for him the world is upside-down. Inverted, reversed - not the normal thing at all. There's something to be learned from that, from doing things the other way, from a different angle.

Oh yeah, I'll take the Borg implants and track the hive mind.

But deep inside, I like my own way.

Much better.