Few articles I read, only about one a year, get saved on my computer. These are articles describing an invaluable overarching idea, a critique of our modern world so potent that I want to reference it so I don’t forget it and can incorporate it into my own life planning. The following is one of those articles.
The decline in opportunity to play has also been
accompanied by a decline in empathy and a rise in
narcissism, both of which have been assessed since the
late 1970s with standard questionnaires given to normative
samples of college students. Empathy refers to the ability
and tendency to see from another person’s point of view
and experience what that person experiences. Narcissism
refers to inflated self-regard, coupled with a lack of
concern for others and an inability to connect emotionally
with others. A decline of empathy and a rise in narcissism
are exactly what we would expect to see in children who
have little opportunity to play socially. Children can’t
learn these social skills and values in school, because
school is an authoritarian, not a democratic setting.
School fosters competition, not co-operation; and children
there are not free to quit when others fail to respect
their needs and wishes.
The article describes how, since about the 1960s, kids have been getting more schoolwork so that schools reach performance goals set by standardized tests. This takes away time where kids can learn empathy at play. As a result, you get less creative kids:
One line of evidence comes from the results of a battery
of measures of creativity — called the Torrance Tests of
Creative Thinking (TTCT) — collected from normative
samples of US schoolchildren in kindergarten through to
12th grade (age 17-18) over several decades. Kyung-Hee
Kim, an educational psychologist at the College of William
and Mary in Virginia, has analysed those scores and
reported that they began to decline in 1984 or shortly
after, and have continued to decline ever since.
…
Other research, by the psychologist Mark Runco and
colleagues at the Torrance Creativity Center at the
University of Georgia, shows that scores on the TTCT are
the best childhood predictors we have of future real-world
achievements. They are better predictors than IQ,
high-school grades, or peer judgments of who will achieve
the most.
From reading the article, I learned about “question tags”, where an assertion is given a clause that promotes discussion if the conversational partner disagrees. For example, I’ve noticed that patients are more relaxed when I say “Is it OK if I take a look?” (a question) rather than “I’ll take a look” (a pronouncement). We both know I am about to set their chair back, and the expectations of the whole interaction are that I will take a look, but giving the person the power to veto is a powerful psychological path to consensus. I could refine this further by fully combining statement and question tag with something like: “Let’s take a look, okay?” I tried “shall we” here, but it felt so different from how I talk, that I threw it away. The “okay” tag is even a little confrontational for me (I know, I know).
You think these details sound hopelessly minor, but such subtle changes are the entire difference between someone being comfortable and upset with you. I’m reminded of this bit about crafting jokes in a recent profile of Jerry Seinfeld for The New York Magazine:
Developing jokes as glacially as he does, Seinfeld says,
allows for breakthroughs he wouldn’t reach otherwise. He
gave me an example. “I had a joke: ‘Marriage is a bit of a
chess game, except the board is made of flowing water and
the pieces are made of smoke,’ ” he said. “This is a good
joke, I love it, I’ve spent years on it. There’s a little
hitch: ‘The board is made of flowing water.’ I’d always
lose the audience there. Flowing water? What does he mean?
And repeating ‘made of’ was hurting things. So how can I
say ‘the board is made of flowing water’ without saying
‘made of’? A very small problem, but I could hear the
confusion. A laugh to me is not a laugh. I see it, like at
Caltech when they look at the tectonic plates. If I’m in
the dark up there and I can just listen, I know exactly
what’s going on. I know exactly when their attention has
moved off me a little.
“So,” he continued, “I was obsessed with figuring that
out. The way I figure it out is I try different things,
night after night, and I’ll stumble into it at some point,
or not. If I love the joke, I’ll wait. If it takes me
three years, I’ll wait.” Finally, in late August, during a
performance, the cricket cage snapped into place. “The
breakthrough was doing this”— Seinfeld traced a square in
the air with his fingers, drawing the board. “Now I can
just say, ‘The board is flowing water,’ and do this, and
they get it. A board that was made of flowing water was
too much data. Here, I’m doing some of the work for you.
So now I’m starting to get applause on it, after years of
work. They don’t think about it. They just laugh.”
True communication, whether to a patient or to an audience member, hinges upon sweating those details. Everything in our friendships, marriages, even in business, revolves around talking with the ones around us, making ourselves understood, and making others feel that they are understood. Play teaches that, and as this article clearly shows, school can not.
Been trying a new workout technique lately, which can be described with the following words: go faster, waste less time. I’ve decreased my time by 30%, which amounts to 2 hours 18 minutes time savings per week. This has been in collaboration with Mykala, who had the original idea long ago. The thing that I had a hard time with is the mental state you have to be in to push yourself constantly for an entire workout. Since I’m lifting weights, I’m constantly resting but now trying to shorten that rest time. It isn’t a treadmill, where your pace is essentially enforced. Rather, it is like running intervals for your entire workout. Every workout. I’m getting used to it, the time-savings are tremendous, and I think I get a better workout.
So the reduction in time per workout has been from 2 hours+ to 90 minutes. The record so far is 85 minutes, and I’ve been averaging 90-95 minutes. Since I haven’t done one of these workout write-ups in a while (oh my god it has been 10 years since I did one… where did THAT time go?), here’s the workout, which essentially consists of a bunch of supersets, where while one muscle group is resting, you do another (unrelated) group with as short a break as possible between.
First, a key:
BP bench press
LRCU compound leg-raise & chin-up
LRS leg-raises w/static half chin-up
MP military press
HSP hand-stand push-up
RDR lying rear delt raise
FDR front delt dumbbell raise
WD weighted dip
CC chair bicep curl
IC incline bicep curl
WCU weighted chin-up
S squat (w/calf, tibialis raise)
SCR Cybex seated calf raise
SP Cybex squat press
PLC Cybex prone leg curl
LE Cybex leg extension
Commas separate sets, lines separate exercises, arrows mean rests during a set. Weights in pounds, bodyweight where unspecified:
Warmup: 10 45° down angle push-ups BP 45×10, 135×5, 155×5, 225×3→2→2 LRCU×10 BP 225×2 LRS×10 BP 185×5→2→2 LRS×9 BP 185×5→2→2 LRCU×8 BP 195×5→2 LRS×8 CC 40×17 BP 205×3→2→2 LRS×8 CC 55×7 BP 205×3→2→2
(30 min) LRCU×7 MP 85×10 BP 205×4 MP 105×6 LRS×9 MP 115×6 LRS×8 MP 115×6 IC 45×9 WCU 45×9 FDR 45×8 MP 135×10 LRCU×7→LRS×3 IC 45×9 WD 100×14, 0×4 LRS×10 FDR 45×5 MP 135×6, 135×4
S 225×18 WD 100×14, 0×4 LRS×9 FDR 45×12
S 225×11
(60 min) SP 450×11, 450×4 LRS×8 RDR 45×15 SCR 180×12 HSP×14 SCR 180×8 RDR 45×10 SP 450×10 PLC 130×15, 150×5 LE 190×12, 205×4, 215×4 SP 540×11, 540×4 LRS×7 RDR 45×11 SCR 180×12 HSP×14 SCR 180×8 RDR 45×9 SP 540×10 PLC 130×11, 150×5 LE 190×12, 205×4 LRCU×10 LE 215×4 PLC 150×4
Looks positively cryptic in that format, but it is really straight forward. I have no idea what it will look like in 10 years, but I do hope to continue exercising. What have I learned lifting? Precor’s Icarian line are the best benches by such a large margin it isn’t even worth considering others. Iron Grip dumbbells and barbells are better than getting rust on you and your clothes. Air piston resistance machines were a short experiment and didn’t work well. Find what works for you: the difference between joint injury and health is less than half an inch or a few degrees. Never EVER hyperextend and think twice before fully extending with heavy weights. Going in 3 times a week and cheating slightly on form is better than going in once and getting your form perfect. When bench pressing, never rest your feet any lower than your back, and it is best to have them up in the air. The lower you go on squats, the higher your chance of getting injured—if you’re in it for the long term and not for show, go just low enough to build the strength and joint stability you need.
Sometimes you go into to work and it turns out you didn’t work that day so you scoot back home and open the windows to let the cool fall air in and crawl into bed next to your lovely wife and your fuzzy little orange cat keeps watch out the window and the light gently rises over the hill on which you live and a thought drifts lazily up from your subconscious, through your limbic systems, past your prefrontal cortex, right out through the crown of your head: life is perfect.
Mykala surprised me at the gym today. I saw a young lady out of the corner of my eye, and it was my wife! I don’t like being away from her, at all, even during my gym time. Nine years into our relationship, this seems like a good sign. We talk and talk and talk and take walks and picnics and spend such wonderful hours together. We joke about going to work at the same place, like maybe I can work at a dental building and she can work in an adjoining suite… but that’s a reality I would be thrilled with! After all, marriages aren’t about time apart.
There is a thunderstorm rolling through right now. After weeks of extreme humidity that has turned the papers in our house to rags and our dispositions into heat-addled crabbiness, the rain is a relief. I’ve thrown open the windows that aren’t painted shut, and the house is finally giving up its heat to cooler air. There’s no lullaby like thunder.
I like to keep patients safe. I like to work on clean, isolated teeth. My endless (ask Mykala) reading of primary literature makes me love what is called a “dry field” to work in (no saliva, no tongue). So, I’m in favor of rubber dams. Very much in favor. Here is one of my favorite photos, ever:
That is a Coltène/Whaledent Flexi Dam Non Latex. It has a little waffle-y expansion matrix in the material (like a Glad ForceFlex garbage bag) that allows it to strrrrrrretch out. After breaking three dams in a row on three patients in a row, I started to suspect it wasn’t me but the material. This stretchy dam looked like a good alternative. For what it’s worth, that is a Fiesta brand color-coded rubber dam retainer also pictured on that tooth above, which is amazing as well.
How do I know? After researching the best dam system for a few months, I put in an order request and my kindly employer was nice enough to purchase the retainers and dams for me. It is hard to say how happy this makes me — I get to do the absolute best quality work possible for patients. Any compromises, no matter how small, say, maybe an increase in relative humidity during bonding or difficulty obtaining a broad contact, makes me really depressed (again, ask Mykala).
Luckily, the opposite is also true — getting to do the best (rubber dam, 4th or 5th gen bonding, V3 sectional matrix system, new burs) makes me so so happy.
