@JoetatoChip when i first start i cant even reach my lower shins when bending over to touch my toes, but give me 10 minutes to stretch and warm up and i can almost get my palms on the floor. I wonder if you would have done better w a little warm up, or is the test supposed to be “natural flexibility?” I cant remember them letting us warm up before we lined up to do that test.
@nogoodwithnames i love when babies suck on their toes. It’s so cute. How old are you? Is it still cute at that age or do people look at you funny?
/image cute baby toes
@mollama It’s not a thing I tend to do, ahh, ever really, but I imagine funny looks would be in order were I to decide to do so unsolicited and/or in public.
In the 70’s, I did get the Presidential Fitness Award but I can barely move today. Can’t sit for too long, can’t stand too long, and cannot even lay down to sleep too long. That old age catches up real fast.
Did we do something similar but not the exactly the same thing? If so, that would explain why I have no idea what “sit and reach” portion of the challenge was. Among the things I do remember were a shuttle run, a mile run, a sprint (not sure the distance), sit-ups, push-ups, standing broad jump and a softball throw.
Lastly, unlike some here, I only did it during my elementary school days. I didn’t even realize it was a thing for jr high/high school students.
@DrWorm the sit and reach is the only part I remember. There was a box that you put your feet against and then you stretched forward to see how far you could push a little bar across the box. It had a measuring tape on it.
@RiotDemon Yeah, I never did that. (as least I think I would at least remember a box like that.) I think whatever I participated in grade school in the 1970’s was decidedly something different, but I am almost positive that it had the word “President” in it. I remember it being pretty hard (typically only a couple of students would achieve it). I specifically remember thinking I crushed it because I did 14 pull-ups, but I was nowhere near passing.
@PlacidPenguin
According to some popular press writings on recent brain and learning research, the answer seems to be:
“focus and work really hard at doing very hard stuff”
and make this practice a regular, disciplined daily routine"
(Part of the “doing hard stuff” activity seems to be breaking the tasks down, understanding each activity or component better, and practicing at putting the sub tasks back together with smooth transitions.
(So that every time you rehearse, practice, and struggle, you are learning new perspectives and extending or refining your technique.)
I was spacing out, but I still came out higher than 92% of people my age. However, that’s not exactly saying much, because people in my age bracket are largely disappointments… Or so they say.
There are a lot of fairly recent books and articles on this. Both normal reading and specialist stuff. Applies to everything from tying shoes to making a salad to hitting a baseball to overcoming anxiety to dealing with social situations to writing a legal brief.
a bunch of recent brain research in learning practices has gone public recently. Avoid the material aimed st classrooms; the best stuff is about how individuals learn complex activities.
@PlacidPenguin languages, math, computer programming, forcing yourself to become sympathetic toward opinions that you despise, reading complex writing, maybe?
(I don’t know about generalized intellectual benefits, but these are all the things that I find challenging and rewarding.)
@KDemo i actually enjoyed the lumosity exercises but gave them up as i quickly got bored - the price to unlock things beyond the free offerings was insane, imo.
@InnocuousFarmer
A lot of people need to learn to “read” other people better. A lot of people have habitual avoidance or high anxiety about social encounters.
It’s not just language, whether a formal logical language or a normal colloquial one. It’s learning how to operate within personal encounters - and learning to understand both one’s own and other’s open and hidden agendas, and how to both read and use the encounter to solve a problem or achieve a goal.
We’ve all seen apparently innocuous encounters that had all sorts of agendas under the surface, with one party or the other possibly being unaware.
Being able to have empathy and sympathy while reserving both personal position and personal judgment, is a learned skill. In contentious interactions, not be subtly outmaneuvered or “played”, or giving up more than one intended, is a tricky biz.
(i do like to play other word games on my phone - i play red herring, seven little words, and monkey wrench every day, and sometimes open moxie to play a few rounds. what’s really a shame - and weird - is that there’s no good free crossword app.)
I can’t keep up in real time conversations, always being lost in potential meanings and implications (and a good dose of anxiety, I’m sure), so I tend to just do whatever and try not worry about it. If I had to worry about being out-maneuvered, I don’t think I’d stick around a place, or engage with a person. I’ve got almost zero tolerance for that particular kind of disingenuous bad behavior.
I do seem to get misread a lot though, judging by how other people react. I suspect that I’m generally better at observation, and worse at projection.
Especially when I am trying to describe a thing accurately, just to better inform someone else, people don’t recognize that as an effort that a person would make, and instead ascribe motives and angles to what I say.
@jerk_nugget if you happen to have an iPhone, there’s an older word game callled Letterpress. It’s great, in that it’s a bit tactical.
(I think lately they changed the algorithms for matching players, or maybe there’s been a drop in the population. I’m winning more games than I used to…)
I can’t keep up in real time conversations, always being lost in potential meanings and implications (and a good dose of anxiety, I’m sure), so I tend to just do whatever and try not worry about it. If I had to worry about being out-maneuvered, I don’t think I’d stick around a place, or engage with a person. I’ve got almost zero tolerance for that particular kind of disingenuous bad behavior.
Potentially political or hidden agenda conduct: Avoid if possible, but learn to deal with it. It happens to a degree, for instance, in every family, tho hopefully at such a innocent level that it’s innocuous.
Most people encounter it at some time or other in a work environment. Often “agenda-conduct” has long term goals that might or might not bother you, depending on the person and the goals. It’s always good to learn a little of what is being involved in being what is often called “an operator”, even if you don’t intend to do that yourself.
Regarding, real-time conversations: no one ever parses one in full, ever. Most of the time that just doesn’t matter. Much of the time, either the obvious logical or overt content is all one needs to bother with.
To: me the trick is to figure out how much energy to throw at this or that aspect of a conversation. Do potential and alternative meanings matter much? Are they intrinsically amusing or interesting? Are the participants short on time? Then toss the extras. Stick with what you really need to get, forget the rest.
Most people really want us to understand the overt part of what they say first, and then give whatever energy is left to the rest of it.
If the material is highly unfamiliar to me, or is being presented in a manner that is confusing or ambiguous: I’ll interrupt the conversation to ask questions. I have learned not to care much about authority and status, and I’ve learned not to be shy or deferential: I’m just so stubborn that I’m not going to bother waiting and wasting thru a conversation unless I am satisfied with my understanding. I guess I’m selfish that way, but it seems potentially efficient to both parties. (Manners, tone, social savvy can help a lot here.)
I do seem to get misread a lot though, judging by how other people react. I suspect that I’m generally better at observation, and worse at projection.
You may not be communicating in the way that makes it easier for other people to understand. An expert or knowledgeable party who describes something has to also imagine what the other person does or does not know, and figure out an efficient path and tone to get the other party to the understanding you desire. That may sound mechanical and cold blooded, but it need not be; in fact, it may well matter most in the conversations we have at home and in personal relationships.
Especially when I am trying to describe a thing accurately, just to better inform someone else, people don’t recognize that as an effort that a person would make, and instead ascribe motives and angles to what I say.
Here I would try to figure out how to properly set a “scene” for the other party up front, so that the other party understands what you are trying to achieve. If the other party loses sight of that, bring the conversation back to that as a reminder.
There is a lot of social “touch” involved in this. (not referring to actual touching.)
Different persons have different tolerances for various sorts of data, logic, explanations, formality, colloquialisms. Some people want quick and dirty, some people want a tech manual, some people want a story. (A lot of people, even logicians, want a story.) Humor usually helps. Not being more detailed or complex than the other party wishes helps. Or giving out details at a rate where they can be understand helps. Giving out information in an order that makes it easy for the other party to visualize or built a mental model helps.
Very attentive practice practice practice helps. For people who think like academics or scientists or geeks, practicing a lot with people who don’t think that way, and don’t want to think that way helps.
Yeah I have issues with all this. Yeah I have to work at it every day. Yeah I fuck it up all the time. Every day, every conversation, all my life. Esp all my life. I’m a lot better than I once was. But I’m no “great communicator”, or even a “better-than-average” communicator. (Much depends on intention, here.)
Once one gets a little self-confidence and a few basic skills, this is always interesting: just to watch the flows of communication, the ways in which people learn, or communicate not only data, but interest, energy, and goodwill (or the opposite, or a confusing mix); and the ways in which people view each other and ourselves over time (to the degree that any one of us can see that in others and in ourselves) becomes an ocean that never runs out of new vistas. So practicing can be a source of learning and joy.
@f00l Ah, see? This is what I am referring to: those were not complaints, nor problems to be solved, but only descriptions of interesting phenomena (to the extent that the things I described are problematic, I think that I am coping well enough). I only write in the first person because, not having the luxury of having lived in another person’s head, I cannot generalize.
I think that I am often misunderstood. I don’t think that it often matters. I do think that the mechanisms involved are interesting.
Some literature (books, plays, screenplays, etc) that conveys conversation can be very illustrative on this; but only some.
A lot of written literary conversation serves other purposes; to make a Hollywood punchline; to show plot movement or emotion thru means other than description. So it’s no so informative for real life person-to-person.
Psychology, linguistics, social psychology, sociology, cultural anthropology all touch on this. To me this subject never runs out of fascination.
Journalist and communicators, print and/or video, usually know a lot about this; either instinctly, or thru formal study.
Nurses, teachers, and other constant-person-contact workers also know a lot, but sometimes they can’t put what they know into words. They know how and what to deal, but some of them don’t know how to explain what they know.
I did fail the sit-and-reach some years. I am not flexible for most of my body, but my hands are freaking contortionists. I have an extraordinary level of control over my phalanges.
Pretty sure I aced the presidential fitness test throughout my high school years but never got one of those certificates with a stamp of the president’s signature on it. Goddamn parochial school.
I can bend at the waist & put my palms flat on the floor. Does that count? Can’t do the splits any more, and have never ever been able to do that darned flex arm hang pull up thing for the Presidential fitness challenge in school even though I could do pull ups/chin ups and do all the sit ups possible under the time limit.
Either my head is in my ass, or my ass is in my head. I forget.
Next time I visit a physician, I’ll be sure to get X-rays and settle this.
I actually failed the sit and reach. I couldn’t reach the numbers so they couldn’t write down a score.
@JoetatoChip when i first start i cant even reach my lower shins when bending over to touch my toes, but give me 10 minutes to stretch and warm up and i can almost get my palms on the floor. I wonder if you would have done better w a little warm up, or is the test supposed to be “natural flexibility?” I cant remember them letting us warm up before we lined up to do that test.
I can get the toes on my right foot into my mouth, but not the ones on my left, so, I guess that balances out to somewhere in the middle.
@nogoodwithnames i love when babies suck on their toes. It’s so cute. How old are you? Is it still cute at that age or do people look at you funny?
/image cute baby toes
@nogoodwithnames Not sure if kinky or disgusting.
/giphy kinky or disgusting
@mollama It’s not a thing I tend to do, ahh, ever really, but I imagine funny looks would be in order were I to decide to do so unsolicited and/or in public.
@nogoodwithnames I used to be able to do that… not any more.
In the 70’s, I did get the Presidential Fitness Award but I can barely move today. Can’t sit for too long, can’t stand too long, and cannot even lay down to sleep too long. That old age catches up real fast.
@cengland0 Your 70’s, or the 1970’s?
@phendrick hehe. The 1970s, silly.
@cengland0 My recollection was doing it in the 1970’s also, but according to the U.S. Department and Health and Human services web site, it only started in 1988 (well after I had finished school) and was discontinued last August.
Did we do something similar but not the exactly the same thing? If so, that would explain why I have no idea what “sit and reach” portion of the challenge was. Among the things I do remember were a shuttle run, a mile run, a sprint (not sure the distance), sit-ups, push-ups, standing broad jump and a softball throw.
Lastly, unlike some here, I only did it during my elementary school days. I didn’t even realize it was a thing for jr high/high school students.
@DrWorm the sit and reach is the only part I remember. There was a box that you put your feet against and then you stretched forward to see how far you could push a little bar across the box. It had a measuring tape on it.
I think I only did that in elementary school.
@RiotDemon Yeah, I never did that. (as least I think I would at least remember a box like that.) I think whatever I participated in grade school in the 1970’s was decidedly something different, but I am almost positive that it had the word “President” in it. I remember it being pretty hard (typically only a couple of students would achieve it). I specifically remember thinking I crushed it because I did 14 pull-ups, but I was nowhere near passing.
Mentally or physically? There’s a pretty big difference.
@KDemo
I have yet to find a good workout regime for my brain.
@PlacidPenguin - Lumosity, or so they say.
@PlacidPenguin
According to some popular press writings on recent brain and learning research, the answer seems to be:
“focus and work really hard at doing very hard stuff”
and make this practice a regular, disciplined daily routine"
(Part of the “doing hard stuff” activity seems to be breaking the tasks down, understanding each activity or component better, and practicing at putting the sub tasks back together with smooth transitions.
(So that every time you rehearse, practice, and struggle, you are learning new perspectives and extending or refining your technique.)
@KDemo
Did their intro fitness test.
I was spacing out, but I still came out higher than 92% of people my age. However, that’s not exactly saying much, because people in my age bracket are largely disappointments… Or so they say.
@f00l
Does talking to people count?
@PlacidPenguin
Absolutely.
Read up on “deep learning” (referring here to the psychological and educational practice, not to the tech-AI use of the term)
Human communication is an incredibly complex area of skill. It is also “learned behavior”.
Here’s a Wikipedia intro to an aspect of it:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student_approaches_to_learning
There are a lot of fairly recent books and articles on this. Both normal reading and specialist stuff. Applies to everything from tying shoes to making a salad to hitting a baseball to overcoming anxiety to dealing with social situations to writing a legal brief.
a bunch of recent brain research in learning practices has gone public recently. Avoid the material aimed st classrooms; the best stuff is about how individuals learn complex activities.
@PlacidPenguin languages, math, computer programming, forcing yourself to become sympathetic toward opinions that you despise, reading complex writing, maybe?
(I don’t know about generalized intellectual benefits, but these are all the things that I find challenging and rewarding.)
@KDemo i actually enjoyed the lumosity exercises but gave them up as i quickly got bored - the price to unlock things beyond the free offerings was insane, imo.
@InnocuousFarmer
A lot of people need to learn to “read” other people better. A lot of people have habitual avoidance or high anxiety about social encounters.
It’s not just language, whether a formal logical language or a normal colloquial one. It’s learning how to operate within personal encounters - and learning to understand both one’s own and other’s open and hidden agendas, and how to both read and use the encounter to solve a problem or achieve a goal.
We’ve all seen apparently innocuous encounters that had all sorts of agendas under the surface, with one party or the other possibly being unaware.
Being able to have empathy and sympathy while reserving both personal position and personal judgment, is a learned skill. In contentious interactions, not be subtly outmaneuvered or “played”, or giving up more than one intended, is a tricky biz.
(i do like to play other word games on my phone - i play red herring, seven little words, and monkey wrench every day, and sometimes open moxie to play a few rounds. what’s really a shame - and weird - is that there’s no good free crossword app.)
@f00l interesting line of thought.
I can’t keep up in real time conversations, always being lost in potential meanings and implications (and a good dose of anxiety, I’m sure), so I tend to just do whatever and try not worry about it. If I had to worry about being out-maneuvered, I don’t think I’d stick around a place, or engage with a person. I’ve got almost zero tolerance for that particular kind of disingenuous bad behavior.
I do seem to get misread a lot though, judging by how other people react. I suspect that I’m generally better at observation, and worse at projection.
Especially when I am trying to describe a thing accurately, just to better inform someone else, people don’t recognize that as an effort that a person would make, and instead ascribe motives and angles to what I say.
@jerk_nugget if you happen to have an iPhone, there’s an older word game callled Letterpress. It’s great, in that it’s a bit tactical.
(I think lately they changed the algorithms for matching players, or maybe there’s been a drop in the population. I’m winning more games than I used to…)
@InnocuousFarmer
Potentially political or hidden agenda conduct: Avoid if possible, but learn to deal with it. It happens to a degree, for instance, in every family, tho hopefully at such a innocent level that it’s innocuous.
Most people encounter it at some time or other in a work environment. Often “agenda-conduct” has long term goals that might or might not bother you, depending on the person and the goals. It’s always good to learn a little of what is being involved in being what is often called “an operator”, even if you don’t intend to do that yourself.
Regarding, real-time conversations: no one ever parses one in full, ever. Most of the time that just doesn’t matter. Much of the time, either the obvious logical or overt content is all one needs to bother with.
To: me the trick is to figure out how much energy to throw at this or that aspect of a conversation. Do potential and alternative meanings matter much? Are they intrinsically amusing or interesting? Are the participants short on time? Then toss the extras. Stick with what you really need to get, forget the rest.
Most people really want us to understand the overt part of what they say first, and then give whatever energy is left to the rest of it.
If the material is highly unfamiliar to me, or is being presented in a manner that is confusing or ambiguous: I’ll interrupt the conversation to ask questions. I have learned not to care much about authority and status, and I’ve learned not to be shy or deferential: I’m just so stubborn that I’m not going to bother waiting and wasting thru a conversation unless I am satisfied with my understanding. I guess I’m selfish that way, but it seems potentially efficient to both parties. (Manners, tone, social savvy can help a lot here.)
You may not be communicating in the way that makes it easier for other people to understand. An expert or knowledgeable party who describes something has to also imagine what the other person does or does not know, and figure out an efficient path and tone to get the other party to the understanding you desire. That may sound mechanical and cold blooded, but it need not be; in fact, it may well matter most in the conversations we have at home and in personal relationships.
Here I would try to figure out how to properly set a “scene” for the other party up front, so that the other party understands what you are trying to achieve. If the other party loses sight of that, bring the conversation back to that as a reminder.
There is a lot of social “touch” involved in this. (not referring to actual touching.)
Different persons have different tolerances for various sorts of data, logic, explanations, formality, colloquialisms. Some people want quick and dirty, some people want a tech manual, some people want a story. (A lot of people, even logicians, want a story.) Humor usually helps. Not being more detailed or complex than the other party wishes helps. Or giving out details at a rate where they can be understand helps. Giving out information in an order that makes it easy for the other party to visualize or built a mental model helps.
Very attentive practice practice practice helps. For people who think like academics or scientists or geeks, practicing a lot with people who don’t think that way, and don’t want to think that way helps.
Yeah I have issues with all this. Yeah I have to work at it every day. Yeah I fuck it up all the time. Every day, every conversation, all my life. Esp all my life. I’m a lot better than I once was. But I’m no “great communicator”, or even a “better-than-average” communicator. (Much depends on intention, here.)
Once one gets a little self-confidence and a few basic skills, this is always interesting: just to watch the flows of communication, the ways in which people learn, or communicate not only data, but interest, energy, and goodwill (or the opposite, or a confusing mix); and the ways in which people view each other and ourselves over time (to the degree that any one of us can see that in others and in ourselves) becomes an ocean that never runs out of new vistas. So practicing can be a source of learning and joy.
@f00l Ah, see? This is what I am referring to: those were not complaints, nor problems to be solved, but only descriptions of interesting phenomena (to the extent that the things I described are problematic, I think that I am coping well enough). I only write in the first person because, not having the luxury of having lived in another person’s head, I cannot generalize.
I think that I am often misunderstood. I don’t think that it often matters. I do think that the mechanisms involved are interesting.
@InnocuousFarmer
Sounds cool then.
Some literature (books, plays, screenplays, etc) that conveys conversation can be very illustrative on this; but only some.
A lot of written literary conversation serves other purposes; to make a Hollywood punchline; to show plot movement or emotion thru means other than description. So it’s no so informative for real life person-to-person.
Psychology, linguistics, social psychology, sociology, cultural anthropology all touch on this. To me this subject never runs out of fascination.
Journalist and communicators, print and/or video, usually know a lot about this; either instinctly, or thru formal study.
Nurses, teachers, and other constant-person-contact workers also know a lot, but sometimes they can’t put what they know into words. They know how and what to deal, but some of them don’t know how to explain what they know.
I did fail the sit-and-reach some years. I am not flexible for most of my body, but my hands are freaking contortionists. I have an extraordinary level of control over my phalanges.
Pretty sure I aced the presidential fitness test throughout my high school years but never got one of those certificates with a stamp of the president’s signature on it. Goddamn parochial school.
I can bend at the waist & put my palms flat on the floor. Does that count? Can’t do the splits any more, and have never ever been able to do that darned flex arm hang pull up thing for the Presidential fitness challenge in school even though I could do pull ups/chin ups and do all the sit ups possible under the time limit.
What does the Presidential Fitness Test ask in terms of flexibility?
I can touch my toes, but am not particularly flexible.
I can’t comfortably sit cross-legged.
I got close enough to my toes to not fail. Stretching is excruciating. Always has been. Tendons like piano wire.
Though, the other direction has always been really easy, and that cross-legged lying down thing has always been easy.
I can touch my toes as my head hits the floor.
Stiff and rigid, like an appliance.
I am pretty flexy
Only three votes for the ‘see comments’ answer, wonder if that’s a new low?