Month January 2018

Can an old dog teach new tricks?

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It remains a question whether someone who has taught successfully (as measured by student evaluations and peer assessments) at the undergraduate level can teach students of her/his own age. After all, a skilled kindergarten teacher may be out of place and skill-set in high school science or maybe not. Maybe, the meta-talent of teaching (deep understanding of content, profound comprehension of where students are, the ability to change tone, accent and appeal, the meeting of where students are with the challenge of where they will be after an encounter with the material) rests far above the content and specifics of teaching physical science or English. Maybe, some of us are master teachers, who are not only good in specific classrooms and subjects, we can also think about the process of teaching broadly and deeply. Some gifted teachers may be able to teach almost anything to anyone.

The actual genius and mastery of teaching is in itself a rare thing. Despite fifteen years of college-level teaching, I am nowhere near being that exceptional teacher but if an interest in self-improvement and a commitment to engaging teaching were half the formula, I would be well on my way. To teach the transferability of my teaching chops, I decided to teach a course at our local lifelong program housed at the local university. Typically, these programs are geared to adults sixty years and over and are peer led. No tests, no credit, no stress—just the joy of learning. Courses include history, arts, wellness, creative expression and others as well as travel and special interest groups. My plan was to teach one concept in sociology (the sociological imagination) and have older students apply this to their lives. The sociological imagination suggests that we cannot understand our own lives without understanding the social, historical, political and cultural environments of the time. This concepts fights against our tendency to believe that we are self-made women and men and points us to an examination of generational differences, changes in norms and values, changes in material conditions and much more. The students were challenged to write short autobiographies and then translate these into creative projects, fashioning sociologically informed stories of their lives. The class was to meet for three sessions in early December 2017.

The challenge of the comfort zone

As the time of the class drew near, self-doubt and panic began to set in. Could I take an exercise that worked with undergraduates to a classroom where students ranged from their mid-sixties to their late-eighties? Could I interest students in sociological ideas? Would they be willing to share their observations about their lives in a setting like this? Could I reasonably expect students to create class projects in such a short time? And, could I do this in three weeks of classes that were 90 minutes long? And, most importantly, after teaching undergraduates for such a long time, what made me think I could teach people my own age and above? As I wrote earlier, are those teaching skills really transferable?

I have to admit to suffering a nightmare before each of the first two classes. These were completely typical anxiety dreams, the first about not being able to get to my classroom because the elevator had disappeared and left in its place was a drawbridge that was up. The second involved teaching a classroom full of mustache wearing lumberjacks in a room with twelve doors, all opening in rapid succession. When I followed a noisy marching band to quiet down, I got lost in my own college in the toy department and couldn’t find my classroom again. Completely normal. That I still suffer from these after teaching so long is a topic for another essay. Let’s just stipulate that I did not imagine that teaching students my own age would be a walk in the park.

However, I must say that I very much enjoyed working with older adults. It is a wonderful experience to share the benefits of the learning one has done, as an older teacher and as an older student. Because I have been working with these ideas for so long, I have distilled the essence and promise of them. My version of sociology may be pretty far from versions held by other sociologists. I suppose this is the case for poets, as well. I may oversimplify the ideas that are core to the discipline. But, for me, these concepts and theories are profoundly helpful for people to understand who they are in the world. And, because, older adults have an opportunity to look back and reflect on their lives, the sociological imagination allows us to see both broad strokes of history as well as the contingent natures of our life paths.

Organization of the class

The course met three times. During the first class, we discussed the sociological imagination and the ideas of sociologist, C. Wright Mills. I asked each of the students to tell the class about his/her career and the paths not taken—careers that, in retrospect, they may have pursued had circumstances been different. In a class of sixteen, only one man would have followed the same career path. I also asked the students to identify five historical events that happened during their lifetimes that they believed had the greatest impact on them. With a twenty-year difference between the youngest and oldest student in the class, we readily identified the differences between growing up as a child of the depression and experiencing childhood as a member of the baby boom generation. The impact of these differences could be readily traced to the older students’ life courses. For the second class meeting, students were tasked with writing a three-paragraph autobiography, which they would share with other students in class.

In the second meeting, students exchanged their stories in small groups, where I asked them to identify common themes and differences. Out of these conversations emerged several points of agreement and common understandings. In this class, I offered a number of resources where students could research their histories.

For the third session, students were asked to begin to think about a creative way to tell their life story or to focus on a transformational event. Not all students were prepared to do this assignment. However, a few were and these were insightful expressions. Many students noted that they had never thought about the historical context of their lives; others said this assignment prompted them to begin chronicling their life story for their children and grandchildren. Still, others reported that they began to better understand their life course after doing some research on historical events. Students who took up the challenge of doing the creative project used the metaphor of life as a great unveiling, as a bookshelf with stories to be told and as a spreadsheet with pluses and minuses and large fields of undetermined outcomes. In this final class, I also distributed The Summoned Self by David Brooks, the columnist for the New York Times, an essay that explores the contingency of careers and life plans which I thought would resonate with a number of the students.

In my undergraduate teaching, I always do this assignment along with the students in my class. On one occasion, I create a three dimensional board game with Chutes-and-Ladders-like paths signifying unearned good luck and undeserved bad luck all winding through historical events and personal mileposts. Because I have spent most of the past twenty years as a PhD sociologist, I sometimes imagine that I have already examined every facet of my life worth examining. However, in the assignment, I focused on my year as a VISTA Volunteer and realized for the first time how profound that experience had been. In fact, I ended up dividing my life into Before VISTA and After VISTA. I got to include Parables, little books where events of that year taught me lessons I am still processing and missing photographs where images of people and events that were key are missing from my scrapbooks. This exercise took research—fact checking and memory checking— to make the story complete. I found it incredibly rewarding, despite the fact that I thought I had already covered this territory of my personal autobiography. Having the opportunity to discuss this project in the comfort of a classroom of my peers made all the difference for me.

The next round

With few exceptions, the students recommended that the course be taught again, offered in five or six sessions instead of just three. Most observed that they would continue working on the project they began in class. Students also observed that the course included just enough sociology. I know that from the experience of teaching this course that older students like small group work. They also appreciate a speaker who speaks loudly and clearly and who writes carefully on the board. Some are interested in more reading related to the topic; other less so.

I aim to think more clearly about the learning styles and approaches of the older student. Many have wonderful experiences that would readily be the subject of some compelling story-telling. If in the next round of this course, we can build up sufficient trust among the members of the class, I would like to showcase these stories in a public setting. With two semesters left to teach at my university, I am also more sensitive and aware than ever of the importance of understanding the students in front of me, from their generational membership to their culture to the ways in which the world manifests itself to them. What I most interested in is what I can learn from them in the limited time we have together.

 

 

 

Giving Until It Helps

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There is a lot of good in the world. We focus too much focus on people and institutions that are behaving badly and on things that are not working, major failures and minor aggravations. Instead, we should be paying attention to things that really matter more—like the decent work of millions of people who assure through adhering to social conventions that our lives are livable and in many cases, pleasurable. David Brooks recently quoted Pope Francis who described people who were kind to the needy, who took their turn, and who instead of running the other driver out of the merge lane waved him into traffic, as “the artisans of the common good” (https://nyti.ms/2E9c6iR). I strongly support celebrating this sort of behavior simply to remind us that without it, we’d need to be more vigilant, more wary of each other and require more protection from the other guy. Think of the quiet comfort we enjoy in daily interactions and how one rude clerk or nasty customer can rattle our whole day. Pile too many of these together makes us bitter, prone to act in kind, setting off our own discharges and sparks of misery.

We don’t hear enough about small acts that make a difference, like making a loan through KIVA. About twelve years old, KIVA invests money to micro-entrepreneurs in 82 countries across the world (https://www.kiva.org/). KIVA is not a government agency, neither is it funded by major philanthropists. KIVA relies on small donors—as little as $25—to fund its work. To date, 2.7 million loans amounting to $1.09 billion dollars have been granted to farmers, shop owners, parents who need to pay school fees for their children and other reasons. More than 1.7 million lenders—average citizens and community groups—have loaned these funds. And, in 96.9% of the time, these loans have been repaid. Once repaid, these funds can be re-lent to support the dreams of another entrepreneur or hopeful parent. I established a student-managed KIVA fund at my university, loaning more than $2500 over a five year period. We have funded cucumber farmers in Estonia, a truck driver in Belarus, a women’s coop in Chile, a store in Peru and many more endeavors. We feel that we contributing in a small way to the economic welfare of the individual, her family and her larger community. Certainly we are not saving the world, but we are contributing in a small way to do our part.

Each at the end of year, I receive a report on our fund which prompts me to make another loan. I defer the choice of who to support until I get a chance to meet with my sociology class. Here, we look at our portfolio of outstanding loans to see where we would like to make this small investment. It challenges students to think about how much difference we can make in someone’s like with a $25 loan. Our loan joins others until the amount requested, let’s say $500, is fulfilled. Once the loan is granted, we’ll get reports on the progress of the project and begin to receive loan repayments. To maximize the sense of community, individuals can create a team made up of people who share a common interest—members of a church group, a school, a large family or other basis. The team manages a portfolio of loans and maybe even engages in some friendly competition with other teams about who can loan the most money or manage the most loans. There are more than 36, 000 teams that loan through KIVA but the two leading teams drew my attention (https://www.kiva.org/teams).

In first place among the teams with the greatest amount loaned are KIVA Christians, founded in August 2008. They have 20,648 members and have lent $42,000,000 dollars pooled in 758,425 loans. KIVA Christians loans have biblical inspiration, which they cite in their reasons to give. “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved, so you must love another” John 13:34 and from Corinthians 13:8 “Love never fails.”

In second place is the A+ team of Atheists, Agnostics, Skeptics, Freethinkers, Secular Humanists and the Non-Religious, also established in 2008 The A+ team has 38,108 members (almost twice as many as the Christians), loaning $36,109,650 (less than the Christians) with more than 1,200,000 loans (about half a million more than the Christians). The Atheists et al loan money because they “care about human beings and understand that it takes people to help people. We are one human family and know that people can do good without believing in a god.”

What are we to make of this? I am wondering which group came first? Maybe, a Christian and her pal, the atheist, met in a coffee shop and set down this dare.

I bet that we Christians can donate more money than you non-believers.

We’ll take that bet and challenge you to put your money where your God is, replied the Atheists.

I suppose we could review these portfolios to see what causes each team has supported. Have the atheists spread their investments far and wide while the Christians have supported a different set of causes? Who is supporting the Palestinians? Muslims? Women and children? School fees for girls? Maybe, there is very little difference between their giving patterns and if so, why donate under the banners of Christianity or non-faith. Does even something as seemingly non-partisan as giving a loan carry partisan baggage? What is really the best way to organize ourselves to do some good? Maybe, a donation to KIVA is, in fact, not the best use of these donations.

I would affiliate with neither team nor claim for giving. I don’t want to give because we are all members of one big human family. That squishy premise doesn’t motivate me at all. On the other hand, loving one another as God loves us also leaves me wanting for more. I can harbor all the positive feelings for my fellow human beings and wish them well as other beings on the planet but until I seriously consider the moral obligations that underpin the simple statement that all human lives have equal value, this one human family loved as God loves us, doesn’t carry much weight. Neither principle calls out my obligation to give in a world where the spoils of our economy and polity are so unevenly distributed and where some have so much and others. These inequities should serve as an embarrassment to all of us.

This, for me, is more a matter of justice than it is kindness and compassion. Similarly, I don’t want to give only when the mood strikes me–when I see that suffering child or when I am moved by a sad tale. I want to connect this giving to commitments that motivate me do more and to do it effectively. If I can shop for a cellphone, I can certainly research whether my donations are doing the most good they can. If the world were suffering from too much kindness and compassion, that would be one thing. But the fact that most of the world lives at subsistence level and a small percent of us are doing quite well is quite another. And, maybe, a donation to KIVA is not the best use of my charitable dollars after all.

As a privileged member of a rich nation and a beneficiary of the gifted generation, I believe that I have encumbered unplayable debts. These include government programs and unparalleled prosperity. A recent book (Goldfield 2017) argues that the generous governmental programs—GI bills for education and homeownership, virtually free college tuition at public institutions, and much more—were designed to lift the working class to the middle class. This gave many of us baby boomers and by extension, our children, great advantages that the current college-age population can scarcely believe. We do have to note here that those benefits were not distributed to blacks and other minority groups but they did establish the point that well-crafted government programs served as escalators into better lives for millions of American families. And, according to most economists, these approaches were far more effective than tax-cut supply-side approaches championed by conservative ideology.

It didn’t occur to me until much later in life how much these advantages propelled me and my peers into a middle class life. If I count up all the fortunate breaks that fell my way, all the investments made in me because of the sacrifices and forethought of others, it is clear I will never repay these. How do I repay those Catholic sisters and my parochial school for an excellent education? How do I repay the government for those social security and GI benefits that arrived just in time after my father’s early death? How do I repay the enormous gift of free tuition for four years from my state college? How do I repay that Ivy League university for their scholarship to this working class student so I could earn a Masters Degree, which impressed many people more than it should have? How about those state-sponsored low-interest loans to first-time homebuyers that allowed me, a single woman, to buy a house after three banks had turned down my application? I could go on. These benefits meant sacrifice on the part of others, of course, and I have reaped the benefits greatly.

Prosperity for many of us came because the U.S. In the fifties and sixties was the unchallenged world economic power. This afforded us with great advantages.  This sort of wealth and wealth-making opportunities seduce us into thinking that we climbed through the class hierarchy and the world pecking order due to hard work and brilliant business acumen when in fact, other forces were in play. Much of the ease and prosperity we enjoy comes at the expense of others. The masters of the universe and kings of commerce have figured out how to create a global engine that spits out low-cost consumer products using the lowest wage labor and under-valued raw materials. We could make the argument that our brothers and sisters in the global south subsidize our comfortable lifestyles in the global north. Behind that great curtain of commerce, we cleverly learn not to ask too many questions about who has made this shirt and iPhone and under what conditions. We ignore that man behind the curtain and assume that some one is taking care of these questions. So much for the great human family.

Given that acknowledgement that we have benefitted from programs (state supported and private) and a favorable economy, what should guide our course for giving back. How much and to whom? What commitments should steer these values here? Local giving to alumni organizations? Scholarships to children like me? Perhaps there are other considerations to examine. Is all giving equally good?

For me, the commitment here rests upon basic math. As Peter Singer has calculated, the rich of the world (the 10% of earners) could easily devote 10% of their income to the poorest people on the planet affording them basic educations, clean water, avoiding needless deaths, better nutrition, sanitation and more (2015). Importantly, this would include not the just the richest citizens but many of us who have middle-class lifestyles. Singer’s plan is not directed at only those people we imagine are comfortable enough to give; he would argue that many of us are in that situation. As radical as it seems, this plan would right the world, as we know it. And, this is simply seen in an organization like KIVA or Heifer where a small donation of $25 (a dinner at a reasonably priced restaurant, yet another T-shirt) could really make a difference in saving a life.

The developing effective altruism movement directs our charitable dollars where they will do the most good to organizations and approaches that are vetted and proven to work. Many things that we expect to address poverty, illness and illiteracy don’t. (For more information on this movement and its applications, see Derek Thompson’s article https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/06/what-is-the-greatest-good/395768/). Movements like the effective altruism movement focus on populations with the greatest need addressing these with field-tested solutions. This approach eliminates the argument heard from so many—who knows where your money goes—and also addresses the concern that one may be throwing good money after bad.

So clarifying the motive to give–those unplayable debt and the great extremes in wealth built upon accidents of birth, the unfair distribution of spoils—and targeting effective strategies to address basic human need—work for me as a compass point for better giving and perhaps deeper commitments to making a difference. This is not to say that this movement lets me live with a clear conscience. Our complicated world is too ethically challenging to do that. But I can live with these questions and hope that they continue to reveal a truer path for me.

References

Brooks, David. 2018. How Would Jesus Drive? New York Times, Jan. 4.

Goldfield. 2017. The Gifted Generation: When Government Was Good. New York: Bloomsbury.

Singer, Peter. 2015. The Most Good You Can Do. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Thompson, Derek. 2015. The Greatest Good. The Atlantic online

 

 

Your Prius is just not that into you

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For many people, buying a new car is a culminating adventure. It reflects all the best we see in ourselves. Marketers want consumers to believe that cars are sexy. That is an amazing sales job. Really. What would make a Jaguar sexier than a BMW or a Ford Focus? Is it the sleekness of the body? Probably not because lots of the world’s sexiest women have curves. Is it their perfume? Is it their come hither headlights? Is it their dazzling bling festooned as trim? Is it those dizzying hubcaps? Is it the manly pose or those virile engines, growling their way out of the showroom looking for a fight? Is it their sense of adventure, with their four-wheel drive, charging off to the wilderness with conveniences unavailable to the grant rajahs when they traveled the Silk Road? Of course, given the number of four-wheel drive vehicles sold these days, if we all go to remote places, it will get very crowded very fast. And there will be nothing to do once we get there, except to compare each other’s trim packages and all-purpose gear racks.

Sure, one can buy a car for its sexiness but I ache for something more practical and less prone to harassment. I mean if you’re sexy, people (and maybe other cars) are going to appreciate you less for your brain and more for how good you look even if those looks come at the expense of plenty of visits to a factory trained mechanic. In any case, after driving my 2006 Toyota for 250,000 miles and almost ten years, I decided to buy a new car. Because of technological advances these days, a lot happens between the old model and the brand new one. It is like going from driving a tricycle where finding the bell is obvious and the gizmos are simple to commanding a B-52 bomber where access to the radio is cleverly hidden behind a series of branching commands and where pushing the wrong button gets you ejected from your seat over North Korea.

My new car is a Prius Prime. It is much sportier looking than I am; no matter how much I try to dress like a hipster. We are style-wise a serious mismatch. My car looks like a Batmobile would if it cared about fuel efficiency and I am more like a sub-subcompact sedan.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

I understood these differences when I bought the car and harbored some reservations about the incongruence of me in this car. Would my friends think, “Uh oh, mid-life crisis” even though mid-life is just a distant memory for me?” Would they think, “Uh oh, she forgot to look at the front of the car to see that the grill actually looks like it is growling and the curved back looks like someone got stuck in a yoga pose gone wrong?” I am tired of conversations with friends who say they couldn’t live with “that car” in their driveway. It is sort of like introducing your bad new boyfriend to your family when you know that they are thinking, “I need to check this guy out on Google to see what sort of criminal record he has. This will never last.”

So, I accepted that the style of the car and my own were in conflict. What I didn’t comprehend until I drove the car for some time was that we were intellectually, spiritually and romantically at odds as well. Over the first few months together, several encounters made this clear. For starters, I have a lovely friend named Janet. She is nearly twenty years my junior, always nicely dressed, mannerly and exudes a cool intelligence. If someone guessed she was a professor of American Studies, you would nod, yes, of course. Janet visited me about a month ago and I was driving her back to her car, showing her my car’s cool features. Things went well until I was demonstrating the voice-activated commands. It is supposed to be possible to direct commands to the car for help with directions, phone calls, weather reports and other tasks. I pushed the activation button and said, “Directions to Home Depot.” Instead, she suggested Italian restaurants. Wrong. I tried again doing my best to enunciate HOME DEPOT, the way one would address a friend with new hearing aids. She asked me to lower my voice. I turned off the feature before I said something obscene and potentially abusive, which may have been reported to the Cloud as mistreatment. I know we (the car and I) are supposed to be developing a relationship and that the voice activation system needs to get used to my voice. Understanding that, I didn’t want say something I would regret for the rest of our lives. More important relationships have been destroyed by less.

So we decided to have Janet try. “Directions to Home Depot,” she asked pleasantly. The car replied “Home Depot. There are several in your area. Which Home Depot do you want? Please say the number.” And sure enough a list of Home Depots appeared on the screen for us to choose from. Easy. No problem. Now, there is no question. Janet is prettier; she is smarter (she has the better degree); she is younger; she has a non-identifiable accent. All that can be stipulated and agreed upon. But, really? Telling me to lower my voice and then throwing me over for someone the car has just met? Really? This is driver friendly? Seriously?

My partner and I have taken some long trips with the Prius to see how well she knows her way around. We are getting used to the ways in which she understands the world. At her very core, the Prius is a worrier. When I activate Navigation, in addition to providing turn-by-turn directions, she warns, “Twenty miles ahead on the route, stop and go traffic.” “Five miles ahead on the route, slow traffic.” Too much information, for me. I don’t know how much of this advance notice I want because once you reach that location twenty miles down the road, actually the traffic moves well after all. All that worry for nothing. Maybe, this is a way to build more gratitude into our lives. I don’t know. I do think about how helpful this technology would have been earlier in our history. “Flooded river and washed out bridge ten miles ahead on the route” or “Twenty miles ahead on the route, the cavalry has been wiped out by a flank of marauding Huns” or “The Ice Age is about to descend. Recalculating the route.” Or maybe dispense with all the traffic information and share instead some wisdom accumulated over the years, like “you will find in your life’s journey, many blessings disguised as problems,” some Eastern philosophy, maybe. It is a Toyota, after all.

When I got the car, it took me a long time to get used to the new technology. Push buttons and dials must be old-fashioned and fifties retro. Everything is touch-sensitive. It took me a week to figure out how to turn on the radio and another week to learn how to turn it off. I spent another week trying to learn how to turn on the rear window wipers and then found out that there were no rear wipers, after all. The back window is too curvy for wipers, I guess. The glove compartment is jam packed with manuals—one for the car, one for navigation and another couple just for fun. The manuals are so poorly indexed and so clumsily written that they are virtually useless. They are as obscure as the Bible in Aramaic and I fear I will die before the easier to read King James Version of the user manuals are written. I pulled out the instructions to learn how to plug in the car to charge it. It actually is one of the easiest things to do in this car. The charging cord has two ends, one goes into a three-prong plug and the other goes into the car. This process was explained in twenty pages and if I had read the instructions, I would have never been able to connect my car to the charging post. It was so full of warnings about inadvertent electrocution that the manual should be used to deter criminals from capital crimes.

It should also be noted that technologically we are in a transition period. As the digital acolytes would console us, the machine-human interface improves all the time. We don’t understand our computers and they don’t completely understand us, either. At this point, the Prius talks too much for my taste in situations where silence and rectitude would be the best measures. She tells me when I am stalled in traffic, not always right away, but right about the moment when I am about to ask her, “Why the heck did you bring me this way?” If things get really trafficky, she does offer “Traffic up ahead. Do you want me to re-route this trip?” But she never tells you ahead of time what that means until after you agree to let her have her lead, sort of like trusting that the horse knows his way back to town. Suppose my car’s computer has been hacked and I am being led to a den of Russian spies or worse yet, a worse traffic jam or to a platoon of Humvees, organizing and eager to run over tree-hugging environmentalists like my car and me. To reach a compatible relationship, I accept that I have to trust her decision-making and she has to trust mine as well, which I sense she is less and less impressed with all the time.
So, sometimes there’s too much information but there are also instances when she is silent when she should speak up. This is exactly like when you are driving with your partner who is giving you too much advice and you suggest that when they are driving, they can be boss of the damn road. Then, they get sulky and instead of warning you that are driving off a cliff, they simply shut up for revenge. Then when you ask why they didn’t warn you, they simply say, “If you are so smart, you don’t need any help from the likes of me.” This silent treatment is illustrated by another encounter with a friend.

So about a month ago, I was driving a friend back to her car. My car was showing off, pointing out directions and being very accurate and trustworthy. Actually, over-involved, I would say. We were talking and I turned the wrong way down a one-way street. My friend didn’t notice but I did. I screamed at the car, “Hey, why didn’t you say something?” and banged the control panel. She remained silent for a minute and then said, as she has many times before, “Recalculating the route.” No apology. No sense of the potential harm done. Sometimes she repeats this so many times, I am pretty certain she is in a trance, reciting this mantra until she regains her composure. (I might do the same when I really mad as well.) I have no proof of this but I am pretty certain I detect in her voice that she is arching her left eyebrow and shaking her head in weary disbelief. I also know that the computers in the car are connected to some cloud where the vehicle and headquarters transmit information back and forth to each other—mainly about me, I suspect. I know that her assessments of my driving behavior are landing up in some big database or being written to my car’s little black box. There is no way to challenge this secret channeling of information. I have mentioned to the car that I have due process rights to confront my accuser but she pretends not to understand my point.

The car also has “safety enhancement features—the lane departure notice, the crash detector, and the pedestrian alert system.” These are handy enough. You can easily de-activate these with a simple command although imagine explaining to a judge that you hit the pedestrian because you unplugged your warning switch. “Your honor, in a gesture of recklessness, this faulty human deactivated the pedestrian warning system, with the obvious motive of striking my client.” If you have all these systems, warning you all the time, beeping and flashing and applying the breaks, pretty soon you are ready to hand over the driving reins to the car itself. And, of course, that’s where we are going, of course. It may be that my Prius is not that into me but we can find a way to co-exist. Either she needs to develop social skills or I need to be a better driver. No way that is going to happen. And, I must admit, if my 85 year old self can climb into my car and have it take me to the opera without my supervision, all well and good. I can be a backseat driver with her fully in control, as into each other as machines and humans can comfortably be.