Jeffrey Alexander Martin

This is the fourth time I'm writing a letter for the future. It's an odd experience because there's a chance I'm still alive, but there's a chance that I won't be. How do I compress down some useful insights and maybe even advice. This has been done many times in history. Some of the greatest minds in history have written letters of advice for family members. I've read some of them. All of them are probably useful. I looked some up, they include:  Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BCE), Seneca the Younger (4 BCE–65 CE), Pliny the Younger (61–113 CE), William Penn (1644–1718), Lord Chesterfield (Philip Dormer Stanhope) (1694–1773), Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790), John Adams (1735–1826), Abigail Adams (1744–1818), Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), George Washington (1732–1799), Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910), Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919), Winston Churchill (1874–1965), Albert Einstein (1879–1955), Ross Perot (1930–2019), Jeffrey Alexander Ma...

A little before I finished the semester I was talking with a handful of college students about what's the most useful thing they are taking from my class, and if there's anything useful. The answers are both surprising and not surprising based on how I teach. One girl answered, "How to talk to people. Like with speaking and being confident." Another answered, "How to think. You know, like with context and everything." Another said, "Thinking deeper about these things." Good answers. The content itself is important, but the framework that it is put in is probably even more important, which is essentially the skill of teaching. A couple of times over the semester I had discussions in the class about how the students thought the class was going and how they thought it could be better. At the beginning the students were almost unanimous in that they wanted the class to be lectures with PowerPoint presentations and multiple choice exams. I told them rig...

I recently wrote an introductory letter for a faculty position. Introductory letters are odd because in the end they're a sales piece, selling your own ability to aid the people and organization that you're introducing yourself to, and therefore you need to demonstrate that you can benefit them, and how you do that is a bit of bragging, which is an odd activity. Introductory Letter Concerning a Faculty Position           I’m in my final week teaching Introduction to Humanities for Muskegon Community College in Michigan. It’s been a good experience. Two classes in different towns, four days a week, mostly early college students, with a couple of older students, 35 in total. It’s been a fun experience and a successful experiment. It was an experiment because over the last four years my primary work has been as a local elected official. I’m finishing my term as the Dalton Township Supervisor in a couple of weeks. The township has just under 10,000 residents ...

Statement of teaching philosophy addressing current challenges to teaching history and/or political science to community college students. by Jeffrey Alexander Martin 14 December 2024 for Yavapai College Introduction The challenges of teaching are never small. Even the growing availability of information and advancing technology don’t alleviate the challenges of teaching, it just changes. In this statement I’m going to address four such challenges. Two of them have to do with technology, and two of them have to do with the culture and subject areas of history and political science. These will not be in a particular order of importance, and it’s worthy of note that this statement will be based on personal observations rather than academic research, although there is research occurring across all four of these topics. Artificial Intelligence (AI) Artificial intelligence is changing the lived environment for humans at a significant pace, with the foreseeable future appearing to be not...

I've been to a lot of events over the last 20 years. I've seen a lot of people work a room trying to get alliances for politics, sales for income, financing for business, employees for growth, allies for various kinds of battles, goodwill for their careers, approval to get hired, interest for dates, and connection to feel human. In observing myself, I'm odd in this respect, which comes as no surprise. I'll give an example to illustrate. This happened a couple of years ago at Acton University in Grand Rapids put on by the Acton Institute, which is a great educational think tank. Main speeches and presentations are conducted in a large room. There are also breakout sessions in smaller rooms, like classrooms. Many of these sessions are filmed to be put online. In the main room there's a professional cameraman. Almost no one talks with him. He's just a function, the guy that runs the camera, almost like another piece of apparatus. Many people are trying to do someth...

If you see someone drowning, it's probably not the best idea to yell, "Hey, you should learn how to swim!" Instead, you should jump in and drag them out. Or, throw them a lifeline. That's what I'm going to do. I'm going to throw you a lifeline. Then I'm going to offer to teach you how to swim. Life is an emotional thing. Something good happens and you're happy. Something bad happens and you're sad. You don't want to be sad, so you get mad. We're full of emotions. If your emotions are too much right now, you need to grab ahold of something. Not with your hand, but with your head and your heart. There are three types of things you can grab ahold of. One, something you can create. You can build a bird house, write a poem, fix a car. Make something. Two, something you can experience. You can go for a walk, admire a painting, read a book, go out to eat with someone. Do something. Three, you can change how you view the world. Life is meaningless ...

I'm seeing a lot of ads online for vagus nerve stimulators. They all tell me they can calm me down. And of course there are a lot of tv ads for Valium and Xanax, also promising to calm me down. Obviously, a lot of people are searching for a way to calm down. These things will work to a certain extent. I haven't tried them, but by forcing the body to calm down it can calm down your mind. There are some problems with that though. It's a classic joke that the side effects for drugs and medications are longer than the benefits. That can be an issue. There's another obvious issue. If when you need to calm down you need to go to something outside of you, the only obvious answer when you need to calm down again is to use again, and again, and again, and when you need to calm down more, you need to use more. The key then is to choose something that isn't bad if you need to use it again, and if you need to use it more, and if you need to use it long term. Preferably it's...

We wish words could solve our problems. That saying we're sad would solve our sadness, that admitting our anger would allow us to let go of our anger. That anxiety and depression could be fixed with just the right words said in just the right order. But it doesn't work. Words are powerful things. They effect us. When someone says something mean to us it hurts, but when they apologize it doesn't fully make up for it. The feeling that is triggered by a series of words can't be put back in the bottle by a different series of words. The only way to sort that feeling out is to feel it. Feelings are deeper than words. That's why I have a client that was recently surprised when she started feeling and found that she had fear, when she expected to find anger and sadness. That's why I had a past client recently message me that knowing how to practice feeling probably saved his life when he recently experienced a major loss. If it would have worked for her to say, "I...

When you accidentally touch a hot stove you don't think about what to do. The pain receptors in your hand send a signal to your brainstem that says, "Pain!", and your brainstem sends a signal back to your arm that says, "Pull your hand back!" Your hand doesn't send a signal to your brain that says, "Make a pros and cons list on whether or not you should pull your hand back." There isn't time. Something has to happen immediately. You have a reaction built into you, and you react. It's the same with emotions. You don't look out at the world and think, "This might be a good time to start worrrying about a bunch of things from the political structure of society to when I'm going to be able to get to the store to pick up groceries." That's not what happens. You're just worried. When you're worried, or anxious, or sad, or angry, it's a reaction to your external environment. But that doesn't mean that you have...

I currently have a couple of small woodchips in my beard. A few minutes ago I was standing at the top of a ladder, with an extendable chainsaw borrowed from the neighbor fully extended, teetering back and forth trying to saw off a limb. The ladder wasn't quite tall enough to reach this branch. So I had stacked up two wooden skids and placed the ladder on top of those. It was not safe. My mother held the ladder. A few weeks ago her house insurance had emailed her about branches needing to be cut. Then I put a new air filter in my father's car. He passed recently and I have it now. I got the oil changed yesterday, and I Rain-Xed the windows. It's convenient to have the water hit the window and just slide right off, even without using the wipers. It essentially gives the window the ability to let go of the water rather than being stuck with it. There's a similar problem with emotions. When a traumatically intense thing happens and we're around, that image gets embedded...

I turned and asked the old man next to me how he was associated with the college. He said that he wasn't. He had made a lot of money and wanted to write a very big check to a college as a donation. But, the college he graduated from had turned against the things he believed in, so now he was on this campus tour bus at Hillsdale College to see if maybe he would write the check to them. He asked me if I was a graduate. I told him no, my degrees are from somewhere else, I just like Hillsdale and have joined some of their programs in Michigan and Washington D.C. He asked me what I did, and I told him that I currently hold a local political office, but in about a year I would be leaving that office, so I had been working on getting a business up and going, and hopefully producing revenue soon. He was interested in that. The bus started pulling out of the parking lot. As we were driving around, the driver was pointing out different parts of the campus. Old buildings that had seen student...

The last few years my writing has been focused on two practical areas, politics and academics. That makes sense because I've been holding a political office and got two degrees in that time. With leaving office in a couple of months I like that there are some options, and I'm thinking about what direction I may take my writing. Stories are so interesting, and powerful. The idea of Sisyphus is something that enthralls me. I bring it up often, often enough that it's a bit of a cliche at the political office. Sisyphus was a clever king in ancient Greece that outwitted death. He was punished by being sentenced to roll a boulder up a mountain, only to always have it roll back down. Pointless, meaningless toil. It's so connected and applicable to life. The philosopher Albert Camus wrote an essay on it, and the last line is, "One must imagine Sisyphus happy." That story, that idea, that philosophy, has many layers to it. It's insightful and useful. If the work we...

There's a disconnect between our life on the outside and our life on the inside. I've been surprised over the last couple of years when people have told me that they can't let go of things emotionally like I can. It's surprising because some people can be doing great on the outside with their family and career, and yet inside they are doing horrible. And no one notices until it's later revealed that they have a drug, or drinking, or gambling problem. I had an older friend who had a son-in-law with a good family, and house, and job, who completely unexpectedly took his own life. Jack knew I had written on the subject before and asked me why someone would do that. I remember the look of complete bewilderment in his eyes. He couldn't imagine why someone who looked happy and fulfilled on the outside could be feeling horrible on the inside. I don't particularly have that skill. I basically show how I'm feeling at the time. But I've spent a large portion o...