I’m not
buccaneer-scholar though I recommend you to think if you are one and join the club. I recommend you to think what type of scholar you are, anyway. What follows is my own thinking of why I think I’m a skeptic-scholar and has always been. As a skeptic-scholar I welcome new ideas because I’m as skeptic about their value as I am about the established values… actually I don’t establish values at all.
I still believe that people use both conscious and unconscious mind in thinking process. But we are only able to share with other people the conscious mind reflections: models, methods, techniques, checklists. This information may be valuable to our mind. But we can’t consciously tell if it is. I use term skepticism to reflect the phenomena.
More about buccaneer-scholar
I have two associations for buccaneer in my mind: treasure chest and stolen values. This is my own association and I could try to refer to it do describe my skepticism. But it’s only the formal explanation. I’m skeptic about any values so I don’t steal them. I feel just wrong when someone says me to implement SCRUM by book (and adopt later). I don’t value it as a treasure. I value the influence it made on my thinking however.
Again, that’s only formal reason. I’m skeptic about this reasoning well. You see - I just stole two ideas (two coins) from James Bach: about defining my scholar type and another to refer to the time when I was 15 (see below).
Defining skeptic-scholar
Whatever let me do what I’m used to do – to analyze. Analyze how I learn. Yes I do read Jarry Weinberg, James Bach, Cem Kaner and others and I’m influenced a lot by what I read. But I can’t describe how exactly I’m influenced. I never adopt (treasure) the techniques they describe. I build my own. I never adopt practices or methodology. It seems to me that James Bach
says adopted Jerry's “fieldstone” method. My mind declines artificial and foreign ideas. I love when people talk about topic that matter to me as it helps me to organize my own ideas (and provoke new ideas, just as today). But I don’t understand how. It’s a mystery to me now… maybe someday someone will tell me how this happens. Maybe that will be the day when people will understand how to build the A.I.
But wait a bit… I was on my way to define the skeptic-scholar. I’m not going to generalization. I won’t say skeptic-scholar is anyone who … I will only say why I believe skeptic is the best association of my way of learning stuff. I’m skeptic about any practice: either mine or yours. Whenever I read or listen to anyone I’m skeptic. Whenever I analyze how I did things myself I’m skeptic.
I know I could do better. I know others could do better than me. But even if they do I’m skeptic if I could learn from them how they do. So I could learn how do to better on my own, but I could consult them when I’m stuck, i.e. when I think I can’t any better.
How I wrote my first writing
Once upon a time... actually in a high-school we’ve got a task to write a fairy tale. Our teacher used to ask us to write essays and this was just another one, wasn’t it? Well actually the task was to write a fairy tale like
Karlis Skalbe (a Latvian writer) did. I could tell you the process that I followed: I took my time and all alone I red a few tales (my writing skill was so poor that it took me half a day) and then without eating or any other break I wrote my own tale. I wrote a tale that was 3 times as long as my longest essay ever and 2 times as long as longest essay teacher has ever met wrote by a student (well I just made up those numbers, but I could assure you it was a quite a long for me and I wrote it on a fly… without a stop.
I got a bad mark because I was unable to review what I wrote so the grammar was terrible. Teacher was surprised about content more than the length. However I failed with content as well. Teacher wanted us to analyze the style and copy it. Others copied words, sentences even paragraphs adapting to their own storyline. I tried to adopt the style. What I produced was my own style. A style provoked by authors’ style, but still my own. Though teacher was impressed with content she can’t give me a good mark as I didn’t do what she asked. I did what I though she asked, not what she thought…
