Become a Guerilla Scholar with Dr. Sheldon Greaves | ep. 112

In this episode of the Falling for Learning podcast, Dr. Sheldon Greaves shares his journey of lifelong learning and the concept of guerrilla scholarship. He discusses the influence of his parents, the importance of public resources like libraries, and how curiosity can foster a love for learning. Dr. Greaves emphasizes the need for critical thinking in today's information age and the value of community in the learning process. He also reflects on his educational journey, the challenges he faced, and the joy of learning as a lifelong pursuit.

Reach out to Dr. Greaves:
email - drshel02816@gmail.com

Check out his book!
The Guerilla Scholar's Handbook
Amazon - https://a.co/d/h1LyArW
Spines: https://book.spines.com/books/the-guerrilla-scholars-handbook/

Transcript

TD Flenaugh: 0:00

TD Gueriilla Scholarship - This is an exciting episode today featuring Dr Sheldon Greaves. We know that falling for learning podcast is all about the lifelong pursuit of learning, loving to learn, and falling in love with learning, the process of learning, and so dr Sheldon Greaves actually lives the actual tenants of that and he's going to tell us more about his life and his lifelong learning pursuit. Hi, thank you so much for joining the falling for learning podcast. We have this podcast to help parents and caregivers with having the resources, strategies and tools needed to make sure that their children are on track for earning and to stay on track for success. Thank you, Dr Sheldon, for joining us. Thank you. It's my pleasure. Can you tell us what was that thing that made you fall in love with learning as a youngster?

Dr. Sheldon Greaves: 1:07

Well, like a lot of things a lot of people like to do, I blame my parents. My folks were both. Were both college educated. My mother had she studied English in college, but she also took a lot of language study. And in fact, she she could get along in four different languages, English, German, French, Italian, oh and Latin too. She knew that as well. And growing up, I was just kind of exposed to this. So when I got into first grade, I was astonished that not everybody's mom knew Latin. I mean, that just seemed like, you know, normal, right? My father had traveled fairly extensively in Europe and the Middle East. In his younger years, he spoke fluent French, and although he wasn't a professor or anything, both of them were very curious about the world. My mother was also a very active in the local friends of the public library. Okay, the library sort of doubled as daycare for us. You know, the public library. So there were always, we were always either being dumped in the midst of books, or books were being dumped on us. We also had some wonderful things. Public Broadcasting was kind of a new concept back then. I remember, in fact, in grade school, someone wheeled in a television and a video machine and said, we want to test market this new show for kids. It's called Sesame Street, you know. Okay, tell us what you think. The other thing too is that 1958 the Congress passed a bill called the Defense and Education Act, and it was signed by President Eisenhower, and this was a response to the launch of Sputnik, the Russian satellite. I mean, we had all been told that Russians were either alcoholic factory workers or semi literate TD farmers with bilateral frostbite and could never possibly do anything like this, until they did

TD Flenaugh: 3:42

and they beat the Americans. So it's like, you gotta get into we gotta get these kids in gear. This next generation has to be much better,

Dr. Sheldon Greaves: 3:50

exactly. And funding poured out like, like a river. You know, the kind of funding that was normally available for the Pentagon was suddenly available for public schools now, 58 that's the year I was born, and by the time I got to first grade, all those lovely, lovely tools were there at school waiting for me. So we had all this wonderful multimedia stuff and movies and film strips and and then later, video and a lot of the the early technology was kind of being tried out. Teachers were getting paid a decent wage. They were enthusiastic. They were encouraged to be experimental and innovative in the and they were and being smart and nerdy was kind of patriotic.

TD Flenaugh: 4:43

So can you tell us what are like? You know, what are the like, some of those tools, we know money is pouring out, but like, what specifically are those tools that you got because of this race to space?

Unknown: 4:57

Well, I I developed in an Appreciation for the public library, not just the fact that they had books, but that they had people there who could show you all the nifty tips and tricks that you don't normally see like I discovered that I could call the library the downtown and say I'm working on a report on the Philippines. Okay, can you help me? And they said, Sure, and they'd send out half a dozen books on the Philippines with the bookmobile that showed up following Saturday.

TD Flenaugh: 5:33

Book mobile!

Dr. Sheldon Greaves: 5:34

yeah,

TD Flenaugh: 5:35

okay, Looked them up. You know, the other thing that I learned was that there are a lot of people around that seemed like ordinary folks that often know things that you wouldn't expect. Okay, you know, you know, it turns out so and so was a retired engineer, so and so over here was a school teacher that knows all kinds of stuff that you wouldn't have imagined. So this is at the public library. They're possibly paying people to go and help and be like information agents.

Unknown: 6:11

Well, this was there was part of that, but it was also just the people in the neighborhood, okay, you know, for example, you know, I'm sitting there looking at it, at a picture of a Greek temple, and my mom comes over and explains the three orders of architecture, you know, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian. And I'm like, yes, yeah, mom, really, you know?

TD Flenaugh: 6:36

And then so I Yeah. So what I think is really important for us to highlight is that it sounds like you had a lot of access to things. But what I hear is, you know, some of it, of course, is, you know, we don't all have access to parents who are like, maybe highly educated, depending on who we are. But I hear the library. I hear Public Broadcasting, which is still free for now, hopefully. And so these are things that we really need to still take advantage of, and it doesn't. And so I may have grown up like on the lower you know, you know more less, less money, right?

Dr. Sheldon Greaves: 7:13

Sure,

TD Flenaugh: 7:14

less, you know, access there. But I did. I was a library kid, you know, that was one of my secondary babysitters as well. So I definitely can relate. And I definitely was, and I thought I was an original PBS kid, but it sounds like in the 1950s they had PBS kids as well.

Unknown: 7:33

Yeah, yeah, there were some wonderful shows. I mean, it was all kind of, I don't know what the word is a little amateurish, maybe, but they got the job done, you know,

TD Flenaugh: 7:43

yeah. And I did realize that later on, when I was watching Mr. Rogers, that Mr. Rogers had long retired, or whatever. I didn't know, but I was watching him when I was a little kid.

Dr. Sheldon Greaves: 7:54

Yeah,

TD Flenaugh: 7:54

they even have like, a new iteration, like Daniel's Tiger or something like that is an iteration. Oh, I haven't heard about that, but that's great. It's like, little puppets and stuff like that are like a little cartoon, but it's like, still like, it's like a, you know, remnant of Mr. Rogers Neighborhood.

Dr. Sheldon Greaves: 8:13

Okay,

TD Flenaugh: 8:14

so, but those things are free that we can give access to our children depend, and it doesn't even matter income level, we can go and take our kids to the library. We could take them we could, you know, focus in on letting them see some public television and all that. So that was, that's something I had access to as well.

Dr. Sheldon Greaves: 8:35

So yeah, and, you know, it's amazing what you could do when you don't have a lot of money. I mean, for most of my growing up like my dad, was a chimney sweep. For God's sake, you know it despite, you know, he had this. He had this talent for getting into a field just before the bottom would fall out of it. Okay, but he finally found this. This got this chimney sweeping business, and that that carried him through until, um, until he decided he was too old to do that. Then he went and got his master's in social work, which was kind of cool because he got his master's degree the same year I got mine. So that was fun. But the other thing too is that if parents display curiosity, genuine curiosity. The kids pick up on that. Yeah, so there's an example in in my book. I've just recently published a book about all this, called the gorilla scholars handbook.

TD Flenaugh: 9:33

Can you hold it up for us?

Dr. Sheldon Greaves: 9:35

Yeah, have a copy?

TD Flenaugh: 9:41

Okay?

Dr. Sheldon Greaves: 9:41

Oh, you can call Guerilla. Absolutely.

TD Flenaugh: 9:44

The Guerilla Scholars Handbook. Love it. Okay, yes. So these this pursuit of knowledge and curiosity that you saw your parents doing, that you were emulating someone, it later on led to you becoming a Guerilla Scholar. So let's get into what that is, because you coined this term, right? Uh huh. Tell us what it is.

Dr. Sheldon Greaves: 10:07

Guerrilla scholarship is doing intellectual work by using creative and unconventional approaches to finding things out and working with information. So here's an example of guerrilla scholarship. There was this, this guy, he was a lawyer, and he used to find, you'll see articles and stuff on the web, and he would make printouts of them and bring them home to his kids, because he thought they might be interested in them. And there was one that he brought home by a guy, a scholar, named Richard Jensen, and it was about Irish immigrants. And Jensen's paper claimed that this whole thing about No Irish Need Apply was actually a myth, that it didn't really happen. Well, his daughter, Rebecca. Rebecca freed was her name. She's an eighth grader, and she sees this paper, and she thinks that seems weird, so she goes on to Google image, and she starts looking, and she starts finding all these period pictures with signs in the window that say, No, Irish Need Apply, like, hmm. So she starts gathering more and more stuff. And then this is where it really becomes important. She She contacted another scholar, a retired scholar, disagreed with Jensen's thesis, and she showed him her stuff, and she says, Have I got something here? And he looked at it, and he goes, Uh, yeah. So what he did was he helped Rebecca take her material and craft it into a paper that could be submitted for peer review. It was, it was actually printed in the same journal that Jensen's paper was printed in, and kind of pretty much, you know, knocked his thesis down several notches. So that's one example. You know, it's, it's unusual, but it is possible

TD Flenaugh: 12:22

that's really, really important to highlight for parents, like helping kids to see how the you know, what they learn, can be used to help empower them. Right? We're in an age with over information, and not all of it is true, and how do you sort it out? And you know that ability to read and to think, critical thinking, curiosity research, all of that can help you know, bolster your child. We know that a lot of kids like to argue, and we can help them to turn that into a tool for advancement for themselves and advancement for their community. And we know that a lot of misinformation about history is, you know, they want to silence certain people's history. Say that it didn't happen, say that it's not important, or whatever, and he or she was able to stand up and show the proof, and actually, you know, advocate for herself and her community. Well, I don't know she was, she Irish? Yes, right? No,

Dr. Sheldon Greaves: 13:26

she just, just a curious eighth grader, so

TD Flenaugh: 13:29

not her own community, but just, you know, just yeah, you know, proving misinformation and obviously somebody's community, you know, where people are trying to, you know, kind of eliminate or erase something that they have gone through your ancestors or family members?

Dr. Sheldon Greaves: 13:45

Yeah, I have an entire chapter dedicated to this whole problem of disinformation with a nod to Harry Potter. The title The chapter is Defense Against the Dark Arts. So,

TD Flenaugh: 13:59

yeah, that's scary stuff.

Dr. Sheldon Greaves: 14:01

It is really scary

TD Flenaugh: 14:02

when, when I could tell you that your family's atrocities or whatever is not that important, didn't happen. Or, you know, like, No, it's not important, didn't happen. You know, it's a big, big issue

Dr. Sheldon Greaves: 14:16

It is a big issue. And, and another big problem is that you get so many conflicting ideas and opinions and whatever, yes, that you reach a point where you you decide you can't possibly know what's real.

TD Flenaugh: 14:33

Yeah, it's for the people who are not you know, as we get further and further away from the history, and we know history repeats itself, especially, we didn't learn those lessons, right? Yeah, yeah,

Dr. Sheldon Greaves: 14:44

yeah, yeah. So we talked a little bit about that, and about how information bubbles happen, and about how you can take a look and vet sources, yeah, and kind of develop your own network. Do? One of the weirder twists in my career was while I was in graduate school, I got mugged one night, and that set me on a path to learn how to protect myself. Well, one thing led to another, and I found myself at the school that was intended to was for training High Threat level bodyguards, okay? And I liked their approach to martial arts because they didn't teach it as a sport. They taught it as a job skill.

TD Flenaugh: 15:35

I see, yeah.

Dr. Sheldon Greaves: 15:37

And one day, the head of the school. He found out that I had an advanced degree. He takes me into his office. He says, Hey, listen, I've got this idea. I want to take this little school, and I want to turn it into an actual university. Yeah, and you know that would cover not just protection, but intelligence and counter terrorism. How would you like to co found a university with me, and I'm kind of like, you know, yeah, we started with practically nothing, but we eventually did end up, you know, creating what became Henley Putnam University, which was the first university to do something like that. And so I learned the craft of intelligence from professionals. And why that's important is that the intelligence analyst always has to be aware that someone is trying to deceive them. Someone is always throwing falsehoods at you, kind of like where all of us are now,

TD Flenaugh: 16:41

yeah, that's, that's an important thing to think about early on. I do have to say, as a youngster, I was more like just believing a lot of things, right? You know, you pick up the book, you read the book, that book is true, and that is a dangerous place to be, especially now, you know. And of course, it's maybe not be a book, it might be Instagram, like I saw it. And I hear sometimes people who are just, you know, little kids or whatever, or people who are just not informed. They're just like, Yeah, I saw it on the internet, and it's like, well, that's not an actual source. I mean, like, which website, which, you know, video, who did that? Video? What was their positionality? But it's something because parents also have less control over what their kids see in here. The rewrite method and the rewrite method workbook are your go to resource for helping kids to learn to fall in love with writing. It has the tips, tools, resources, strategies and skill building activities to help kids fall out of writing heat and into loving to write. Get your book set today. You TD, and you know, we were reflecting on this before on the podcast, before, you know, you turned on that one radio or thing, and we're all listening to the same music. You grow up with the music of your mom, yeah, your dad. And now it's like, I have my device. My mom has her device. My dad has his advice. My sister has, you know, so we're not listening to the same music that algorithm is shaping, you know, like, what I'm interested in, and I may not know what my mom's music is, right? Or I'm watching, we're all sitting down and watching the television show together, yeah? Now everybody has their own little device, their own show that they could watch, and it's like, I don't know what show you're talking about. Never seen it, you know. And so we are not, you know. So that means all the video not video games, but video games obviously have some control. But also, like the commercials, the you know, the the messages that you're getting are so different for the kids and they are for the adults, and so they need their own critical eye, because they're seeing so much that we aren't able to say, look at that silly commercial about the cocoa crispies. Cocoa crispies are not really good. You know, when we're kids, our parents can say, Coco crispies are not good for you. It's not notice they said nutritious breakfast. They're not saying it's healthy. You know, even though nutritious, people think, Oh, sounds like healthy. Like, no, not, not healthy. So, but we don't even know what the commercial to warn our kids about now, to be like, That's not okay. We don't know what they've seen. And then, you know, we know videos just pop. But, you know, and maybe they were watching this show, but then something else pops up, something's on the site that they click on, and so it's so good for them to it's so important for them to have their own critical thinking, their own critical eye, their media literacy, right? You know, be able to be critical of those messages that are hitting them from all points, right? Yes, absolutely. The billboards, even I'm like, should they? Should all kids be able to see this billboard? You know, like a lot of stuff,

Dr. Sheldon Greaves: 20:31

yeah, we can you touch on another really important point, and that was that we were doing this together, and we don't do that anymore. Well, that's one of the things that I stress a lot when I talk about guerrilla scholarship, is it's best done communally. You know, form a reading group, form a salon, get a few people together for heaven's sake. You know, the perfect university could be two people sitting on either end of a very short log discussing passionately something, you know.

TD Flenaugh: 21:05

Yeah, I just want to back up. You use the term salon. And while I know what you're talking about, maybe some of our audience members, you know. Is it where you get your hair done? What are you referring to?

Dr. Sheldon Greaves: 21:18

Fair point, yeah, back in the day. And this is like going back to the 18th, 18th century, the salon, actually, come to think of it. No, this goes back to Roman times. Someone who had, you know, a house, some space, and usually some money, would bring together interesting people and set a topic of discussion, and then the people would discuss it, and people would come either to participate or to watch, and they would kind of have these freewheeling debates. And people would be selected, you know, based on their knowledge or based on their wit, or, you know, whatever. And very in many cases, some of the really important ideas in in western politics were actually kind of thrashed out in these salons, mostly in Paris and other parts of France. And actually, in fact, there's a section in my book that talks about in America, about antebellum African American literary societies, yes, yes, yeah, where they were figuring out the whole abolition and thing, and how are they going to do this, and using these salons as a vehicle for teaching reading and literacy and political understanding, and a lot of the ideas that underpinned the American Revolution and the French Revolution were formed in the salons of Paris. A lot of as you say, abolitionist ideas were formed in these African American antebellum societies. They're just really important. After World War One, they kind of fell out of fashion, but there were a couple that that came back. There was one in the 1920s it was called the House of truth, and it involved some low level functionaries, government functionaries in Washington, DC, but they managed. I mean, just about everybody who was anybody ended up passing through that salon. I mean, you know, like judge Brandeis and all these other people, including the guy, one of the founding members, and I can't remember his name, but he was the sculptor who conceived and carved Mount Rushmore, okay, that guy.

TD Flenaugh: 24:01

That's interesting. That's something that people should bring back. It sounds like, well, I don't know. I'm thinking like podcasts are a new salon then, right? Because people are just like, discussing their ideas. And there's definitely groups of people. Sometimes there's just two, sometimes there's just one, but it gets discussion going, right about different things happening in our society. So maybe that's our new salon. It could welcome to the falling for learning salon. Guys,

Dr. Sheldon Greaves: 24:32

brilliant. I love it,

TD Flenaugh: 24:35

all right, so you, can you tell us about the your educational journey like, where did you go? Where did you study? What were the subjects you were studying? Let's learn more about this guerilla scholarship in action,

Dr. Sheldon Greaves: 24:51

right? Well, my now, I have to make a disclaimer here at first, because when I started college, it was actually. Possible to get through college without, you know, having to put your left kidney in the hock in order to pay for it, all you know.

TD Flenaugh: 25:09

Okay, so tell us what it was though, like, what were they, what school and what? Like, what was that tuition like, right,

Dr. Sheldon Greaves: 25:15

right. So I had my my first undergraduate school was a little college called Rick's College in Idaho, and I went there to study theater because they had a good theater department, and I was very much into that sort of thing. And I also had done a little bit of broadcasting work, actually, my summer job before I went to college, I was, I was a disc jockey at a radio station, so I did that for a while. Decided, okay, that it's interesting, but I'm not sure that there's really a future there. I spent some time to travel abroad, spent some time in Europe, just basically wandering around, picked up some of the language there, came back and decided I wanted, well, I wasn't sure what I wanted to do, but I actually managed to get, I got a scholarship at at BYU in Utah, okay, and I Started out in earth science, and kind of got sidetracked, because of all of all the subjects that I study, math is kind of my white whale, you know, and I had this class that I had to take. It was intermediate algebra. I studied like mad for it like crazy. Spent hours and hours on it and got a C and something snapped. I dropped out of the University. I went back to my hometown of Salem, Oregon, and I went to the community college there, and I took math classes just to demonstrate to myself whether I really was just math stupid or not. And I got far enough to say, okay, I can, I can manage this. Then I went back and back to to BYU, and I decided I become very fascinated with the ancient Near East, what we call the Middle East today. Okay, and so I and I decided, okay, I can, I can do the math, but I'm better with languages, because that's in that field is very language heavy. So I started doing that. Got to the end of my bachelor's degree in Near Eastern Studies. That's about the time I met my spouse. We met in the library, and, yeah, there was this cute blonde in the corner reading Aristotle in Greek like it was a newspaper. And I'm like,

TD Flenaugh: 27:55

I want to get to know her. A meeting of the minds.

Dr. Sheldon Greaves: 27:59

Meeting of the minds, yep. And you know, it's been, what, 41 years, and we're still together. So she was a classicist. She did well. She also had a degree in music, but we, we decided to to get married. The one issue was, I needed to get a master's degree in order to pursue a doctorate. She already had her Master's. She just finished it, and she'd been accepted with a full scholarship to Stanford. Right now they Stanford said, Well, look, we can, we can put it off, hold it off for a year. And so I went to my advisor, and I said, Dave, his name was, was Dave Montgomery, Dave, you got to help me. I need to get a two year master's degree in one year. Can we do it? He says, Well, we'll figure out a way to do it. So we did that. Then I got accepted at Berkeley, so we both were at least in the same city, and we rival schools. They are Rival Schools. I know it was, it was endless fun. I would wear a Stanford sweatshirt at Berkeley, and she'd wear Berkeley sweatshirt at Stanford, and just piss people off, but, but this is kind of where some of the some of the gorilla stuff comes in, because we were living in very close to Stanford campus, and I found a way to get into the Stanford library because I didn't want to make the hour, 45 minute commute if I needed to use the library

TD Flenaugh: 29:30

up there. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. I

Dr. Sheldon Greaves: 29:33

also discovered that a lot of the things that I needed were in a library that belonged to a local Catholic seminary in Menlo Park that most people didn't even know was there, and got to know the librarian there. He was. He was a hoot. He was, he was a southern ordained Southern Baptist minister who was the librarian at a Catholic library, Catholic seminary. I don't know how that happened, but he was. Great. He was, he was a lot of help. The other problem too was that it's expensive living in the Bay Area, and it even back then, huh? Even back then, it was starting to get, you know, kind of pricey. And so what we would have to do is, after she finished, after her scholarship ran out, we would trade off, she would go to school and I would work, and then after the end of that year, I would go to school and she would work, and we would just kind of take these financial leaves of absence. Teamwork. Wow, yeah, but in the meantime, if I was working and not going to school, I still needed to find ways to keep going on my studies, right? And that meant that I had to either like, approach professors directly and say, you know, kind of off the books, so to speak, and say, what can you do? You know, help me talk to other students. Find other ways to research certain things. The internet was just kind of becoming a thing. When I started my my doctoral program, there was no such thing as as the World Wide Web. It hadn't been invented yet and and in fact, Stanford still had their card catalog in their library, right? And they were just starting to replace it with an electronic catalog that we could access on our little Macintosh through a 300 baud modem. That was, that was all very, you know, war games and stuff. So you have to, you have to get creative about how you get information and how you you keep track of it. Another thing that I learned was how to, how do you how to apply the used book market? Because sometimes there was a book I needed and I couldn't find it and or the library had it, but I couldn't check it out because I didn't have a current card, so I'd have to find some way either to buy it or to get up through the public library. And I discovered that the public library has all kinds of stuff that most people have no ideas even there, but if you go and talk to the reference librarian, my God, it's just like, wow. Where did all this come from? Another thing I came to discover was government documents. The US government is the largest publisher of English language materials in the world. There's like something like 8000 new titles that come out every month, and they're about everything, just everything now that might not be as true now as it was before, certainly not then. But by law, every congressional district has to have at least one government documents repository, and each repository has to have people who know how to find stuff. And very often, you can go to a government document source and talk to someone there, and they can put you in, you know, find stuff for you. Or the government also keeps an index of experts, government experts. You can say, I need to find an expert on, I don't know, spotted owls or something. And they can look in this thing and say, well, there's this wildlife biologist in the department of such and such, and she knows everything about it. Here's her phone number, you know,

TD Flenaugh: 33:47

my goodness, so there's, like, that's some new information. Yeah, it sounds like your book is just full of amazing strategies, resources, and that's what we're all about here on the falling for learning podcast,

Dr. Sheldon Greaves: 34:03

wow, this can keep you busy for a long time. So where can we get your book? It is available on Amazon at the moment. It's available in hardcover, soft cover, ebook and audiobook. The audiobook is available from like six different platforms. They've they've gotten that one out there pretty quick. You can also find it through book finder.com There will be other things coming on online sooner. So I'm told the thing just was published on June 25 so it hasn't been out that

TD Flenaugh: 34:42

great. All right? And can you tell us your what your doctoral degree is in my

Dr. Sheldon Greaves: 34:50

doctoral degree is in Ancient Near Eastern Studies. My primary area of emphasis is the Hebrew Bible, or the Old Testament. Oh, okay, Old Testament.

TD Flenaugh: 35:03

So okay, well, that's amazing. I am so glad that you joined us today on the falling for learning podcast. Are there any like final things that you could talk to parents about that really helped you to develop as a learner?

Dr. Sheldon Greaves: 35:20

Um, what really has kind of stuck with me is that learning is fun. It is a pleasure. If you're not, if you're not enjoying it, you're not learning. There's a there's a quote from T H White's book The Once and Future King, about King Arthur and all this. And it's Merlin talking to Arthur, and he's, I guess Arthur's having a rough day or something. And Merlin says the best thing for being sad is to learn something that is the only thing that never fails, and that has just stuck with me. I too much of what we try to learn is about getting a job or getting prestige or something like that. Get all that learning is fun. Doggone it, it's there's so much fun to be had, and I worry that we're missing

TD Flenaugh: 36:26

that. That's awesome advice. Thank you so much. Dr Sheldon Greaves for joining us, and for all of the listeners and viewers out there, please do something today that you're going that's going to give your child the competitive advantage. Please like and subscribe. Have a great week. Thanks again for supporting the falling for learning podcast. New Episodes go live every Saturday at 5pm you can watch us on youtube.com at falling for learning or listen on all major podcast platforms such as Apple, Google, Audible, Spotify and much more for more resources, visit falling in love with learning.com we really appreciate you. Have a wonderful week.