SALT: Suggestive Accelerative Learning & Teaching

Photo: "Classroom" by Robert Baxter, used under Creative Commons License

Presented to the Club by Robert M. Henderson on Monday evening, January 30, 1984

Plain old table salt, our most common and most used seasoning. Salt, sodium chloride, or the other well-known salts such as potassium or magnesium chloride, have extensive use in industrial, commercial and food usage.

We have salt water in the great majority of the waters found her on planet Earth, salt lakes by the dozen, Salt Lake City, Salt, the fifth of the six cities of Judea. And then we get down to some of the esoteric uses of the word.

To salt a mine, for example, is to artificially enrich, more often than not to do so in a fraudulent manner.

“Old Salt” – immediately we think of the one seaman or skipper.

“Pour salt into the wound” – if done, literally, hurts like the dickens, and if figuratively, means making a bad situation worse.

“A salty remark – with the number of such remarks passed around in this illustrious group over the years, I need not say more.

And then there are Salt I and Salt II, the never fully implemented arms control agreements that certainly deserve some attention on our part today.

Such statements as “You’re the salt of the earth” reminds us that salt was rare and valued. Our word “salary” comes from the Latin word “salaria” — salt, which was used as compensation at one time. 

However, the S A L T that I wish to discuss with you tonight is Suggestive Accelerative Learning and Teaching. SALT. I believe that this SALT may become as valued as seasoning salt has been throughout the course of history.

Suggestive Accelerative Learning and Teaching is a technique that increases the rate of learning by a factor of somewhere between three and ten times normal. My initial interest in this matter was highly selfish. If we could teach our children three times as fast as we now do, we could teach the same amount of learning with one-third the number of teachers, one-third the number of facilities. In essence, the amount of expense I would need to pay for education, my own, my family’s, and my share of the taxes dedicated to schools and education, could be reduced by two-thirds or more. Just as a matter of reference, my out of pocket expenses for educating five children up through their Bachelor Degrees is in the neighborhood of $200,000. I roughly calculated that my taxes due to education expenses were well over $70,000 over the past 20 years. Together, these amount to $270,000. If I could have the same amount of learning for one-third that amount, I would have some $180,000 in my pocket. These numbers certainly are of sufficient magnitude to be of interest. We can only speculate what would happen if we did not reduce our education expense, but got children that were three times or ten times smarter for the same money. I, for one, do not particularly begrudge spending all those dollars for education, but, let there be no doubt in anyone’s mind, I would be greatly pleased if I had three times the results or, even better, ten times the results.

In Memoriam: Robert Henderson, 1923-2017

Robert Maurice Henderson passed away in Lenox, Massachusetts, on October 16, 2017, the morning of his 68th wedding anniversary. Wife, Aleva, and son, Jack, were by his side. He was four days shy of his 94th birthday.

Born in Livingston, Montana, October 16, 1923, and raised just over the mountains in Bozeman, Bob was a consummate cowboy. Raising and caring for horses in his early years gave him compassion for animals and a high regard for nature and all its wonders. Bob's father, Maurice's career in public service, ultimately retiring as city manager of Bozeman, MT and Colonel in the Montana National Guard as well as the example of his mother, Grace, a former school teacher and community volunteer, taught Bob the value of hard work and sound ethics. Throughout his life people turned to Bob for good advice and leadership. Bob attended Montana State College (now MSU). He paused his education during WWII for service in the Army Air Corps but returned to MSC to complete his engineering degree and as he would always be first to acknowledge, most fortunate to meet the young nursing student who would become the love of his life, Aleva Benjamin. Aleva ultimately attained a degree in dietetics and Bob in mechanical engineering. They married in Bozeman, MT, October 16, 1949.

The Horseman: A 1976 exploration of global crises and solutions

Four Horsemen of Apocalypse, by Viktor Vasnetsov, 1887

Presented to the Club by Robert M. Henderson in 1976

On this final evening of a very enjoyable year of camaraderie and discussions you might wonder what "The Horseman" has to offer to such an illustrious group. Particularly so in this bicentennial year of our nation's history. I'll start by thanking our host, Bill Selke, for a delightful dinner and the opportunity to share with him his lovely home.

Then, let me ramble just a bit and state some seemingly unrelated bits of information, mostly of my early life, as they all do have some bearing on the main point of this evening's presentation.

As a young boy and for many years thereafter, horses were my first love. My only goal as a youngster was to have my own horse to train and to ride. In due course, this came about, and I thoroughly enjoyed riding, pack trailing, and training horses. Even today it is a pleasurable experience for me to ride a good horse. During high school and college days, I broke several horses to ride — and in my senior year in college, I rode in the first intercollegiate rodeo. This sport has now developed into a rather large affair, and some 57 schools have organized rodeo teams today. (Editor's note: As of 2014, there are more than 135 colleges who are members of NIRA, the National Intercollegiate Rodeo Association). My participation was in the less strenuous roping events and my success was absolutely zero. Nonetheless, I did consider myself quite a horseman and a judge of good horses.

Just a little bit: The future of computing as foreseen in 1980

This paper was presented to the Club by Robert M. Henderson on Monday evening, March 24, 1980. The portable computing and communications gadget Bob called a "dator," which he predicted for the 1980s, remarkably resembles today's smartphones and netbooks.

Photo: IBM Model 4341 (produced from 1979 to 1986; source: KCG Computer Museum, Japan)

Back in 1946, well within the memory of each of the members of this illustrious group, three scientists from Princeton University published a paper that has had far-reaching effects. The paper was quite innocuously entitled “Preliminary discussions of the logical design of an electric computing instrument.” Their paper contained no new or startling technical information. However, it did very accurately sum up the technical knowledge already available, and presented a well-organized approach to the development of an electrical computing instrument. Many people immediately recognized a large potential for such an instrument, and the race was on to develop computing instruments of various types. And what a race it has been! IBM, Control Data Company, and large other computer manufacturing concerns, as immense as they may be, are only the tip of the iceberg as far as the total impact of computers in our world society.