Yearly Archives: 2008

Student-centered Education Reform

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Much longer post than normal.  Economists may see a dip in US productivity as people all over the country simultaneously read this Monday’s missive, or more accurately, massive.  Persevere to the end and you’ll be rewarded with a picture of the worst cross country skier in Norway.

Thanks to the hospitality and constant help of people like our friend Inger, we’re adapting well to Norwegian life, learning lots, and enjoying the experience.  We’re settled into the second story of a nice house, picked up some Norwegian phrases, and learned our way around town.  It’s been clearer and colder than normal and It hasn’t snowed since our first two days.  J wants it to snow and I want it to melt so I can run which probably explains the meteorological impasse.

I enjoyed teaching for the first time recently with Inger in a town about an hour away.  Beautiful drive, combo of forests and snow covered family farms disguised under the snow as pure white ocean swells.  Interaction was limited in the classroom, but the students were very attentive, and they want me to return, so that’s a good sign. 

J is in a neighborhood school part time and A is playing in an orchestra and is about to enroll part time in school too.  L has been organizing school visits and has turned our apartment into a nice base.  Home schooling is underway and during today’s break J went ice-skating across the street where we live.  She came home from PE the other day and said basketball isn’t the Norwegians strong suit.  I told her not to talk too much smack because everything will even out on the ice. 

We miss friends and elements of home—ice-less running paths, Marleyboy, our garbage disposal, and Costco prices.  Prices are two to three times what we’re accustomed to.  Gallon of gas, $7.50-$8.  Litre of milk, $2.20, or nearly $8.50 gallon.  Small jar of peanut butter, $4.  Swimming pool/fitness center entrance, $14.  Movie, $13-$14 depending on how long the movie has been playing.  It’s a daily torture chamber for a cost conscious person like me.  The Fulbright stipend was adjusted upwards for the higher prices, but it’s still hard to pay $4 for six eggs or over $40 for a family trip to the pool.  On the plus side, the hens probably have decent health care.  In A’s and J’s view, the killer slide at the 50 meter pool . . . priceless. 

The UN Development Program uses about 30 variables to measure quality of life in countries throughout the world and Norway is often ranked #1.  Minimum wage is around $20/hour which helps explain the cost of goods.  L and I tried to figure out the bus system recently and failed.  We must have looked pretty forlorn because we were offered a ride by a nice couple and jumped in.  Nice, newish VW wagon I thought to myself before learning our new friend was a prison guard at the 50-person prison in the middle of town (built in 1864).  I think he makes a bit more money than his counterparts in the U.S.  

Schools provide an interesting window into a culture.  Before offering initial impressions about Norwegian schools, a precautionary parable:

In the mid 90’s I traveled to Accra, Ghana with a colleague, Dave, to visit students of ours studying at Cape Coast University. Over the course of a two-week visit, Dave and I became friends with Marshall, the Cape Coast University employee who had been assigned to us as our driver. The more I got to know Marshall, the more I liked him. He had held a series of interesting jobs in a few different countries, he had a large and loving family, and he was excited about the goings on at his local church. I could tell by the way he talked about his family that he was a caring father.

These positive impressions were all called into question when, while negotiating narrow streets in a dense, residential part of Accra in our van, an 18-month old child ran out into the street right in front of us. Marshall slammed the breaks, stuck his head out the window, and yelled at the knee-high girl in a local dialect. I was stunned. I thought I knew him well enough to know he wouldn’t cruelly lash out at a young child.

The three of us sat in silence for a few minutes until Dave, sitting in the passenger seat, asked, “What did you say to that girl back there?” Marshall briefly paused, and then said, “I didn’t say anything to the girl. I yelled at her mother telling her ‘Children are precious gifts from God and you should keep a closer eye on yours!’”

This cultural misunderstanding was an epiphany for me. I learned that cross-cultural encounters aren’t always as they first appear; as a result, when trying to make sense of them, it’s important to guard against quick and definitive conclusions. I was certain that I saw and heard Marshall yelling at an infant. In actuality, I couldn’t see Marshall’s eyes from where I was sitting to know who he was looking at, and I couldn’t understand what he said because I didn’t understand the local dialect. Sadly, I didn’t let those limitations keep me from concluding that Marshall was not a caring person. When trying to understand cultural differences while living abroad, our eyes, ears, and other senses sometimes fail us.

With that caveat, here are some initial impressions and tentative conclusions from visits we made to a range of Norwegian schools last week.  We also spent one evening watching a youth orchestra rehearse.   

The administrators couldn’t have been friendlier.  They spent a lot more time with us than U.S. administrators would have been willing and able to spend with a visiting Norwegian family because they had far fewer fires to put out.  I looked in vain for the requisite denizens of school offices in the US, the frantic parent, the in-trouble troubled students awaiting their fate, the over-eager student council leaders clamoring for the intercom, the disgruntled faculty member. 

We casually walked into class after class sometimes unobtrusively watching and others creating enough of a stir to interrupt the lesson.   My favorite entry was through a black sheet that turned out being the back drop for the cast of “Queen: We Will Rock You.”  Suddenly we were on their stage.  I figured that was sufficiently embarrassing for A and J so I resisted the urge to belt out “Find Me Someone to Love.”  The administrators exuded a calm that spoke to the smooth functioning of their schools and society I suspect.

The ethos at each school was informal.  After our tours we sat down with the administrators to look over the master schedule.  We’d explained our interest in classes that weren’t as language intensive; art, music, PE, and their response were always, “No problem, whatever works best for you.”  When L and J finally settled on a school, L asked about paper work and was blown away to learn there was none.  In essence they said, “Whenever she shows up, we’ll take good care of her, no problems.”

Teacher-student interactions were informal too.  Students seemed almost equally divided between being in class with a teacher, socializing while on a formal or self-determined break, or working on a class project in small groups mostly independent of a teacher.  Inger’s daughter Rakel explained that students at her high school (grades 11-13, children start school one year earlier) are free to leave the classroom if so moved.  No real explanation needed.  Most of the time they visit in the cafeteria awhile before eventually returning to class.

Like everywhere, the students were social.  A friendly eighth grade girl complained to us about the obnoxious boys in her class, a universal lament.  Students were lively and energetic, but not so much so that administrators or teachers had to intervene.  I didn’t notice any obviously alienated or unhappy students.

The hallways and classrooms struck me as unusually relaxed environments.   

There was one telling sign that at least some of the instruction was more teacher-directed than student-centered.  Some of the classrooms were V-shaped.  Strangest thing ever.  Everyone knows classrooms are supposed to be rectangular.  We walked into a “V-shaped” 9th grade English class and the teacher was so excited she stopped reading about the King of Norway’s new Toyota and explained the lesson to us.  The 50% of the students on our side of the “V” gawked at the real live Americans that magically appeared before them.  The other 50% had to listen and imagine what the visiting foreigners looked like.  Eventually, we exited through the other half of the “V” so they could compare their images with reality.  How do you lead a class discussion when one half of the class can’t even see the other?  And more importantly maybe, what do you do if the person you have a crush on is assigned a seat in the other half of the “V”?  Classic example of architecture confounding student-centered teaching and learning.

It’s difficult to assess how good one set of schools is compared to another without first thinking through the purposes of public schooling.  One philosopher of education distinguishes between a utilitarian/extrinsic orientation toward the purposes of schooling and a humanitarian/intrinsic one.  She labels the first “education for having” and the second “education for being.” 

In the US, in the first decade of the 21st century, business model thinking has reshaped public schools and the pendulum has gotten stuck on the “education for having” end of the continuum.  Teachers are constantly being told that economic competition is intensifying and China and India will dominate the 21st century if we don’t raise academic standards, improve math and science teaching, eliminate the achievement gap, and toughen graduation requirements. 

As Nel Noddings notes in “When School Reform Goes Wrong,” teachers are unfairly scapegoated when our economy underperforms because they don’t receive credit when it does well. 

I’m extremely skeptical of politicians and business leaders ideas for improving public schooling, yet I acknowledge young people are entering a more competitive economy and more challenging future.  Phone calls, tax returns, x-rays, anything that can be digitized probably will be, and once digitized they will be sent via coaxial cable to a lower paid worker on the other side of the world.

My sense is new teachers are passively accepting the business model prescriptions for strengthening schools.  Add to that the publics uncertainty about whether young people will be able to earn a livable wage, have health benefits, and afford decent homes in an era of outsourcing.  Instead of hoping that their kids will do better than them, many parents wonder whether their kids will live as well as them.

This mantra of foreign competition combined with general economic unease has created stressed out teachers, parents, and young people.  I want my college students to earn a livable wage and successfully compete for jobs with health benefits, but I would be doing them a disservice if I didn’t challenge them to think about the intrinsic, “education for being” value of education as well. 

My sense is Norwegian educators and parents aren’t nearly as worried about China, India, or their children’s economic prospects, and not just because they’re sitting on incredible oil and financial reserves.  My guess is they know that type of pressure isn’t in their children’s best interest.   

As we drove to class recently, Inger, my colleague and friend and I, were discussing this.  She thinks Norwegians may be compromising academic excellence by limiting academic competition.  In fact, during my initial visits to four Hamar schools, I didn’t get a feel that many students were deeply engaged in especially challenging content. 

To a casual observer, Norwegian and American schools would look fairly similar, but dig a bit deeper and meaningful differences reveal themselves.  I believe cultural differences enrich the world, so I’m glad schools in Norway and the US reflect those differences.

Advocates of business model education reform often reference the “race” we’re in with other developed countries.  The “race” metaphor suggests a zero-sum global economic competition with clear winners and losers.  What about challenging the business model orthodoxy with other metaphors that accentuate cooperation more than competition?  Does educational excellence have to be a zero-sum game?  What can I learn from Inger about Norway’s unique approach to schooling and what can she learn from me about schooling in the US?

If Inger and I were put in charge of educational policy in our respective countries, she would seek to infuse a bit more US-style academic competition into Norway’s schools and I would seek to emulate aspects of Norway’s more informal and relaxed educational environments by decoupling academic excellence and global economic competition and by asking teachers, parents, and students for their best ideas on how to make schools healthier, happier places.

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Mad as Hell

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As Ian McEwan’s last few novels and Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking attest, writers engage readers by using descriptive details in place of vague generalities and by revealing their true, unvarnished selves.

Recently, I’ve been wondering, how do writers, including bloggers, reveal their true, unvarnished selves while maintaining some semblance of privacy?  And this question is complicated when, in being transparent, a writer also reveals details about close family and friends.  For example, right as I was launching this blog, I published a commentary in the Tacoma News Tribune originally titled “The Social Cost of Wealth.”  I forget what the editor changed the title to.  In the essay, I argued there is a psychic disconnect between affluent people and those struggling to make ends meet, a disconnect that impairs social relations.  The only way I could help readers grasp that idea was to provide concrete examples. 

The problem was my wife was uncomfortable with a few of the details provided in some of the examples.  In essence she was saying, “It’s one thing for you to sacrifice some of your privacy for the sake of your craft, but I’d prefer to manage my privacy myself.”  Makes perfect sense. 

So now I’m trying to reveal as little as possible about close family and friends while revealing just enough about me to engage readers and maintain some semblance of privacy.  Tough balancing act. 

Currently I’m reading a special section from a recent Wall Street Journal about anticipated technological changes over the next 10 years.  One conclusion I’m drawing is that whether we’re writers or not, our privacy will continue to ebb unless more of us begin tapping our inner Howard Beale and begin yelling at those who couldn’t care less about our privacy, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!” 

Nothing short of “Seattle World Trade Organization in the streets” type of resistance will probably make any difference.

Recently I was walking into the Tampa Bay Aquarium when a guy reached out for my elbow and tried to pull my family and me over to his makeshift camera studio.  He had a digital camera on a tri-pod, stools, and some dorky, ocean-themed backdrop.  He was pouncing, staging, and snapping before acquiescing families even knew what hit them.  Jerking my elbow away I said, “No, I don’t want our picture taken.”  Incredulous, he looked at me as if I was the first person to ever say no to him. 

I didn’t want him to have digital images of my wife, children, and me on his computer.  And I don’t want to have to give Big 5 my address and phone number every time I want to buy a pair of frickin’ swim goggles.  And I don’t want video cameras on every street pole like in London.  And I don’t want GPS devices alerting others exactly where I am.  And I don’t want marketers tracking my purchases in order to individualize their advertising. 

Even if I stick my head out of my window and yell, “I’m mad as hell” I don’t think I can stop the further denigration of my privacy without tens of millions of other people getting equally as pissed off.  I don’t see that happening so I’m resigned to a certain erosion of my privacy. 

Few adults are helping young people think privacy issues through as they dive headfirst into Facebook, MySpace, and related social networks.  Admittedly, there are security concerns in London and elsewhere, GPS devices are wonderfully helpful at times, and many people look forward to customized advertising, but too few people are thinking through the negative consequences of these technological advances.  Instead, they’re mindlessly acquiescing to predatory photographers and high tech marketers.  Once they get concerned about the loss of privacy, it will be too late.  You can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube.

Twenty-three years ago I was chasing my now wife around southernmost Mexico.  One day we hiked from one small village to another just outside of San Cristobal de las Casas in Chiapas.  It was a beautiful walk that culminated with a sharp descent onto a small zocalo where the most unexpected event imaginable was taking place.  Indigenous Indians were hoopin’ it up in a ragged basketball tournament.  The tallest player might have been 5’5”.  They were very physical, but not very good. 

I was hoping some team would be a man short and I could channel Kareem Abdul Jabbar but that wasn’t to be.  I didn’t think people would believe my descriptions of the scene so I took out my camera, focused the zoom lens, and began snapping away.  An Indian sitting behind me made a “tsskk” sound, which I took to mean “Hi” in his language.  I kept snapping away, but couldn’t help notice the “tsskk” change to “TSSKK!”  Culturally oblivious, I continued to focus in when “SMACK” he hit my zoom lens with a stick.  That I understood.  Soon after I learned Chiapas Indians believe that when their picture is taken, a part of their soul is entrapped inside the camera. 

I wonder am I sacrificing a part of my soul every time I provide personal information to a business, make a purchase on-line, or add to my blog?  Like my Indian friend and my wife, I want to manage my soul, but Madison Avenue and Silicon Valley are formidable foes especially when they team up.  Anything short of a mass movement of tens of millions of people refusing to be grabbed by the elbow and the continuing erosion of our privacy is all but certain.

          

Northern Retreat

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When it comes to parent-child relations and the “quality versus quantity of time” debate, “quality of time” adherents are often rationalizing skewed priorities.

Parents cannot spend enough time with their children during the first ten years of their lives. 

Parenting is the most selfless act imaginable.  Effective parenting entails putting your child’s needs before your desires on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis year after year.

I’m far from a perfect parent, but I’m proud of my wife’s and my work and the young women our daughters are becoming.  I’ve accomplished a fair share of things, but without a doubt, I’m most proud of who my daughters are becoming.

Why ten years?  That’s fairly arbitrary, but three of four years ago I remember having a conversation on the way to school with A, age 15, that is etched in my mind.  The specific words aren’t as memorable as the vivid feeling the conversation engendered.  It had something to do with friends, choices, the importance of schooling, delayed gratification, and planning ahead.  She cut me off midstream and completed “the talk” in her own words.  It was as if I was seeing the future, hearing what she’s likely to tell my grandchild on the way to school in two or three decades. 

It was an epiphany.  We were done.  Give her a driver (with navigation), a frig filled with food, and she could damn well live on her own. 

Ten years of affection, reading together, attending violin recitals, talking over dinner, commitment.  Ten years of trying to put her needs before my desires.  I enjoyed the process, but at that moment, felt even more moved by the result.

Intellectually, I knew A would forge her own path after high school; I just was caught off guard by how mature she already was.  Part of me was saddened that she would never need me in the same way, but I knew I had to accept it as a natural part of the cycle of life.  I had an intense joy that’s tough to put into words. 

We’re probably a more modern family than we’d like to admit.  We try to be countercultural and resist the urge to over schedule ourselves.  But it’s two steps forward and one back.  There’s an ebb and flow, but too often we get overscheduled, drive too much, and don’t spend enough time together, unplugged, and fully present. 

Maybe the best way to flee the grasp of modernization is to retreat on occasion.  In 2003, thanks to my university, we retreated to Chengdu, China for three months.  I was the site director for our study abroad program at Sichuan University.  We separated ourselves from our friends and regular activities, lived in a small apartment without an internet connection, walked all over together, dealt with homesickness and cultural differences together, played ping-pong and made new friends together, and as a result, deepened our bonds.

If you’re reading this on Monday, February 4th, we’re probably half way over the Atlantic in transit to Hamar, Norway, 83 kilometers north of Oslo, where, thanks to a Fulbright grant, I’m doing guest teaching at a university. 

Our first shared experience was preparing together.  And we just learned our “semi-detached, tiny, but cozy” guesthouse won’t be ready until February 25th so it’s three nights in a hotel and two and half weeks in an apartment in a museum 30 minutes away.  Most importantly, we’ll bop from place to place together.  It will be the first of hundreds of new experiences that we’ll share together.  Instead of five minutes of conversation after school, or ten during dinner, we’ll once again be living in very close proximity, experiencing interesting and challenging new things together on a daily basis, leaning on each other, and once again, deepening our bonds. 

My hope is we’ll be changed as a result of our Northern retreat, both individually and collectively.  When school and full-time work begins again in September, and we return to our regular routines, I hope there’s a legacy of intimacy that helps us better manage the pace of modern life and relate to one another and others with even more patience, kindness, and love.

 

Market Downturn

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I’m enjoying blogging. My readership is small (about 360 hits so far), but ticking upwards. It looks like I have a core of readers made up of family, friends, and students. My hope is if people enjoy it they’ll send the link to a friend or two.

A writer friend once told me that if your first thought when you wake up isn’t your current project, you’re subconscious isn’t working hard enough. With my self-imposed deadline, I find myself thinking about writing more than normal. As a result, I have lots of ideas for future posts.

So far I’m struck by how much thinking I’ve done over the years about parenting and family life and how much I enjoy communicating about those topics. I’ve never committed to writing a book. My doctoral dissertation, the story of an international studies magnet high school in SoCal, was well received and would have made a decent book, but in hindsight, I needed a mentor to help find a publisher. Since finishing my dissertation, I’ve never felt like I’ve needed more than 30 pages to communicate what I’ve most wanted to. I’ll know more in a year, but as a result of this process, I think a book may bubble up. If I do commit to writing a book and it starts taking the form of an insipid, run-of-the-mill self help manual, please organize an intervention and steal my laptop.

You may be relieved to learn I don’t feel a need to communicate all of my thoughts on parenting and family life in the first month or two of this year-long experiment. I should probably turn to a more masculine topic like finance. Nothing girlie about bears and bulls.

After reading my initial post, one of my sibs asked, “If you’re writing about wellness shouldn’t faith play an important part?” I was remiss in leaving spirituality out of the mix. What does spirituality have to do with finance? Far more, I believe, than is normally acknowledged.

So many people are stuck seeking fulfillment through store purchase after store purchase that materialism is our secular religion. Religion isn’t the opiate of the masses, consumerism is.

Financial planners assume that the key to financial success is understanding the technical aspects of investing—indexing, asset allocation, minimizing investment costs, dollar cost averaging, etc. But personal finance study after personal finance study demonstrates that even knowledgeable investors buy too high, sell too low, and trade too often.

In sports, athletes that melt under pressure and underachieve talk about “getting in their own way.” Golfers are a good case in point. When a golfer breaks through and wins their first tournament they often say, “I finally got out of my own way.” It’s counter-intuitive, but by relaxing and not trying as hard, we sometimes experience more success. Investors who are most materialistic are most prone to anxiety in times like this because their ability to consume is eroding. They listen intently to the financial pundits, fret over their portfolios, and tend to “get in their own way.”

In contrast, people whose fulfillment comes more from intangible things like meaningful work, intimate relationships, and service, are less likely to sell low, buy high, and trade unnecessarily. Also, these spiritually grounded investors have a tremendous advantage over the less spiritually grounded in that they can delay purchases almost indefinitely. As a result, they can time the selling of their assets only after they’ve greatly appreciated. As their portfolios dip, there’s a longer-term perspective and a calmness that enables them to either tune out the hyperbolic analysts or put their hysterics in historical perspective.

As an investor, I’ve made more good decisions than bad. I tend to “stay out of my way” but there are bogeys mixed in with the birdies. I admit to watching my portfolio more closely since New Years so the last few paragraphs are reminders to myself.

Our mutual fund company provides an unusually helpful service that helps me keep historical perspective. When I log on to its website there’s a “Portfolio Watch” that shows our asset allocation. Currently, it’s short-term reserves, 3.5%; bonds, 38%; stocks, 58.5%. Then there’s a link to “Historic Risk/Return, 1926-2006.” Average return, 8.8%. Best year, 35.7% (1933). Worst year, -25.9 (1931). And here’s the key stat for getting a hold of today’s market. Years with a loss, 19/81, 23.5%.

This won’t sell many papers or fill much time on cable television, but after an unusually strong six year run, the market is returning to the mean.

Average return, 8.8%. After adjusting for investment costs, taxes on earnings, and inflation, what, 4-5%? So the critical questions are 1) how much is invested and 2) how patient is the investor?

Shifting gears, my youngest daughter, J, learned about the stimulus bill in one of her classes recently (props to that teacher) and she was more than intrigued. “What are you going to do with your $1,200?” she wanted to know. “Save it, invest it.” She couldn’t have been more disappointed.

I haven’t given the tax rebate a lot of thought, but increasingly, money’s most important value to me is time. In all of the “What would you do with $600?” discussions going on, I haven’t heard anyone say, I’ll use it to slow down a bit, rest, reconnect with friends, think, nap, exercise, start a garden, read.

At work recently, I encouraged a close friend known as “Ichiro” to apply for an administrative position in part because I knew he’d be good at it and in part because I told him he could nearly double his salary. His response? “The more I’d make, the more we’d spend.”

Psychologists who study happiness refer to our tendency to adapt to what we have and perpetually seek more as the “hedonic treadmill.” Ichiro’s self-understanding is unique. Most of us don’t know we’re on the treadmill.

How much is enough? When does time for one’s self and one’s closest friends become valuable enough that we “buy” time? What about saving not to spend, but to slow down? What would being more spiritually grounded look and feel like?

The Bush and Obama administrations better hope my thinking doesn’t spread, because if it does, a recession is all but guaranteed.

Social Transformation

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An observation, question, and prediction.

The observation. Women with children do a better job than men of reflecting on and talking with one another about the art of parenting. My male friends and I don’t talk about parenting too often, and when we do, the conversations tend to be brief and fairly superficial.

The question. Why is there a gender gap when it comes to reflecting on and exchanging thoughts and ideas on parenting? If women spend more time with their children than men, and also spend more time with one another, I suppose the gap makes sense.

It may not be that simple though because my male friends and I are way more involved in our children’s daily activities than most of our fathers were. Our children also see us help around the house a whole lot more than we saw most of our dads. Sometimes when L complains that I’m not doing my fair share around the house, I remind her how abysmal my dad’s modeling was and how helpful I am by comparison. I admit, pathetic, blaming my dad when he can’t defend himself.

The prediction. Over the next few decades, “the stay-at-home dad” ranks are going to swell. If I were an entrepreneur I would be strategizing on how to capitalize on this impending social transformation. Like you probably, I know a handful of stay-at-home dads, but they’re still a distinct minority. I predict this will change because my female students are running circles around my male ones. My experience jives with what others are documenting in other parts of the country. Not only are there more female college students than male, they also tend to be more purposeful in their studies, they’re studying abroad at greater rates, and they’re enrolling in graduate schools in greater numbers.

In some of my classes, the gap is glaring. I might have 30 students, 17 or 18 female and 12 or 13 male. Typically, six of the top eight students who are most engaged, most hard working, and most successful, are female. Class after class, semester after semester. There are purposeful, hard working, outstanding male students; they’re just outnumbered by their female counterparts. To create better gender balance, some universities are relaxing admission criteria for men.

Apart from the fact that young men spend a lot more time playing video games than young women, I don’t have many sociological insights into the reasons for this gender gap in academic achievement, but I believe it is going to have profound implications for all us, especially my daughters and their girlfriends. Specifically, will my daughters and all of their girlfriends find partners with similar levels of education, ambition, and gumption?

Related to this, I predict more women will graduate college, more women will enroll in graduate programs, and more women will enter the professions, and in the not so distant future, women will out earn men. Given that likelihood, more couples will decide that the lower-earning male should take the lead in child rearing. This has started to happen already, but it will accelerate.

In twenty years, I expect more men to have even more child rearing responsibilities. They’ll probably form playgroups and bump into one another at their children’s schools, and seek out one another for adult conversation. They’ll spend more time together than my male friends and I do. And when they’re sitting at the park pushing their kids on the swings, I won’t be surprised if they begin reflecting on and swapping ideas about the art of parenting.

Of Politics and Parenting

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Sometimes when I’m watching sports on television one of my daughters will plop down beside me and ask, “Who are you rootin’ for?” I tell them the “blue team” and return serve asking, “How bout’ you?” Without fail it’s, “I want the blue team too.”Recently, standing in our kitchen, I asked J, “Who are you voting for?” even though she’s a senate term too young to cast an official ballot. While seeing exactly how much ice cream she could pack into her bowl, she replied, “Barack Obama I think.”

That makes two of us.

Obama’s Iowa victory speech was the most moving and inspiring I’ve heard in a long, long time. Among other parts, I liked his “there are no red states, blue states, only the United States” idealism and his admonition that 9/11 shouldn’t be used to “scare up votes.” Instead he talked about terrorism as one of several important 21st century challenges including global warming, poverty, oil dependence, and nuclear proliferation.

I was less impressed with his simplistic criticism of outsourcing and economic globalization, which I assume was a nod towards Midwest manufacturers. Go ahead and join the drumbeat against outsourcing, but first convince the American consumer to pay quite a bit more for consumer goods. People want Wal-Mart prices and protectionist trade policies, but seem unwilling to connect the dots.

I wondered how can someone be so incredibly comfortable on the national stage when he hasn’t been on it all that long?

I’m admittedly conflicted about J’s voting intentions. On the one hand, I’m glad she didn’t say “I’m really upset that Tom Tancredo withdrew because like him I dream of living in a country surrounded by an insurmountable wall.” But on the other hand, I want her to become a self-confident, creative thinker willing to take positions different than my own. On one level it’s flattering that she wants the blue team and Barack Obama, but I’d rather she become an independent thinker rather than a carbon copy of me.

I want to guide her development while simultaneously remembering she’s an autonomous, unique person whose life will take unknown twists and turns.

It’s an interesting dance, hoping she adopts the values I’m attempting to model while simultaneously encouraging independent thinking.

It may be like promoting democracy in the Middle East and then saying “Oh shit, look who they voted into office.” In cultivating an independent thinker, how much control am I prepared to give up? What if she applies to USC, votes for a Tom Tancredo, and drives a Hummer?

Cultivating independent thinking is messier, takes more time, and is less efficient than more traditional and authoritarian models of parenting. Sometimes the dishwasher needs emptying, the lawn needs mowing, and bills need to be paid. To develop self-confident, independent young adults we have to guard against saying “because I said so” too often. We need to respect their ability to reason.

Also, children need to see the adults in their lives respectfully disagree and constructively resolve conflicts. And as children age, we need to draw them into more and more substantive conversations consisting of topics upon which reasonable people disagree.*

Ideally, teachers will help model these skills and sensibilities and provide our children with opportunities to practice and develop them. Unfortunately though, the educational pendulum has swung so far towards easy to test content (mostly of the math and science variety) that in-depth, critical classroom conversations are far and few between.

How do you test respect for contending viewpoints, tact and diplomacy, an appreciation for ambiguity, active listening skills, and the boldness and creativity of someone’s thinking? It’s tough to assess those skills and sensibilities, but it’s difficult to understate the importance of them in our homes, communities, and world.

* Postscript: I wrote this post a week ago. Last night, L and I attended a great dinner party. Without prompting, one couple explained how they do exactly what I’m proposing here. On the way home, L was deep in thought about their example, and said, “Our dinner conversations are more John Belushi Animal House than anything else.” At which point J and her both blamed me. I admit, there are times at dinner that I don’t act very professorial and my table manners could use some work. At the same time, they say they don’t laugh nearly as much when I’m not there, so there are trade-offs. My point in sharing this to admit to a gap between theory and current practice.

Grand Experiment

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The world does not need another blog. Time will tell, but I think I can create one others may want to read. I will post on Mondays throughout 2008 and then decide whether to continue. If I’m successful in building a readership and if this activity contributes positively to my off-line writing, I’ll change the name of my blog in January 2009 and continue.

My writing process has three parts. The first part is the nearly non-stop reflecting on all aspects of daily life. This is the Woody Allen internal dialogue that I suspect everyone experiences to greater or lesser degrees. At times, I wish I wasn’t as introspective as I am, but I guess it’s better than the alternative. I think the second part involves my subconscious filtering the steady stream of reflections into more coherent patterns and themes. This is a form of pre-writing. Finally, there’s the formal writing up of the filtered stream of reflections. When I get to that point, I think in terms of paragraphs and make a list of bulleted points, each one representing one paragraph.

I anticipate my posts falling much more along the lines of semi-filtered streams of reflection than carefully crafted off-line essays I’d submit for publication.

In print media, editors play an important role and I’m sympathetic to the argument made by Andrew Keen in “The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing our Culture.” Instead of democratizing knowledge and jump starting civic and political life, Keen argues that without gatekeepers, the internet has led to a profusion of inane content on the internet and a general dumbing down of public life. But one upside of near-complete editorial freedom is the tone of my posts will be more casual, informal, and playful than what most editors of mainstream publications would accept.

I like Slate magazine a lot because of its contrarian bent, its edginess, and occasional humor. Like Slate journalists, I will question conventional wisdom, but you’ll have to decide just how edgy and humorous I am. I don’t anticipate my blog being as much of a personal diary as most I skim. Instead of describing the mix of cereals I combine in my bowl on any given morning (Raisin Bran, Corn Flakes, Cheerios, Wheat Chex, my wife’s amazing granola, topped with dried blueberries), I want to analyze aspects of contemporary life and float ideas that I hope will prompt conversation among diverse groups of people.

Admittedly, the best bloggers post several times a week, but my writing process is slow. I want to allow for that slowness and set what I think is an achievable goal.

What will I write about? Again, the best blogs have a clear focus. I suspect the creators of those blogs can talk specifically about their audience. I have to confess I don’t have a clear sense of my intended audience except to say I hope it’s a cross-section of society. I’m an academic that has tired of writing for academic journals that are read by a handful of other academics. My desire is to engage a wide range of people that might be reading my posts on their wireless laptops at their local coffee shop. In the end, I want readers to describe my writing as authentic. This feels a bit like starting a business without a business-model.

I anticipate philosophizing about many things including: education, writing, parenting, personal finance, fitness, politics, popular culture, and globalization. Maybe, in a nutshell, wellness writ large. In fact, that might be a decent title for this blog a year from now if all goes well.