Category Archives: Education

E Pluribus Unum?

Posted on by
2

I’m keenly interested in how people of different political, cultural, and religious points of view relate one to another.

I first became interested in how people deal with those whose politics are radically different than their own as a high school social studies teacher leading discussions about contemporary issues. I quickly learned to play the “devil’s advocate” since some of my students were right or left-wing ideologues whose positions were highly predictable.

Also, I’ve been fortunate to have two friends whose worldviews are very different than my own. In contrast to most people who tend to keep the peace by avoiding talking about subjects related to politics, religion, race, and sexual orientation, we tackle them head-on.

In the last few years the church my family attends have added two new pastors for two that left. They’ve taken a moderate, fairly apolitical church considerably to the left in a few ways including a gay and lesbian friendly “welcoming statement” and by embracing evolution.

Here’s an excerpt from the “Clergy Letter Project” that was read Sunday. “We believe that the theory of evolution is a foundational scientific truth, one that has stood up to rigorous scrutiny and upon which much of human knowledge and achievement rests. To reject this truth or to treat it as ‘one theory’ among others’ is to deliberately embrace scientific ignorance and transmit such ignorance to our children. . . We ask school board members to preserve the integrity of science curriculum by affirming the teaching of the theory of evolution as a core component of human knowledge.”

I like the pastors and  strongly support the stands they’re taking, but I’m intrigued by how little effort they seem to be making to retain conservative members. Attendance is down a bit, so I assume some have left. My guess is there will be liberal replacements in the months ahead. In a year’s time I expect us to have the same size church, but we’ll be much more homogeneous.

Consequently, the church may lose some of it’s distinctiveness and potential to model the Kingdom of God on earth. Given the choice, people already tend to socialize with, live next to, work with, and recreate with like-minded people. If truly committed to following Christ’s example, it seems as if the church would be a counter-cultural institution, one where people’s faith trumps political differences.

And not one where political differences are swept under the rug, but where people commit to conversation and learn how to agree to disagree when necessary about things like gay rights, the causes of global warming, and the death penalty, all in the interest of modeling “another way”.

Am I too idealistic to think this is possible? The cynic in me can’t help but notice our church, like many, has two services, one formal with hymns and a traditional liturgy, and a hymn-free, informal “contemporary” one. The nucleus divides again.

In the end, will the small corner of the world that is Olympia, Washington end up more religiously, socially, culturally, and politically fragmented?

“How To” Conundrum

Posted on by
5

A very successful blogger I read says “always write something that’s useful.” Her posts are often of the “How To” variety. A friend told me the other day a recent post was too long. “I started reading it,” he said, “and then I scrolled down, down, down.” Another requested more pictures. Obviously no point in trying to please everyone, but I thought I could experiment with writing a shortish “How To” post.

Then I wondered what the hell do I know “how to” that others may not? I came up with a few things I don’t normally screw up, but then thought, what percentage of people would care? And do I really want to even flirt with a form that could be grouped together with the self-help writing that I almost always find complete bullshit because the authors dumb down complex phenomena.

Then I worked through those dilemmas and started in on a “How To” post, but I got hung up on qualifiers or caveats.

And then I thought, since I’m more comfortable with good questions than simple answers, maybe I’m just not cut out for “How To” writing. But there’s some evidence to the contrary in the archives, some decent posts (I think) about how to create an active lifestyle, how to cycle long distances, and how to choose a college.

It will never be a natural form of writing for me, but I’ll try again, sometime soon.

SuperBowl Edition

Posted on by
3

Secular holiday Sunday. I’m down with it, but for the love of all things non-material, please kill the Pro Bowl and return to the original one week between conference finals and kickoff.

I was pleasantly surprised to see a Peyton Manning essay by Stefan Fatsis on Slate.com Friday. I’ve enjoyed listening to Fatsis, a sports business analyst/writer on National Public Radio over the last few years. He also writes for the Wall Street Journal. Smart, fast-talker, good insights. He lets his hair down a little in the Manning piece.

Fatsis’ piece brought to mind lots of things including what a curse perfectionism is for those encumbered by it. Perfectionists can’t help but project their unusually high and often unrealistic expectations onto others which subjects them to perpetual frustration. Others can’t measure up.

When I finished writing my lengthy self-assessment for promotion recently, I felt a real sense of accomplishment, but not in the way you might expect. Here’s the truth of the matter. I could be a better teacher, scholar, and university citizen (the shorthand term for service). And I could be a better husband, father, son, brother, and friend. And I could be a better triathlete and blogger. And I could read more fiction, keep the gutters cleaner, and manage my time better.

My sense of accomplishment comes from fulfilling a wide range of roles as well as possible. I’m never going to win an MVP (most valuable professor) award or the Hawaii Ironman and I don’t anticipate, fourteen, seventeen, and forty-nine (yikes, did I just out the gal pal as not young, more evidence I fall short as a husband) ever teaming up on a sculpture in honor of me (my birthday is fast approaching though).

I choose to live a more balanced life than Manning, that doesn’t make me better, just different. Would I like to play in the Super Bowl*, of course, but I would not have traded the breadth of life experience I’ve enjoyed for that type of single-minded success.

At times, I wonder if I use the “balance” argument as an excuse for not pursuing excellence in a particular area for a particular time. Do I opt for success out of fear of Success? I wonder, maybe I should dedicate myself to excellence in one role, whether to write a book, race an Ironman well, or become the man my dog thinks I am—for a period of time. It’s very hard for me to accept doing some things poorly in order to do one thing especially well.

I expect the Colts to win, but I’ll be pulling for the Saints. And if the Saints pull the upset, I’ll be watching for Peyton to blow.

* I realized my football career was pointless in eighth grade when I was a bad-ass (a legend in my own mind) cornerback for the Lexington Lions. Screen pass to the other team’s stud who looked like it was his third go-round in eighth grade. Someone missed their assignment and I was unblocked. Closed the eyes, wrapped, wrapped, uh, wiffed. Started playing more golf at that point!

Zerosumness

Posted on by
Reply

I enjoy watching MadMen, the AMC series about an early 1960’s advertising firm. I started watching it midstream, so I’m in the process of catching up from the start. In one episode, in the middle of year one, there was an especially illuminating subplot involving the junior account managers who continuously compete among themselves for the top execs’ attention and favor.

One of them casually announced he just had a short story published in the Atlantic Monthly. The others didn’t even know he was a writer. Despite being caught off-guard, they suppressed their jealousy and feigned congratulations. Later that night, one of them asked his wife for feedback on his own short story that he probably punched out that afternoon. She tried to defer. When he presses her, she says she’s not used to modern fiction “where bears talk”. Eventually, she cashes in some social capital with a family friend who offers to publish it in Boys Life for $40 (in 1959-60). Funny and extremely poignant.

Are we socialized or hardwired to compare ourselves to others? And why do we begrudge other people their success? Maybe the scene resonated with me because academics seem particularly susceptible to zerosumness, a condition in which I interpret your victories as losses for me. Por exemplar, your getting published makes my scholarship look more anemic by comparison. So people say “congratulations on getting published,” but do they really mean it? We know where the producers of MadMen stand on the subject.

K-12 teachers are susceptible to jealousy and pettiness too. It often takes this form. “Your classroom successes and glowing reputation erode my own teaching success and reputation.”

This most human of tendencies (jealously or coveting thy neighbors’ publications, reputation, successes) pervades far more than the workplace. A few weeks ago Bruce and I were discussing AAPL in the “Y” lockerroom. He not only informed me he owned it too, but he paid $80 for it back in the day. While saying “way to go,” I was thinking, “a pox on your portfolio for sitting on 150% gains!”

How do leaders, whether parents, deans, principals, executives, clergy, or coaches, create family, work, or team cultures where people are relatively secure in what they do well and genuinely celebrate one another’s successes?

Shortcut-mania

Posted on by
4

Spent Saturday at the King County Acquatic Center in Federal Way (the “KCAC” if you’re cool) watching the State YMCA Championship swim meet with over four hundred competitors. Fourteen’s swimming career began last August at the start of high school. She decided to swim because she recognized she wasn’t lighting the soccer world on fire, her parents encouraged it, her older sissy was a co-captain, and she thought it would be a good way to make friends.

The season exceeded her expectations in part because she improved a lot, a result of swimming five times a week and improving her technique. Dropping time is fun. Now though she’s an intermediate swimmer and dropping time is considerably harder. And swimming isn’t as fun. Saturday she swam more slowly than she had hoped. There had to be an explanation she thought. “Was the pool meters?”

The great thing about competitive swimming is there’s an almost perfect correlation between one’s training, pre-race prep, and race day performance. Fourteen misinterpreted her results on Saturday. Her conclusion, “I didn’t race very well. Just didn’t have a good day. Maybe I’m not as good as I thought.” The truth of the matter is she hasn’t been training consistently and intensely enough to swim any faster. It doesn’t matter if you have the perfect track on on your iPod pre-race and are completely amped, race day is simply a barometer of the quality of your training. The question is have you put in the time, have you done the work?

Aren’t we all like Fourteen? We often want to see improvement in some aspect of our lives without investing much time and energy in whatever it is? For example, recently I’ve read some extremely successful blogs that generate one hundred plus comments per post. When I do this I don’t think about how much time those bloggers spend on their blogs, I just say to myself, self, “You should have a blog like that.”

One’s blog readership and juice is almost exclusively a barometer of time and energy invested. The blogosphere is a meritocracy.

So the question for Fourteen, me, and maybe you, is how badly do we want to swim fast, have a widely read blog, get out of debt, lose weight, make a relationship work? Fourteen has other priorities like school and I have a day job. She swims and I blog “on the side” or maybe the “side of the side”. Maybe you try to reduce spending, save money, eat more healthily, exercise more consistently, and spend quality time with your partner “on the side”.

The challenge is being honest with ourselves about what’s most important. In the meantime, we shouldn’t be surprised by the meager results of our sporadic, abbreviated labors.

Democracy and Design

Posted on by
3

According to Timothy Egan (writing on his NYT blog), Amazon sold more electronic than hardcopy books during the Christmas season. He goes on to predict that the iPad and other electronic readers will accelerate the closing of brick and mortar bookstores. He writes, “. . . if Denver were to lose Tattered Cover, or Portland lose Powell’s, or Washington, D.C., lose Politics and Prose, it would be like ripping one lung from a healthy body. These stores are cultural centers, shared living rooms; no virtual community on the Web, or even a well-run library, can replace them.”

I agree. I suspect those specific stores will be anomalies, they’ll survive over the medium-term at least as a result of their loyal followings, extensive inventories, and exceptional customer service. The question though is what becomes of the small and medium sized independents who can’t compete on price and don’t have the history or momentum of a Tattered Cover, Powell’s, and Politics and Prose? I hope I’m wrong, but I expect them to go out of business. Does it matter? Is it just creative destruction, a shifting of economic tectonic plates, an inevitable byproduct of free-market capitalism?

Of course, from the perspective of bookstore owners, employees, and loyal customers, it matters. But what about from a socio-political perspective?

Social scientists are telling us what seems intuitive, we’re growing more and more ideologically segregated. I tend to listen to public radio and watch public television, with some Jon Stewart, Rachel Maddow, and Keith Olberman (in very small doses) mixed in. My right wing friends listen to Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and watch Fox News almost exclusively. Plus, nearly everyone is plugged in to their personal iPods and smartphones making spontaneous conversations with people all but impossible.

Among other things, a vibrant democracy depends on civil discourse, or put more simply, people with differing opinions talking directly to one another. If not at bookstore cafes, or in book discussion groups, or during book reading Q&A’s, when do people truly engage with those who think differently than them? I’ve expressed my opinion before that women are better than men at making time for tea, conversation, and one another. For example, my better half and her friends, “The Clatch”, meet every few months at one of their houses. But I’m only giving them partial credit because they’re all left-of-center libs who think more alike than different.

What becomes of the listening, thinking, communicating, and problem solving skills of people who very rarely engage in civil discourse? For an answer, look at Congress.

Egan’s insight got me thinking about design. Are architects factoring socio-political variables like I’m describing into their designs. And if so, how? How do we design cities or redesign existing ones so that there are inviting public places where diverse people—culturally, economically, ideologically, religiously—are in the same place at the same time?

Rollercoaster

Posted on by
Reply

Teaching high school taught me that adolescents can be living, breathing rollercoasters, up one day, down the next. After awhile, I learned not to take the inevitable dips personally.

Which takes us to the other day and my facebooking seventeen year old. “Why are you trying to talk to me?” she asked staring at her laptop. My bad, I’m an awful dad for being interested in last night’s field trip to Seattle.

Fast forward a day. . . the rollercoaster standing in the kitchen, studying page four of my Tacoma Broadway Center for the Performing Arts pamphlet. Gaelic Storm.

I throw caution to the wind. “Wanna go?” “Yeah!”

Surprisingly, she doesn’t get any better offers during the week.

We hit traffic, arrive five minutes late, run through downtown T-town together, and buy two of the last tics.

For the next three hours nagging, tension, and adolescent angst were replaced with clapping, laughing, and singing. Irish music has always moved me in inexplicable ways and seventeen is a talented violinist on a piano playing tear. She was transfixed by Jesse Burns the group’s fiddler who shredded from beginning to end.

Wonderful concert made better by the company.

Balance

Posted on by
1

Imagine writing eighteen single-spaced pages about your job performance? I’ve spent the better part of the last three weeks writing a 10,732 word self-assessment for promotion to Professor.

The very lucky 17% of higher education faculty in tenured track positions typically begin as Assistants, become Associates at tenure, and then eventually when their hair is mostly gray and their vision is shot, become Professors. Most faculty spend about seven years at each level. Unless you’re the rare all-star that gets recruited by another institution, promotion is the only way to improve your salary.

“Like a lawyer” I had to “make an argument” for myself in light of the University’s criteria for promotion. I embedded the criteria in the first two sentences.

“Through this self-assessment, the letters of colleagues and former students, and the accompanying artifacts, I aim to demonstrate that I am deserving of promotion to Professor. This is due to my record and reputation as an excellent teacher, continual growth in scholarship, and distinct academic influence and leadership.”

I’ll spare you the remaining 10,700 words. I should note though that after reading all 10,732 words my wonderful mother said if she could she’d award me promotion in a “New York Minute”.

Reminds of a classic moment in modern American film. Carl Spackler in Caddyshack, “So we finish the eighteenth and the Dalai Lama’s gonna stiff me. And I say, ‘Hey, Lama, hey, how about a little something, you know, for the effort, you know.’ And he says, ‘Oh, uh, there won’t be any money, but when you die, on your deathbed, you will receive total consciousness.’ So I got that goin’ for me, which is nice.”

So I got that goin’ for me, my mom in my corner, which is real, real nice.

Since no one is perfect, I would have preferred writing about what I’ve done well and what I haven’t done as well. But that’s not what the Rank & Tenure Committee expects.

So after three weeks of writing almost exclusively about what I do well, it’s time to restore some balance in my life and the cosmos by coming clean about my myriad shortcomings to a proxy for the Rank & Tenure Community. . . you.

1. I can be an impatient listener.

2. On more than one occasion, I’ve been wearing a towel when my daughter’s friends come to the house. My “man skirt” or “utility kilt” embarrasses her unnecessarily.

3. I sometimes mistake the family dinner table for a lockerroom.

4. I am indescribably inept at Christmas lights, home repair, laundry, and pruning.

5. I sometimes don’t act immediately on emails, necessitating multiple readings.

6. I regularly cut through the Denny’s parking lot on Pacific and Hwy 512.

7. When it comes to food and drink, I can be too disciplined. My own beloved mother recently said to me, “Sometimes you have to live a little.”

8. My frugality can take completely irrational forms.

9. I received cable for free for a long time and didn’t report myself.

10. When in “writing at home” mode, I can wear the same pair of pants and t-shirt for a long time (purposely vague).

That’s a Lettermanesque start. I feel better. Thanks for listening.

Please don’t forward this link to anyone on the Rank & Tenure Committee.

A Passport and Library Card

Posted on by
2

This post is only for men under 35, and my brother, “Mother’s Favorite”. If you don’t fall within that demographic, stop reading.

Yes, a happy wife equals a happy life, but what if  you’re single? Singleness is cool, but if you want to marry, get a passport and a library card. Traveling abroad and reading are probably optional. More advice here.