Category Archives: Education

There Should Be A Medal

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The most extraordinary, ordinary thing happened to me recently.

A former student, a career changer, early fiftyish former draftsperson, wrapping up his third year teaching English/Language Arts at a local high school, contacted me.

After a long school day in the middle of May, he tucked his students’ essays under his arm, got in his car, and instead of driving home, headed to my university office. He wanted my help better preparing his students for college level writing. He admitted he wasn’t doing a good job teaching writing and didn’t really know how to improve.

He deserves a medal of some sort for a trifecta of positive attributes that are a powerful formula for self improvement writ large. Not just self improvement, a foundation for strengthening the common good.

1) Self-compassion. His starting point was the essence of this NYT essay:

‘I’m an imperfect human being living an imperfect life.’

2) Selflessness. He cares deeply about his students. So much so he wants to increase their odds of success in college, and in turn, life.

3) Initiative. 999 out of 1,000 high school English teachers are content not really knowing if they’re doing their best to prepare their students for college level writing. They have lots of other, more pressing things to do after work.

self-compassion + selflessness + initiative = personal growth

We had a great conversation despite my being distracted by two things. First, I was struck by the fact that college writing is a topic I know a lot about. That was a nice realization, because like most people I suspect, sometimes I wonder if I have any expertise.

Second, I was distracted by the realization that I don’t do what my fellow educator was modeling so powerfully. I have a lot of acquaintances and friends who are way more knowledgeable about and/or skilled in areas I’d like to learn more about and/or improve, yet I never ask them if they’d be up to teaching me.

Why is that? There are lots of possibilities. Maybe I’m not secure/vulnerable enough to embrace my imperfections. Or maybe I’m too lazy a sad sack (how’s that for self compassion). Or most likely, despite how much I enjoyed helping my former student, I just don’t want to impose on them.

I’m not alone. Most people pay experts for specialized knowledge and skills or watch “Do It Yourself” YouTube tutorials. The person who asks a friend or acquaintance to teach them something they don’t know is the wonderful exception to how most of us approach life.

 

Monday Assorted Links

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1. My Gender-Fluid Senior Prom by Ara Halstead from. . . Olympia, WA.

2 . The Spy Who Came Home. What do Fallujah and Savannah, Georgia have in common? Find out from Patrick Skinner, who I find inspiring on so many levels. Then follow him on Twitter.

3. How Bike-Friendly Is My City? Not as friendly as Fort Collins, Colorado or Wausau, Wisconsin.

4. Jerusalem opens a bike tunnel in a sewage tunnel.

5A. Silent soccer.

5B. Young swimmers may have to wait to dress like Katie Ledecky.

 

What Milton Friedman Got Wrong

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First, Friedman in praise of greed or “economic self interest”.*

Oliver Hart and Luigi Zingales on what Friedman and his fellow free market true believers got and get wrong:

“. . . the conclusion is that this idea, which seems to have taken hold that companies should be all about making money and that indeed managers, the CEO, they have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to be concerned only with the bottom line. We think this is wrong — a serious mistake. Actually if they want to act — be loyal to their shareholders — which is what fiduciary duty means, they should actually ask them what they want. That’s the loyal thing to do. Rather than just assume that it’s making money at the expense of all else.

* Seriously underrated. . . Phil Donahue’s hair.

 

 

 

On the Greatest Virtue

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Juliet Macur, the author of this recent NYT article, in an unrelated interview was asked, “What is your favorite virtue?” “Kindness,” she answered, and then added:

“My earliest memory of it is my mother taking the train to Manhattan from our house in New Jersey, toting three freshly baked loaves of bread. She would leave each loaf next to a homeless person sleeping on the floor of Penn Station.”

I sent an email to a student of mine this week to see if there was anything I could do to support her in the last stages of her teaching certificate work. From Central America, a wife and mother, Rosa is struggling to complete the high-stakes performance assessment she has to pass.

She wrote back:

“I think the only reason I will end the program is thanks to you all. Every time I was about to break there was one of you to hug me, encourage me, smile at me. Remember when you stopped to talked with Rebeca, Drew and I one day? You called us “three of my favorite teachers.” You have no idea how much that meant to me. Now every time I feel like dropping out, I get my journal and read. Stop Rosa you are already a teacher and not only that, you are one of Ron’s favorites so get it together and finish! You haven’t come so far to come just this far!”

I barely remember that interaction. My words that afternoon were a spontaneous, simple, seemingly forgetful greeting that I never would have guessed any of them would’ve remembered very long at all.

As teachers, parents, and coaches, we forget that our words, whether we think before speaking or not, whether kind or not, have lasting impacts.

In the New Testament, James (Chapter 3, verse 5), encourages his readers to “Consider what a great forest is set on fire by a small spark.”

Think first, convey kindness, and most everything else will fall into place.

Wednesday Assorted Links

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1. Research Puts Spotlight on the Impact of Loneliness in the U.S. and Potential Root Causes

The findings:

  • Nearly half of Americans report sometimes or always feeling alone (46 percent) or left out (47 percent).
  • One in four Americans (27 percent) rarely or never feel as though there are people who really understand them.
  • Two in five Americans sometimes or always feel that their relationships are not meaningful (43 percent) and that they are isolated from others (43 percent).
  • One in five people report they rarely or never feel close to people (20 percent) or feel like there are people they can talk to (18 percent).
  • Americans who live with others are less likely to be lonely (average loneliness score of 43.5) compared to those who live alone (46.4). However, this does not apply to single parents/guardians (average loneliness score of 48.2) – even though they live with children, they are more likely to be lonely.
  • Only around half of Americans (53 percent) have meaningful in-person social interactions, such as having an extended conversation with a friend or spending quality time with family, on a daily basis.
  • Generation Z (adults ages 18-22) is the loneliest generation and claims to be in worse health than older generations.
  • Social media use alone is not a predictor of loneliness; respondents defined as very heavy users of social media have a loneliness score (43.5) that is not markedly different from the score of those who never use social media (41.7).

2. Nearly half of jobs are vulnerable to automation.

“In 2013 Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne of Oxford University used—what else?—a machine-learning algorithm to assess how easily 702 different kinds of job in America could be automated. They concluded that fully 47% could be done by machines ‘over the next decade or two.'”

3. Mental health on a budget.

4. The Secret to Magic Mornings? Put The Kids to Work.

“Our kids — all daughters (and no, we aren’t and weren’t trying for a boy) — are ages 4 through 18. And over the years we’ve tried all kinds of systems and routines as we’ve tried to make mornings more manageable. Yelling didn’t work. Bribes and reward charts were more trouble than they were worth. Doing everything for them was unsustainable — we all were cranky.

So we kept tinkering with different ideas.

A while back we hit the jackpot with a plan that is finally working well.”

5. How Refugees Are Finding Home on an American Campus.

Proud of my former employer for resisting Trump’s xenophobia so concretely.

Friday Assorted Links

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1. How we talk to our kids about race, racism and identity. After the discussion, one of the participants communicated an important insight that is often lost on people who do not have much experience with people different than them.

“This experience concretized a familiar truth: black identity is not a monolith. Our experiences and stories are as vivid, varied, and complex as our culture and hues.”

2. Does implicit bias training work?

Researchers suggest:

“When companies get in hot water over bias, their initial reaction is often to do some kind of training because it’s something you can outsource and it’s relatively easy to do and has good optics. The studies that look out six months to a year tend to be equally likely to show increased bias after the training as they are to show decreased bias.”

All is not lost though:

“. . . companies can have better success decreasing bias by making sure their workforces are integrated so that people of different racial groups are regularly in contact with one another. “We know that what works best is for workers to be put side by side with people from other groups and have them work together collaboratively as equals. That seems to be the best way to change stereotypes in people’s heads because it causes people not to lump all members of a group together, but to start to individuate.”

3. Fixing Ethiopia Requires More Than a New Prime Minister.

Hilary Matfess describes the The Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front’s  (EPRDF) political hegemony. It’s a blueprint of sorts for wannabe authoritarians the world over.

Her logical conclusion is disheartening:

“The current unrest in Ethiopia is not a phase that will fade with the pronouncement of a new prime minister, but rather a reflection of a system in which modest reform and dissent have been made nearly impossible. Until the government remedies the marginalization of ethnic groups and ceases to perpetrate gross human rights abuses, it will experience protests, potentially escalating beyond the low levels of violence that have characterized the clashes between Oromo protesters and the government thus far. Putting a new face to the leadership of this system will not be enough to stabilize the country—radical democratizing reforms are necessary. Failing this, the country (and its hand-wringing security partners) can expect continued resistance and instability.”

I Don’t Like People

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Almost all of my interactions with differently abled people occur at the YMCA. Tuesday morning, while showering, shaving, and getting dressed for work, I surreptitiously listened  to a dude rapping non-stop. Clearly on the autism spectrum, I enjoyed how he rhymed away oblivious to those around him.

Same thing this morning. From the showers I heard, “There’s money all around you, one million right there in the air. . . I am the source and a force” and something about “breaking legs”. Then he suddenly appeared at the blow dryer.

Ron: That’s really good stuff. Is it other people’s or your own?

Free Styler somewhat taken aback: What, my free-styling?

Ron: Yeah. Is it your own stuff?

Free Styler: Yeah, it’s all mine.

Ron: It’s really good.

Free Styler: Thanks.

Ron: Do you perform?

Free Styler: Yeah, all the time.

Ron: Where?

Free Styler: At home. In my studio. I don’t like people. I hate performing for people.

Ron: Cool. It’s really good stuff.

I’m not bullshitting, the guy is talented, but few will ever know that.

Given the (understandable) tendency of artists to market their stuff to the hilt, I dig the image of my new acquaintance sitting in his home studio throwing down original rhymes for hours on end. I’d love to eavesdrop on a session, but know an invitation will not be forthcoming. And that’s okay. Knowing his art enriches his life is consolation enough.

Who Is This?

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A conservative friend of mine, let’s call him Domingo Montoya, is determined to recast himself as a Centrist. I’ll stifle my chuckles and give him more credit when he parts with his Reagan-Bush and Bush-Cheney t-shirts. I know, I know, I should encourage his personal transformation; instead, I derisively call him a faux-centrist.

Recently, I was surprised to learn that someone I had pegged as a classic liberal is in fact a centrist. If you follow American politics, you know him, and no, it’s not Kasich.

“X has said the he follows the ‘canoe theory’ of politics: ‘You paddle a little on the left and a little on the right, and you paddle a straight course.'”

“X. . . sees danger in the growing discord between Democrats and Republicans. ‘The last time we had that, we had the Civil War,’ he said.”

“. . . X’s opposition to Trump is somewhat different. On occasion, he drops some ‘rhetorical bombs,’ as he has called them, but he prefers a measured, pragmatic approach. X rejects the idea that a state can offer sanctuary from the federal government, and he does not like to talk about ‘the Resistance,’ either.”

“If, as now seems possible, Democrats dominate the 2018 and 2020 elections, and they end up governing as unilaterally as the Republicans have, X fears that ‘a cycle will be created, in which one side pushes as far as it can until it’s thrown out, then the next one does it, and then it will happen again.’ He compared it to a car ‘fishtailing’: ‘I was driving on the freeway, I don’t know how fast, and I almost missed the exit, and made a hard right onto the ramp. Luckily, I got control back. But it’s that kind of perturbation of a system. So,’ he resumed, ‘the Democrats get more extreme, the Republicans get more extreme, and you have an ungovernable America. And a stop-start, not-reliable superpower. Other people will have to react to that level of uncertainty, and that will not be positive for America’s role in the world. Therefore, it’s very important to take prudential steps to keep a stable society. I’ve always thought that’s important—to keep balance. Don’t push things too far, because it will unnerve people.”

Who is the mystery centrist? The answer is here.