Random Acts of Kindness

Posted on June 25, 2010 by Ron Byrnes

Example one. In February, I wrote about a fellow passenger rescuing L and me from a stranded Amtrak train in Portland.

Example two, also in February, admittedly more subtle, but still a kind, selfless gesture that was also greatly appreciated. A short simple phone call from a colleague across campus during an especially difficult work experience.

Example three, Wednesday, June 23rd, Mount Rainier National Park. Three maniac cycling friends and I have climbed from just inside the Nisqually Gate to the top of Paradise, past a partially melted Reflection Lake, then through Steven’s Canyon, Box Canyon, and back. The maniacs extended it to Ohanapecosh and back, so I was climbing solo, trying to ride each mile in about six minutes.

My two bottles of gatorade were still in the freezer where I set them during breakfast to get cold (note to self—ride checklist). A friend lent me a bottle, and I had some electrolyte pills, but there was no water after topping off at the Visitor’s Center. So there I was with about 8 ounces and 8 relentless miles of climbing left. Not a good ratio.

An angel disguised as a shirtless 23 year old pulled up next to me in a purple Buick with New Jersey plates. “How YOU doin’ on water?” “Not so good actually.” “I’m going to pull over.” No where to pull over, he stops in the road, jumps out, grabs a gallon jug of water from his back seat and tops me off. “You didn’t look so good.” Well hell I thought, I didn’t feel so good. “Man, I really appreciate it, you’ve got good kharma today.” “Training for anything?” “Ah, no, not really.” I should have got his picture, although as an angel, he may not have been visible. I kept giving him a thumbs up while he was taking pictures along side the road, in one case while standing on top of his hood. Pictures like these.

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Weekend Notes

Posted on June 21, 2010 by Ron Byrnes

U.S. OPEN

• I was off Friday and spent some of the day prepping for 17’s Graduation Open House and some fantasizing about being at Pebble Beach. As great as the visuals were, listening to Chris Berman do the U.S. Open is excruciating. I’m sure he’d be a fun guy to play poker or watch football with, but he obviously did not grow up playing golf. I can take “We’re all just Dustin’ in the Wind Johnson” but I can’t take the “He shot a 9” and “That’s the second snowman there of the day!” and the “back, back, back” urging of a short putt. No one shoots anything on an individual hole. One MAKES a nine. And pros occasionally make eights, not snowmen. This is a MAJOR, not the Bristol Municipal Club Championship. Listening to Dick Vitale is soothing by comparison.

• Also on Friday, very interesting ruling involving Paul Casey’s chip on 14. Brutal uphill chip with zero margin of error. Casey hits it a tad chubby and in frustration hits/repairs the divot a few times. In the ensuing ten-fifteen seconds, the ball backs all the way off the green, eventually to almost the exact spot. Viewers alert the rules officials that Casey has improved his lie. Penalty? Rules officials huddle with Casey after the round, review the particulars of the two shots, and ask him whether he hit/repaired the divot in order to improve his lie in case the ball returned to the exact same spot. Based upon his body language they didn’t think so, and so they weren’t surprised when Casey confirmed that. There really was no way Casey could have known the ball would return to exact same spot. The rule is it’s a penalty if there’s intent is to improve one’s lie. I hereby declare that before wives rip husbands and daughters ban fathers from speaking in public that they adjust for intent.

WORLD CUP

• After reading the comments about my “it’s poor form to complain about officiating” post, I’ve changed my mind. Merty’s comment in particular reminded me of the NBA/FBI/Tim Donaghy fiasco. I’m sure there’s far more $ coursing through World Cup matches than NBA games. Maybe the Malian ref who blew the call at the end of US/Slovenia is cut from Donaghy cloth. So here’s my revised axiom. Whenever athletes are amateurs, it’s poor form to complain about officiating. The corollary is “The younger the athletes, the poorer the form.”

SCHOOLING

• I understand it’s sociocultural/historical roots, but I’m still amazed at how prevalent individualism is in our schools especially when future success will inevitably hinge on interpersonal intelligence. The OHS awards assembly and graduation (where the same award winners were feted a second time) reminded me of that. Why is it that teamwork and groups are only emphasized in extracurricular activities? Our success in solving pressing social, economic, and environmental challenges hinge mostly on team/group work. Sarason’s concept of the “regularities of schooling” comes to mind. A “regularity of schooling” is some feature of teaching and learning that we no longer question, it’s just accepted as the natural order. For example, we always assign grades to each individual student and we only award individual student achievement. This also calls to mind Sarason’s “ocean storm” metaphor in the Predictable Failure of Education Reform. Lots of wind, waves, tumult on the surface during an ocean storm, but no change in water chemistry, temperature, etc, on the ocean floor. The ocean floor is the teacher-student relationship. How would teaching and learning change if we tempered our individualism and focused at least some of our assessment efforts on small group academic achievement?

• During his grad speech, the OHS principal honored the top ten students. A slide of the students flashed above. He said, “good job girls” with no sense of irony or urgency. I’m in the middle of a related article in the most recent Atlantic magazine titled “The End of Men”. Highly recommended.

• Byrnes Postulate (be sure to credit me). The more meaningful the curricular objective and related classroom activity, the more difficult to assess the associated student learning. Granted seems obvious, but I suggest that postulate informs more of what’s wrong with the “standards movement” than is first apparent.

WORLD POLITICS

• Heard an interview with the author of this book. He persuasively argued that no single nation can singlehandedly solve the immigration challenge. Made perfect sense, but it doesn’t seem as if anyone is acknowledging that. In fact, it’s true of most global issues today, but there are at least two serious impediments to thinking more globally and acting more in concert with other people in other nations to address pressing global issues like global poverty, environmental crises, and terrorism/war. First, the U.N. has a lot of negative baggage associated with it and there are wonderful NGOs, but few truly global alternatives. And secondly, no country/region (in the case of the EU) really wants to be take the lead in compromising their relative sovereignty.

FITNESS MALISE

• It’s 12:56p Sunday, we’re on the cusp of the summer equinox, and I’m sitting at my desk in half a cycling kit, staring at a cold, wet, dark gray landscape with 57 miles on the odometer for the week. Pathetic. I started down the street at 9:50a only to turn around when it started to rain. Mother Nature is testing all cyclists’ mental health this June. Look for some to start snapping. I was supposed to be Lance’s domestique on Mount Saint Helens today and then opted for a 10a club ride. Now I’ve performed the rare “double wuss”. My problem is I have nothing I HAVE to train for, not a single event on the calendar. I don’t even think I’ll do our local Oly triathlon in September. I’m 280th on the RAMROD waiting list. This is a desperate cry for help. Someone tell me what event should I do next and why? To add insult to injury, 14 informed me that if I had stayed in bed, her sister and her would have made me a “Dad’s Day” breakfast.

World Cup Notes

Posted on June 18, 2010 by Ron Byrnes

• I’m a casual football fan who shamelessly jumps on the World Cup bandwagon every four years. I am not a connoisseur, but after watching it in slow motion a few times, that disallowed goal at the end of U.S. v Slovenia was a terrible, terrible call. But the one thing I dislike more than missed calls, is people who complain about poor officiating. I didn’t see the first 67 minutes. There may have been blown calls that benefited the U.S. Human error is part of the game, deal with it. So, terrible call and points off for me for dwelling on it.

• Why do women always feel sorry for whomever is behind? After the second tying U.S. goal. “Oh no, it looks like the Slovenian fans are crying.” Note to self: teach daughters that whenever you have your foot on your opponent’s throat apply PRESSURE.

• Notice the coaches down jackets? Nice that there’s somewhere colder than Olympia, WA. Of course it is late Autumn in South Africa. It hasn’t reached 75 in this area yet this year. The previous “latest 75 degree” date was June 9th. The high temp on the 10 day forecast. . . 68. High 50’s this weekend. Apparently, summer has been cancelled. Is Rush Limbaugh right, is global warming a crock?

• Why do people complain about things they can’t change? Like the weather.

Viral Seatbelt PSA

Posted on June 18, 2010 by Ron Byrnes

Thanks to one of Positive Momentum’s biggest fans, a new “wear your seatbelt” public service announcement airing in the UK. Submitted by a lad not hired to do it, now it’s gone “viral”. Brilliant. The democratization of advertising.

iPad Review

Posted on June 10, 2010 by Ron Byrnes

In the Steve Ballmer-desk-top computers will continue to thrive v. Steve Jobs-desk-tops will become like a truck that you use sporadically for a few specific tasks, I’m putting ALL my money on Jobs.

And I will be in the vanguard. I have been blown away by my Pad and am frustrated I haven’t had more time to set it up and learn the ins and outs. Two things are conspiring against Pad-time, a heavy June teaching schedule and a light fourteen year old.

Just how great a handheld computer is it? Eventually women will find an alternative word for their feminine product. At the store, “Do you have any pads?” “Wi-fi or 3G?” The first night I went to bed at 10 p.m. and by 6 a.m. the next morning five new apps appeared out of thin air including the bible and an especially riveting one where you poke plastic bubble wrap. The highlight so far has been showing fourteen how to lock it in either horizontal or vertical mode.

Let’s get my least favorite feature out of the way so I can return to positive product pimping. The homepage photograph is a beautiful coastline at dusk with white wisps across the sky, remnants of shooting stars maybe? The problem is they look exactly like ruinous scratches. They still give me heart palpitations six days later. Don’t know that I’ll ever get used to them.

As every other reviewer has explained, typing on the screen keyboard is okay for a few sentences at a time. I bought a separate keyboard and mouse so that I can go long on it. Lack of printing is an issue, but no doubt a temporary one.

Here’s one way it’s changed my life already. Yes, that was tongue in check. My wife is of the anti-television persuasion. I wear the pants in the family nearly all the time (I should confirm that with her), but I have not mustered the courage to defy her “no television in the bedroom” edict. With this bad boy, I mean pad boy, what she doesn’t know won’t hurt her. Case in point, the other night I surreptitiously watched an episode of Scrubs on ABC’s app. I know what you’re thinking. Let’s just say it will be ON if she even suggests a “no Pad in the bedroom” policy.

Admittedly, this may be the most incomplete, least technical, least insightful, least helpful iPad review written to this point. But how many of those other fanboys can do this?

Palming the Pad

The Negative Utility of Losses

Posted on June 7, 2010 by Ron Byrnes

At present I’m privileged to be working with twenty-eight hard working people who just completed a year-long teaching internship. Beginning teachers typically fall into a common psychological trap. Hell, what am I saying, I still do it too and I’ve been at it for a quarter century. All but the most callused teachers fall into the trap of letting a few negative student encounters shade one’s thinking about an entire class or course.

For example, when I think about my sixteen writing students last semester, I know at least twelve learned a lot, improved, and had a positive experience. One to four, probably not so much. One of my current students is the mother of one of my first year spring semester writing students. She confided in me that her daughter said, “He doesn’t like the way I write.” Insert knife. Twist. I really work hard to help students develop more positive attitudes towards writing and to develop self confidence so that really bummed me out. Then my thought process becomes, “Nevermind loser that the majority of the class had a positive experience, a few didn’t.”

Why is it that you can have a neutral or positive working relationship with nine students, but the negative one with the tenth takes away from the entire teaching and learning experience?

I was wondering this while reading The Investor’s Manifesto by William Bernstein, page 108 specifically. He writes, “It makes little sense that we should care about a bad day or a bad year in the stock market if it provides us with good long-term returns. But because of the importance of our limbic systems, we care—very, very much—about short term losses. We cannot help it: That is the way we are hardwired. Behavioral studies show that, in emotional terms, a loss of $1 approximately offsets a gain of $2; in the unlovely language of economics, the negative utility of losses is twice that of the positive utility of gains.”

Or five or ten times that depending on how negative the teacher-student relationship.

Conceptual convergence. I love the phrase “the negative utility of losses” because it helps me better describe the abstract psychological (or actually biological) phenomenon that plagues most teachers.

My natural tendency would be to strategize on how to combat negative utility of loss thinking, but if it’s biological is it inevitable? Is resistance futile?

Woods, Nicklaus, the Globalization of Sports

Posted on June 4, 2010 by Ron Byrnes

The world is most passionate about futbol, the Canucks are hockey-crazed, and in the U.S. we’ve always staked our claim to baseball, basketball, and football. Then global interdependence accelerated and now we get spanked in international baseball competitions, the bigs are a multinational polyglot, our days of bball dominance are a thing of the past, and only football remains predominantly national in orientation.

One especially poignant event took place in 2000 that illustrates the globalization of professional sports. The Dallas Mavericks had five international players on the court at the same time—Obinna Ekezie (Nigeria); Eduardo Najera (Mexico); Steve Nash (Canaduh), Dirk Nowitzki (Germany); and Zhizhi Wang (China). If you need more evidence, check out an LPGA leaderboard.

Speaking of golf, TW is known around the world as a result of his amazing on course success, endless advertising, and sexcapades. Some in the media have reported that his Swedish wife is seeking $750 million (which will only worsen our balance of trade). Until recently, I would have bet 100% of my retirement assets that TW would break Jack’s major championship record. TW sits at 14, JN has 18. Now, I’d only bet 70%.

To win a major championship, I assume the following. You have to be play really well for four consecutive rounds. To do that, you must have your swing grooved going in, be mentally focused, and injury free (TW’s US Open win at Torrey was a freakish anomaly). Pre-sexcapade-escalade-firehydrant, TW usually had his swing grooved going into majors, was always off the charts focused, and usually healthy (pre-knee problem).

Times have changed. Hard to focus on the eight footer for par with 18″ of break when you’re wondering if your wife has discovered your most recent sexts. Then there’s the neck injury. Then there’s the swing coach that decided he wanted a divorce too.

All of those things can be fixed over time. After the divorce he’ll sleep around worry-free, his neck will probably return to normal, and eventually he’ll probably get someone to take seven figures to help with his swing.

Tiger is 34 years old and Watson almost won the British last year at 59. Apart from Gary Player, has there ever been a golfer more dedicated to fitness than TW? So let’s say his window is between 15 and 25 years. All he’d have to do to pass Jack is win one major every 3 to 5 years. Assuming he plays every major every year that’s winning one of twelve or twenty championships.

But globalization is the variable that gives me pause. As of May 31st, 2010, thirty-three of the top fifty golfers in the world are international players—66% (I did that in my head). Several of the top international players are considerably younger than Tiger, just as long, and nearly as talented—McIlroy, Kaymer, Schwartzel, Villegas, Ishikawa, Davies. As a result of the globalization of golf, Tiger faces increasingly deep fields, much more so than Nicklaus did. I wish I had a research assistant to dig into the comparable world ranking figures for Nicklaus when he was in his mid-30’s. I’m guessing the number of international players in the top 50, and the non-Gary Player major championship winners, paled by comparison.

There’s also anecdotal evidence that the next generation of golfers is going to be better than the current one. Jordan Spieth, a 16 year old, finished 16th in a PGA tour event two weeks ago. Last week he finished tied for 8th in a junior golf tournament, 9 strokes behind Anthony Paolucci (66-69-69).

Then there’s a non-globalization, psychological factor. Over the last ten years, nearly everyone nearly always has been intimidated by Tiger, wilting under the pressure of playing in his shadow. Now, not as much. Can he get back to the same level of physical and mental dominance? Possibly.

And that’s why I’m only putting 70% of my retirement assets on Tiger winning five or more majors.

Pressing Pause

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