society and culture

First Day Back 2026

Monday 5 January 2026

I went into the teachers’ workroom to make a coffee. It was the first day back, and some teachers had brought their kids with them. When I opened the door, I found three energetic children playing with balloons.

“Do you want to see what we’re doing?” a small blonde girl asked, her ringleted hair bouncing with excitement.

“Of course I do,” I said.

She grabbed a balloon, puffed out her cheeks, and forced air into it with all her might until it inflated just a little. Then she opened her mouth. The blue balloon shot across the room, and she erupted—squealing, jumping, delighted. She chased it down and did it again.

I smiled and walked away. Hearing her repeat it a third time, I felt unexpectedly envious.

It was such a simple act, yet it held her completely. Children can endow the smallest things with meaning, with such intensity that repetition never dulls the pleasure. Each time is new—better, even.

Fifteen or twenty minutes later, when I went back downstairs to get pork for my lunch, the kids were still there, still playing with the balloons, still just as excited.

When did we lose that kind of wonder? Why do childish pleasures cease to be adult ones? As a fifty-three-year-old, I find nothing remotely appealing about blowing up a balloon and letting it fly away. I wouldn’t do it once, let alone again and again. If I did it at all, it would be to entertain children—and even then, my pleasure would be borrowed, derivative of theirs. Otherwise, it would feel like a chore, something to check off before a birthday party. And knowing I could pay someone else to do it, I probably would.

Children don’t outsource joy. They might share it, but even that has to be taught. Their pleasures are closely held.

What, then, are mine?

I don’t think I have many. Most of what I enjoy I’m happy to share—or no one else wants. I’m the only one in my family who likes whiskey. I’ll offer a puff of my cigar, though I know my wife won’t take it. And what pleasures I do have, I pass easily to my children.

Just before Christmas break, I came home with small treasures from my students and gave most of them away. Lena claimed the Starbucks cards. Both kids went for the candy. Ginger took the restaurant gift cards and tucked them away for busy weekends. I let them—all of it—without hesitation.

That ease, too, is a kind of privilege.

It must be a particular first-world luxury to carve out moments so carefree that our troubles dissolve into the fog during an evening walk. We have worries, yes, but nothing dire. Poverty is distant, almost unthinkable. We do not worry about our next meal.

And yet, how quickly could it all unravel? How quickly could democracy slide into chaos? How fast could our civilization collapse and leave us worse off than before? We like to imagine that people in poorer parts of the world know how to survive with less, that hunter-gatherers endured without any of the technologies we now depend on.

The preppers who populate my social media feeds—once you watch one, the algorithm supplies the rest—are convinced collapse is imminent. They warn us where not to go, what to stockpile, how to survive martial law and total disorder. But can anyone live a fulfilled life while obsessing over collapse? To call oneself a prepper seems to require abandoning nearly every other concern.

Perhaps that is the core of first-world nonchalance. We live in a world that feels inevitable, permanent, destined. Even its collapse is hard to imagine. To suggest that food might one day be hard to get—or that entertainment might disappear—feels as absurd as waking up without arms or legs. We are too accustomed to having the world at our fingertips, carried in the microcomputers we casually call phones.

So what do we make of first-world luxury? Of privilege? Of the innocence of childhood?

I see it in small rituals: walking the dog at night, schedules snapping back into place, students lining the halls—eager, a little sad that break is over. The Christmas decorations came down at school today. Our own sad little tree will linger until the weekend, or until my mid-January birthday passes, and then it too will be gone. Another Christmas season ended.

And yet each one seems to close with more uncertainty than the last. Political turmoil deepens. Environmental collapse feels less abstract. There is a troubling naivety—perhaps even selfishness—in those who greet this with confidence that, before it gets too bad, salvation will arrive.

A new year. Another war. New threats of evil.

And still, we go about our business.

What else could we do?

American Society

Wednesday 13 August 2025

Hoodie

Sunday 27 August 2023

I don’t think I will ever understand the fashion of wearing hoodies — with the hood pulled firmly over the head — in the heat of summer. One of our neighbor’s sons was doing yard work the other day wearing a hoodie. It was ninety degrees; it was a full, thick hoodie and not one of those fashionable cooling hoodies that have come on the market in the last few years. A long-sleeve, thick hoodie in ninety-degree weather.

I have students who, when they can’t wear hoodies (dress code violation), wear sweatshirts in class. When my air conditioning in the classroom was out the first week of school, they complained about how hot it was. While wearing sweatshirts.

Reflections on a Family Evening Out

Sunday 3 January 2021

“Tomorrow we go back to normal.” It was a thought in everyone’s mind. Of course, this covid-normal is far from normal, but it has become our new normal: masks, plexiglass, and social distancing while at school. We decided, though, to have one last little hoorah and went to Barnes and Noble for a little shopping. The Boy got a book about Stan Lee comics, in part how to draw them, in part how to conceptualize comics. The latter is a little advanced for him, but he’ll grow into it. The Girl got the newest addition to a couple of series she’s been reading. I thought about getting Bob Woodward’s Rage since it was half-price in hardback, but I’m ready to be done with Trump entirely, so I just let that go.

Afterward, we went to a shoe store for the Boy to get his first pair of Vans. He explained he’d wanted them forever — “My dream shoes!” — but I don’t recall him ever mentioning them. Still, he had the money from Christmas, and we let him choose how to spend it. I wouldn’t have imagined spending my gift money for shoes at his age, but he’s his own person.

On our way out of the shopping center, a young woman stood in the median with a sign proclaiming that she was homeless. I gave her five dollars as we passed her, but I haven’t stopped thinking about her that much since then. She looked to be in her mid-twenties at most, and she appeared relatively healthy, but her shoes, tattered and filthy, told a different story. All evening, on and off, my thoughts returned to her. If she was as young as I conjectured, she’s only about a decade older than L. What would I want for L if she were in such a situation? Obviously and simply, I’d want her to call us and ask for help before she ever got to that situation. Did that young lady have no one to turn to? Was she living in a car she’d parked in one of the vast parking lots of the shopping center? And, of course, there’s the common refrain: was she faking it?

A lot of people don’t give money to beggars because they feel they’ll just waste it. “He’ll just use it to buy booze.” “She’ll just use it to buy drugs.” It’s as if they don’t want to be taken for suckers, to be seen (or to see themselves) as gullible. We’d just spent a fair amount on books, shoes, and volleyball equipment (while the Boy was buying shoes): the five dollars I gave her will not make a dent in our budget. I’d rather be generous but gullible.

Value

Sunday 12 January 2020

We were playing Monopoly this evening and the Boy bought his first railroad. It’s always his plan to try to get all four railroads. When L landed on the next railroad, she bought it for $200, then offered to sell it to E for $400; he accepted the offer. I tried to explain to him why this was a bad deal, that paying double for this railroad was not worth it at this point, but he was stubborn and would not listen.

“It might be worth it if this were your final railroad,” I told him. “As it is, it’s certainly not worth this much money just for the second railroad. There’s no guarantee that you’ll get either of the other two railroads.

A couple of hours later we were looking through a box of old collector cards that I had. There were baseball cards, football cards, basketball cards, and even, strangely enough, some Star Wars cards that I have gotten from somewhere at some point in my childhood. E asked me how much these cards were worth I tried to explain to him that I really didn’t have any idea because there was just no way of knowing.

A newly-discovered creek about a mile from our house

“Where on the cards does it show how much they’re worth?” he asked.

“It’s not on the cards,” I explained. “It all depends on how valuable they are and that depends on how rare they are.”

“How could we find out?” he asked.

“We would have to go talk to an expert.”

“I think I know an expert.” He told me of a friend at school so that’s mini baseball cards. “A couple of them are worth a few million dollars.”

“How do you know that?” I asked.

“Because he told me.”

“Do you believe him?”

“No.” He thought for a moment then changed his answer.

“Does that make sense?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

I tried to explain to him that if indeed the family had a card which is are several million dollars they certainly wouldn’t let the seven-year-old child keep it.

“Why not?”

“Because remember what I told you about Star Wars characters and every other collector item: they’re only valuable if they’re in perfect condition. If you bent it, or wrinkled it, or tore it, it would be worthless.”

“Why?”

“It’s just the way it is,” I sighed.

It’s all but impossible to explain to a seven-year-old how the scarcity of an item makes something valuable, something which otherwise would have no value, priceless. Baseball cards are just a bit of paper with a picture printed on them. Then again, change the word “paper” to “fabric” and it holds true for money: just a bit of material was a picture printed on it.

In the midst of all this, I’ve been re-reading Francis Spufford’s fantastic book Red Plenty, set in Khrushchev’s Soviet Union.

The premise is simple. When Khrushchev was ruling the Soviet Union. it seemed as if the Communist Utopia could indeed come to pass. A state-planned economy that would bypass all the uncertainty and unfairness of supply and demand capitalism seemed achievable. Vacuum tubes and algorithms made such calculations on such a scale achievable.

The book follows various characters as they weave their way through the creation of this Utopia, each playing their own part. Mathematicians, economists, biologists, Politburo members, Eisenhower, Khrushchev, and others all appear in the novel. All of the Soviet characters are searching for the formula that will make the magic Elixir of Plenty. Plenty of meat. Plenty of bread. Plenty of apartments. Plenty of cars. Plenty of everything.

Within all of this, the chief problem is how to assign value to both work and commodities. The book, which is part-novel, part-history, is filled with characters fictional and real; many events of the book are actual events in history. It’s nearly 500 dense pages telling the story of just over 70 years of men and women working feverishly to determine a mathematical and certain way of deciding value.

If they couldn’t do it, I’m not sure I can explain it to a seven-year-old in one evening.

In Line

Wednesday 20 November 2019

We reached the checkout line at Aldi roughly at the same time. I had a cart filled with items; he had a package of bacon.

“Go ahead — you have so little,” I said.

He shook his head.

“Seriously, you should go ahead of me.”

“No, no, you go,” he mumbled. He was an African American man in his sixties, it appeared, with a long, white, disheveled beard, and the faint reek of body odor, alcohol, and feces.

That particular Aldi is in an area of town that can only be described as “economically depressed.” There is one particular section where, when I ride my bike to school and back, I always smell marijuana, even at 7:15 in the morning. So seeing homeless people like that is nothing all that unexpected.

I stood there in line, wondering about the gentleman there in behind me when suddenly the manager of the store walked up to the man and politely asked if he was supposed to be in the store.

“I have a couple of cashiers telling me that you’re not supposed to be here. Are you supposed to be here?”

The man hung his head a bit and started walking out as he said, “No.” There was no defiance in his voice; no anger in his voice; no disappointment in his voice — no emotion at all. He just placed the bacon on a store display as he passed by and walked toward the door.

“If you come back in here again,” the manager continued, still calm, still very respectful, “that will be trespassing, and we will notify the authorities.” The man said nothing and simply shuffled out of the store.

What could he have possibly done to get barred from the store? Perhaps he stole something. Maybe he panhandled and that was deemed as harassing customers. Perhaps he simply harassed customers. I don’t know, but I couldn’t help but feel pity for the man. Mental illness seemed a certainty, but what about his youth? Had life always been like this for the man? Did he have a family? Did they know where he was? Did they care?

I have taught so many students over the year for whom, tragically, such a life seems an entirely realistic possibility. They, too, would leave someone who doesn’t know to wonder whether they have family, whether they have anyone to support, help, or even care about them.

I have to believe that we can do better as a society. I can’t believe someone could watch such an exchange and not feel moved. And the more pessimistic side of me — realistic? — realizes that there are countless who can look at this and not feel that there must be some dark hole in the center of our society that allows such things to happen.

1984 in 2018

Wednesday 14 March 2018

Somehow or other, I’ve encountered in articles discussions of or quotes from George Orwell’s 1984 two or three times in as many days. “When was the last time I read that?” I asked myself, quick to answer: “The first time I read it, which was in ninth or tenth grade.” In other words, thirty or so years ago. So on the way home from school today, I dropped into the local branch of the Greenville County library system and picked up a copy of the novel.

It somehow seemed ironic that I borrowed a book about ultimate and total control of a society on the day when thousands of kids around the country protested the perceived lack of gun control in the States. I say “perceived” not because I’m a card-carrying member of the NRA — which I am not — or am any kind of staunch opponent to gun control laws but because many of the perceptions I’ve heard from the teens protesting seem to have missed the point. Many haven’t, but a few have.

For instance, I heard on the radio coming home the other day an interview with a young lady from Chicago who wanted all guns banned because she was “scared of guns.” Growing up in the inner city, she’d witnessed gun violence firsthand, and she and her mother had once held a young man as he died from a gunshot wound. She wanted laws that would make it all but impossible to get guns. I wonder if anyone pointed out the likelihood that the guns used in inner city violence are obtained illegally, and thus no amount of legislation will stop that from happening.

On the other hand, it seems that many of the kids had very logical ideas: increased background checks, better cooperation between law enforcement to prevent such things from happening, more money for school counselors and psychologist to help find those kids before they pop.

So I came home and in the evening, read a bit of the novel. Within a few pages, when Winston goes into the apartment across the hall to help the woman who lives there with her clogged drain, he leaves thinking about “the look of helpless fright on the woman’s greyish face” because of how children were behaving: they’d been pretending to be Thought Police arresting Winston, accusing him of collaboration with the enemy, declaring that they knew he was committing Thought Crimes on a regular basis.

With those children, he thought, that wretched woman must lead a life of terror. Another year, two years, and they would be watching her night and day for symptoms of unorthodoxy. Nearly all children nowadays were horrible. What was worst of all was that by means of such organizations as the Spies they were systematically turned into ungovernable little savages, and yet this produced in them no tendency whatever to rebel against the discipline of the Party. On the contrary, they adored the Party and everything connected with it. The songs, the processions, the banners, the hiking, the drilling with dummy rifles, the yelling of slogans, the worship of Big Brother—it was all a sort of glorious game to them. All their ferocity was turned outwards, against the enemies of the State, against foreigners, traitors, saboteurs, thought-criminals. It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children. And with good reason, for hardly a week passed in which The Times did not carry a paragraph describing how some eavesdropping little sneak—’child hero’ was the phrase generally used—had overheard some compromising remark and denounced its parents to the Thought Police.

I read that and thought of the parent who emailed me because he was afraid that his child had missed a test in my class due to skipping class for the protest. “No,” I assured him, “I thought about the potential for many kids being absent for some part of that class and planned accordingly.” He mentioned that he would have been disappointed if his daughter had missed the test because of choosing the protest over school work. In other words, he expected X of his daughter and could express disappointment and presumably some kind of consequence for her actions — the exact opposite of the reality in Orwell’s novel.

I read that and thought about how I can teach my children what to think and believe, and that I have the freedom to teach them something that counters the prevailing narrative of the time. There’s a certain wonder in that freedom, but when you see little kids on documentaries doing a Nazi salute and using the N-word freely, it’s hard not to wonder where the limits on that might logically be, and how we could enforce those limits, and whether we would even want to try. I think the answer is obviously “No,” but how do we counteract that as a society? Or do we counteract it? Is America so free that we can raise bigots? Isn’t that an Orwellian Thought Crime until someone acts upon it?

I read that and thought about people who homeschool their kids. Some who choose that route do so because they’re afraid something like this is already happening, that kids are being brainwashed in the schools, being turned into evolution-believing, homosexuality-accepting, socialist-leaning moral relativists who will end up rejecting all the parents have tried to instill in them. They see 1984 as virtually fulfilled prophecy.

I read that and thought about what it would have been like to live in the Soviet Union in the height of thought-control there, when people could be denounced for anything or nothing, when people were arrested simply to fill a quota. (I’m getting this from Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, which I read probably twenty years ago — might be rusty on the details.) In such a society, one did indeed have to be careful around one’s children.

So it’s been a day punctuated with thoughts of potential disasters and real disasters, of potential fears and real fears. But far from depressing me, these thoughts have just lingered at the edges here and there, which is perhaps a good thing and bad at the same time. On the one hand, we can’t live our lives consumed with such thoughts lest we become nihilists, and that’s no way to be a parent. On the other hand, a seeming complacency breeds — what? Stagnation? And yet — and yet.

The kids played; the Boy tried to build; the dog behaved; the Girl took out compost without a single complaint; the duration of the battery in K’s new phone is improving daily, assuaging her worries. So in the immediate scope of things, it was a great day. Would that it were for more people.

Passing Along Info

Saturday 29 July 2017

This is a short piece about a recent experience I had online. I am thinking about using it as part of my curriculum for assessing internet information information. I knew from the start, before clicking on the link, that it was bogus, but since my audience will be thirteen-year-olds, I took a step-by-step approach as if each little discovery slowly confirmed my suspicions.

I recently saw a link in social media to an article that made me raise my eyebrows considerably.

http://www.truthandaction.org/nasa-admits-spraying-lithium-into-the-atmosphere/

I’ve heard about conn trails and the suggestion that it’s some government agency spraying chemicals on a hapless population, but I wondered: In what context did NASA admit this? Was it a news conference? Will there be a video in the article with an official NASA spokesperson admitting this? Will there be a document from NASA?

I read the article and found it lacking from the opening paragraph.

New evidence emerged this week regarding NASA spraying unusual substances into the atmosphere. Officials state these chemicals are “harmless to the environment”. But the real question we need to be asking is, are these substances safe for humans?

Notice: the article cites “new evidence” but never supplies that evidence. Instead it simply summarizes the purported evidence. There’s a quote that lacks any attribution whatsoever: these chemicals are “harmless to the environment.” The quotation marks indicate that it is a direct quote from some source, but that source is never named or even explained. A search of the exact phrase “harmless to the environment” provides “about 2,230,000 results” from Google (source) and 306,000,000 results from Bing (source). So even if this is a direct quote, there’s no telling where it came from.

Next, the paragraph lists as their authority unnamed “officials.” Who are these officials? Are they insiders acting as whistle blowers? How many officials exactly are there?

The rest of the article continues in a similar vein, without listing a single source or providing anything beyond commentary.

But truth be told, I had my doubts from the beginning. The moment the page loaded, I was suspicious.

Three ads in the top fourth of the page? I immediately began thinking that this was a web site set up by one individual simply to earn money from ads. The fact that this is a WordPress.com site (See the WP logo in the clipped fragment at the top? WordPress, which also runs this site, automatically adds that if it is a site it hosts.) also makes me wonder that this might just be an ad-farm site set up by one individual. Whois confirmed this:

The domain is registered by one Bill McIntosh. he’s also the admin contact and the tech contact. I know from personal experience that when one registers a domain name, there is an option to include as admin contact and tech contact the same data supplied for the registrant contact. Most news organizations have very different data for this.

Here’s CNN’s registration information.

And here’s Fox News’s registration information:

Very different indeed.

Who is this “Bill McIntosh” behind Truth and Action? It’s not immediately obvious, and it’s not very easy to find out. What are his credentials? Who has he hired to work for him?

This too is questionable because there is a link suggesting that readers themselves can “report for” the web site. This suggests that just about anyone can write something for this site.

Finally, there’s the other content on the site itself. Articles include

“The Nazi Origins of Renewable Energy and Global Warming”
“The Most Secretive Treasury in History…Meet the Rothschilds”
“Who Really Owns, Controls the Military Industrial Complex?”

Applying a little background knowledge, it becomes clear that this is a site that peddles conspiracy theories as its main fare.

I commented to the original poster,

And the source? A document? A press conference? What about the web site itself? Who’s saying this? Do they have any credentials at all or is it Joe Blow in his basement making money off the ads for this site?

The poster replied that she was “just passing info” and pointed out that she “did not voice an opinion.” Pointing out that “person is free to do their own research” she encouraged me to “research for yourself please.” And so I did. What I found was confirmation of my initial suspicions: nothing but nonsense.

The question, though, is whether or not this is “info.” If its on the internet, is it automatically “info”?

In Mauldin

Tuesday 25 July 2017

In our town. I ride by bike to school on the back road he takes to escape. I can tell by the light, by where the sun is, that it’s early morning. I could have been pedaling down that road at that moment, but I wasn’t — I would have remembered such stupidity in our little town.

Alternate Facts

Friday 14 July 2017

“He said it. I can show you a video!”

The Neighbors, Redux

Friday 6 January 2017

Some years ago, I wrote about a house we’d discovered under construction in the Asheville area. It’s on the market now, for just over $10 million. The Trulia listing reads:

An elegant French chateau constructed of 3″ thick limestone and the utmost quality styled for today. A complete Roman Spa, entertainment area with card room, kitchen, pool, wine tasting room and theater entertain guests and owners regally. Formal rooms abound including a very special oak bar. There are 4 full kitchens, 4 garages, HVAC is water furnace.

A blatant attempt to make one’s own Biltmore, the house is certainly huge: at 15,000 square feet, though, it’s not even 1/10 of Biltmore’s 175,000 square feet.

Approahing Floriańska

Sunday 26 July 2015

As you emerge from the tunnel that passes under the intersection of Westerplatte, Pawia, Baszowa, and Lubicz streets in Krakow, you emerge into a green park that surrounds the old city center. All tourists who arrive from a train or a bus must walk this way, and it’s the logical place for buskers, solicitors, and beggars to line the wide sidewalk and compete for attention. There’s always an accordion player or three along the way, numerous students working for a few extra groszy by handing out fliers, and beggars. One tends to grow accustomed to them all. “Dziękuję,” you learn to say politely and briskly to the students who are near enough that you can’t simply ignore. The buskers merge with the city traffic and the general conversation to form an ignorable element of the soundtrack, unless a given performer is really gifted. And the beggars: they’re everywhere. The conscience hardens, especially when you suspect their motives. (Beginning in the nineties, some younger beggars were more honest, holding placards that simply read “Piwo” with “Beer” possibly scratched underneath for foreigners.)

But some of them get to you.

Last week, as we were walking the kids towards the old city center, we passed by an elderly woman sprawled on the sidewalk, her hands shaking violently and her medicines spread out in front of her.

“Why is she shaking?” L asked.

“She’s sick, honey,” K replied.

We took a few more steps and realized what we’d done.

“Here,” I said, giving L a couple of five-zloty coins. “Go take this to her.”

The Girl grabbed the Boy by the shoulders. “Come on, E,” she said solemnly. They went back and clanked the two coins into the small metal box that held a handful of change. Hopefully, a small, quiet lesson for them.

Another Saturday Morning

Saturday 14 March 2015

We are aware of what the kids watch, and we’ve cut a few shows from L’s media diet because of concerns about values and behaviors exhibited and hence promoted.

But what about shows I just personally find annoying? Pokemon is a prime example. L loves it; E enjoys it — I think it’s the most irritating thing on earth. But is that any reason to ban it? Certainly not. But it’s plenty of reason to tell them, “Turn it down. Way down.”

Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Tuesday 16 September 2014

I was recently asked to view this TED talk and provide some feedback. Here’s the talk.

Here are my thoughts in virtually un-edited form:

To begin with, a few seemingly-random facts: Sir Ken Robinson has a PhD from the University of London. He’s speaking as part of the TED program, which was implemented by Chris Anderson, an Oxford graduate, and his Sapling Foundation. This video was delivered on the World Wide Web, which, despite Al Gore’s protests to the contrary, was the creation of Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee, who studied at Queen’s College at Oxford. All of this is computer based, and many attribute the creation of the computer largely to John von Neumann, a classically trained Hungarian mathematician and physicist who, in an effort to bring himself some peace on his deathbed, quoted from memory large swaths of classical poetry in their original Greek and Latin. I am currently writing this on a computer in my home that uses Linux, an operating system (i.e., Windows and Apple’s OS X) created by Linus Torvald while he studied at University of Helsinki. While many might never have heard of it, Linux is the most used operating system in the world, running on 80% of the world’s super-computers and probably closer to 95% of the servers that make up the Internet. Finally, I am writing this in a country that in the history of the world is and has always been quite unique for its constitutional freedoms, a country that was created by a group of men that experience classical education in its truest meaning.

So it’s deeply ironic that Robinson and all of the individuals who created the technology to view his speech were products of this very education system that Robinson suggests needs reforming. Robinson suggests that we’re stifling innovation and thus we need to have a revolution in education but he says so on a platform made possible by this age of unprecedented innovation, an age that is the product almost exclusively of classical education and its modern kissing cousins.

Robinson suggests that modern education is killing creativity. Yet to be creative, one must have something to be creative with. Otherwise, creativity consists of only the basest instincts, as we have seen here at Hughes on the eighth-grade hall with the recent behavior of two of our students. Their hideous act (and if you don’t know what it was, it’s best not to ask), in their eyes, was brilliantly creative. But as the saying goes, garbage in, garbage out. If we start with nothing to be creative with, we will be creative with our basest instincts.

We traditionalists often suggest that we need to have a wide liberal arts education before the specialization of college in order to ensure the continuation of culture, but it is less esoteric than that. Creativity comes from having something to create with, and all great creative endeavors have stood on the shoulders of the creativity of others–I know I’m mixing my metaphors here, but I’m only intending a first draft of this, so bear with me. Picasso, for example, did not start with Cubism; he learned all the rules, then he decided how he wanted to break them. Faulkner did not begin by writing run-on sentences; he mastered his craft and then learned how and when to break the rules for effect. Linus Torvalds did not create the Linux operating system in a vacuum, and Jef Raskin, Bill Atkinson, Burrell Smith, and Steve Jobs did not create Apple’s operating system from nothing: they both used UNIX, an older, very stable system, as a starting point. So when we start pushing this individualization, this specialization from graduate school to college to high school to middle school, we decrease the amount of raw materials we provide students to be creative with. Despite Robinson’s contention to the contrary, it is based on “the idea of linearity.”

The truth of the matter is that education is linear: one has to learn addition before algebra, and one has to learn algebra before calculus. One has to learn to read music before embarking on a Chopin Ballade. One has to learn basic coding before attempting to create an operating system. There is a hierarchy of knowledge in any discipline, and one must learn things in that hierarchical order or else it’s simply chaos.

I understand Robinson would not dispute that. He’s not suggesting we let students begin wherever they want. He’s talking about an organic model that allows students to follow their own interests wherever they lead them. To do otherwise, he suggests, is soul-killing: We “have sold ourselves into a fast food model of education, and it’s impoverishing our spirit and our energies as much as fast food is depleting our physical bodies,” says the man who quotes Yeats, a product of this very education, an education that, in Yeats’s time, was much more linear than anything we have today. My point is that, as with creativity, to be organic, you have to start with something: life, art, technology, or even existence does not start from nothing.

But there’s more to it than that when we consider the fact that we live in a democratic republic like America. Robinson suggests that students should be able to create learn “with external support based on a personalized curriculum.” This is going to result in a highly fragmented society, with very little common knowledge–i.e., cultural literacy–to share. It is nothing short of Balkanization. E. D. Hirsh, Jr. writes in Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know about the impact of highly-specialized knowledge on democracy:

No modern society can hope to become a just society without a high level of universal literacy. Putting aside for the moment the practical argument about the economic uses of literacy, we can contemplate the even more basic principle that underlies our national system of education in the first place–that people in a democracy can be entrusted to decide all important matters for themselves because they can deliberate and communicate with one another. (12)

In other words, for democracy to work, everyone must be informed about the basic issues and be conversant about them. That this is not the case in America today is painfully obvious when watching the gotcha viral videos that show people struggling to name one single American senator, to find a given country on the map, and other ridiculous ignorance. Should we create a completely personalize curriculum, many of our students would study video gaming and rap music, leaving very few who are interested in the functions and institutions of our government. It’s easy to see that this becomes an oligarchy quite quickly.

So Robinson can’t possibly be suggesting complete topical freedom for students. He would have to accept the fact that there are some basic things that everyone needs to know in order to function in a modern Western democratic society, but the instant he does that, he’s undermined his own argument. What we have them is not the revolution Robinson is claiming but a bit of feel-good tinkering around the edges. Or complete chaos.

What then is the problem? Why does our education system not work anymore? I suggest that it’s not the education system that’s broken: after all, as I pointed out, it has created all we see around us today. It’s culture that’s broken. Why does the same educational system of the early 20th century no longer work? Because it doesn’t mesh with the 21st century culture, which demands instant gratification, complete and blissful entertainment, and absolutely no hard work.

Furthermore, education doesn’t kill creativity; our modern culture kills creativity. We turn on and tune out with our huge televisions, mobile devices, and gaming systems, then wonder why we aren’t as creative as we used to be. We serve up to our children mindless entertainment that requires no imagination, then wonder why they don’t have imagination. And like always, we blame it on our education system, the system that created Mark Zuckerberg and Sean Parker, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. And what do most people use these men’s amazing inventions to do? Foster creativity? Hardly.

So can this proposed Robinsonian revolution solve the problem? Well, I don’t think as Robinson presents it, it really is much of a revolution. A total revolution would look like this: the dissolution of the grade-level system in exchange for a mastery-learning program with a basic curriculum that fosters general civic, mathematical, linguistic, scientific, and technological literacy. This program would let students learn these basics at their own pace, but it would require mastery before moving on. If takes a student three years for one topic in math, then it takes that student three years and she stays there until she shows mastery; if it takes another student three months, that student moves on in three months. Once students master these basics–what used to be about an eighth-grade education but now is probably more like a twelfth-grade education–students can move on in a similar setting to explore any interest he or she wants. And if that means a student stops his education then and gets a job in construction, then that’s his choice. But that is too radical a reform, and still more important to policy makers, the fiscal cost of such an education would be relatively staggering.

Yet that wouldn’t solve the underlying cultural problem. That, I’m afraid, is out of the purview of public education. It’s a pessimistic view, I understand, and I’m sure some might wonder how I could be a teacher with such a bleak outlook.

And so in final response to Robinson and to more succinctly and beautifully sum up my thoughts, I too turn to Yeats:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Invitation

Wednesday 21 May 2014

Ashley Madison sent me an email some time ago. I don’t really know Ashley, so I was surprised she was contacting me. “What could this be about?” I wondered as I opened the email. I quickly discovered that Ashley was offering me a chance to betray all I believe in, to betray my wife, to betray my children, to betray my community, and above all, to betray my conscience. More fundamentally, in doing all of that, I would, in an echo of one of the most the paradoxical Christian ideas, both initially and ultimately betray God.

Ashley’s letter began,

Join our Married People’s Dating community right now and we GUARANTEE that you will have a sexual affair with a married woman or man! We GUARANTEE this!

Press here if you want to have an affair with a married woman or man.

I wondered for a moment about all the stresses an affair would entail. There’s the guilt, of course, of betraying the person you’re supposed to be closest to, the guilt of betraying God, the guilt of betraying your children, your parents. Then there’s all the stress of discovery: this is something that must be kept secret, so the unfaithful partner needs to scrutinize every little act, every little word, every single facial expression to make sure not to betray oneself.

Ashley, though, pointed out another way being unfaithful can increase stress:

Having an affair can be stressful because you never know if the other person involved is going to get attached to you. You just want the “sexual activity” and nothing else.

“What a great point!” I thought. It’s bad enough that you’ve already got someone attached to you, someone who expects you to be faithful and honest with her. What could be more stressful than people expecting this of you?

Fortunately, Ashley had a solution:

The BEST thing about our DISCREET dating community is that you will only meet up with people just like you that DO NOT want a commitment, just a sexual relationship.

Still, I wasn’t convinced. I mean, that’s money we’re talking about. What if someone signs up for this web site and then can’t manage to have an affair? What a tragedy! All that money and time wasted. On the other hand, you might meet someone who’s only playing some kind of game — more money and time wasted. Fortunately, Ashley once again came to the rescue:

Here is why you should join today if you want to have an affair with a married person, or if you’re married and want to have an affair:

You can check it out, see if you like it, and then begin contacting married people for secret intimate encounters.

We GUARANTEE that you will have a sexual relationship with a married woman or man!

Our dating community is 100 percent DISCREET, and you will not have to worry about someone getting attached to you!

What a relief — my biggest concern in having an affair of course would be that the woman I’m having the affair with might actually think it’s something serious, that she might not realize that a man who can’t be faithful to his own wife certainly couldn’t be faithful to a mistress. I was so relieved that Ashley saw this concern immediately.

The letter ended with a simple question:

There are thousands of unhappy married women and men in every city, but they DO NOT want to leave their spouse. They want to stay married, but they want to have an affair without ever being caught. Our dating community is PERFECT for these people. Are you one of them?

All sarcasm aside, no, I am not one of them Ashley. If I were unhappily married, I would try something novel, like talking to my wife about it, like getting counseling, like being honest. I would ask myself a simple question: “Am I not happy because my wife is not happy?” In other words, I would consider whether I was the root cause of it all.

I guess Ashley wouldn’t, which is why I feel for her, but most of all, I feel sorry for whomever she claims to be committed.

Aldi Quarter

Friday 7 March 2014

“Daddy, can I have my quarter back?”

“Just a second,” I say, reaching into my pocket as I come to the stoplight. To find my pocket is empty. The irony brings a smile: “Honey, I think I left it in the buggy.”

Aldi saves money in many ways, but one method is based on the simple principle that we like physical things, that the slightest bit of actual money has more value than the minute or two we might save in leaving a shopping cart in the middle of the parking lot. The theory was, I’m assuming, that if people have to put down a monetary deposit, they’ll want it back, no matter how insignificant. And so we all dutifully roll our carts back to the long outdoor line of carts, snap the metal tab back into place, and retrieve our quarter. (Actually, since we leave our cart at the checkout for the next customer, it’s the quarter belonging to the guy who beat us to the checkout lane.) In doing so, we save work for the employees, because no one has to go out and round up all the carts, thus reducing overhead, which leads, in part, to Aldi’s famously low prices.

Why do we return the shopping carts? After all, it’s just a quarter, and we could easily just tack that on as a shopping expense like gas. But we don’t. Not a single one of us: I’ve never seen a single buggy left in the parking lot at Aldi. Not one. Yet in the parking lots of grocery stores that have buggy corrals and regularly send out young employees to rustle them up, we see shopping carts left here, there, everywhere. Customers must feel that, since someone is already coming out to release the carts from their little prisons that they could just as easily walk a few more steps and pick up the buggy left a few yards away. It’s rare that you see a good Samaritan pushing back someone else’s cart, but therein lies the beauty of the Aldi system: it relies not on motivating customers to return their own carts but in motivating other customers to round up abandoned carts, because, hey, free quarter. So the rest of us must internalize that thought and tack on a little sense of competition: “Someone’s going to get that quarter — it might as well be me.”

At least that’s my idea. Any others?

Photo by JeepersMedia

Stories

Monday 3 February 2014

You pass by an old house in the middle of the country and you immediately start thinking about the story. About the stories that make up the one story. A house is the physical center of a family, and so when you see a house that is falling in on yourself, you wonder about the times in the house when the roof was still whole and the chimney still smoked. You wonder if the condition of the house is in any way a reflection of the condition of the family, sure that it isn’t but equally certain that it could be, especially when it’s a house in the South. It brings to mind images of the Sutpens and Bundrens and a thousand other families from Southern Gothic novels.

It’s hard to see a house that’s caving in on itself and imagine laughter in that house, but surely it was there, you say to yourself. A family without laughter is as horrific a thing as you can imagine. But still, it’s hard to hear the echoes when the roof has fallen in and a wall collapsed under the weight of years of neglect.

On the other hand, perhaps it is the old family homestead that is empty now because one of the sons has made good enough in some venture or another to be able to build his parents a new house. Or perhaps it’s simply that the widowed mother has now moved in with her daughter and son-in-law in the house across the way.

All these stories swirling around us and we don’t even know what page we’re looking at.

Leave Your Best Shot

Tuesday 7 January 2014

Odd day today: three hour delay for students but a normal arrival time for teachers. Due to the cold, the district didn’t want people out waiting for the bus; due to the lack of snow, most parents would be going to work and would have no way to arrange care for their children. (What do they do on snow days? The whole city doesn’t shut down? They still have to go to work many times students get to stay home.) That was the thinking: delay school for those who have to wait for a bus but open school for those who have no way arrange care.

The result: an odd day. No student at all during first period. One student during second period; three students during third period, though technically I’m supposed to have no students during third period because it is the first related arts period for eighth grade. Fourth period we returned to semi-normal for the rest of the day.

So I arrived home and Babcia jokingly asked if we teachers did a little drinking during the morning when no one was there. A shot or two. Only, she wasn’t really joking: until recently, it was fairly common in Polish schools.

“No,” I said with a smile, imagining the horrors that would produce in an American school.

“Why not?”

“Because you can get fired for that. Or possibly even face some jail time.”

“I don’t believe it! Not even a little something? That’s a bit of an exaggeration,” she pontificated.

Like so many cultural differences, I just let it slide at that.

To be fair, the trend of drinking in the teachers’ room was noticeably on the decline when we left almost ten years ago, and at that point, it had already diminished significantly in frequency compared to what it looked like in 1996, when I first arrived. Then, the teachers’ room looked like any other office when it was someone’s name day or some date of similar significance: cake, coffee, tea, a bottle of vodka, perhaps some wine, maybe some champagne. Indeed, in one of the most ironic scenes I’ve ever witnessed at a school dance, one teacher took a shot of vodka, stood, squirted his always-present breath-freshener into his mouth five or six times, and said, “Come on, Tadek, let’s go check the students for alcohol.”

By the time I’d left, a bottle of this or that was a relatively rare occurrence in the teachers’ room. It happened, but seldom, and more and more people begged off when offered a drink. As Poland has looked more to the West and less to the East, they seem to be leaving this cultural oddity — something which likely strikes the average American as unspeakably unprofessional — behind.

Enforcement

Friday 6 September 2013

Measure B — it sounds like something from a cheesy low-budget sci-fi, but it’s law in Los Angeles County. It requires permits from the health department for the creation of pornographic films, regular testing of participants in pornography (not sure what to call them, but “actor” certainly doesn’t seem right) for the HIV virus, and the use of condoms in all pornographic ventures. Predictably, the porn industry is against it. Porn starlet Cameron Bay’s recent positive HIV test, however, might be causing some second thoughts. ABC news has an article about it.

There is of course the question of the constitutionality of the law. “U.S. District Judge Dean D. Pregerso [ruled] last week that found Measure B’s mandatory condom requirement on all shoots in Los Angeles County to be constitutional” (Daily News), but porn company owners insist that it is a violation of their First Amendment rights.

There are of course other concerns as well. An anti-Measure-B web site makes the contention that “Measure B will hurt working, middle-class families that have been hurt hardest during the Recession” (source) but it’s hard to understand how that could be the case: I don’t think most porn stars/starlets would be considered working class. Of course there are those actually shooting, editing, packaging, and marketing the pornographic videos, and since porn is a multi-billion dollar industry, that could be a sizable number of people. (The same site suggests that the number of jobs affected would be more than 10,000.)

Whatever the argument for and against, I have some questions of my own. How will this be enforced? Will county representatives be on set for every pornographic video filming? Will they be randomly screening videos to see that actors wear condoms? Will there be pre-filming inspections? Just how will this be enforced?

Furthermore, do we really want to have our government engaging in full-time viewing of pornography? How will the county advertize the position? One shudders at the thought of the wording of such a classified.

These people are engaging in a morally questionable (at best) industry, and they’re adults: they know the risks. No one is forcing them to act in these films, so why is the government wanting to force this on them? People participating in this form of entertainment should do a risk assessment, taking into account the risks not only to their bodies but to their spirits, before embarking upon or continuing in a porn career.

Negligent Parents

http://www.cnn.com/2013/08/22/opinion/granderson-criminal-kids-responsibility/index.html?c&page=4

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