This Is Not News

Every now and again my belief that people can be reasonable runs smack into the evidence that we sure as hell aren’t rational. We can lay out in advance what the “rational� choice is, the choice that makes the most sense given circumstances, needs, opportunities, and so on, but there are points where the human brain just refuses to follow that script.

I’ve noticed a blind spot I have when it comes to kids, and it’s no surprise that it’s grown since I’ve become a father. Thinking about kids being hurt, deprived, suffering in any way makes me recoil, sometimes physically. I had a particularly vivid case of that today that still has me shaken up a bit. I’m trying to sort out a whole bunch of emotions, but I keep coming back to this lizard-brain impulse I have that You Don’t Mess With The Kids. And I’m trying to figure out why I feel so strongly about it. I mean, I know why I feel that You Don’t Mess With MY Kid. And I have a lot of intellectual support for a general You Don’t Mess With Anyone position. But somewhere, I think I have a belief that childhood should be a happy, relatively carefree time – not just from big stuff, but from as many of the little heartbreaks and disappointments that life throws at us, and so anything that interferes with that is some sort of extra heinous offense.

And I don’t even know how much sense that makes. I mean, I don’t want to coddle anyone, leave them unable to deal with disappointment. And as they get older, kids certainly have the ability to ostracize and torment each other without any of us grownups getting involved. So the idyllic vision of childhood that I keep in my head probably doesn’t even exist, so why should I get so worked up when it doesn’t pan out in reality?

Then I think about the hugs I get from my daughter, affection with reckless abandon. I think of the story that Peter King wrote last week about an Army sergeant home from Iraq, whose young daughter curls up on the couch next to him and says, “Daddy, I’m glad you didn’t die in the war.� And there’s an honesty there, there is something pure there, and life just chips away at it relentlessly. So when someone or something comes in and just takes a wrecking ball to it, maybe it’s not so surprising that I react so viscerally to it.

So much has been written about the horrible killings of Amish schoolgirls in Lancaster County, PA this week, I wasn’t sure if we could add anything to the discussion. There are only so many ways to say “senseless” after all.

Then I came across this story:

The Pocono Record reports that monies are pouring in from all over the world to help the families of victims pay for that most visceral of modern “conveniences” – high hospital bills. Several paragraphs down in the story, you’ll find that the victims’ families were not only reluctant in accepting the money, they also insisted that similar funds be set up for the shooter’s children. This corresponds with earlier accounts that Amish community elders visited Roberts’ wife on the very day of the shootings to tell her that they forgave her husband for what he did.

That kind of foregiveness and compassion for those who would hurt you, who have hurt you, is unheard of in these times.

It sort of makes you understand, in a way, why the Amish separate themselves from our world in the first place.

Sorry for the lack of updates. Been getting myself settled into a new semester, teaching at two local colleges. I’m almost stunned at how much more I’m enjoying teaching now that the whole dissertation/grad school thing isn’t hanging over my head.

Over at theLogBook, Earl has finished overhauling the episode guides and putting them into a WordPress-based format that adds some new navigation and search options. I think the new look is pretty sweet, and it does reinforce how much easier it is to add content when you don’t have to code it. (I’m coding the very minimal syllabus pages for my courses, so that XHTML manual I bought isn’t going entirely to waste . . .)

The R.E.M. geek in me has been having some fun this week. The band was inducted into the Georgia Music Hall of Fame this past weekend, and Bill Berry participated in the festivities. If you go to Murmurs.com, you can seee YouTube video of the performances at the induction. A little lower on the page there’s a clip from a tribute concert a few days before, where the band showed up to play a couple of songs. I think I prefer the performance at the 40 Watt Club. I think the sound mix wasn’t quite right on the V broadcast of the induction. Plus, there’s something about the shots of middle aged folks at their banquet tables trying to dance to Begin the Begin that kinda reinforces the whole best-days-are-behind-them vibe that’s surrounded the band for a few years now. Like I mentioned to my classes the other day, you know you’re getting old when your favorite band has released more best-of compilations than new material over the last four years. The band, minus Bill, says they’re going back into the studio soon to make their next album. From a selfish standpoint, I hope they kick the energy level up a notch. But if they’re still doing stuff they like, more power to them.

Pattie and I just watched the first episode of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. Sorkin got the band back together, all right. Thank goodness for DVD and DVR, because the television season looks like an embarrasment of riches.

More on democracy later this week. Promise. 🙂

I heard about this one on NPR and I had to find out more about it on my own.

There’s a company (and by now, I’ll guess there’s at least one) that has tapped into a market dominated once by nursery school children and their teachers: Napping. That’s right, as a nation, we are so damn sleep deprived that MetroNaps believes it can make a fortune by giving us all a place to nap for twenty minutes or so.

They’re willing to let us nap anywhere: at work, in school, in airports, or at their franchised storefronts in North America and Europe. Frankly, they don’t care where we nap, so long as we do it in one of their state-of-the art napping pods. Aside from the franshised locations, they’re willing to lease out these pods to businesses and airports so employers can create their own napping rooms for their weary workforces. They’ve got lots of science on their site touting the increased productivity that comes from napping not to mention the dangers of overtired people driving, operating machinery, and blogging (OK, maybe not blogging).

As the parent of a young child, who works full-time, and goes to school one to two nights a week, all I can say is this: do you take VISA?

As a matter of fact they do. Napping passes start at $14 but volume discounts are available. MetroNaps claims busines is booming but a similar enterprise by another company recently failed at the Mall of America, although that company later claimed the ratio of tourists made that site a poor location. MetroNaps has its sights set on locations like NYC’s financial district, where they believe the walking weary are in abundant supply.

The first essay I wrote in the Public Policy section here looked at the disparity in spending between Philadelphia and the neighboring suburban districts, in order to illustrate the idea that it’s not reasonable to expect a district to be competitive with a fraction of the resource base. Almost six years later, Chris Lehmann at Practical Theory brings up a similar point. Like me, Chris looks at the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Report Card on the Schools series. Unlike me, Chris has the experience of working to launch a new charter school in Philadelphia to provide more specific, vivid examples. So go check out his post. It’s great that Lehmann and his team are committed to doing the fundraising work necessary to make their vision for the Science Leadership Academy thrive. But how much greater would it be if they could put all that energy into actually educating kids?

Remember when I said I might have been lucky not to go to a Phillies game? Well, I’m pretty sure of it now. One of the team’s owners, former managing partner Bill Giles, just got back from a trip to Italy and promptly put both feet in his mouth. The stuff about how the team owners really want to win and David Montgomery, the current managing partner, is doing a sensational job is frustrating but probably within the boundaries of “Well what do you expect him to say?” But then he has to offer his opinion on the Brett Myers fiasco, saying that Myers did nothing wrong and was really just trying to help his wife, despite other witnesses and police reports to the contrary. Montgomery came out today and said that Giles must have misunderstood what Montgomery was telling him about the incident. Which means that one of the team owners has a problem with listening comprehension and doesn’t have the sense to keep his mouth shut about events he doesn’t have any real knowledge or understanding of. Great.

Back when the Wor;d Cup started, the Inquirer’s economic columnist Andrew Cassell argued that many economists were rooting for Italy to win. Apparently, it’s been reasonably well documented that the country that wins the World Cup experiences a jump in economic growth in the following year. Cassell argued that Europe was most in need of a jump start, and that Italy’s economy was big enough to make a difference in the overall health of the economy and sluggish enough that the World Cup bump would make a noticeable difference in pushing it onto a growth track.

Well, thanks to penalty kicks, we’re going to find out if Cassell’s theory is right. I caught the last few minutes, just in time to see a French player get kicked out of the game for head-butting an Italian, and then to see the penalty kicks. I gotta say I feel bad for those goalkeepers. The French keeper didn’t stop anything, and really, neither did the Italian – the French missed when one player hit the crossbar after the Italian keeper had dived. That’s gonna lead to a few years of could’a-should’a, I’ll bet.

One of the books Earl loaned me to read this summer is David Bennahum’s Extra Life, his account of how computers influenced his education and childhood. It’s a very good book, and I’ll point you to Earl’s fuller review of it for the details. But there’s a point Bennahum makes a few times, when he’s discussing his early school years when he wasn’t really striving to excel academically but was putting a lot of attention into games and computer programming, and I wanted to highlight some passages.

On Big Trak, a toy truck that could be programmed to move along a predetermined path:

Here was a form of responsibility, of active participation, thinking, and analysis that crept into my time with Big Trak. The process was instinctively modular, a breaking apart of goals into subgoals, building back up to the whole from the smallest unit of problem solving. The act of laying out graph paper, modeling a room, and associating each square with a unit of distance meant I had to measure the room first and then think about what scale to use. Each square served as the smallest unit of measurement and gained meaning by pulling back, much as dots in a newspaper photograph or television screen fuse together when looked at from a suitable distance. I used a lot of math to make Big Trak work. At school I consistently received Cs in math, yet at home I eagerly applied principles of arithemetic and geometry. What made these laborious tasks worthwhile was the experience of making a finished product that happened to be thrilling to a ten-year-old. (32-33)

And a few pages later, on his summer spent playing Dungeons and Dragons with a group of friends:

The games we played began to alter my abilities. Up to then my analytic activities were limited to theoretical exercises in math or science class, like seeing what happened to plants when we stuck them in a closet with no light (they turned white and drooped, or pointed to the seam of the door if any light came through). Now, of our own free will, we were taking on problems – math, probability, mapping, the mechanics of which were rarely called upon for most ten-year-olds. More subtly still, we were doing a special kind of problem solving, what some might call systems analysis. (37)

Bennahum eventually graduated from Harvard, but his academic turnaround can be traced to the fact that there were things he wanted to accomplish in his non-school life, and he had to develop certain skills in order to accomplish them. This is not to say that formal education is unimportant, but I think it does say something about the need to get students engaged in that process. “Why do we have to know this?” is still one of the deadliest questions a teacher can bump into. People like Bennahum show how teachers can find answers to it. (Indeed, I really recommend the chapters where he talks about his high school computer teacher, and the teacher-led but cooperative culture he created.)

…if you’re still looking for irony, you might soon be able to major in it at the University of Missouri. According to this article over at Time, the school’s most recently convicted alumnus has been trying to take back a $1 million donation he made to the business school to endow an Economics chair in his name, claiming he wanted to donate the funds to Katrina relief instead.

For various reason, including fears that Lay was trying to improve his standing in the potential jury pool, the university flatly stated “no backsies.”

Meanwhile, other alumni are still a bit standoffish about the idea of listing the Kenneth Lay Chair in Economics among the institution’s assets.

One possible solution, however, deserves some kudos and perhaps the attention of the magazine that some time ago wondered where the irony had gone in these troubled times. The suggestion is to rename the position and hope that whoever fills the “Kenneth Lay Chair of Economics and Business Ethics” has a sense of humor. A conscience wouldn’t hurt either.

Kind of an odd juxtaposition this weekend. Being one of Earl’s friends, I heard about the lengthy but ultimately successful labor of Hannah, a mare that he and his wife own. (Pictures over at Earl’s blog.)

Being a Philadelphian, I also heard a lot of hype about the Preakness and Barbaro, and then the accident that left one of the horse’s legs fractured in a life-threatening way. (Looks like surgery to repair the leg was successful, but I’m counting no chickens.)

And there’s a part of me that really wonders about the whole horce-racing thing. When a boxer or a football player puts himself at risk of death, paralysis, or debilitating injury, we can at least say it was his choice. You can’t really say that with a horse, and trying to call a horse an “athlete” doesn’t really change that fact. These are creatures being bred for the purpose of being forced into a dangerous situation for the sake of human beings’ entertainment. Something about that is just not sitting right with me right now.