This Is Not News

Another off night tonight, but while I was looking on thenotebook.org for details on the latest contract snafus in Philadelphia schools, I found this item that mentions my own school a couple of times:

Students face long odds at many popular schools

Parkway Center City, where I teach, admits the smallest percentage of its applicants, and is one of the high schools in the city with the largest number of applicants. On the one hand, it’s certainly nice to know that lots of parents and students want to be part of our community. But it also reminds us that lots of parents and students want something from their education that they only feel they can get from a selective-admission school. There may be no getting around that, but it sure would be nice if there were even more of those options available for students across the city.

I’m pretty much taking the day off from blogging, but here’s a link to a story on CNN about a high school football team that rarely punts and usually attempts an onside kick after every score. The coach’s logic is that doing everything you can to increase your chances to keep possession of the ball does more to improve your chances to win the game than giving up the ball because you’re afraid of what will happen. I’d love to see this data-driven convention-defying approach tried elsewhere.

Following up on last night’s post, I was talking to a college friend who’s now a library teacher for young students, who are used to being able to type a question into Google and having a website pop up with an answer. (Not necessarily a good answer, but an answer.) It got me thinking about how we use search engines. I’m still used to using keywords from all my time using academic libraries, and I think general keywords are a better tool for understanding a topic because they will present you with a range of general information that you can use to build context. That way, when you do find out the specific detail you’re looking for, you understand what it really means. But that requires an entirely different kind of thinking than a natural language question search, and I’m not sure if there’s a best way to teach kids about Boolean operators. If there is, I wish someone would teach me.

My students have to find an article about “how the world has changed since 9/11/01” and bring it in tomorrow. It’s meant, in part, to be a way to break free of the idea that I have to curate every experience, but I admit I have a little trepidation. I mean, there’s a lot of stuff on the Internet, y’know? Some of it is written by people of questionable talent, honesty, and/or sanity. And I find that a lot of my students don’t differentiate between different sources – indeed, many of them don’t pay attention to the actual website where they get a piece of information. It all comes from Google. I find myself wanting to teach my students my media habits born of a pre-Internet youth, pre-Google young adulthood, and trying-to-keep-up-with-it-all 30s. (Remember portals, anyone?) Should I? Am I sharing wisdom gained through years of experience, or trying to force a new generation into the same world of gatekeepers that I’m comfortable with? Maybe there’s no way to do the first without a little bit of the second, but at the moment I feel like it’s still worth it to try to impose just a little bit of order in the Information Age’s Wild West.

I almost feel bad for the Atlanta Braves. Right now they have an 84-60 record for a .583 winning percentage. They’d be leading three of baseball’s six divisions with that record and be tied in the loss column for the lead in a fourth.

But since the Phillies are having an insanely successful year, the Braves are 10 games out of first place in the National League East.

It does make me appreciate the wild card. If the goal is to have baseball’s best teams appear in the postseason tournament, I think the Braves pretty clearly should be there. Does it mean that the Phillies could wind up getting bounced from the playoffs by a team that they outperformed during the regular season? Yes, and if that happens I will be certainly be bummed. But that’s the way that playoffs bounce. They’re short series and the “best” team doesn’t always win. If that bothers you, that’s a reason to get rid of the playoffs and declare the team with the best regular season record the champion. I don’t see any league or television network going for that any time soon.

New school year starts in earnest tomorrow. I find myself very anxious right now, so much so that I’m finding it hard to focus on what I’m trying to write. I’m looking over my course syllabi, and feeling frustrated that they read more like a software End User License Agreement than the first step of a year of inquiry. I’m constantly asking myself how I’m going to encourage my students to ask more and better questions about the world around them and hoping that I am up to the task.

I’m also thinking about the site. I still have longer stories to write, and I want to start thinking more about how to use a tag cloud. Not News dates back to 2000, and there are a lot of things we weren’t thinking about in 2000 that we are today. I am also considering whether to use the site as a forum to re-evaluate some of the ideas in my dissertation. I think it’s time to refresh and renew some of my thinking there.

I almost but did not quite accomplish my goal of having the house (minus the garage) organized by the end of the summer, but I can keep working on that.

That’s probably the attitude I need to keep in mind right now. The summer’s over, but a new day starts tomorrow, and I need to get ready to make the most of it.

Celebrated the last day of my summer vacation by taking a trip with the family to Sesame Place. A couple of dunks later, I’m pretty much wiped out. I am looking forward to starting a new school year tomorrow. I’m hoping that the planning and research I did over the summer will help my students and me get off to a good start. I’m wishing that I had finished a few more projects, but I’m proud of the ones I finished. One of those completed goals is making a daily post on Not News in August, and since I’m completing that goal tonight, I feel justified in going a little bit meta. Taking at least one thought and developing it into written form is a habit I want to stay in, and I certainly have plenty of those left to develop. So stay tuned for discussions of baseball’s lessons for a problem-solving future, what my college experience gave me, why time travel is usually a flawed storytelling device, and more. See, now I’ve promised those stories, so I have to write ’em.

But for tonight, it’s time to wish the summer farewell and get ready to turn the page to fall. See you on the flip side.

I’ve hit a bit of writer’s block today. I have ideas for stories I want to write, but I’m lacking the energy to develop them to the point that they make sense. It makes me think of an expression I know I’ve used before, but I don’t remember who to give credit. I don’t always like writing, but I do enjoy having written. So I went back and looked at pieces of my dissertation, which I finished five years ago.

Holy smokes. It wasn’t until I wrote that sentence that I realized it had been that long. That thing took up so much of my energy for so long, it’s hard to believe that I’ve done so much since it was done.

On the other hand, that helps explain why re-reading it tonight felt a little alien. I recognized my thoughts and beliefs. But I haven’t tried to use that technical “academic” voice to express my thoughts in so long. I kind of wonder how long it would take me to find that voice again if I were to use it. When I write here on Not News, or I write something to help explain something to my students, I try to generalize and avoid jargon. I am deliberately painting in broader strokes to introduce a topic rather than getting very precise to discuss details with an audience that is already very familiar with it. I think I tend to prefer the more general voice. Part of the reason is that jargon helps cut experts off from the people who might benefit from their expertise. But taking the voice of the popularizer also kind of allows you to set yourself up as having a position of authority over the audience. I understand this, and you don’t, so let me explain it to you. For someone to correct you, they’d have to go find out from other sources why you’re wrong. But if you’re writing for an audience that knows the same background that you do, you better know what you’re talking about or be prepared to be called on it. There’s something a little exhilarating about that. I probably need to find that voice again a little bit. I don’t know if I’ll do it in philosophy or education or find a way to combine them. If Dewey could, I can probably take a shot at it, right?

As I write this Philadelphia is in its second weekend with a special curfew for teenagers. The curfew was instituted after the most recent spate of flash mob violence, and during the first weekend dozens of teenagers were arrested for violations. There were no major violent incidents, although one news report pointed out that almost all of the prior flash mobs had occurred earlier than the curfew anyway.

The curfews got national and even international news coverage, with the BBC and the Telegraph filing reports.

Not everyone is happy with the curfew. One editorial in the Philadelphia Inquirer called it an “overreaction” and an unjust law because it punishes teenagers not for what they do, but for who they are. The curfew is clearly a blunt force instrument to try to prevent the large crowds that make riots possible from forming. As a temporary tool, it might be possible to justify its use, but only if we acknowledge that we are in the need for a temporary tool because we failed to establish a more lasting solution.

If I can analogize to my teaching experience – when there is such a breakdown of the classroom culture that I feel that I need to implement a blanket penalty in order to get things back on track, that might be the proper response at that moment. But the fact that I got to that moment means that I failed to create a classroom environment where the students respected each other and the classroom norms enough in the first place. The responsibility is on me to figure out what I need to do differently to engage the students and help them find the motivation to move forward. The same goes for the city and society at large. A curfew is, at best, a bandage. If we don’t change the structures that helped to create the problem, we’ll be forced to keep escalating the bandages until we’re a mummy – unable to move forward because of the restrictions we created in order to preserve us.

Couple of stories that connect to the riots in England, flash mobs in Philadelphia, and the general topic of law and order in the 21st Century.

The New York Times reported on the transformation of Los Angeles’ police department. Former LA police chief Bill Bratton is now doing some consulting work for the British government, and the story goes into some detail about how he was able to change the reputation of LA’s police by improving operations through technology and building closer ties to the community in order to build trust and rapport.

CNN reports on how flash mobs – the “get together and break stuff and beat people up” kind rather than the “let’s perform an opera in the middle of the train station” kind – are not just a problem in big cities like Philadelphia, which seems to have become the national capital of criminal flash mobs. Social networks and mobile devices make it easy for crowds to develop even in smaller towns like Germantown, Maryland. So police forces are starting to realize that they need to reach out to virtual communities as well. It’ll be interesting to see how the police develop techniques to monitor and communicate with social networks – and how people develop techniques to elude them.