This Is Not News

It’s my birthday, which means it’s also Not News’ birthday. 10 years ago I uploaded the first articles to a Dellhost server and wondered what would happen. In one sense – not much. I’ve left the site dormant for fairly long stretches, never quite hitting a stride long enough to make this more than a hobby. On the other hand, in the last ten years my wife and I have had a child and bought a house. I’ve finished grad school twice and started teaching high school full time. And those are all pretty good things to put my energy into, so no regrets.

At the same time, the Web has changed. The political blogosphere is full of places to talk policy and politics. There are sites and blogs dedicated to the notion of deliberative democracy that still inspires me, but there’s also plenty of evidence that nurturing the spirit of deliberation takes a lot of time and energy that I will never have as a hobbyist, so I’ve let go of any dream that Not News might be a hub for such deliberation.

Still, I think Pattie, Kevin, Earl and I put some good pieces up here over the years, and I don’t see any reason to take them down. I still have dreams of converting the rest of the Comics section to WordPress posts, and finally having the site’s archive in one database.

And I think it’s worthwhile for me, as a teacher and a citizen, to have a place to work out some of my thoughts on the issues of the day and perhaps engage the dialogue about education in this country more directly. So I think my birthday present to the site will be a promise not to neglect it. Over the next few weeks, let’s see if I can keep that promise.

Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office:

http://www.phila.gov/districtattorney/

Brian Grady for DA:

http://www.votegrady2009.org/

Dan McCaffery for DA:

http://www.mccafferyforda.com/

Dan McElhatton for DA:

http://www.votemcelhatton.com/

Michael Turner for DA:

http://www.turner4da.com/

Michael Untermeyer for DA:

http://www.myspace.com/michael_untermeyer
(Inaccessible from School)

Seth Williams for DA:

http://www.votesethwilliams.com/

Coverage of Candidate Debate from Philadelphia newspapers:

Story 1: http://www.philly.com/philly/news/local/43021167.html
Story 2: http://www.philly.com/inquirer/local/pa/20090423_Lively_debate_for_DA_candidates.html

I have to say that it does not fill me with confidence that the new chairman of the board at Citigroup is gonna be a guy who thought it was a good idea to essentially sell Time Warner to America Online.

(One of my main images of the year 2000 is Pattie coming into the bedroom while she was getting ready for work and waking me up with some ridiculous piece of news that I was convinced had to be part of some hallucinatory dream I was having. “Time Warner’s merging with AOL!” “There’s a recount in Florida!” “Aliens have stolen our dining room chairs!” I think that last one did turn out to be a dream, at least.)

Always willing to be happily surprised, but that one strikes me as odd.

Pattie just told me that MSNBC got complaint emails when they cut away from Barack and Micelle Obama dancing. That – along with the not insignificant visual of two million people on the Mall in Washington – sums up the significance of today for me. People wanted this day, people worked for this day, and now people are happy together basking in this day. Tomorrow we get to work, but today – this is pretty awesome.

I am not a science guy. I wish I were, but my brain won’t wrap itself around numbers as easily as it wraps around words. I do have an interest in science, though, so from time to time I try to read geared-for-mass-audience science books. I’ve just started Michio Kaku’s Parallel Worlds, and a couple of chapters in I got struck by a question that I am not smart enough to see the obvious answer for:

If the light from various stars billions of years ago is just now visible because of the distance that the light has traveled, how did we get to this spot first?

My reading thus far has led me to the idea of cosmic inflation, which suggests that in the instants after the universe began there was a period of very rapid expansion, but A) I don’t know if I understand the theory yet and therefore B) I don’t know if it connects to the question I’m asking. So it looks like it’ll be back to the books on this one.

I would just like to take a moment to review a recent seven-day period:

Wednesday, October 29: The Philadelphia Phillies win the World Series at home, ending a 25-year drought for the city’s four major sports teams.

Friday, October 31: I take my daughter trick-or-treating. She has chosen to go out as Princess Leia. This occurs on the same day as the parade honoring the 2008 World Champion Philadelphia Phillies.

Sunday, November 2: My birthday. To celebrate, several members of my family come by to visit, including my two cousins from Georgia. (This site also celebrates its eighth anniversary.)

Tuesday, November 4: The country elects Barack Obama – who had previously announced that he would be cheering for the 2008 World Champion Philadelphia Phillies – as the next President of the United States.

Seriously – 1996 is the year Pattie and I started going out, and 2002 is the year my daughter was born. Those are the only two years I can think of that 2008 does not blow right out of the water on the basis of that week alone. Stephen Colbert joked that the Large Hadron Collider had thrown us into a parallel universe exactly like our own, except Obama was president and the Phillies are world champions. If so, I really need to buy those Collider folks a beer. I like it here.

And now that my brain is not overloaded with campaign stuff, and now that I harbor some hope that smart policies might actually have a chance to be implemented, I’m hoping to have some more brain space to devote to the site here.

My roommate from college called me a few hours ago. We met fifteen years ago, hanging out in a lounge in our dorm at Fordham. There were several baseball fans from Philadelphia and South Jersey, and we gathered to watch the Phillies beat the Braves in the NL Championship Series. I can remember watching the Blue Jays win that World Series.

As my roommate said tonight: “This is much better.”

I gave my wife my credit card, ’cause you could probably convince me to buy just about any old thing right now as long as it has “2008 World Champion Philadelphia Phillies” on it.

I’m here at my PC doing some data entry and iTunes has pulled up “I Wanted to Be Wrong” from R.E.M.’s 2004 album Around the Sun. Now, this is one of the songs from Around the Sun that I like, which is why it’s still in my iTunes library. But there’s probably an interesting commentary on the way the mood of the country has changed over the last four years in the contrast between this quiet, haunted, perplexed song and the mad-as-hell intensity of the tunes from Accelerate. And I find it oddly difficult to pull up the 2004 mood in my own emotional memory.

Back when Not News had a message board, I said that we should have an official award for things that seemed like a good idea at the time. I was motivated by hearing the Julio Iglesias/Willie Nelson duet “To All the Girls I Loved Before,” so I suggested the award be named in their honor. If you were to say that this suggestion would, itself, be a leading candidate for the award, I would not be likely to argue with you. But in any case, I have a feeling we may be handing out a whole bunch of the awards to the 2008 Olympics. At the very least, it’s an interesting learning opportunity. The latest incident regarding Joey Cheek’s suddenly-revoked visa is one example. On the one hand, it demonstrates China’s severe desire to avoid bad publicity. But it also highlights the reason why China gets so much publicity in the first place: given its economic clout, and its willingness to trade with nations like Sudan, there’s simply no avoiding dealing with China and trying, in some way or another, to get on its good side. As a result, you see many folks – like the US Olympic Committee – bending over backwards to avoid casting China in a bad light. It’s an interesting position to be in for a country that’s used to throwing its weight around with most folks.

With a little distance between the school year and me, I’m trying to reflect on what went well and what still needs work. This was an important year for me; as I think I’ve mentioned, the contrasts between what I was learning and advocating in my education-related coursework and what I was doing in the classroom became very vivid. As a result, I had something of a crisis of confidence, but I think that when I fought through that I gained some resolve and some inspiration to do things better.

Going back over the year in review, here are some of the things I’m thinking about and where I want to go in the future:

Classroom Layout: I’ve always taken the path of least resistance here and stuck with the traditional rows. This spring I gave students the choice and except for a few weeks in one section, everyone also wanted to just stick with the way the desks were laid out when we walked in. But those couple of weeks have me convinced that next year I should dictate that we rearrange the desks into a circle. It does raise some potential issues with seeing the board, but it does so much to encourage students to engage each other and not just me. And I think it’s a psychological reinforcement of the idea that participation is valued.

Participation Grading: This was a major shift. I’ve always encouraged my students to ask questions and participate, but I don’t think I was structuring enough opportunities for them to do so into the course. So I added a specific participation credit to the course, and allowed students to earn credit for participation in three different ways. They could speak up in class, to ask or answer questions. They could post responses to the discussion questions I provided for each reading in course’s online discussion forum. Or they could complete journal entries in class, where I would ask them to take ten to fifteen minutes to reflect on a question or problem related to whatever we were studying. This adds a layer of record-keeping and commenting that I don’t think I was completely ready for, but it’s definitely worth it. What I need to do, though, is make the journals and online postings a two-way process, and ask the kind of follow-ups that I would ask as part of a class discussion. Again, that’s a lot of work, but I need to build it into my schedule that this is what I’m going to do. Different paths to participation can help students who might not feel comfortable in verbal discussion, but it’s on me to make sure those different paths are all robust.

Reading Guides and Discussion Questions: I used to provide review sheets near the midterm and final to help students with their studying. This year, I decided to switch things around and provide the review sheets from the get-go. One of my initial reservations about doing so is that some students might just look at the review sheets and not bother reading the text. But if I’m honest with myself, I know that many of those students won’t read the text anyway. And that’s not to say that they’re lazy or unmotivated. Reading philosophical texts, many of which are translated and use centuries-old grammar and style, can be a tough slog, and some students are going to decide that the effort/reward ratio is higher if they just come to the class and ask questions there. But if I give students the review guides, along with a list of key questions to tell them what they should be looking for in the text, the slog might seem more manageable.

Along with the these three elements, I’m continuing to work on my own organizational skills. I have a hunch that my “2040 in Review� post to the HoloWeb will conclude with a similar statement.