Easy Come, Easy Go

A few weeks back my buddy Tim and I entered a March Madness basketball pool. This in itself isn't all that newsworthy because we enter a basketball pool every year. When I was younger and more willing to fill my head and time with meaningless scores and stats I felt the $5 or $20 entry fee was but a small investment toward greater reward. Of course, this was never the case.

Now that I'm older, busier, and likely won't watch a single college basketball game all year it would serve to reason my chances of winning are even slimmer than before. When I look at all those schools in the brackets I tend to remember them for how good they were eight or nine years ago and pick accordingly. Or else I just keep picking the teams who are seeded highest so I can hope to finish in a 50-way tie with all the other mindless knuckleheads filling out a bracket.

This year I chose a handful of upsets here and there but kept most of the #1 seeds in line to play for the championship. I wasn't sure who the best of the best was supposed to be but took a random guess - the Kentucky Wildcats. It turns out they were something like 33-2 this year and the hands-down favorite to win it all.  A lucky guess except that about 60% of America chose them to win which made my chances of winning the pool even worse. On my second bracket I tabbed Ohio State who, it turns out, had been playing really badly over the past few weeks and very few people were picking. Again, the chances were slim.

But, alas, the stars have aligned. For all the ignorance I brought to the two brackets I filled out I am currently in 8th and 16th place. Out of 432. Kentucky is already in the final and Ohio State is playing Kansas in the other semi-final. If Kansas wins tonight and then falls to the Wildcats on Monday I'll finish 3rd. If Ohio State wins tonight and then goes on to beat the Wildcats on Monday I'll come in 5th. Gambling is illegal so let's just say 3rd place is good enough to win 1,000 pats on the back from the 429 people who finished behind me while 5th place is worth 600 congratulatory high-fives. Of course, if neither of those scenarios play out I'll have accomplished nothing more than being strung along for an extra week or two.

Of course, I'd gladly trade this for one of those three winning lottery tickets that will share more than $600 million dollars. We never buy lottery tickets so our chances of splitting that jackpot weren't all that spectacular except that Tim buys tickets each week and has long promised to give us 10% should he ever win. During that time he and I have come up with some great ideas as to what we'd do with that much money. Some, like building a "major league" whiffle ball park for ourselves to play in, were realistic while others, like buying out Gary Sheffield's Yankee contract and making him go back and play for the small-market Milwaukee Brewers,  were a little more far-fetched.

For this week's lotto jackpot of more than a half-billion dollars Tim bought not one, but five tickets. The extra four bucks increased his chances of winning from about 170,000,000 to 1 to a far more likely 34,000,000 to 1. Turns out it didn't help much. He was a loser for the 518th time in a row. So I guess the whiffle ball park will have to wait at least another week. Until then...

Go KENTUCKY!

Choices

There is no value in life except what you choose to place upon it and no happiness in any place except what you bring to it yourself.
                                                                --Henry David Thoreau

Life presents us an endless string of choices. While some are really big, most are so mundane we don't even recognize them as a choice at all - say, whether you brush or floss first.

Of course, there are an infinite number of choices we fail to recognize not because they are mundane but because we've been programmed - make that, conditioned - to ignore them. Just this morning I could have woken up and started singing "Oh What a Wonderful Morning" at the top of my lungs while mercilessly tickling Tricia awake. However, I subconsciously know there's a very good chance I'd receive a swift knee to the groin so my mind skips over this choice without my conscious self even realizing it. More realistically I could have ridden my bike to the grocery store this morning, packed the groceries into the bike trailer, and pedaled back home all in the name of fresh air, exercise, and conservation. But this falls outside of my normal routine so I never considered doing so.

Life's big choices weigh on us more heavily. Where to go to school. What to study. Who to marry. Where to live. What church to go to. How to spend, or maybe even save, our money. How we make each of these choices says a lot about us. In many ways these choices define us - if not for ourselves, at least for others.

I chose to go to Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville because it was what we could afford. I chose to study education because journalism was not what I thought it would be and I remembered how much I enjoyed kids. I chose to marry Tricia because she was kind, smart, fun, and pretty (At the time I started with pretty and let the other reasons reveal themselves along the way). I chose not to go to church because I realized that any god who would let my dad suffer so much in one lifetime deserved neither my love nor my  faith. We choose to spend our money, when possible, on experiences rather than things.

Some choices are easier to make than others. There's a quote I like that goes "If you limit your choices to only what seems possible or reasonable you disconnect yourself from what you truly want and all that is left is compromise." Compromise is easy. And safe.

I was thinking about this yesterday as I watched the kids jump from our new dock into the lake. The water was so cold it would have been easier to dangle their feet in and splash around a bit. That's what the grown-ups did. But while we chose to wait until summer when the water is less likely to emit an initial scream of discomfort, the kids chose to jump right in because it was exactly what they wanted to be doing at that very moment of time. No amount of cool breezes or chill bumps were about to keep them from their fun.

Seeing them splashing and laughing out in the water made me think, too, about how happy we've all been since we moved here into the country. Swinging from tire swings, building fires, and looking out into nights so black you wonder if there's anything out there at all. Moving here, that was a choice too. A choice that at the time was not easy. It was definitely not safe. But it was right.

I ran back to the house to grab my camera so I could capture some of the things that remind me how much I love living and playing in the woods. In the meantime we'll think on other big choices that seem, at least right now, to be impossible.

What I Hate: V - X

It's been quite a long while since I have visited this list. Some -namely my buddy and co-blogger Tim - would suggest this layoff is due to the fact I have finally reached the bane of all ABC books and lists - the letter X. This is a finicky letter that most dictionaries can knock out in less than three pages. A letter any novice Scrabble player hates to pull from the bag when all the A's and O's on the board are tied-up.

 It's been my experience, outside of the oft-used xylophone and x-ray, that most writers cheat on this letter. Our son Ty has an ABC book of Alaska and for the letter X it reads "X-tra Large State!" This author obviously has no integrity. There is no such word as X-tra. I would think that if you choose to take on such a task you should, at the very least, be diligent and do your research; or else select a more writer-friendly format.

Our school had a visiting author this past week. He writes ABC books for children (although he claims to really write for teachers). Over the past two decades he has written more than a dozen of these alphabet books. There's the Jet ABC Book, the Plane ABC Book, the Extinct ABC Book, the Vegetable ABC Book, and so on. During his visit the teachers had an opportunity to have lunch with him and ask all sorts of questions and learn more about what it's like to be a writer. He explained, with regard to writing ABC books, the first twenty letters are a piece of cake but the final six are excruciating. U, V, W, X, Y, and Z. No, these letters are not for the meek. Especially that damn X.

Here's the latest installment...

V- VENTURE CAPITAL. This one may not be fair given that I have no earthly idea what venture capitalism actually is. I looked it up only to find that the definition made no sense to me what-so-ever. If you have sixty seconds you don't mind wasting you too can give it a try:

Venture capital (VC) is financial capital provided to early-stage, high-potential, high risk, growth startup companies. The venture capital fund makes money by owning equity in the companies it invests in, which and usually have a novel technology or business model in high technology industries, such as biotechnology, IT, software, etc. The typical venture capital investment occurs after the seed funding round as growth funding round (also referred to as Series A round) in the interest of generating a return through an eventual realization event, such as an IPO or trade sale of the company. Venture capital is a subset of private equity. Therefore, all venture capital is private equity, but not all private equity is venture capital.

Others: vagueness, veils, valedictorian speeches, Vaseline, vampire books, vandalism, vans, varmint (the word), velvet, vengefulness, ventriloquists, and vermouth (it just sounds snotty)

W - WRESTLING (at least the "professional" sort). I enjoy stopping on wrestling programs just to see how long it takes Tricia to get mad at me. When I was a kid I really liked wrestling - especially Hulk Hogan. As he headed to ring they would play his theme song "I Am a Real American." Do you want to know what's more embarrassing than the fact that I know this? The fact that Newt Gingrich used this very song last week at one of his events. Yikes!

Others: waiting rooms, wallpaper, warts, whiskey, and wedding receptions

X - XANADU. A really, really, really, really bad movie. The equally lame tagline was The story of a girl who makes dreams come true. This movie was so bad the only bright spot movie critic Roger Ebert could find to highlight was that "It's not as bad as 'Can't Stop the Music'."

Others:  xenophobia, Xena Warrior Princess, and X-tra large food portions

Walking Up the Mountain as a Metaphor for Learning

This passage, also from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, serves as a great metaphor for the content of my "Making the Grade" post.

*****

Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed. If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion. Then, when you're no longer thinking ahead, each footstep isn't just a means to an end but a unique event in itself. This leaf has jagged edges. This rock looks loose. From this place the snow is less visible, even though closer. These are things you should notice anyway. To live only for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top. Here's where things grow.

*****

This is the type of passage that makes you put your book down and rest for a bit - unwilling to move ahead until it settles upon you.

Making the Grade

A few years ago, just days into my first year of teaching at the Center for Inquiry, I was walking out to my car with my then-new buddy Tim. I mentioned to him that I was sometimes frustrated by students and particularly parents who become far more concerned with grades than with learning. I offered an idea that I had toyed with for quite some time - asking parents on the very first day what grades they wanted their kids to receive and then giving it to them. That way, I surmised, we could be free of that nonsense and focus our attention and energies on far more important topics and work. Tim didn't know me well enough at the time to determine whether this was meant in all honesty or just in jest.

It'd be hard to persuade the masses that grades are harmful in that they negatively change the way teaching and learning take place. Some schools have been successful in this, though. I've been fortunate in that two of the four schools I have taught at did not have grades. Instead they offered narrative accounts of progress.

I've been reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance the past few weeks. It's a great book in that it challenges you to reconsider the ways in which you've come to view reality. It becomes clear when reading the book that we've really narrowed our ways of looking at things in a way that keeps us from seeing the infinite other ways of viewing and constructing the world. Often we look for the simplest explanation, per Occum's Razor, and tune out all other possibility.

Here's a short passage I read yesterday that speaks to the notion of grades in schools as well as to the idea that to teach someone to write necessitates teaching them to do no more than mimic the ideas and styles of others. There's validity in what he says here; however, a good counter-argument could be made as well. That's what makes topics such as these so rich - you could spend quite some time chasing down an answer.

***

[Phaedrus had] been having trouble with students who had nothing to say. At first he thought it was laziness but later it became apparent that it wasn't. They just couldn't think of anything to say.

One of them, a girl with strong-lensed glasses, wanted to write a five-hundred-word essay about the United States. He was used to the sinking feeling that comes from statements like this, and suggested without disparagement that she narrow it down to just Bozeman.

When the paper came due she didn't have it and was quite upset. She had tried and tried but she just couldn't think of anything to say.

He had already discussed her with her previous instructors and they'd confirmed his impressions of her. She was very serious, disciplined and hardworking, but extremely dull. Not a spark of creativity in her anywhere. Her eyes, behind the thick-lensed glasses, were the eyes of a drudge. She wasn't bluffing him, she really couldn't think of anything to say, and was upset by her inability to do as she was told.

It just stumped him. Now he couldn't think of anything to say. A silence occurred, and then a peculiar answer: "Narrow it down to the main street of Bozeman." It was a stroke of insight.

She nodded dutifully and went out. But just before her next class she came back in real distress, tears this time, distress that had obviously been there for a long time. She still couldn't think of anything to say, and couldn't understand why, if she couldn't think of anything about all of Bozeman, she should  be able to think of something about just one street.

He was furious. "You're not looking!" he said. A memory came back of his own dismissal from the University for having too much to say. For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses. The more you look the more you see. She really wasn't looking and yet somehow didn't understand this.

He told her angrily, "Narrow it down to the front on one building on the main street of Bozeman. The Opera House. Start with the upper-left hand brick."

Her eyes, behind the thick-lensed glasses, opened wide.

She came in the next class with a puzzled look and handed him a five-thousand-word essay on the front of the Opera House on the main street of Bozeman, Montana. "I sat in the hamburger stand across the street," she said, "and started writing about the first brick, and the second brick, and then by the third brick it all started to come and I couldn't stop. They thought I was crazy, and they kept kidding me, but here it all is. I don't understand it."

Neither did he, but on long walks through the streets of town he thought about it and concluded she was evidently stopped with the same kind of blockage that had paralyzed him on his first day of teaching. She was blocked because she was trying to repeat, in her writing, things she had already heard, just as on the first day he had tried to repeat things he had already decided to say. She couldn't think of anything to write about Bozeman because she couldn't recall anything she had heard worth repeating. She was strangely unaware that she could look and see freshly for herself, as she wrote, without primary regard for what had been said before. The narrowing down to one brick destroyed the blockage because it was so obvious she had to some original and direct seeing.

He experimented further. In one class he had everyone write all hour about the back of his thumb. Everyone gave him funny looks at the beginning of the hour, but everyone did it, and there wasn't a single complaint about "nothing to say."

In another class he changed the subject from the thumb to a coin, and got a full hour's writing from every student. In other classes it was the same. Some asked, "Do you have to write about both sides?" Once they got into the idea of seeing directly for themselves they also saw there was no limit to the amount they could say. It was a confidence-building assignment too, because what they wrote, even though seemingly trivial, was nevertheless their own thing, not a mimicking of someone else's. Classes where he used that coin exercise were always less balky and more interested.

As a result of his experiments he concluded that imitation was a real evil that had to be broken before real rhetoric teaching could begin. This imitation seemed to be an external compulsion. Little children didn't have it. It seemed to come later on, possibly as a result of school itself.

That sounded right, and the more he thought about it the more right it sounded. Schools teach you to imitate. If you don't imitate what the teacher wants you get a bad grade. Here, in college, it was more sophisticated, of course; you were supposed to imitate the teacher in such a way as to convince the teacher you were not imitating, but taking the essence of the instruction and going ahead with it on your own. That got you A's. Originality on the other hand could get you anything- from A to F. The whole grading system cautioned against it.

He discussed this with a professor of psychology who lived next door to him, an extremely imaginative teacher, who said, "Right. Eliminate the whole degree-and-grading system and then you'll get real education."

Phaedrus thought about this, and when weeks later a very bright student couldn't think of a subject for a term paper, it was still on his mind, so he gave it to her as a topic. She didn't like the topic at first, but agreed to take it anyway.

Within a week she was talking about it to everyone, and within two weeks had worked up a superb paper. The class she delivered it to didn't have the advantage of two weeks to think about the subject, however, and was quite hostile to the whole idea of eliminating grades and degrees. This didn't slow her down at all. Her tone took on an old-time religious fervor. She begged the other students to listen, to understand this was really right. "I'm not saying this for him," she said and glanced at Phaedrus. "It's for you."

Her pleading tone, her religious fervor, greatly impressed him, along with the fact that her college entrance examinations had placed her in the upper one percent of the class. During the next quarter, when teaching "persuasive writing," he chose this topic as a "demonstrator," a piece of persuasive writing he worked up by himself, day by day, in front of and with the help of the class.

He used the demonstrator to avoid talking in terms of principles of composition, all of which he had deep doubts about. He felt that by exposing classes to his own sentences as he made them, with all the misgivings and hang-ups and erasures, he would give a more honest picture of what writing was like than by spending class time picking nits in completed work of masters for emulation. This time he developed the argument that the whole grading system and degree should be eliminated, and to make it something that truly involved the students in what they were hearing, he withheld all grades during the quarter.

Phaedrus' argument for the abolition of the degree-and-grading system produced a nonplussed or negative reaction in all but a few students at first, since it seemed, on first judgment, to destroy the whole University system. One student laid it wide open when she said with complete candor, "Of course you can't eliminate the degree and grading system. After all, that's what we're here for."

She spoke the complete truth. The idea that the majority of students attend a university for an education independent of the degree and grades is a little hypocrisy everyone is happier not to expose. Occasionally some students do arrive for an education but rote and the mechanical nature of the institution soon converts them to a less idealistic attitude.

The demonstrator was an argument that elimination of grades and degrees would destroy this hypocrisy. Rather than deal with generalities it dealt with the specific career of an imaginary student who more or less typified what was found in the classroom, a student completely conditioned to work for a grade rather than for the knowledge the grade was supposed to represent.