Is there any difference, in the end?

As the new semester enters Week 2 for Metro State, I find myself confronted by a "new one." I have a 14-year-old boy freshman boy from Colorado Springs taking Composing Arguments (which is a mandatory first-year writing course). 

I hesitate to call this "existential" in its possible effect, but it forces me to consider whether the course I have created is advanced enough to be beyond a current English I student's abilities (and Riley may be quite a fine student and writer) or whether the very concept of grades and life experience is irrelevant.

A high school student taking college classes is not new... we have lots of concurrent courses in Colorado, at least, and many high school students are interested in either getting dual credit or simply acquiring some college credits without any added expense. I hadn't given the entire issue much thought until, well, last week, when I could not avoid it.

On the one hand, I would like to think that my content, from readings to assignments, was aimed at college-age students. I guess I am enough of a traditionalist to think that we build our skills over time and take on more and more sophisticated thinking and writing as we go along. 

But on the other hand, I have long argued that my ENG1010 course is just a version of AP Language and Composition, and it may honestly be a bit less demanding than I expected from smart Rock Canyon HS juniors. After all, many of my Metro students are not native English speakers and a large proportion are what I would term "non-traditional" in many ways. 

In the very brief introductions made online, at least two students shared in the online discussion that they are non-binary, at least two are grandmothers returning to school (young grandmothers, but still), and at least six are from Africa or the Middle East. To hold such students strictly to what I call " Mainstream U.S. English" standards seems a bit too much. The English department even has a strong suggestion that grammar and punctuation not amount to over 10 percent of a student's grade.

I don't know how to properly measure that without a grading rubric that is close to a physics formula, but I get the tone. When I am feeling particularly snarky, I will quietly share with people that I have pretty much abandoned most of my standards for writing and thinking in my college teaching.

It will be interesting to see how Riley does. If he sticks with everything, he has as good a chance as others in the course to earn a solid grade. 

Is it OK, however, to treat him any differently than anyone else? My first instinct is to provide more guidance to a young teen, but that doesn't seem just, to Riley or to other students (and maybe to me).

I don't want to inflate the significance of this situation too much, but perhaps by the end of the semester I will have a different perspective on how "college writing" should differ from "high school writing." The answer may be: Not at all.

Stay tuned.

What if we pushed government to be better, faster, clearer?

Every once in a while, an article in the New York Times or The Atlantic will worm its way into my head and lead me to investing 20 minutes reading one post on my iPad. Today was one of those occasions and it was a podcast transcript, of all things. 

It was Ezra Klein and his wife discussing her new book and her in-depth research on "the time tax" that government creates for all Americans... though hardly uniformly and definitely not fairly. 

Here is the thing that struck me as something I should have realized... but did not.

The IRS knows exactly how much I should be paying in taxes without me struggling through TurboTax each spring. After all, we take the standard deduction and have no mortgage (and I assume the IRS could know what that is from some bank form). 

The truth is that every bit of our income, other than a handful of very small payments for judging from various organizations, goes to the IRS electronically. Our investment income is all reported to the government right alongside the forms mailed to us. Our retirement income (social security plus PERA) comes from government and those totals are also automatically shared. 

In a way, the current system is based on the weird choice of making us take a test, so to speak, just to see if what we come up with is accurate. The IRS already knows.

If we foul up on the "test," trouble follows. Mostly fines and penalties.

Most modern governments just send out notices about what should be paid in taxes, with an opportunity to respond if there is a discrepancy or some special case. We could do this, as well, and many IRS professionals are quite clear that the service is quite capable of doing that.

As the podcast episode makes clear: the Republican Party is almost entirely responsible to the convoluted tax filing system we have. The goal is not mysterious. Republicans want us to hate the government and creating laborious paperwork is part of the plan. 

Ironically, many Republican voters are victims of the "you need to earn everything and pain comes with the experience." To their credit, many Americans have been taught to hate government so much that they are quite willing to vote against their own plain interests.

Shockingly, the U.S. tax system is chock full of all sorts of twists and turns that mostly serve tax preparation companies as well as -- who would ever guess -- really rich people. 

The podcast contained all sorts of other outrages and governmental clumsiness, created on purpose by both parties, BTW, but most of those affect my fellow citizens who are not doing so well. To be poor in America necessitates a certain amount of suffering... again, part of the plan.

In America, too many times the cruelty is the point. 

Another mixed bag this Sunday

I tried to follow today's sermon... really. It was Liza and I have long been a booster and have appreciated her youthful energy. Kathleen and I rarely miss a "pub theology" gathering, led by Lisa and something she started to provide young men, particularly, an excuse to drink a beer and talk about morality and religion and to find community. 

That never worked. There is a core group that averages 60-plus years old and consists of St. Luke's members who think of such gatherings as part of their preferred community. Shockingly, young men are not attracted to a Rock Bottom on a Wednesday at 6 p.m. to hang out.

At any rate, today the theme was "a Methodist constantly prays," one of five features of what being a Methodist means. This was the fourth of five Sundays in the series. She chose the Parable of the Unjust Judge, also called the Parable of the Persistent Widow, which is found in Luke 18:1–8. Jesus tells the story to teach His disciples that they must always pray and never lose heart. 

The widow is, from one point of view, rather annoying and will not be put off. The "unjust judge" eventually gives in and gives her what she wants (smiting her enemy? throwing someone in prison? issuing a steep fine?... we don't know). 

Leaving things unsaid, Jesus shifts to comparing a "just judge," i.e. God, to the unjust judge who does not fear God and cares little for others. The point seems clear to me: Look, if the unjust judge eventually answers prayers (or pleading or nagging), just think of how much quicker and better a just judge will act.

It's really a rather simple little story, one that a reasonable person could interpret as "don't give up in your request for vengeance... your continued pleading may eventually break down even the least sympathetic person." 

Never give up.

But Liza got a bit lost in her ruminations on this parable and she never got close to helping us define what "constantly praying" might be. I could sense that she knew she hadn't gotten anywhere, and I'm sure our blank faces betrayed out own confusion. One friend came up to me after the service and immediately shared that she had sort of napped during the sermon. I was glad to hear a similar reaction to my own, and I mostly filed this sermon as another is a long series of sermons that did not start with a strong anecdote or "news peg," and then proceeded to become more and more confusing and convoluted.

There have been a very few occasions when I have emailed Liza about a particularly fine piece of rhetoric shared during a sermon. This will not prompt such a message. 

Kathleen and I have been noticing that Liza has over the past few months seemed adrift in her sermons and even in her informal exchanges. The pub theology last week went nowhere (not helped by the acoustics of the restaurant and the tight seating), and Liza's prompt was basically "What is pub theology? And "what is public theology?" 

Even among our little group of four at our table, we couldn't really hear one another and it was pointless for tables to report out, so to speak, to the larger group. 

These pub theology gatherings have been happening for over a year and we are still trying to define what the heck we are doing? Liza doesn't know. Neither do I. 

There's another one in September and we will be going. It's a new venue that may be better acoustically. Liza also teased that she had asked Janet Forbes, who was lead pastor from 2004-2016, to lead that one. 

Probably a good time to hand things off to someone else.

My latest battle in the war with AI begins next week

It seems too early for a new semester to begin, with a couple more days of 90s (followed by the return of the monsoons and the 80s), but my Metro class officially begins Monday. And there is an on-campus department meeting Friday, though it is not required of part-timers like myself. That is fine, since we are supposed to be in Seattle Thursday - Sunday. 

CSU begins a week later, which seems more civilized, so I still have some time to fiddle with that course. But the Metro class is pretty much locked now, with several new assignments. 

My hope is that they will be AI resistant. I even asked Claude.ai for some advice on creating AI-resistant assignments, and the ideas seemed solid to me. The key seems to be to tighten the time span that the assignment covers and stick to recent events. AI needs to be trained and there is a lag between the programs grabbing up the news and processing the new information.

Even better is to make assignments intensely personal... AI does great when it comes to generalizations, for instance. So, asking a student to write a descriptive essay about something that seemed interesting in his or her life over the past two weeks might work.

On the other hand, I have simply copied and pasted assignment prompts into Claude.ai or ChatGPT and the robot is quite shameless in simply making stuff up. I am getting fairly good at recognizing "robot writing," but I can't claim to have any foolproof method. In fact, I couldn't make an iron-clad case if students protested their innocence.

One thing that I learned last semester was that any famous writing or speech or movie or TV show cannot be the subject that an argument essay can build upon. There's just so much writing out there and the tech companies have done an effective job of vaccuming all that data into their systems.

So, for instance, if I asked for an argument that grows out of even a brand new show, like Season 4 of Tedd Lasso, fuhgettaboutit. I had a favorite graduation speech by David Foster Wallace from two decade ago - "This is Water - and had to replace it after being confronted by a handful of obviously AI-aided rhetorical analyses last spring. There was really nothing I could do about it, since there is no detection software that is 100 percent. The best I can do in that case is sigh and make a note to find something else as a prompt.

The good news is that argument prompts are everywhere. Claude suggested asking students to keep a log of their social media feed for a short time, with screen captures as evidence, and to then ask them to analyze what their "feed" thinks about them. 

I have added a version of that for this fall, though it is one of two options that week. It did occur to me that I shouldn't just assume that every students follows social media, just like I shouldn't assume every student will choose a shortcut with AI over doing their own research and writing their own drafts. 

I would never kid myself about inventing "uncheatable" assignment prompts, and the universities have not created anything that we can count on. Lowly adjuncts such as myself are left to stumble and experiment and agonize. 

And I'm not sure it was ever much better for online writing classes. Heck, a kid could easily hire someone or just have a bright spouse do all the work, and that has nothing to do with AI. 

There is a certain amount of faith required in academic life... and in life, more generally.

When socialism just looks like being a good neighbor

The latest fad in political reporting involves "Democratic Socialists," which is something I didn't realize was a thing until a few months ago. I'm not sure it is a thing in reality, BTW, and I will hazard a guess that few voters really understand whatever the concept is.

I know "socialism" is a dirty word in American politics, with the traditional American reluctance to let go of our fabled independence while embracing our hatred of government. No wonder we are a messy country.

I also know that a lot of what I value about the country is at least "socialism adjacent." We can start with Social Security, which many claim we have all invested in over many years and are just "getting back what is ours." But I, for one, will be receiving far more in benefits than the amount I contributed, even considering interest. Medicare is quite similar, though I continue to hope that I don't need all that much from that particular safety net program.

I pay taxes each year into local, state, and national government with little idea of how my money will be used. I do know that I am paying a lot more than many extremely wealthy Americans, but I am not really angry about it. After all, that tax money provides all sorts of great things that benefit me, and my neighbors more generally. 

Nice roads are one of those things. Municipal lighting is another. I expect police and fire fighters, if they are needed, and expect that those services will arrive quickly (if rarely, of course). 

I am a supporter of unions, and happily paid my minimal dues into various teacher associations for decades. I never needed the help of a union rep, which seems positive, but it was nice to know there would be someone available. I appreciated union officials investing many, many hours in negotiations over salary and benefits. I gladly donated sick leave to "banks" for teachers in need. I never was a booster of "merit pay," preferring to be part of a system that supported all teachers and avoided ranking systems. 

I served in the military, not willingly, but... I "lost" three years of my life, in a sense, though there were some great things that came out of the experience. One was G.I. Bill, that paid over $300 a month for me to attend school over several years and those years allowed me to earn a B.A. and an M.A. Most of my fellow veterans did not take advantage of G.I. Bill benefits, I am sure, but we all paid in. 

My view is that I have (perhaps naively) assumed that society would support me at some basic level if disaster occurred. When I tripped and broke my hip some years ago, police and an ambulance were there within just a few minutes. I did not have to give them my credit card, though I certainly paid for most of those services since my insurance only covered so much. 

I am not anti-capitalist, though I am skeptical about many aspects of the system. Mostly, I don't trust the extremely rich and don't hesitate to blame that elite group for many American problems. 

I have never owned a business. In fact, I have always been employed by some governmental entity, whether the Air Force or Regina HS or City HS or Heritage HS or Rock Canyon HS or Colorado State University or Metro State University. Oh, I guess I did work for Jostens for one miserable year when we lived in Arizona, but that is barely a blip in my history. 

I trust government to solve problems and "bend toward better" over time. The few politicians I have actually met and spoken with seem like they genuinely would like to make things better, though I am well aware of the Mitch McConnells of the world who are in it solely for the power. 

Individuals seem both "basically good people" as well as "dumb as posts," and we are collectively not nearly as good as we should be. Yet I still assume good intent when I walk the neighborhood or drive the streets or even fly the skies. 

I will end my interminable list here, but I am pretty sure I am a Democratic Socialist. I won't buy the water bottle or attach a bumper sticker, nor join that "party," if it exists.  

Time to print what I have. There's no second draft without a first.

I will soon be publishing a book... the history of the first 25 years of St. Luke's United Methodist Church in Highlands Ranch, covering 1979-2004. It's going to be nearly 150 pages and I will be publishing using Kindle Direct Publishing from Amazon. Anyone wanting a copy can order through Amazon and the company handles printing "on demand" as well as shipping and handling the money.

That paragraph above is full of stuff that might need further explanation, it occurs to me. 

Before you ask: No one asked me to research and write this book, and I have no idea if anyone will ever buy a copy, much less read it. I won't be making money on it. Right now the estimate is that I might earn as much as 63 cents per sale in royalties. Alert the accountant! 

I have been conducting interviews, making phone calls, scouring the internet, browsing print materials from the past, including an invaluable scrapbook compiled by a woman who died about a month after Kathleen and I joined St. Luke's in fall of 2002. I have become friends with two former ministers, both now in the 80s but quite "with it." That is something I would never have predicted. 

I have also designed the book and will be able to upload the PDFs of the letter-sized pages as soon as Kathleen and I complete one more reading of the content. There will be a few errors, I assume, but my sense is that the narrative will be readable and logical, even if incomplete in many areas. 

The history is at times dramatic and at times a bit mysterious and occasionally surprising. I was not here for most of it and really could not be classified under "religious guy." I have avoided attributing good or bad luck in this history to some celestial plan. What fascinates me in the history are the people and the unlikely connections many of them share. 

In many ways, I am the last person who should be writing this history, but perhaps distance from the events allows me to produce something interesting. I guess I will find out soon.

My original plan was to write the history up to today, but the more I dug, the more I wanted to include. And when I saw the pages count going toward 140, it was easy to leave the "second 25 years" to a later date (and a second volume). In fact, I am not all that excited about writing a "next volume," assuming that when some people read the first volume, I will suddenly receive emails and find myself buttonholed by folks after church or in King Soopers who want to disabuse me of some notion I included in the book. I anticipate lots of "how could you leave out...?" questions and my only response will be "sorry, but did you see how long this thing is now?" 

I honestly hope I do hear from people. The great thing about online publishing (I don't what else to call the KDP service) is that it's relatively simple to upload a "second edition" of the book, and a third. I can make changes on my own desktop computer and I don't have to worry about "sunk costs" of inventory sitting in the garage. 

It was never my intention to make a nickel on this project, so that simplifies things. I would call it a retirement project that is as close to a hobby as I can come. 

There is satisfaction in discovering answers to questions, which I suppose I have known for a long time and have certainly taught to so many student journalists over the years. But it's been instructive to be in the role of writer as opposed to writing teacher. One role informs the other, that's for sure. 

Interestingly, I often say to friends that I am ready to finally publish the "damn book." It's been in works for some time. I began the research in June of 2024 and have invested hundreds of hours in this enterprise. But as the time to upload it (and learn all the ins and outs of Kindle Direct Publishing) nears, I wonder if I will find excuses to hold off. 

Nah! Time to get this book out in the world and move on to new projects. I have been toying with doing some family history writing about the Kennedy and Guffey sides of the clan. 

And then there will be those inevitable corrections and expanded explanations and all new characters and anecdotes that the first volume will produce. Could be fun.

Texas religious conservatives are about to catch the car... then what?

This was coincidence, but brother Joe mentioned during a quick call the other day that one of the things he remembered most clearly from being in my class at Regina was the "Bible as Literature" unit within junior year English class.

Then yesterday I read a compelling post in The Atlantic that argued for inclusion of reading Bible passages/stories as part of a well-rounded education. That was prompted by a Texas board of education choice to require selected readings in grades 4-12 in the state's public schools.

There are at least two unlikely things to consider between those two facts. One is that Catholic school is relatively Bible-free, it turns out. I don't recall ever being required to read the Bible in my own Catholic high school years, for instance. The passages read on Sundays during mass were rigidly prescribed by the powers that be and priests rarely attempted to modernize Scripture for the masses. Ritual was way more important than whatever exhortations a priest might offer.

For the Atlantic, the supposedly ultra-liberal publication, to come down even in the same ballpark as the religious conservatives of Texas seems a bit surprising. 

After all, we live in the age of knee jerk reactions and "give no quarter" arguments. If a religious conservative likes something, a modern progressive is expected to adopt an opposite position.

I honestly don't remember much about that Bible unit in 1979. I do remember that it was pretty easy to get copies of the Bible for everyone in a time when we didn't have much money for new texts. In fact, they may have been free. I also remember a vague sense of fun in taking young minds into the actual Good Book and talking about it much as we would a novel. I know most of my students had never opened a Bible until that unit.

It's a fine collection of classic stories and is often so strange and remote from our current lives that we can feel comfortable cracking some jokes or pointing out scientific errors. When I moved to City High, a public school, there was a trimester-length course called Bible as Literature, and I don't recall any brouhaha over its inclusion in the curriculum. The "as Literature" seemed descriptive enough for most of the public.

In today's Texas politics, requiring students to read the Sermon on the Mount or the Book of Job may seem like a victory for Christian true believers. But my prediction is that such a victory is likely to produce chaos, lawsuits, and unintended consequences. 

Imagine a second-year ELA teacher having units containing Biblical passages dropped into their curriculum and suddenly engaging in philsophical debate and discussion about meaning and spirituality with a room full of juniors. My guess is that parents will very quickly begin objecting to almost anything that is said. 

After all, the Sermon on the Mount extols all sorts of virtues and the virtuous who are out of favor in modern times. Kids won't be reading something about "Blessed are the billionaires" -- more likely they might discuss the difficulty of a rich man entering the Kingdom of Heaven (I know, different parable). 

My sense is that most modern politicians haven't read very deeply in the Bible and I am equally sure that even top scholars will argue for all sorts of interpretations. That young teacher doesn't stand a chance.

But ignoring the looming chaos: My long-held view that for a person to be able to fully engage in the thought and tradition of the Western World (where we live, after all), that person needs to be familiar with at least basic Bible stories and passages. And with Shakespeare. 

It's not that the Bible or Shakespeare are inherently superior in insights or language use or morality, but that they have been so influential for so long. I might argue something similar about the need for an educated American to have a passing knowledge of baseball, BTW. We use phrases and analogies from that once mighty game all the time. 

There are plenty of additional important books and poems and stories that a Texas student would do well to be aware of and understand. I would never argue that all a person needs is one big book and a collection of plays to be educated. 

But this Texas curriculum change is more likely to get kids thinking deeply about the immoral and downright evil Trump administration than turn kids into religious zealots.

Also worth considering it that once we require a kid to read something, that assignment becomes part of "school work." Just something else to get through. But maybe, just maybe, some of the material will stick with some kids. And maybe a very few will want to learn more and do their own reading, even without the threat of a pop quiz.

Fill in the blank: "Blessed are the ___________, for they will be called children of God."

And don't say "cheesemakers." But if you are watching Monty Python's "Life of Brian," knowing the answer adds to the fun. And don't we all want to be in on the joke?